Reasons you should never feed the trolls
Trolls are a tricky thing to deal with. Not the things that hide under bridges – a can of pepper spray and a flaming pitchfork tends to work for them. I’m talking about internet trolls: people who post inflammatory messages online with the intent of getting a rise out of you. And there are millions of them: an entire army of faceless, shuffling, impotent (probably. Almost certainly) half-wits.
The really nasty ones make headlines; the ones who post racist abuse or make offensive comments on dead children’s Facebook memorial sites. But this is the grubby tip of a vast fecal iceberg. Messageboards – one of the great democratising achievements of the internet – are besieged. And you only have to click on a YouTube video to find hundreds of comments saying: “This thing you like? Well it’s AWFUL. And I hope you DIE. Lol.” Scrolling through YouTube comments is like staring into the dull, lifeless gutter of humanity; a miserable black-hole of venom and pent up sexual frustration.
Trolls tend to be contrary creatures. Right-wing trolls love nothing more than posting comments on left wing websites and vice versa. The less imaginative ones usually say something along the lines of: “X isn’t as good as he/she/it used to be”, “I’m never coming back to this website” or, simply, “This article is rubbish”, which makes you wonder why they went to the trouble of not only reading it but taking the time to complain too. It’s a bit like queuing up for a roller-coaster you know you’re going to hate then queuing up again to spit at the guy who presses the button to make it go.
Websites have agonised over ways to get round the problem, like insisting that people register with their real name and email address before posting. But this is a barrier to debate, and is easy to circumvent for a determined troll. Others heavily moderate their discussion boards: generally more effective but it’s a fine line between moderation and censorship.
If only the trolls had listened to their mothers and only spoke when they had something nice to say. Or maybe that’s not my opinion at all; maybe I’m just trolling the trolls, hoping it will make them disappear in a puff of logic.