Troll (Internet)

“Don’t feed the trolley, please,” he suggests that it should not react to a trolley, that similar approaches should not be used to engage in endless and inconclusive discussions.

Notice: «On this page it is forbidden to troll».

In Internet slang, a troll, plural trolls (from Norwegian troll), describes a person with an unknown identity who posts inflammatory, irrelevant, controversial, or off-topic messages to an online community, such as a discussion forum, chat room, blog comment, or the like, with the primary intent of upsetting or eliciting a negative emotional response from others users and readers, for various purposes (even for fun) or otherwise disrupt normal conversation on a topic of discussion, getting the same users angry and at odds with each other. According to Indiana University, they are a growing community. The trolls can create messages with different types of content such as rudeness, offenses, lies that are difficult to detect, with the intention of confusing and causing mixed feelings in others.

Although originally the term only referred to the practice itself and not to the person, a later metonymic shift has meant that it is also applied to people who engage in such practices. Its most likely etymological origin evokes the idea of "taking the bait" or "biting the bait much more" (troll is a type of fishing in English).

While the word troll and its associated verb troll are linked to a discussion on the Internet, the media in recent years has treated it as an adjective, and they use it to tag intentionally provocative actions and harassment outside of an online context. For example, the media has used trolling to describe "a person who damages praise sites on the Internet in order to cause pain to families".

Etymology

The word trol comes from modern English, the verb troll —called trolling in Spanish— is a fishing technique that consists of slowly dragging a lure or a baited hook from a moving boat. By extension, the noun trol was used to designate those who act in a provocative manner.

From the coincidence with the word that comes from the Old Norse, which designates the mythological monster, the meaning of provocative has been amalgamated with that of the mythological being, especially in a pejorative sense.

The word evokes trolls from Scandinavian folklore and children's tales, where they are often creatures bent on mischief and mischief. The image of the troll under the bridge in the tale "The Three Grumpy Goats" (also known as "The Giant and the Three Little Goats") emphasizes the troll's negative reaction to strangers trespassing in its physical environment, particularly those who they intend to graze on their domains without permission.

Trol mode.

The first colloquial use of the word trolling outside the realm of the Internet to describe deliberate actions carried out in order to provoke a reaction, can be found in the Armed Forces: around 1972, it is documented the use of trolling by United States Navy pilots to describe MIG fighters in Vietnam.

Contemporary use of the term is said to have appeared on the Internet in the late 1980s, but the earliest known examples date from 1992.

Early history

Jimbo Wales at a special session in Wikimania 2006, speaking in relation to the problems posed by trolls.

The most possible derivation of the word troll can be found in the phrase "trolling for newbies", popularized in the early 1990s on the Usenet group, alt.folklore.urban (AFU). Commonly, it can be understood as a relatively mild inside joke among veteran users, presenting issues and topics that were well done that new users can take seriously. For example, a group veteran may create a post on the common misconception that glass flows through time. Older readers might recognize the name of the poster and know what they're talking about, but new subscribers to the group wouldn't be able to pick it up yet, and would respond like that. These types of trolls serve as a practice to identify insider information from the group. This definition of trolling, considerably narrower than the modern understanding of the term, was considered a positive contribution. One of the AFU's most notorious trolls, David Mikkelson, created the urban folklore website Snopes. com.

In the late 1990s, alt.folklore.urban had such high traffic and participation that trolling of that kind was frowned upon. Others expanded the term to include the practice of playing a prank on a seriously misinformed or misled user, even in a newsgroup where one was not a regular. However, the term is more humorous than provocative.

In other languages

In Icelandic, þurs (a thurs) or tröll (a troll) may refer to trolls. The verbs þursa (to troll) and þursast (to be a troll, to troll at) may be used.

In Chinese, a troll is referred to as bái mù (Chinese, 白目; literally, 'eye white'), which can be simply explained as "eyes without pupils", in the sense that while the pupil of the eye is used for vision, the sclera cannot be seen, and trolling involves blindly talking nonsense on the internet, having complete indifference to sensitivities or being unaware of the situation at hand, similar to rolling your eyes. An alternative term is bái làn (Chinese: 白爛; lit. 'white mold'), which describes a completely absurd and nonsensical post made to annoy others. Both terms originated from Taiwan, and are also in use in Hong Kong and mainland China. Another name, xiǎo bái (in Chinese, 小白; literally, 'little white') is a derogatory term. which refers to both bái mù and bái làn, and was used in Internet forums by an anonymous author.

