I troll a lot, and this doesn't describe me at all. For me, it's simple - I like eliciting reactions out of people. I like saying controversial things to see if someone will get upset or offended. It's fun. Same reason I liked to tease my siblings when I was younger. For some reason manipulating people into losing control of their emotions is very entertaining.
It's a form of learning. Children do this all the time. The social function is to find out what the social boundaries are.
Simplifying a great deal, and summarising a century of social theory, what is stable in society are second-order expectations, i.e. what others expect myself and others to do. But social expectations are not directly observable, which is a problem. Trolling is a form of behaviour that teases out others's reactions which gives us information about their boundary between socially acceptable and socially unacceptable behaviour.
I think you're mostly right, but is it not a form of learning with an expiration date? Like, once a user of this strategy reaches a certain age, it becomes socially unforgivable?
I don't think it becomes socially 'unforgivable' per se. Although it really could be experienced as such when done with people who you don't know at least a little. My friends and I often try to illicit reactions from each other but everyone knows it's just a game and in the end no one gets hurt. I would say that's what separates trolling from just plain bullying: people know it's just a game of sorts.
> I like saying controversial things to see if someone will get upset or offended.
It's unfortunate this brings selfish joy at the cost of other's suffering, all without external attempt to solve the dissonance behind the disagreement.
I find your comment a mystery. The fact that something is communicated via the Internet doesn't magically make it dismissible. Ideas that make people mad can be communicated in all sorts of ways, the medium is irrelevant.
So I read your comment as dismissing the concept that words actually have meaning. It seems like a very nihilistic point of view.
The point is that everyone knows (or should know) that Internet communications contain at least 10× more trolling than any other common medium, and thus people should have sufficient emotional self control to avoid getting mad at least until they have definitively determined whether a particular idea is intended to be serious.
The point is that everyone knows (or should know) that dark alleys are at least 10x more dangerous than lighted streets, and thus people should have sufficient situational awareness to avoid getting mugged, blah, blah, blah...
Yeah. Uh huh. Exactly.
If I could roll my eyes any harder, they'd fall out the back of my head.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Of course people should avoid high crime areas when practical and maintain situational awareness when out in public. This is simple common sense, and although not 100% effective those steps will drastically reduce the risk of getting mugged. Ask any police officer.
A mugging is always the mugger's fault. Full stop.
I could walk down the street wearing clothes made from $100 bills and gold thread, and it's the person who attacks me that is to blame for that attack. They initiated the use of force and violence, contrary to law, custom, and human decency.
Any claim to the contrary is, unambiguously, "Well, if she hadn't been wearing that dress..."
You're completely missing the point. First, getting mad about someone trolling on the Internet has nothing to do with sexual assault. Second, I never stated anything about blaming the victim. But that doesn't make it smart to walk down a dark alley flashing $100 bills. The mugger is to blame but that won't keep you safe in the real world where some people will always be vicious predators.
In fact through your intentional misunderstanding and inflammatory rhetoric about unrelated topics I now suspect you have successfully trolled me in a discussion about trolling. Well played, sir!
> ...but that won't keep you safe in the real world where some people will always be vicious predators.
And I'm saying the troll is the predator. He views his entertainment as more important than his "victim's" emotional state, and justifies it with arguments like, "Well, it's the internet, maaaan!" or "It's only a joke, lighten up," or "Serves them right for being so sensitive."
I flatly repudiate that kind of self-serving rationalization. If you fuck with people's emotions for your own amusement, you are a predator. Doesn't matter how "easy" it is. Doesn't matter how "sensitive" they are. You (that is, the party trolling someone) are in the wrong.
Does it change the fact that there are predators in the world? Of course not. But that still doesn't justify predation. And if you say it does, the same logic applies to muggings and sexual assault.
I think the point is that by accepting a situation where perpetrators are not responsible for their actions and victims are criticized for not assessing risk appropriately is a disappointing and destructive way of thinking.
