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A thought about trolling
Jul. 6th, 2012 01:06 pmSpecifically people who create troll personas for the purpose of impersonating members of other communities to mock them, or slapping together a bunch of identities that they think are ridiculous (including ones that don't actually exist, like the nonexistant 'transethnic community'), and claim they did it in order to demonstrate how ridiculous/stupid/pathetic/etc these people are.
If you believe they are that obviously ridiculous/pathetic/etc, why do you think they need your 'help' to make them look worse?
Is it actually going to help your 'cause' of trying to get as many people to hate them as possible, when it turns out that people that many of the haters had been holding up as some kind of typical example of These Crazy People are, in fact, trolls, and don't actually have any of the identities they claim to have? That much of their 'case' against a whole community is based on trolls? (Or, in other cases, the idea that a community for a certain thing exists at all?)
...we could write a lot more about this, but we're too tired right now to keep structuring words well. Trolls in general. Having spent fifteen years in various "weird" identity communities and how you start to get a sense, after a while, for who's honest (maybe naive and overdramatic, but still honest) and who's a troll. The fact that we've seen repeated incidents where self-proclaimed SJ crusaders began attacking people who gave off all the warning signs of being trolls, to us, and no one else seemed to notice any of those signs.
If you believe they are that obviously ridiculous/pathetic/etc, why do you think they need your 'help' to make them look worse?
Is it actually going to help your 'cause' of trying to get as many people to hate them as possible, when it turns out that people that many of the haters had been holding up as some kind of typical example of These Crazy People are, in fact, trolls, and don't actually have any of the identities they claim to have? That much of their 'case' against a whole community is based on trolls? (Or, in other cases, the idea that a community for a certain thing exists at all?)
...we could write a lot more about this, but we're too tired right now to keep structuring words well. Trolls in general. Having spent fifteen years in various "weird" identity communities and how you start to get a sense, after a while, for who's honest (maybe naive and overdramatic, but still honest) and who's a troll. The fact that we've seen repeated incidents where self-proclaimed SJ crusaders began attacking people who gave off all the warning signs of being trolls, to us, and no one else seemed to notice any of those signs.