In Japanese, tsuri (釣り, 'tsuri'^?) means “fishing”, and refers to intentionally misleading posts whose sole purpose is to provoke readers. The term arashi (荒らし, 'arashi'^?) means "leaving waste", and can also be used to refer to spam.

In Korean, nak-si (낚시) means “fishing”, and is used to refer to trolling attempts on the Internet, as well as posts with misleading titles posted in this way. purpose.

In the Portuguese language, in its most common variant in Brazilian, trol (ˈtɾɔw in Portuguese pronunciation) is the usual term to denote Internet trolls (examples of common derivative terms are trolismo or trolagem, "trolling" and the verb trolar, "to troll", which entered popular use), but an old expression, used by those who wish to avoid Anglicisms or slang, it is complexo do pombo enxadrista to denote the behavior of trolls, and pombos enxandristas (literally, "chess doves", or simply pombos, are the terms used to name trolls). The terms are explained by a saying: "Arguing with so-and-so is the same as playing chess with a pigeon: the pigeon walks around the board, knocks over the pieces, defecates on it, and simply flies away, claiming victory."

In the Thai language, the term krian (เกรียน) has been adopted to describe Internet trolls. The term literally refers to a very short haircut worn by most school boys in Thailand, thus comparing Internet trolls to mischievous school boys. The term top krian (ตบ เกรียน), or “slapping a short head” refers to the act of posting clever replies to refute and dismiss messages from internet trolls as silly.

Other denominations

Another likely origin is that it could be a shortening of patrolling ("patrolling", "watching"), in the vulgar sense of searching ('searching'), especially 'searching for those who do not wish to be found'.

Trolls as spoofers

Beginnings

Before Deja News began archiving Usenet, reports on trolling were sketchy, with little evidence to study. However, the huge archives have been available to researchers ever since. The first (albeit poorly documented) case may be the 1982-83 saga of Álex and Joan on the CompuServe forums. Van Gelder, a journalist for Ms. magazine, documented the incident in a 1996 article in that publication. Álex (in real life a very shy 50-year-old psychiatrist from New York) posed as a bombastic, anti-religious mute woman named Joan, confined to a wheelchair after a car accident, "so he could better relate to his female patients.". This charade went on for two years, and Joan grew to become an enormously detailed character with a collection of emotional relationships. It all started to fall apart when Joan persuaded one of her online friends of hers to have an affair with Álex.

Even those who barely knew Joan were implicated — and in a certain way betrayed — by Alex's deception. Many of us like to believe that the online community is a utopia of the future, and Alex's experiment showed us all that technology is not a shield against lies. We lost our innocence, when not faith.

Van Gelder, 1996, p. 534

Trolls in the 1990s

One of the first references to a troll in the Google Usenet archive was made by user Mark Miller about another user named Tad (February 8, 1990). it is unclear if the term "troll" was used in its current sense, or if it was simply a casual choice of an epithet:

You're so far from being able to understand something that anyone says here that this only leads to inutility. The really sad thing is, you really think you're winning. You are a terrible waste of natural resources – please re-enter the food chain... stupid trol flatulent–.

The most likely origin of the term can be found in the expression trolling for newbies (meaning 'fishing for newbies'), which in the early 1990s became popular on the Usenet group alt.folklore.urban. Its use was somewhat different from the current notion of trolling, being a relatively mild inside joke on novice users consisting of asking questions or bringing up topics of conversation so hackneyed that only one of them would respond seriously. Others extended the term to include the practice of playing the role of a seriously uninformed or naive user, even in groups where one was not a regular participant, but these attempts were often more joke than provocation. In such contexts, the noun "troll" used to refer to the act rather than the perpetrator.

Some veteran Usenet users continued to insist on these early definitions even after the term was more generally applied to the incendiary actions previously characterized as flamebait.

Trolling, identity and anonymity

Early incidents of trolling were considered flaming, but this changed with modern usage due to news media to refer to creating any content that goes against another person. The NetLingo online dictionary suggested that there are four degrees of trolling: recreational, tactical, strategic, and dominant. The relationship between trolling and flaming was observed on an open-access forum in California, in a series of computers with modem connection in the 1970s. Some psychologists have suggested that flaming would be caused by disindividuation and decreasing self-esteem: the anonymity of online publication would lead to disinhibition among individuals. Others have suggested that, although flaming and trolling is often uncomfortable, it may be a form of normative behavior that expresses the social identity of a certain user group. According to Tom Postmes, a professor of social and organizational psychology at the universities of Exeter and Gronigen, the Netherlands, and the author of Individuality and the Group, who have studied online behavior for 20 years, "trolls aspire to to violence, at the level of p problems that can cause in an environment. They want to get it going. They wish to promote unpathetic emotions of disgust and indignation, which morbidly gives them a sense of pleasure."