It is not formal or face to face communication, even if it were, there is no obligation to participate or oblige someone trying to get a rise out of someone else. On top if it people have more then enough tools to completely remove themselves or the offending party from conversation. Thus medium is relevant.
But if you mean an e-ego has to be defended and proven superior to others in order to maintain e-streetcred... yeah, sure it will amount to nothing but entertainment for someone else.
What does 'formal' or 'face-to-face' have to do with anything?
Words and ideas have meaning whether the situation is trivial or earth-shattering, whether the communication is face-to-face, online. To view otherwise is to reject meaning at all levels, to be nihilistic.
Why unfortunate? this sort of 'suffering' is minimal and if a person saying controversial things causes upset, then they can grow thicker skin, troll back or find different company.
This is a leading question. Leading questions are obvious when the question they ask cannot be answered with a simple statement. Leading questions are a sign of dissonance and should never be answered, unless one desires the dissonance for themselves. Dissonance itself creates suffering, which is an inefficient process that attempts to resolve the dissonance in a way that causes the holder the least amount of suffering in the near term. "Thicker skin" is simple a reference to burying dissonance. "Troll back" is a reference to spreading the dissonance to others. "Finding different company" is impossible as the Internet now connects all of us. Better buckle up.
It's been my experience people will rationalize being an asshole until they start accepting themselves for who they really are. What is fun is to see someone solve that dissonance on their own and realize the truth that willful suffering is more efficient than offloading your suffering to someone else.
>This is a leading question. Leading questions are obvious when the question they ask cannot be answered with a simple statement. Leading questions are a sign of dissonance and should never be answered[...]
This reminded me of the famous questions the Buddha refused to answer.[1] Your mentioning 'dissonance' and suffering made me see it in a new way.
A question is not a leading/suggestive question just because it "leads the comment". Parent was merely picking up the grandparent's main claim (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leading_question also doesn't define the term by whether it can be answered plainly or not either).
That said "something being unfortunate" is a very subjective thing connected to personal morals. Intuitively I don't have much empathy for "victims" of (not outright criminal (by which I mean heavy scamming and the sort)) trolling either, it's the natural rule of this place. You'll get bitten by it a couple of times and move on. Nothing to see here.
Or someone else can step in and flame and/or downvote and/or fire you because we don't want to lose valuable community members, colleagues or employees because of your childish attitude ;-)
You are welcome, I feel you have earned my downvote now.
I think this is the problem right here. If any kind of suffering results, I think it's very much opt-in suffering, much more so than in other situations. The "victim" almost has to want to suffer to experience it.
Certain people on forums have always written as if they think forums are a "space" where they "go". Or that such a "place" is automatically a "community". Recently, more and more people opine that one can be made to "feel unsafe" in such a "space" when certain unicode strings appear there.
I think this is mistaking of a metaphor for the real thing, that borders on willfully ignorant. I think it's over-dramatic. To me, viewing a web page is much more like opening a magazine or tuning in a radio station. If you read/hear things that offend you, change the channel.
This metaphor-mistaking has got to an extreme on Twitter, in particular, with people claiming they're being victimized because "people can @ me without my consent" and "omg my mentions".
I definitely subscribe to the Tyler the Creator school of thought on this:
I think there is an important difference between engaging people in controversial conversations and trolling.
In person, body language and tone are often enough to understand when someone is playing the devil's advocate or when they are otherwise stating things that they may not actually believe. When both parties understand this is going on, there is no trolling. Alternatively someone may have honestly come to the controversial opinions they are espousing. Again, body language and tone can often (not always) communicate the honest advocacy of controversial ideas and in this case there is also no trolling.
But when one party is misrepresenting their opinions in a way that the other party can not discern, you've moved away from just 'controversial' to fraudulent.
Online, almost all of the nuance of tone, body language, mannerisms, age, and so on is gone and all you are left with are the words making it much, much, easier to successfully execute the fraud.
To be proud of trolling is to be proud of engaging in deceitful and fraudulent interactions with other people.
