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The Psychology Of Trolling

  
  

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Ganesh
18:46 / 08.11.05
Ganesh, have you thought about people who just feel generally screwed over by life and see the sites they troll at as their way of getting their own back at the world?

Yes, I have. I'm sure that's a popular rationale.
 
 
--
01:11 / 09.11.05
All I have to say is, I actually don't mind most people here, even most of my detractors, but I'll be blunt and say that I dislike you, Ganesh. I think you're just a terribly snide, rude person, not to mention cruel. Also, you spread lies about me on Temple and put words in my mouth and that just ain't cool. Ironically, you always claim I'm attention seeking yet you're always willing to make a snarky remark towards me, whereas most of my other detractors know better and just ignore me. I guess that makes you an enabeler, no? But really, our worldviews are so different that we're almost utterly alien to each other, and we will never find common ground. I think it would be in the forum's best interest if we just avoided each other period.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
03:20 / 09.11.05
Looking through this thread I think it's obvious that while people who are bringing "insider knowledge" to the discussion may have the best intentions, basically to "tell it from the troll's mouth", any useful information they provide is dwarfed by the ammount of trouble caused. I'd say we should try and continue the thread without these confessions, as they only seem to cause trouble, and in any sense confessions are selective.
 
 
---
03:59 / 09.11.05
Sypha : can't you just PM the person you have a problem with if something like this happens again? It just gets annoying when a thread has an extra page on it that de-rails the topic, and if this carries on it looks like it might do that.
 
 
--
04:41 / 09.11.05
I don't believe in spamming people's message boxes with trivial matters such as this. If the person who started the thread finds my deviations to be an abstraction, they can just ask a moderator to remove them (wouldn't be the first time). I don't really give a flying fuck, to be honest. Some people take the internet way too seriously.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
06:29 / 09.11.05
you spread lies about me on Temple

That's a pretty serious accusation, Sypha. Can you back it up?

most of my other detractors know better and just ignore me.

Is that what you really want? To be ignored? I hate to say it, but you're really going about it in entirely the wrong way. You can't post lengthly screeds on a public board, often including accusations or criticisms of other posters, and then when they respond shrug your shoulders and say "Oh, well, you should have just ignored me!" Don't you see how irrational that is? You're demanding enormous tolerance and the most iron-clad self-control from everyone else, while refusing to excercise any yourself! If you really can't hold back from posting, maybe you should scramble your password--as you said you were going to do a while back.

Don't you realise that your "antics" as you call them are not innocuous, not harmless? That the things you say actually affect and, yes, hurt other people? When you do this kind of thing, it's a slap in the face for anyone trying to befriend you. Just saying "Oh, you take the internet too seriously!" isn't going to cut it here and you know it. There are real people on the opther side of the text wall, you know.
 
 
Ganesh
07:05 / 09.11.05
Sypha, I think you'll find my snarkiness is, by and large, confined to those threads wherein you find yet another way of talking at great length about The Wonder Of You. The times you manage to contribute material that's not wholly self-centred, I'm generally not moved to comment. You seem, finally, to be managing to avoid vast Sypha-themed monologues in the Temple; you need only resist the urge to post the same elsewhere (either sincerely, as a JOKE!!1!!!, as a meta-commentary or whatever) and we should be a-okay. I'll happily leave you in peace to assume whatever you like about my "worldview".

(If you're going to continue down the line of making specific accusations of lying against me, though, you might be advised to PM me or a Temple moderator rather than stink out the Policy. Or, at least start a new thread. Assuming the accusation isn't another of your merry "antics" which I'm supposed to ignore.)

But yeah, I agree that some people take the internet far too seriously - particularly those for whom it becomes a substitute for Real Life interaction.
 
 
Ganesh
07:18 / 09.11.05
Looking through this thread I think it's obvious that while people who are bringing "insider knowledge" to the discussion may have the best intentions, basically to "tell it from the troll's mouth", any useful information they provide is dwarfed by the ammount of trouble caused. I'd say we should try and continue the thread without these confessions, as they only seem to cause trouble, and in any sense confessions are selective.