In the serious literature, the practice was first documented by Judith Donath (1999), who used several anecdotal examples from various Usenet newsgroups in her discussion. Donath's essay charted the ambiguity of identity in a disembodied "virtual community":

In the physical world there is an inherent unity with the self, for the body provides a compelling and practical definition of identity. The rule is: a body, an identity. [...] The virtual world is different. It is composed of more information than matter.

Donath provides a concise overview of personality falsification games that arise from the confusion between the physical and epistemic community:

The trolls play a false personality, even if they do so without the consent of most players. The trol tries to pass as a legitimate participant, sharing the common interests and concerns of the group. The members of the news groups, if they are aware of the trolls and other personality counterfeitings, try to distinguish authentic messages from those written by them and, after judging a user as a trol, force the offender to leave the group. Their success in the first depends on the degree to which they — and the trol — understand the clues of identity, and their success in the second, whether the pleasure of the trol is sufficiently diminished or mitigated by the punishments imposed by the group.
Troles can be annoyed in various ways. A trol can unravel the discussion in a news group, spread bad advice, and damage the feeling of trust in the news group community. Moreover, in a group that has become sensitive to trolls—where the deception index is high—many who honestly ask naive questions can be quickly rejected as trolls. This can be quite discouraging for a new user who after daring to write his first message is immediately bombed with angry accusations. Even if the accusations are unfounded, being classified as a trolley is quite harmful to one's online reputation.

Susan Herring and friends on "Searching for Safety Online: Managing 'Trolling' in a Feminist Forum" indicate the inherent difficulty in monitoring trolling and maintaining free speech in online communities: "harassment frequently arises in spaces known for their freedom, lack of censorship, and experimental nature." Free expression perhaps leads to tolerance of trolling behavior, complicating members' efforts to maintain open area and collaborative discussion, especially on sensitive topics like race, gender, and sexuality.

In an effort to reduce uncivil behavior through increased accountability, many websites (such as Reuters, Facebook, and Gizmodo) now require users to register their name and email address.

However, there are still user communities that encourage and enhance anonymity (and therefore trolls) in their interactions, such as 4chan and anonymous image boards in general.

Use

The term "troll" is highly subjective. Certain readers may classify a post as a troll while others will see the same post as a legitimate contribution to the discussion, even if controversial. The term is frequently used to discredit an opposing position or its proponent through ad hominem argument. Likewise, saying that someone is a troll means making assumptions about their motives, which may be incorrect. The author's motives aside, controversial messages have a high chance of attracting a corrective, protective, or violent response from those who do not distinguish between actual physical communities (where people are actually exposed to some shared risk of bodily harm by their actions). and epistemic communities (based on a mere exchange of words and ideas). Norms of treatment, or etiquette, that originated in such physical communities are often naively applied to online discourse by newcomers unaccustomed to the range of viewpoints expressed online, often anonymously. Thus, both users and their messages are commonly and sometimes inaccurately branded as trolls when they offend the group: ironically, people may be more inclined to use epithets like "troll" in public online discussions than they would be in person, as online forums can seem more impersonal. The expression "Forbidden to feed the troll" is often used.

When properly applied to intentionally disruptive online behavior, the word "troll" cheaply turns an abstract code of conduct online into a concrete image. Seasoned online forum participants know that the most effective way to deter a troll is usually to ignore it, as the responses encourage genuine trolls to continue writing disruptive messages on such forums - hence the frequent "No Disclaimer" warning. eat the troll." Sending this signal publicly in response to a troll's behavior to discourage further responses may deter the troll. However, it can also have the opposite effect, becoming itself food for the troll. Therefore, when a forum participant sees an innocent-seeming reply to a troll as potential food for the troll, it may be wiser to send the "No Feeding Troll" notice in a private message (for example, by email).

Vicious circles

For many people, the hallmark of troll behavior is the perceived intent to disrupt the community in some way: writing inflammatory, sarcastic, disruptive, or humorous messages intended to draw other users into a fruitless confrontation. The greater the community reaction, the more likely the user will go back to behaving like a troll, believing that certain actions achieve their goal of causing chaos. This has given rise to the oft-repeated protocol in Internet culture: Don't feed the troll.