Curiously I think there is at least one scenario where I don't think that deceit and fraud are necessarily unethical and that is in response to deceitful or fraudulent behavior. So pretending to go along with an online scam just to keep the scammers resources tied up isn't a bad thing. I believe in self-defense.
And just to be clear, when I read the parent comment, I did ask myself if it was a some sort of self-referential trolling attempt. Who really knows?
I'm saying that being fraudulent and deceitful is a bad thing.
Telling jokes isn't fraudulent in general but obviously telling a joke or pranking someone at their expense could be fraudulent and deceitful.
I didn't say "intent" didn't matter, in fact I said the opposite. Intent is important and when you are fraudulent and deceitful in your intent you are being unethical.
The way I understood your comment, is that saying something untruthful or presenting something in a way that the truthiness is difficult to determine is inherently unethical, unless it is very explicitly for a good cause.
I personally enjoy ambiguity in my interactions with other people, online or offline. I'm not personally sure how misrepresenting yourself for no evil purpose can be considered inherently bad.
You have a thought that I want to understand, but i'm just not sure how to read/interpret it to make sense. Perhaps your understanding/definition of "trolling" is so different than mine that it is incomprehensible to me.
Life is really short -- there is very little time to leave your thumbprint on this place. If you ever look back, I wager you'll come to wish you could use that time doing something different.
Right, it's so lame how people immediately turn to "you're a hater, hate hate hate" when discussing this topic. You don't have to hate anybody to understand people's foibles and how to get a rise out of them.
I sometimes troll to demonstrate to people how wrong and stubborn they are, but it doesn't work very well because people who are stubborn enough to fall for trolling are usually also stubborn enough to ignore just having made a moron of themselves.
My favorite form of trolling is saying something ambiguous to people arguing with each other so that both of them at the same time go "see? qb45 agrees with me!" Then they both realize what happened and resume previous thread as if it didn't happen ;)
I think everyone trolls, to a greater or lesser extent, and whether they admit it or not. It's a form of a prank/social response experiment when done in taste. The current political climate in the US, however, has brought out some ugly, inhumane behavior I'd never thought I'd see in the present age.
Haha, you sound like a fun person to be around. For some reason, I like trolls. In eliciting a reaction from me, they show me how I can improve by taking a step back and having a more stable mood that cannot easily be played with.
I troll a little bit, but I've followed the activities of more prolific trolls much more, and agree this essay has very little to do with trolling. I don't have any feelings or expectations at all about the people I interact with on the internet, so certainly nothing remotely approaching hate (an extremely diluted word, anyway). I think exchanging text with anonymous strangers is very far removed from real social interaction.
I do sometimes try to take down trolls but have almost given up because it feels like nailing a jellyfish to the wall: easy but doesn't stick and might hurt me in the process.
Edit: add "try to", not because I feel I didn't win but because it feels so useless as that kind of trolls seems to be unable to recognise when their views have been shot to pieces.
As in, has anyone successfully trolled me? Or have my "victims" defeated my attempts? If the latter, all the time. The people that defeat me are the ones that just ignore me. Once I can get people to engage with me, I'll try to string them along as long as possible.
I started trolling back - occasionally. In order to troll back you need to know how to troll, because the chance of a fruitful conversation is very low. Nice stories like the one above are... nice, but outliers. The problem is there will never be another "meeting" between the two parties, so putting effort into the "relationship" is just not worth it - please note that I'm not giving normative advice here, this is a description, "game theory" like. Places like HN and reddit are almost exclusively for chance meetings of people who will never meet again, or if they do won't realize it because there are too many user IDs.
Key points to troll - and I collected those points over years, watching my own reactions, what frustrated me the most:
- Never act smart - act stupid! There is nothing that riles people more than "stupid", especially when it's directed at you. Also, it is much harder to get through to a stupid person. After all, arguments don't work!
