NYT Magazine: Trolls Tell Us Not To Feed Them
Posted in: Blogosphere
Believe it or not, this Sunday’s NYT features a lengthy story on internet troll culture, with a reporter actually visiting and interviewing two of the more prominent ones over an extended period of time. It’s creepy but fascinating, like the old cliche about turning over a rock to find something squirmy and unspeakable underneath. The subjects of the article take a sociopathic delight in the infliction of misery, hidden under a thin veneer of rationalization.
One of the two primary subjects of the story claims that his exploits are sociological experiments or valuable life lessons (i.e., If you’re an epilepsy foundation, don’t allow flashing images in your user forums), the other is eagerly awaiting an impending "Malthusian crisis" that will kill off two-thirds of the Earth’s population. Others believe they’re simply taking self-important jerks down a peg, or waging darwinistic jihad against their intellectual inferiors.
What’s most instructive, however, is their absolute need for a reaction, or the game simply doesn’t work:
“Lulz” is how trolls keep score. A corruption of “LOL” or “laugh out loud,” “lulz” means the joy of disrupting another’s emotional equilibrium. “Lulz is watching someone lose their mind at their computer 2,000 miles away while you chat with friends and laugh,” said one ex-troll….
Another troll explained the lulz as a quasi-thermodynamic exchange between the sensitive and the cruel: “You look for someone who is full of it, a real blowhard. Then you exploit their insecurities to get an insane amount of drama, laughs and lulz. Rules would be simple: 1. Do whatever it takes to get lulz. 2. Make sure the lulz is widely distributed. This will allow for more lulz to be made. 3. The game is never over until all the lulz have been had.”
(…)
…The willingness of trolling “victims” to be hurt by words, he argued, makes them complicit, and trolling will end as soon as we all get over it.
There you have it. If you react, they win. If you don’t react, don’t get sucked into trying to refute dishonest, absurd or hateful comments, they don’t get their lulz, and they lose. Even if you’re so pissed off and furious that you can’t see straight, as long as you don’t say anything, they still lose.
Fortunately, thanks to the miracle of mods, we Firepups don’t have to worry about trolls too much. But we still see them infrequently here and more frequently elsewhere, and as tempting or satisfying as it may be to give them the back of your hand, nothing is crueler than giving them the back of your head.
(Yes, I just took over 400 words to say "Don’t feed the fucking trolls!" It’s that important.)
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