It often happens that someone writes a sincere message about which they will be emotionally sensitive. Skilled trolls know that an easy way to anger you is to dishonestly claim that said person is a troll. Other times a person may not immediately understand or fit into the social norms of a forum where most of the participants do. As a result, acting slightly outside the norm (often unintentionally and for legitimate reasons) leads to such a person being labeled a troll. Sometimes it can be difficult to distinguish between a user who simply has different values, views, or ideas, and one who is intentionally trolling. Unfortunately, many users react aggressively at the first impression of a supposed 'troll', sometimes leading to disgruntled novice users or political minorities being considered trolls.

Troll Culture

The long history of trolling and strong support for anonymous and pseudonymous speech on the Internet suggest that the "anonymous troll" story is only just beginning. Whether it can be considered a 'culture', made up of people who don't know each other except through the common experience of being rejected on Internet forums, is questionable, but some say it is possible and is already happening.

There is strong evidence of this in the existence of forums that claim to exist specifically to support trolls, to trade tricks and identify targets that other trolls may be provoking or fruitfully discussing.

Troll culture is best seen in trolls who don't know the others they work with. Because the common methods of creating inflammatory messages are well known and the subject of jokes on many Internet sites, it is sometimes possible for a troll to identify another troll in action. A troll acting on another troll often creates such an amount of apparent drama between them that it is taken seriously by non-troll observers.

Forms of appearance on the Internet

Trolls act differently in different media. They started in newsgroups, and as the Internet has evolved, so have trolls.

• Usenet — the hierarchies of the news groups limit the exposure of the trolls, but the cross sending of messages (crossposting) can overcome this limitation. Some ISPs limit the number of news groups to which the same message can be crossed. As a remarkable example, alt.net instituted a cross-ship limit after the trolls in that system had become so scandalous that Peter da Silva launched a campaign in other systems to stop the exchange of news with alt.net until they did something to solve the problem.
• Mail lists — usually controlled by moderators, so undesirable participants can be expelled quickly.
• SlashCode-based forums — use a score system so that readers can moderate each message up or down from their initial rating. Readers can then choose to ignore the messages that others have “moderated down”. Troll coordination is particularly important, as the first messages are more likely to be read than the following. An ideal trolley should generate very heated discussion and answers without further intervention.
• Wikis — its flat, asynchronous and open model allows anyone to write anything. Users work to undo negative changes using serial reversion tools, but this requires hundreds of volunteers to monitor extensive and popular sites. Troles tend to be more subtle than in the discussion groups, often providing material that could be legitimate, but they will provoke controversy challenging the current power structure. The difficulty is aggravated by the impossibility of discerning whether a user is simply exposing a controversial opinion or a trol.
• Weblogs — in its most common form as a personal pulpit with the possibility that any comments may be left, popular weblogs are often effective springboards for trolls, using arsonist comments or provocative inputs. The ease with which weblogs can be linked encourages the spread of the trol.
• IRC — the open nature of most IRC channels in popular networks allows trolls to enter and use any abuse technique, from the simple flooding of trash to subtly irritating comments, which harvest angry responses. The ease with which channel and server locks can be evaded, and the volatile nature of many IRC users can allow trolls to perpetuate indefinitely.
• Multiplayer first-person action games — the online game usually attracts a large number of teenagers, who take advantage of the fighting atmosphere and their general anonymity to underestimate other players. See pwn and noob for more information. Group killing and breaking the social norms of the game to screw up other players are also considered troll-specific activities.
• Online sport games — A trol will infiltrate a free online league with multiple teams from different accounts and identities and then try twisted player exchanges to improve a team. The trol will leave numerous messages on the league's ad board from its different identities to give the appearance of legitimacy to a behavior that is clearly illegal. Players who object to the obvious farce can receive an insult bath and other evasion attempts.
• Forums — Be of the kind they are, will attract trolls, whose behavior does not differ much from previous examples. Few forums are free of trolls, except for some very small sites and those that establish very strict policies in this regard.
• BBS — Although there are already very few BBSs running and most of them have a user control, trolley cases are still reported.
• Social media --- Social networks are an extended area where the trolls attack. The social network with the greatest presence of trolls is Twitter, given the ease of being accounted for, because it is public and by the many people who use it, including spectacle figures, public and political characters. Other social networks such as Instagram and Facebook also have trolls.

Types of trolls

A troll is a person who posts sarcastic, inflammatory, or controversial content directed at an account or movement seeking to disrupt communication around them. This can be done either by using your personal image or by creating a fictitious profile. Troll behavior, to fit the definition, must be consistent; oscillating between the sarcastic, the controversial and the digitally violent.