- Don't bother putting any effort into your replies! Goes with the first point, but it also helps you remain detached. Whenever the other guy posts a reply, don't bother reading it, just post your prepared (stupid) statement. At some point it's enough to post the same thing again and again. It shows the other person how futile their position is. Also helps to keep the effort you put in very low.
- Reply (mechanically!) for as long as needed. I have never met someone who would stop a lot sooner than me. Simply because I have next to zero emotional investment with the above methods, and it costs very little time, such a response is just mechanical. They put so much effort in though that it feels like losing, which is mirrored in their replies.
- Caution: If you do end up with any emotional investment at all, the moment you stop before the other person does you will feel bad. Really bad. You will dread the next time you open reddit (for example) and see the red icon on the inbox, because you know it's going to be another response. The only way to avoid this is to do the whole thing mechanically. Imagine you are an mobile carrier company's customer service person. Instead, you want the other person to feel that way!
- Responding quickly for a while is okay. However, what is far more effective at getting under people's skin is when you continue the next day or even days later. Imagine your own experiences: You were caught in a nasty troll fight. It is over, you go back to normal. Two days later, out of the blue, you expect nothing but normal conversations - you click on your reddit inbox - and there is a very nasty reply continuing that dreaded trolling thread! It's not over at all, your troll has stamina! See above, this is doable at no emotional cost to yourself only if you have no emotional investment. If your mind is healthy no amount of impersonal Internet-based anger lingers on to the next day, not normally! Instead, if you were emotionally involved, the last thing you want the next day is to even think of that nasty exchange. So if you plan to be a long-term troll: Make sure you are not invested at all. I think I repeated this piece of advice a few times by now. It is key. And the key to this key is to be "stupid", if you think you cannot help but be invested, or at least I can't help it.
When do I do this? Whenever somebody replies to a comment that I put a lot of effort in, so it wasn't just some funny joke (on those comments I take the downvotes like a man and don't care), and when it is obvious that they don't care about the actual subject, instead I somehow triggered an emotional response (in 1 out of 1,000 people, it's unavoidable) and all they are after is to "get me" (emotionally).
Why do I do it? I want to put a cost on their trolling. You troll me for my honest, long and well-thought-out comment I want you to pay.
So I don't know what people reading this might think, I realize it depends a lot on context, but I can't think of an example right now. It's not like I do that every day, it's rare.
Should I ever meet my match it does not matter - because since I only posted mechanical replies I don't really care. I could stop at any point if I find something better to do. It really feels more like a chore. I don't enjoy it, but it's "a job" at that point.
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I would like to say a lot more about the reasons for trolling, but there already is so much text now...
Anyway, one reason that I already hinted at and would like to talk about more is that no actual real conversation is possible!
I invest a lot of time at a great and well-sourced reply - and what does it gain me? 10 people read it, 5 misunderstand or don't care. I don't build any reputation, I don't build any followers - while you can do that, sort-of, on reddit for example (and there's a "friend" feature here I think, no idea what it actually does) if anyone uses it at all it certainly is niche.
These discussion forums by their nature encourage memes and jokes and 1-3 paragraph "short stories" at most. Each topic must be started, talked about and completed within a handful of sentences per person, at most. Anything deeper and more meaningful is not actually possible, at least not on a statistically meaningful scale.
So sometimes, when a topic would require exactly that, longer conversations, I just give up. I don't even try to convince that guy who misunderstood my comment, I take the shortcut, frustrated less about the comment and the person but about the medium.
The moderation system also helps (i.e. it doesn't), that's yet another topic I could write a few pages about. I have come to the opinion that it would be better not to have any negative votes at all. The few comments that really deserve it are outweighed by the many many more that don't, where somebody just didn't like it. Downvotes create frustration when they come unexpectedly, i.e. especially when somebody put an actual and honest effort into a comment.
There are likely multiple evolutionary factors behind the tendency to create mischief.
