This post is not about the mythical creatures that lurk in fiction, but the real trolls who frequent blogs, forums, and social media. These are the people who sometimes make the internet unpleasant at least, and dangerous at worst. A troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat rooms, or a blog, with the primary intent of provoking readers into an emotional response, or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion. Sometimes the postings are blatant and really obvious. Good examples can be seen on Youtube as well as other public sites. They tend to be just obvious hate posts such as "this video really sucks, and you are lame and stupid"! But it still often gets a reply even though it is clearly bait. The more worrisome trolls are the ones who are more subtle and less clearly a troll.
I read quite a few forums and smaller web sites posts and I recently saw a good example of the less obvious troll entry. A woman on a craft site was showing how she presented autumn leaves in a scrap- booking tutorial. The first few comments discussed the information in the project , but then there was the following post: "This is really not an original idea and I have been doing this for a long time. What we need is new thoughts and not information that is already available". This was totally off-topic but the next ten posts had to do with the originality of the tutorial and not the content. The blog author had to defend herself and never claimed the idea to be original. The troll had redirected the posts and was probably satisfied with the result. He or she wanted an emotional response and received it.
Those of us who write original material are always open to constructive criticism and differing opinions. And we welcome it, as we can learn from the feed back. But, be a aware that all comments can be a troll in disguise. Most trolls say that it is for amusement and fun, but if they are searching for sites to disrupt, their lives must be somewhat sad. They should start a website and let us comment....
I read quite a few forums and smaller web sites posts and I recently saw a good example of the less obvious troll entry. A woman on a craft site was showing how she presented autumn leaves in a scrap- booking tutorial. The first few comments discussed the information in the project , but then there was the following post: "This is really not an original idea and I have been doing this for a long time. What we need is new thoughts and not information that is already available". This was totally off-topic but the next ten posts had to do with the originality of the tutorial and not the content. The blog author had to defend herself and never claimed the idea to be original. The troll had redirected the posts and was probably satisfied with the result. He or she wanted an emotional response and received it.
Those of us who write original material are always open to constructive criticism and differing opinions. And we welcome it, as we can learn from the feed back. But, be a aware that all comments can be a troll in disguise. Most trolls say that it is for amusement and fun, but if they are searching for sites to disrupt, their lives must be somewhat sad. They should start a website and let us comment....
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