One Hit Trolls

One-hit troll messages are intended to be disruptive and tend to be very obvious to ensure they get angry responses.

Disruptive Trolls

• Messages out of the topic — Irrelevant to the users interested in the forum in question: "Can anyone help me make a website?" "No, this is a music forum." This can also be done in the middle of an existing discussion in an attempt to kidnap it, or at least change the subject of discussion.
• Page Break — Send messages with big images or full of characters to make the previous messages unreadable. A skilled trolley will use an extremely long but narrow image that camouflages with the bottom of the page to make it less evident.
• Offensive material — Annoying sound files or disturbing images in a message, or link to shocking sites (shock sites) that contain such material. These links are often disguised as legitimate links.
• Burning messages — Including racist, sexist, classy or unnecessarily odious allusions: "You are an idiot for including these messages on your list."
• Write spoilers — Unveil the end or important part of the plot of a movie, book, game, etcetera without warning, sometimes subreptically buried in messages otherwise innocuous.
• Return to start an old discussion or recycle an earlier theme (bump) very controversial, particularly in small online communities.
• To deliberately and repeatedly miswrite the names of the other users of the discussion with the purpose of disturbing or irritating them.
• Promit non-existent pornography to people who write in the forum, causing an endless avalanche of messages of the type "to me too" (especially common in the Usenet alt.sex hierarchy in the mid-1990s).

Attention-Seeking Trolls

These types of trolls seek to incite as many responses as possible and absorb a disproportionate amount of the total collective attention.

• Publish another forum, especially if you are a rival or hated.
• Affirming being someone who is impossible to be — "As an authentic samurai I am, I have certain problems with The seven samurai».
• To lack any current relationship or knowledge with the topic discussed, but to continue to write opinions as "experts".
• Messages containing some obvious error or error — “I think Sea in is the best film of Santiago Segura”.
• Ask for help for an unbelievable task or problem — "How do I feel my pot? I don't want everything I cook on it to know the same."
• Intentionally naive questions — "Can I use olive oil instead of water to boil pasta?"
• Messages containing alusive references to their own status — "Evian is bottled water for the poor. I prefer the imported Dasani from Italy”.
• Intentionally write a scandalous argument deliberately built around a fundamental but embroiled failure or error. The author will often be defensive when the argument is refuted, but many may, however, continue the thread using more erroneous arguments, which is known as "feeding" the trol.
• A subtype of the former is the false demonstration of an important unresolved mathematical problem or impossibility (e.g., 1 = 2). However these messages are not always trolley and sometimes are at least mathematically interesting.
• Politically debatable messages — "I think xxx is the greatest president of history."
• Send politically sensitive images in inappropriate places.
• Pretend to be innocent after participating in a “flame war” (flamewar).
• Write out complaints about your private life, including suicide threats: sometimes it's about the trolley.
• Responding paranoidly or pluralizing personal opinions issued by different individuals — "I don't think you all think the same thing: you agree to take the opposite!"
• The conquerors are enthusiastic about chaining love affaires online with the women of a group. This provokes public rivalry among women who once believed that the affectionate appeals, the poems and declarations of affection they received were exclusively for them. Since these adventures are usually developed separately in chat channels, it usually takes a long time before these conflicts break out.

Other examples

Some trolls may denounce a certain religion on a religious newsgroup, although historically this has been called flamebait (see above). Like those who engage in a "flamewar," self-proclaimed or self-proclaimed Internet trolls sometimes resort to double entendres or misdirection in pursuit of their target. It is possible to distinguish between inflammatory messages and comments from a troll: the former are intended to be antisocial and offensive while the latter seek to provoke a reaction, although they can also be considered antisocial, despite the author's intention.

A particular case of the second variety (inflammatory messages) involves sending content that is obviously at odds with the interests (stated or implied) of the group or forum. For example, posting cat meat recipes on a pet forum, evolutionary theories on a creationist forum, or posts about how boring dragons are on the alt.fan.dragons Usenet group.

The "troll puppeteer" often enters a forum using several different identities. As provocative comments from one identity draw increasingly critical responses from other forum members, the troll intervenes in the discussion using a second identity to support the first. Alternatively, the troll can use this second identity to criticize the first, thereby gaining credibility or esteem on the forum.

Crossposting is a popular method of Usenet trolls: the same message can be simultaneously discussed in several unrelated and even opposing newsgroups, possibly ending up in a "flamewar" (flamewar). For example, a flamebait message against fast food could be cross-sent to groups on healthy eating, ecology, and animal rights, as well as to a group on a completely unrelated topic, like artificial intelligence.

