Unless you are famous like Banksy … then it improves property values? Clearly there is more going on with graffiti than just the urge to destroy.
Maybe all those people that live in poor urban neighborhoods find rattle cans more affordable than canvas, brushes, frames, gesso, and art classes.
You missed the critical conclusion of the article, the majority of those who comment online exhibit the Dark Tetrad characteristics, most people do not comment and the majority of them are decent. I am ashamed now.
We have nothing to fear since we are all trolls? Yikes.
that’s what i came here to say. It seems so obvious, and the article doesn’t mention that they controlled for what–to us–is the most obvious potential flaw in the poll.
And they are?
I posit:
Am I trolling?
Do I care?
Me: Not and do.
Now that we’ve got some psychological profiling of trolls and griefers, here’s a question.
Is it time to re-evaluate tactics in dealing with them?
Because the old Internet adage “Don’t feed the trolls” sounds an awful lot like the mistaken advice from a lot of well-meaning mothers to kids being bullied: “Ignore them and they’ll go away.” That advice doesn’t work.
I’m more of a “punch a bully in the nose” kind of person. So here’s my idea.
If I created a new forum, I’d make it free for anyone to join. They could remain anonymous, use pseudonyms, whatever, and use the board freely, and free of charge. But…
…to be allowed to post, they must provide a valid credit or debit card (or Bitcoin account, or Paypal). How the means of money exchange is done is irrelevant, so long as it’s secure against theft and fraud, and people feel safe using it.
Now. If a troll posting on the board violates one of the board’s rules, say he violates Wheaton’s Law and says dickish things to fellow users, he gets fined.
Small fines at first. A buck or two, then five bucks, then ten bucks.
And if you keep it up, you will get banned. And a banning comes with an automatic $200 fine, taken from the credit card instantly. Permission to do this is in the terms of service when you signed up - those are the conditions you agree to in order to post on the board - you agree to pay fines when you break the rules.
I’ll bet that would curtail the trolling significantly.
or we could use binomial nomeclature. e.g. trollus concernus
And I bet FARK would profit.
Fuck profit.
That’s all.
If you have clearance, you are bereft of respect.
What have you earned?
Decrial?
Well done, human steak.
We shall feast upon your bones…
[FILE PHOTO]
The fact thay you have ever been even slightly perturbed by anything you ever saw on the internet means that you lose and the trolls win.
Even that one that just kept repeating the phrase “lol” and nothing else for four hours.
Was Genghis Khan a troll?
Trolling is not a science. Trolling is a art.
There are two kinds of asshole in the internet - those that want to say things that other people don’t want to hear, and those who want to stop people saying anything that they don’t want to hear. We hear a lot about the former, and they get accused of being ‘trolls’ which is very dull, but I think the second, the censorious, the worthy, the holier-than-thou are actually worse.
I also think that there is a world of difference between flaming someone in a juvenile manner, or being stalkerish online, which any fuckwit can do, and actively exposing someone’s cognitive dissonance in a way that they cannot avoid. The latter is what I’d describe as trolling. The former is just harassment, just as it would be in the physical world. A troll is trying to push you into a position where you concede the point or stick your fingers in your ears and go ‘lalala I don’t want to think’.
It is interesting how a certain sort of person wants to see the latter (aggressively challenging people) grouped alongside the former (harassment).
Something I never had the pleasure of observing.
Surprising how often people fail it.
is called debate. Not driving trollies.
driving trollies involves disruption of the forum itself, personalizing arguments, and fallacy compounding fallacy - in the disguise of a debate.
I worry for the generation that grew up learning intellectual rigor from content delivered on 16:9 screens.
I’ve been experimenting with feeding the corpuses of commenter’s posting histories through a Bayesian filter - basically, through a spam filter that’s trained to classify trolling rather than spam.
It’s a very effective approach, but by no means foolproof. I have limited resources, but the trials I’ve run are very promising, digesting walls of text in political forums, flagging personal abuse, tagging ideologue’s talking points plagiarised from professional pundits.
After working with it for quite some time, I think several things: it would be a very useful tool for moderators, and it’s imperative that it not be automated — Robots do heavy lifting, and discourse is not heavy lifting;
Our discourse should not be governed by those who can figure out how to manipulate or evade a Bayesian filter, or train it to censor speech they merely disagree with. It only knows to recognise what people flag as trolling — or fallacies, or personal abuse, or “shitposting”;
Forgetting or never learning how to recognise sociopaths and narcissistic behaviour makes us all more susceptible to being taken advantage of, not less;
Training sociopaths and narcissists to mask the easily recognisable behaviours that act as warning signals only sharpens their skill set.
I think the article — and my own experience — make an argument that moderators of fora are both skilled and undertaking a hazardous profession.
You are mistaken if you think that trolling and aggressive debate can be cleanly separated. See Schopenhauer. All of the techniques you mention, and more besides, are typical methods of argument or of rhetoric - regardless of the fact that they are rarely relevant nor elevate the debated subject towards truth. In fact it’s quite normal for people to engage in such fallacious forms of argumentation quite innocently, without even recognising that they are doing so. Being able to recognise and either expose or manipulate unwitting fallacy is a key troll method. Likewise, a troll may engage in fallacy if it draws out their quarry.
As for your old-mannish comments about the generation that grew up learning intellectual rigour on the internet, 'twas ever thus. Have you never seen a newspaper?