Several concepts are interconnected with the idea of mischief:
- Playing fair vs. ignoring the rules (following/breaking social norms)
- Playing for fun vs. purposeful goal directed activity
- Pleasure derived from antisocial behaviors
- Pleasure derived from eliciting reactions in others
- Strategic reasons to create disruption
- The role of anonymity
Most of these have been studied separately, and not all of them may be required for an activity to be considered "mischief." Each one has its own set of evolutionary stories.
Breaking the rules: There are evolutionary advantages to the species as a whole (e.g. stable organized societies) for having everyone predisposed to following the social norms. Similarly, there are advantages to breaking the social norms: personal advantage in a world where others are unwilling to cheat, collective advantage to having a society that isn't 100% conformist (if the norms are bad, that will only be discovered if some people start breaking them and succeed).
Playing for fun (not goal-directed): Studies on play behavior in animals suggest that play during development serves several functions. It develops practice with give-and-take social interaction for more harmonious social order later, and physical play develops coordination that can help in adult behavior later (puppies playing and becoming better at fighting as dogs).
Pleasure derived from antisocial behaviors: This may fall a little bit outside of mischief, however the desire for revenge has been studied, as has duper's delight (pleasure from fooling others), or pleasure from cheating. In general, any behavior that could have an evolutionary advantage for some individuals is likely to have pleasure associated with it somehow, since that ensures that the behavior will be expressed. In any competition, using a strategy that would not occur to the opponent is to the individual's advantage because the opponent won't be planning to counter it. So whatever rules the opponent assumes you are playing by represent opportunities for advantage by ignoring them. There is the risk of winning the battle but losing the war (getting caught and punished), however this is a risk/reward trade-off.
Pleasure derived from eliciting reactions in others: There are rewards on multiple levels (neurological, social, existential) from getting others to respond:
- Neurological: Experiencing perceptual feedback to an action is inherently rewarding, which may relate to why kids enjoy hitting things and knocking things over. It is part of experimenting with and discovering the causal mechanisms of the environment.
- Social: A displaced or repurposed desire for social interaction, for example when preteens chase and hit girls or boys they are attracted to, or when adults "play the victim" to elicit sympathy.
- Existential: Feeling that one has an impact on the world, that one exists, that one matters. This might relate to enhancing the feeling of personal agency: the sense of power and causal control over the environment.
- Curiosity and personal amusement: Finding out what will happen, and watching the predictable reactions of others play out can be amusing (credit Naman Kumar).
There are also strategic reasons to create disruption in the specific social setting of a dialog (e.g. "trolling"):
- The disrupter wins social points for being dominant, tougher, funnier, and less naive than other participants.
- The bad boy (or b* girl) is admired by peers for being immune to the judgments and approval of others. From an evolutionary perspective, being revered by peers makes one attractive to potential mates in a social species (credit Ernie Bornheimer).
- Humor can be a way of moving the discussion away from an uncomfortable topic (credit Marcus Geduld).
- Sarcasm, ridicule, and shaming can be a strategy for shifting the power in a dialog, silencing opposing viewpoints, and changing the official view in the disruptor's favor (as with political debates).
Lastly, there is also the role of anonymity in mischief. Acting anonymously can be a way of playing out a fantasy without consequences to one's reputation in society. It certainly resolves one of the inner conflicts to antisocial behavior, the risk to one's reputation, by eliminating that risk altogether. Anonymity also facilitates pleasure derived from superiority, power, or knowledge. If you know something that no one else knows -- who is behind the mischief -- then you may be getting pleasure from what would normally be a positive evolutionary behavior: acquiring more knowledge than the next person, understanding causal mechanisms in the world, accumulating power.
Research on the neural basis of breaking the rules:
Moll J, et al (2005) The neural basis of moral cognition. Nature Reviews Neuroscience.
Spitzer M et al (2007). The Neural Signature of Social Norm Compliance. Neuron.
Sanfey AG et al (2003). The Neural Basis of Economic Decision-Making in the Ultimatum Game. Science.
de Quervain DJF et al (2004). The Neural Basis of Altruistic Punishment. Science.