One example of successful trolling is the well-known Usenet thread Oh how I envy American students, which garnered over 3,500 responses. This troll was written by someone posing as a European student, and successfully sent to all the college and university newsgroups, then leaving the American students to do all the outreach work. The thread was active for close to a year (generating an average response every 160 minutes) and its greatest blow was when an innocent American student not only lost her Internet account but was also expelled from the institute for abusing computers, because of He somehow managed to take the blame for starting the troll.

Motivation

Self-proclaimed trolls may designate themselves as devil's advocates, social horseflies, or "cultural troublemakers," challenging mainstream discourse and forum assumptions in an attempt to break the status quo groupthink: the belief system that prevails in your absence.

Some critics claim that true "devil's advocates" generally self-identify as such for the sake of etiquette and politeness, while trolls may reject both. Most of the discussion about what motivates trolls comes from other Internet users who claim to have studied troll behavior. There is little research literature describing the term or phenomenon. Comments from users accused of being trolls may be unreliable, as they may actually be trying to stimulate controversy rather than further understanding of the phenomenon. Likewise, accusers are often motivated by a desire to defend a certain project, and references to an Internet user being a troll may have no basis in the person's actual goals. As a result, identifying troll goals is almost always speculative. Even so, several basic goals have been attributed to trolls, depending on the type of disruption they are thought to be causing.

To further complicate matters, many accusers err by first questioning whether alleged troll material is actually disruptive (a required component of such behavior) before declaring it as such. Thus, many trolls are born from the other party's own too fast inference, whether it is accurate or not.

The proposed motivations are: The activity of a troll can be described as an experiment in contravention that, through the use of an alternate personality, allows one to test or break the usual social boundaries and etiquette without serious consequences. This may be part of an attempt to test the limits of some discourse, or to identify reactive personalities. By removing identities and histories from the situation, leaving only discourse, some scientists believe it is possible to carry out experiments in social engineering using troll-like methods. However, few believe that troll organizations are involved in science, and a few scattered individuals with no particular methods or thesis cannot be described as scientists, though they may nonetheless be involved in some research.

• Search for anonymous attention: The trol seeks dominate the discussion provoked anger, and effectively hijacking the subject of conversation.
• Fun: For some people it is fun to think that someone else is angry at what they say complete strangers or, even, known. This could be classified as a type of schadenfreude: Troles with this motivation get pleasure from frustration, fear or pain (or what they perceive in their minds as such) real to their victims.
• Angry: Some people behave as trolls to express their hostility to a particular group or point of view.
• Request for help: Many alleged trolls, in their messages, point to disturbing situations about the family, relationships, drugs or school, although it is generally impossible to know if such situations are only part of the trol. Some believe that this behavior is an aggressive form of confrontation in which trolls seek a kind of strong sentimental guidance in an anonymous forum.
• Self-proclaimed trolls and their advocates suggest that their behavior is a smart way to improve the discussion, or an alternative method of seeing power relationships in large public wikis.
• Propose a challenge to oneself: Just to see if it can be done successfully, for example a member of a forum is registered with a new non-identifiable name to see if he can cheat, and for how long, the other members.
• To waste time on others: One of the most important aspects of a trol's activity is the idea that using a single minute to write an appropriate message is achieved that many others lose several minutes of their time, causing a waterfall effect. Most trolls enjoy the idea that they can waste the time of others with comparatively little effort on their part.
• Domino effect: Related to fun, but in a more specific way, it means starting long chain reactions in response to one's initial message. It consists in achieving a disproportionately large response to a small action. This is similar to the rejoicing with which a small child can act who pretends to be lost by seeing a large number of people undertaking a massive search in response to his alleged disappearance, when he is actually hiding.
• Deletion of information: A particularly nihilistic trolley often tries to stop the flow of information among the participants of the forum, making it a place where only insults are exchanged. For example, a skilled trolley can turn an informative discussion on tricks and techniques to relieve X disease into a heated argument completely useless. This can prevent important information from reaching the hands of those who need it most, thus increasing human suffering. A slightly less hostile variant is the suppression of a discussion that the trol does not like or finds offensive.
• Make a change in the opinions of other users: A trol can hold extreme positions to make their real beliefs seem moderate (this often involves the use of a puppet playing the role of bad police) or, alternatively, play the role of devil's lawyer to strengthen the opposing convictions (with which they actually agree).
• Prove the integrity of a system against social attacks or other forms of misconduct: For example, blatantly violate the terms of use to see if the site administrators undertake any action.
• Overcoming feelings of inferiority or impotence through the experience of controlling an environment.
• Self-promotion.
• Fight against group thinking: Many trolls defend their actions by claiming that they must be shaken from people's conformism.
• Satira: In these cases, individuals do not think of themselves as troles, but as humorists or incomprehensible political commentators.
• Satisfaction produced by personal attacks.
• Harassment: For example, following a person—who has been harassed in a forum but who has decided to avoid becoming a victim by going elsewhere—and employing trol tactics in the new forum until this is an uncomfortable place for that person.
• Lowering the signal-ruid relationship: In Slashdot, points that could be used to moderate interesting topics were wasted to moderate things like Goatse's ASCII drawings. At certain thresholds, this lowers the quality of comments.
• Try an alternative personality anonymously.
• Emptying a forum: what is usually only feasible if the forum is small.
• Borrowing from power: stumbles that somehow gain the confidence of the moderators of some large wikis, then they become moderator and moderator all that, in their opinion, is wrong and erase negative opinions toward their ego, and a lot of older or important editors are lost and these "informative" forums lose value.

