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Comment by lhnz | Hacker News Reader

Does anybody remember when trolling was a term used to describe an activity in which users wielding enough understanding of other's perspectives would attempt to give other's cognitive dissonance?

It seems that one of the most powerful online political classes have lumped hatred and abuse in with disagreement, mockery and satire.

I don't think it's good for the conversation between the group of user's that dislike where Reddit and other big social media sites are headed and the people that are taking them there.

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It is really easy to define the meaning of terms if you are the easy-to-agree-with side of a conflict. And now you cannot even mention the elephant in the room anymore without being immediately flagged, banned or at least called a women hating privileged white boy.

I miss those days when I was proud to be a troll, when it meant tricking people into thinking in ways that they normally wouldn't. People used to love trolls! Of course, it didn't just mean that. There were also troll raids when friends would get together and make silly comments on every thread they could find, crashing the party but having fun with it. The incendiary ones used to be called flamers, but I think that term is too trollish to use against trolls these days.

> People used to love trolls!

No they didn't.

> crashing the party but having fun with it.

I'm sure you and your friends were having fun with it. The people whose parties you crashed? Probably not so much.

This is starting to look like a debate similar to "where does tagging stop and graffiti begin?".

I was never the type to participate in the troll raid style, just the kind to nudge a conversation in a certain direction, more like taking a position in a debate that I didn't necessarily agree with to make it more interesting. I'm thinking of threads on forums where people would actually vote for their favorite trolls. But you would have had to be there to know what I mean.

>> People used to love trolls!

> No they didn't.

... Poe's law?

I think I remember the term flamers being retired as people began to misinterpret it as a negative term for homosexual individuals (based off of flamboyant). This would've been around a decade ago, maybe a bit more, so it could just be a false memory.

Yes, I think that's definitely it. That's what I meant by being too trollish. It's too much like something a troll would say. But I never even realized the anti-gay term was based on flamboyant, although it makes perfect sense. Thanks for pointing that out.

Bingo, the whole thing has taken on the contours of a psyops with the goal of silencing the opposition under the guise of "trolling".

More and more political debates have turned to a battle of "framing" rather than actually debating the positive and negative sides of some action (or inaction).

EDIT: Removed overreaction to grammatical pet peeve that distracts from the main point.

> It seems that one of the most powerful online political classes have lumped hatred and abuse in with disagreement and mockery.

Its pretty common, online and off, for people of all classes to ascribe disagreement with their preferred position with "hatred and abuse". Mistaking this common error for a feature of a particular "powerful online class" is, AFAICT, the same kind of misperception of persecution as the error itself.

Like changing the topic of #windows to "PC users wet the bed" during a netsplit? I think you may be viewing the past through rose colored lens.

Regardless, the things people are complaining about on Reddit aren't satire. I don't think a debate over word meanings is helpful.

No, not at all like that.

Like holding a straight face and carefully putting forwards an extreme position which you do not hold while making use of the correct memes and language so that it appears congruent to outsiders.

A humorous effect is created because a line can be drawn between those of the audience that know what you're doing and those that do not. A selection of the audience watches on as people that are not in the know either get angry with you or agree with your bizarre statements.

It's effectively hidden satire and that's why it was so fun and so potent.

I use to love to do this while at college. Homosexuality was still controversial enough you would get people debating it. Of course someone would eventually compare it to something most everyone agreed was wrong. Immediately the other side would try to say why that other thing was wrong, at which point I would jump in to defend it. I became so good at it that people would approach me after class to clarify if I was being serious or not. I even wrote a paper for a class that was titled something along the lines of 'A Defense of Consensual Relationships Between Genetically Similar Adults'. I ended up Poe's Lawing myself with that paper.

Sadly corporate environment isn't anywhere near as tolerant of this.

In essence invoking Poe's Law intentionally.

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