I'd agree. I'm rather dubious about these "confessions", in any case: they seem, often, like another way of perpetuating the behaviour under discussion, or of minimising/disowning it. As an illustration of, or lightning-rod for trolling, this thread is grrreat. As an ongoing discussion, it's less than perfect.

I suppose it shows one of the problems with discussing 'troll psychology': it's a difficult thing to discuss with individuals who've previously been considered trolls without a feeling of collusion, of giving tacit approval/permission for trolling. I guess focussing on trolling in any sense provides an irresistable spotlight, an opportunity for attention/impact.

I'd agree with whoever said there were probably many, many varieties of trolls and trolling behaviour. It's probably analogous to weeds in that a) they're plants in the wrong place, and b) there's a myriad of species, varying in terms of how rampant or deep-rooted they are.
 
 
Tom Coates
08:30 / 09.11.05
I think this is an interesting and important discussion though. I mean there's always this tension in definition with trolling - some people wouldn't self-describe as trolls, others would, some people are probably unfairly described as trolls by the majority etc. I've always been quite happy that on Barbelith people seem to have pretty much total license to argue any position as long as they argue it sensibly and calmly and are prepared to listen and adapt that position, and I really approve as well of the idea that it's mainly about a respect for the other members of the board and a willingness to engage in discussion that distinguishes the troll from the non-troll, not their positions, but I can completely understand how some people on occasion find the whole thing frustrating and want to cut to the chase and ridicule the niceties and apparent rules of the discourse.

Sometimes, I get the impression that a good proportion of trolling is borne of frustration - frustration that something is moving too slowly or in too mannered a fashion, frustration that things aren't exciting enough or impatience that they require too much work for too little apparent reward, frustration that other people seem to represent a community that is staid or rigid and a community that doesn't seem to bend to listen to new voices. I'm being as positive as I absolutely can be here - suggesting purposefully that some troll-like activity (while bad) is motivated by very human, non-sociopathic tendencies. Alongside that stuff, which I think we need to find social mechanisms to deflect and incorporate, there's the other two forms of trolling - borne of frustration that you're not smart enough to follow the discussions, or too arrogant to believe that other people can offer useful insights or generally just too sociopathic to understand that social spaces are not purely created for the pleasure of the individual but are supposed to be commons where everyone contributes and everyone reaps more benefits than they could do alone. Obviously we have had representatives of the latter group around the place.

And a quick line to say that some people take the internet too seriously - well, I'm afraid I think that's rubbish. It's a medium - nothing more - and can be used by people for trivial things and serious things alike. You wouldn't say 'people take the ability to speak too seriously', and a message board like Barbelith is a way in which people can utilise their voice to communicate and discuss stuff. If they're discussing how funny it is when you're drunk - that's probably something that no one wants to take too seriously. If they're discussing Holocaust denial, then maybe it is. There are places on this board for all kinds of discussions from the most offhand, playful and trivial (Conversation) through to the most serious and complex (Head Shop, Switchboard). If you don't want to take conversations seriously, confine yourself to the Conversation!
 
 
Tom Coates
08:37 / 09.11.05
You know, actually, reading through some of this thread again, I'm extremely disappointed in the way it's moved and progressed. What I need people to do is to step back from the personal aspects and the history for a moment and talk at a higher level again about what constitutes a troll, whether there's a political dimension to it, how it relates to group formation and exclusion, whether there are types of trolls motivated in different ways, what trolls consider their purpose to be, or what are their goals. That kind of stuff. There's too much of value that could be said here for it to all descend into rehashes of famous Barbelith battles, and I'm really really going to try and persuade you that this is precisely the kind of thread where everyone has to try and dislocate their arguments from their own personal experience for a while and try to argue the positions and the interpretations rather than argue the person or their history or their board status.