It is difficult to gauge the motivations of trolls, since most of the justifications offered by suspected trolls are nothing more than ploys hatched to continue the mischief they imagine they are up to. This is unfortunate because, as the foregoing implies, there are legitimate reasons to undertake the type of actions typical of trolls. However, the etiquette is simple and straightforward enough that most people will anticipate the manifested purposes of self-declared trolls without actually resorting to these methods. Since there is a wide spectrum of possible motivations for trolls, with some being benevolent and others clearly malevolent, labeling troll users in the negative sense is often unwise.

Some users of Internet forums are considered troll "hunters" or "troublemakers". They willingly come into conflict when trolls emerge. Trollhunters are often just as disruptive as these. A single troll post can be ignored, but if ten troll hunters "jump" following it, they will steer the thread off topic.

As for conflicts related to trolls, there are six groups into which users could be classified:

• Troles: Users who provoke conflicts actively.
• Hunters or provocative They behave according to the beginning of the “second coup”. They do not start the conflict, but they intensify it as soon as it begins. They often use other trolls as an excuse for their own bad behavior, and in many cases qualify a user as a trol, despite the purposes of this.
• Indifferent: They try to ignore the conflict, continuing with the original topic of discussion. They often express careless disdain to the trolley, but they do not actively insult him. They behave like older brothers, sharing wise words such as "Don't feed the troles" or other phrases made that usually mean the same thing: "Ignore the troublemaker and so he will surrender and leave." This type of response can be taken as a passive-aggressive behavior of troll-producer.
• Moderators: Not the moderators of the system, but the users who try to "resolve" the conflict, contenting all parties if possible.
• Showers: They depart from the conflict. In particularly bad cases, they'll leave the forum disgusted.
• Kidnappers: An out-of-the-themed discussion begins in response to the provocative messages of a trol.
• No-troles: Users who are rated trol by other users or even moderators to be silenced and discredited easier.

Solutions and alternatives

In general, conventional wisdom advises users to avoid feeding trolls, and to ignore temptations to respond. Talking back to a troll inevitably takes the discussion off-topic, much to the dismay of the viewers, and gives the troll much-needed attention. When troll hunters pounce on them, the indifferent respond with YHBT. YHL. HAND., that is, You have been trolled. You have lost. Have a nice day. (in English 'You have picado. You have lost. Have a good day.'). However, since troll hunters (such as these) are often conflict-seekers themselves, the loser is not the hunter's side, but rather the other forum users who would have preferred the conflict not even to have happened. emerged.

Conflict resolution literature suggests that labeling participants in online discussions as trolls can perpetuate undesirable behaviors. A person rejected by a social group, both online and in real life, may adopt an antagonistic role towards it, and seek to annoy or annoy its members even more. The label "troll", often a sign of social rejection, could therefore perpetuate their existence.

Better results tend to be obtained when users adopt the role of moderator and display more constructive behaviors avoiding judgments and confrontations. Trolls are excited by hunters and frustrated by indifferents, and neither emotion produces positive results for the forum. Fighting the trolls ends in flamewars. Trolls frustrated by the strategy of the indifferent may leave the forum (and continue to behave in the same way on another site, or become constructive users) or become more and more incendiary until they get a response.

Newbie trolls can experience serious "troll remorse," a feeling of great regret after losing their account (either their ISP account or a website account) due to their reckless actions.

