> but the filthiest asshole isn't Brutsch IMO.

Gotta disagree with that. What this kid was doing on a micro-level hurt and affected far more people than Gawker ousting him. Plenty of trolls have been made public before, but outside of the risk of finding a job and the initial backlash, they aren't doomed to lifelong persecution. Whereas his words and actions could have prompted someone to hurt themselves or just cut themselves off from the world.

Kid? He's 49 years old.

People hurting themselves over trolling is an education issue. Education on the part of the troll for one, and education on the part of the victim as well. Children, teens, and young adults need to know that life is not over if you get trolled. Too often I see someone hurt themselves over online comments and lawmakers/advocacy groups begin clamoring for new regulations to clamp down on anonymous trolls online. That's the wrong approach.

I don't like what VA did, I find it distasteful. But that's his prerogative, and he literally hurt no one online. If anyone was hurt by his actions or comments while he was on reddit, then there is an education issue that needs to be solved. Electronic bits on a screen, even if they represent real words, cannot hurt you. It's the actions taken offline that hurt.

> People hurting themselves over trolling is an education issue.

You can tell someone plenty of times that they shouldn't take something to heart, but it takes a lot more than "education" to give them confidence and self-worth. On edit, I don't mind calling him a kid. What he did was childish.

I think it would be interesting and worthwhile to study the effects of trolling on different personality types, to see if there's some kind of link between taking trolling to heart and some other factor. Say, a root cause for being offended. I believe it's upbringing and education, but I have no data on that. It's just a random guess.

I do know that there are millions of people who have no adverse reaction to being trolled. I also know that there are a lot of those people who also have low self esteem and very little confidence. I believe these people are people who understand what the Internet is, understand the psychology of Internet trolls. They know that it's a joke, or at worst they know that the troll is harmless. An annoyance at most. And they know they can do the same thing right back again.

The issue seems to be in when the two major subcultures online clash: the ones who know the Internet's darkest reaches and have an understanding of how awful the Internet can get, and the casual Internet users, the Facebookers/MySpacers/etc. It's like nudists strolling through The Vatican.

I would say that pseudonyms do more than just allow us to be anonymous with our opinions, but it also allows us to be anonymous with our emotions. In that sense, everyone has - or realizes - their jimmies are likely to be rustled at some point and it's best to shield your real identity from that person hitting the fan. But I agree I think we need to do a little bit more to figure out who gets hurt and why, and what we can do to curb that or provide them with some sort of kiddie pool to wade in. Sounds kind of silly, but I think it'd help.

"this kid?" Michael Brutsch, AKA violentacrez, is 49 years old.

What words or actions would be those? As far as I know he kept himself mostly to his own subreddits, where one could just not go.

Can't reply to my child comment, but that makes it all the worse.

> At least Brutsch had no illusion about the value and ethics of what he was doing, wasn't purposefully ruining someone's life, and wasn't making money out of it.

What do you mean by "purposefully"? Do you believe that all (or most) of the harm in this world is caused intentionally, by people who deep down in their hearts, think they are doing the wrong, evil thing?

I agree with you that Mr. Brutsch seems like a decent guy overall with just a very eccentric sense of dark humor. But I think you're being naive to think that him just wanting to have old-fashioned trolling fun precludes the possibility that people that he could be hurting people unwittingly. And no matter his intent, he and his activities are fair game for a journalist to expose.

Brutsch claims that to his knowledge, no one has been hurt by his trolling or administering of the content in question. And so we just believe him? This is the same person who, until five days ago, thought he could do this undetected even though he attends real-life Reddit meetups and posted his phone number and complete work history on the Internet, so pardon me if I worry that he may have several blind spots.

The degree of objective and conscious evilness in Violentacrez' behavior is debatable, indeed, but that's not the issue. At least that's not what makes this story newsworthy IMO.

I think that Gawker's "journalist" ought to get more flak than Violentacrez, because the latter doesn't pretend to be anything but an asshole, whereas Chen pretends to have the higher moral ground. Chen needs a tougher reality-check about what a gigantic scumbag he is, even though Brutsch sounds quite delusional himself about his actions' outcomes.

"wasn't purposefully ruining someone's life,"

debatable based on the content in some of those subreddits where he was active.