It seems to me that it should still be completely conceivable for people on the board to have a debate about a serious issue without it turning into 'well you said this then' and 'everyone thinks you're a troll' and 'well you did that thing at this point back then too'. No one is going to learn anything from those discussions at all.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
08:41 / 09.11.05
Perhaps Legba might like to try starting the thread again in Head Shop, and HS mods can keep a close eye on it for threadrot?
 
 
Ganesh
08:45 / 09.11.05
As I say, Tom, there seems to be a central difficulty in attempting to discuss this in the abstract, in that examples are invariably being drawn from personal experience, and it's become fairly apparent that there's a perceptual gulf in terms of how those examples were and are perceived. Perhaps this perceptual gulf is the foundation of (at least one type of) trolling, in which case one could discuss it in terms of individual and/or group psychology. In pointing out the gulf, however, one becomes all too easily sidetracked into discussions of who (individual or community) ought to examine their behaviour in light of specific past events.

I'm happy attempting to discuss this at one remove, but if so, we'd be best avoiding specific examples and/or attempts at "jest".
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
08:46 / 09.11.05
Possibly they should also move self-exculpating narratives posted by trolls in the thread for deletion? That would neatly remove the elements that caused threadrot here.
 
 
Tom Coates
08:52 / 09.11.05
I'd rather we didn't if at all possible - let's just encourage people from now on to try and focus on the bigger issues here and ask people to try and avoid any more personal references. If people could talk in the abstract where possible and if they cite examples, could they be from their experience on other boards or at least phrased in those terms. For people who want to rehash old battles of troll vs. non-troll, or engage in that side of the debate any more, cann I suggest that instead of writing another post on the subject here, could they create a new thread in the Policy - or more practically - in the Conversation and post a link to it here with little or no commentary.

Now back to the issues at hand - what motivates trolls, who defines trolling, how can you generate a sense of a culture and a shared value-set or an open discussion forum without generating people who feel on the fringes or like they're outsiders or whatever? Is that even possible? Are there different techniques for helping different kinds of 'troll' to either adapt to the community or to have a community adapt to their presence or to deflect them, etc etc.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
08:53 / 09.11.05
That would work too... but I still like the idea of a Head Shop thread with the original abstract What motivates people to attack internet communities from inside? Not "what motivates people to attack Barbelith from inside", although I admit that reading may be a leetle difficult to avoid...
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
08:54 / 09.11.05
(That was in answer to Haus, btw...)
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
09:00 / 09.11.05
(apologies for triple post, but I'm back on-topic now)

Ganesh said-I'd agree with whoever said there were probably many, many varieties of trolls and trolling behaviour. It's probably analogous to weeds in that a) they're plants in the wrong place, and b) there's a myriad of species, varying in terms of how rampant or deep-rooted they are.

That's a good way of putting it. I'm thinking of things like the Barbelith Chatroom Peace Protest just prior to the US invasion of Afghanistan (only a few weeks after I joined), when a bunch of us went into a couple of pro-war chatrooms and argued. Now, we took great care to remain polite and reasonable despite the abuse being hurled at us, and I seem to remember we even managed to engage a couple of people and got at least one new member out of it. But the fact remains that we had gone there with the express intention of arguing- specifically, of DISAGREEING. (I know a chatroom's not quite the same, but I think the principle could equally be applied). That, I would say, constituted trolling in a very literal sense, but I don't see it as bad behaviour as such, and in that sense I'd say, yes, there can be a world of difference between different types of trolling.
 
 
Tom Coates
09:16 / 09.11.05
So this was my point - some 'trolls' on some sites (I don't think on Barbelith so much) are simply users with divergent political positions who are shouted out of the space, but really the definition of trolls has always been people who go into spaces in order to cause arguments and wind people up and bring things to a shuddering halt rather than to talk about the subjects at all.
 