Some argue that a lack of response to trolls can also inspire more aggressive behavior. Particularly fanatical or irrational users will participate in a forum that annoys them quite independently of the responses they get. Trolls often continue to write messages as well, taking offense at peripheral arguments or arguments that were less well founded, until their positions become untenable, at which point they will resort to insults or move on to another argument. By this logic, ruthless confrontation through argument (when it can be found) can be vital.

Usefulness of trolls

A major debate on the Internet is whether or not trolls perform any useful function. Since troll is such a broad term, if all the definitions given so far are to be accepted, the answer must definitely be "yes and no."

Users who perform many useful but controversial functions are often judged to be trolls, and in such cases, they may actually be benefiting the forum in which they participate. For example, the presence of a far-right described as a troll may allow a conservative reader to feel more comfortable expressing his views, which will appear very moderate by contrast. On the other hand, if the troll hunters organize a "flamewar" (flamewar ) against the far-right troll, the conservative peeper may feel less comfortable expressing his views., to the detriment of the forum. Although trolls claim to fight groupthink, they may actually encourage it by cementing opinions against it.

Trolls can also, in some circumstances, be a source of genuine humor, which depends entirely on whether the troll is good or bad. It's usually quite easy to tell the difference between such actions: a bad troll will resort only to weak hackneyed plots, while a good one will create a perceptive set of plots that drag people into cunning twists while providing a thread of Non sequitur humor. i>.

Trolls can also provide a valuable service by making people question the validity of what they read both on the Internet and in other sources. Trolls show that expressing any opinion is just as easy as expressing an informed and reasoned opinion, getting the same visibility. It has also been argued that radio commentators and newspaper columnists sometimes probe public opinion by behaving like trolls. John C. Dvorak and Slashdot are often cited as examples.

Even though useful content and productive users are sometimes flagged as trolls, the general consensus is that typical troll activity benefits only trolls and hunters and should not be allowed on any forum. Most forums reject the claim that pure and intentional trolls serve any useful purpose. Some trolls have been known to attempt to cause entire discussions to be deleted, which has served as negative reinforcement for inexperienced users and helped reduce the amount of spam on large discussion forums. In many cases, trolls can lead the administrator or moderators of a forum to add mechanisms to prevent their actions. Although this can be considered an improvement to the forum, it is also true that such tools would not have been needed if there were no trolls.

Behavior problems

Precise definitions of "troll" have been difficult because they often depend on assumptions about internal motivations, which have been difficult to prove conclusively. Some behaviors such as swearing are not candidates for a "troll" classification unless they are intended to provoke a reaction, as swearing would be considered more anti-social behavior, perhaps better falling under the "flare warfare" classification.

Some have suggested that rather than branding someone a "troll" it's better to focus on specific behaviors that a group finds annoying and enforce rules of behavior that consistently and appropriately prevent them. The idea is to focus on the undesirable behaviors rather than the motivation for them. If such behaviors cannot be identified, then perhaps the alleged troll should be tolerated in fairness. Some call this the "if you can't identify it, then tolerate it" plan.

Alternative points of view

Although the troll phenomenon is long considered a negative and undesirable presence on a forum, some claim that the belief that it is inherently evil can lead to many detrimental consequences. The use of the word "terrorist" is often cited as a example of abuse However, anything tagged with the word "terrorist" evokes a feeling of an "us vs. them" mentality that is helpful both in isolating troll behavior and in reinforcing the "need" for anti-troll tactics, thereby cementing support for trolls. the administrators.

In most cases the latter is an unexpected advantage when dealing with trolls. However, the pertinent question arises: “What if this was the only goal, and the admin just wanted to silence certain criticisms, such as poor moderation, too much publicity, or restrictions on discussion topics?” Playing the "troll card" could be the ideal weapon.

Many of the people labeled "trolls" are simply labeled by someone else in the course of an ongoing religious, political, or other dispute. In other words, they are labeled "trolls" for acting like dissidents or heretics. Characterizing sysadmins or moderators as "the troll that got there first" is not entirely inaccurate. Many debates between people with and without administrative or legal powers resemble a simple heated personal argument. Specifically on the Internet, the possession of technological powers (such as the power to block users or IP addresses) is not necessarily a sign of some superior political or moral judgment. Similarly, one can be labeled a troll just for disagreeing with someone (often the one who started the argument).

As with similar pejorative labels, a group of people who have received the label can turn it around to create a group identity and the power to resist collectively. Individuals outside the group who use the label on someone become targets of a collective response. However, members can use the tag without consequence, usually as a joke, or to convince.