 
Ganesh
09:25 / 09.11.05
Stoatie, I can related to your chatroom thing. I've approached other boards with conscious aims in mind other than to be accepted by like-minded individuals: in the wake of my bust-up with my aunt, three or four years back, I joined several Christian forums, with the aim of discovering whether her viewpoint on homosexuality (it's a sin and, as sins go, it's akin to murder) was widespread. I wonder too, in retrospect, whether I was also less consciously motivated by the fixity of her stance and the impossibility of any sort of engagement other than total agreement - and seeking to find people with whom I could engage in constructive argument.

For those interested, I talked about the experience on Barbelith, and tried to make sense of my own motivations as well as the responses I received. I'm pretty sure that, on CBBS, I was viewed as a troll - certainly latterly - so that account might lend weight to the 'plants in the wrong place' analogy, and also perhaps the idea that 'trolls' are individuals seeking discourses they cannot, for whatever reason, easily carry out in Real Life.

My own experience on Christian boards suggested to me, however, that there's more to trolling than this, that there needs to be an individual component too if the 'trolling' behaviour is to be sustained. For example, while it was easy enough for me, on (what turned out to be) a relatively fundamentalist Christian board, to attract screeds of attention, I was eventually too much of a compromiser to maintain that level of 'impact'. On being banned from CBBS (for quoting Philip Larkin, and asterisking the word "f*ck"), the posters I'd got on with went on to start a much more tolerant multi-faith board, which I helped moderate for a while.

Point being, although I can understand a lot of the suggested rationales for why people first start 'trolling' - and recognise that these can be situational - I suspect that those who keep 'trolling' to the extent that they alienate all their friends/allies have an additional factor peculiar to their individual psychology. As I said earlier, I can well understand the desire to start jokesuits and play the prankster - but, if one's pranks are obviously causing significant distress and one can't/won't respond to that, I think it goes beyond 'situational trolling' and into 'career trolling'.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
09:30 / 09.11.05
(I was hoping you'd bring up the CBBS thing, Ganesh- I always found that fascinating, but didn't think it was my place to mention it if you weren't going to.)
 
 
Ganesh
09:40 / 09.11.05
Shame the links don't work anymore. I'm sure I'm still searchable, though...
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
09:47 / 09.11.05
but, if one's pranks are obviously causing significant distress and one can't/won't respond to that

I think this is also key- both in real life and online, I'm fairly sensitive to criticism and abuse. This also means I'm terrified of upsetting people as well- hence my annoying habit of apologising for everything. I can see how trolling could be fun, but unless you enjoy upsetting people I can't see there being much mileage in it, because in order to do it "properly" you'd have to do that.
I think it was Mordant who said earlier about remembering that there are real people behind these blocks of text, and I think that was a very important point, on either side of the divide.

(Just re-reading that thread Ganesh- it's still fascinating, for many reasons. I recommend anyone at all interested in this discussion to check out the link).
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
10:06 / 09.11.05
And I just got to this part... the temptation to register under a different name and start a wide-eyed innocent 'Who Was This Ganesh And Why Are You So Unfair To Him, PS I Am Not Him' thread is near-overwhelming. I feel I have gained a true insight into troll psychology...

(off-topic- we used to have threads of that quality ALL THE TIME in the Conversation... can we do that again, please? That was nice.)
 
 
Ganesh
10:30 / 09.11.05
Yes, I'm quite enjoying rereading the CBBS thread. I think it was a really useful experiment - more than an experiment, actually, in that my positive engagement with Cross+Flame continued much longer and was richer than my time at CBBS. I still got narked with them from time to time, but overall my experience of Christians and Christianity was a good one. I'm no longer a moderator on C+F, but do still post there occasionally.

My other experience of 'trolling', which took place on Rage's short-lived 'discordian' board, perhaps illustrates your main point, Stoatie. That nature of that board suited - even encouraged - multiple suits and pranksterism, so I registered a few fairly silly jokesuits. The most memorable was Ana, crap-poetry-writing refugee from a pro-anorexia board. My main purpose, in Ana, was to showcase the dire foodangst poetry I'd penned, but other posters followed the link in her profile and quickly became outraged by the concept of pro-ana (something which rather surprised me, given the ostensibly libertarian slant of the board itself) to the extent that they started to plan a board invasion.

At this point, I started to think "uh-oh" and wonder, queasily, whether I'd gone too far. I contacted the board admin, Rage herself, and told her who 'Ana' was. She seemed okay with it, so I didn't unmask - but I did tone down my shit poetry. In retrospect, hand-over-the-mouth-amusing as it was to see certain posters messianically addressing the issue of hardcore eating disorder by, cunningly, telling those concerned they needed to eat more, I think that was an example of going too far. Even if it wouldn't have changed things, I should've unmasked before all the excitability.
 
 
Jack Fear
10:58 / 09.11.05
O/T: Holy shit, we got BoingBoinged!
 
 
Tryphena Absent
11:10 / 09.11.05
Oh great.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
11:14 / 09.11.05
I take it that's not a good thing then? I'm not really aware of BoingBoing...
 
 
Ganesh
11:19 / 09.11.05
Me neither. So long as we don't attract too many meta-trolls (ho HO, let's troll a thread about trolling!1!!), I'm sure it'll be fine.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
11:21 / 09.11.05
The write-up itself is very nice, though...
 
 
Jack Fear
11:22 / 09.11.05
Well, it's pretty high-profile, generally very smart, and consistently ahead of the curve. You tend to see links on BoingBoing about three days before you start seeing them on every blog in town.

What Nina's worried about, I imagine (and the thought crossed my mind as well) is that a link to a thread about trolling, if disseminated on a widely- and indiscriminately-read thoughtleader blog like BoingBoing, may act as honey for would-be pests: "Oh, so these ivory-tower intellectual types think they've got trolls all figgered out, eh? Well, wait til they get a load of me, mwah-hah-hah."
 
 
Ganesh
11:23 / 09.11.05
Abstrollutely.
 
 
Jack Fear
11:23 / 09.11.05
Ah. Ganesh beat me to the point.

You win this round, Herr Doktor.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
11:47 / 09.11.05
Actually I regard BoingBoing as having partially created a frenetic consumerist Internet that allows easy access to a limited number of sources and focuses only on the Internet with any consistency. It's not really a slight, I just preferred the Internet back in 1996.

That and what Jack said.
 
 
Ganesh
12:05 / 09.11.05
Back on topic, does anyone think trolls can be divided into theoretical subtypes, or is any sort of attempt at this bound to founder? I guess I've suggested a broad categorisation of 'situational' vs 'career' trolling, the latter being distinguished by extreme persistence over years and/or over several message-boards. I suppose that, on the Christian and 'discordian' boards, I'd be an example of the former.

I'd say that, the less evidence there is of a poster's ability to communicate (or interest in communicating) in ways other than conflict-seeking, the more likely they are to shade toward the latter category. The really severe end of trolling would, I suspect, begin to overlap with actual psychiatric illness or personality disorder: those are the people who occasionally make the news, as part of stalking/harrassment suits. I think of their behaviour as broadly analogous with the abdominally-scarred Munchausen's types who travel the country, presenting at A&E departments with simulated appendix pain. In both cases, there's an apparent hunger for a specific sort of attention, with considerable time and energy, and extreme behaviour, devoted to an aim which the majority would find hard to comprehend.
 
 
Axolotl
13:26 / 09.11.05
Could people be single issue trolls? Amenable to persuasion, even pleasant to talk to on most subjects, but get them on the topic of the state of Israel/materialism in hip-hop/whether abbreviations count in scrabble or whatever and they become impossible to reason with to the point of trollism? Or does the typical trolls' unwillingness to listen or engage in debate only occur in people who in you'd cross the street to avoid if you saw them in the flesh?
 
  

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