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I think there is an important difference between engaging people in controversial conversations and trolling. In person, body language and tone are often enoug
by gwright 10y ago
I think there is an important difference between engaging people in controversial conversations and trolling.
In person, body language and tone are often enough to understand when someone is playing the devil's advocate or when they are otherwise stating things that they may not actually believe. When both parties understand this is going on, there is no trolling. Alternatively someone may have honestly come to the controversial opinions they are espousing. Again, body language and tone can often (not always) communicate the honest advocacy of controversial ideas and in this case there is also no trolling.
But when one party is misrepresenting their opinions in a way that the other party can not discern, you've moved away from just 'controversial' to fraudulent.
Online, almost all of the nuance of tone, body language, mannerisms, age, and so on is gone and all you are left with are the words making it much, much, easier to successfully execute the fraud.
To be proud of trolling is to be proud of engaging in deceitful and fraudulent interactions with other people.
Curiously I think there is at least one scenario where I don't think that deceit and fraud are necessarily unethical and that is in response to deceitful or fraudulent behavior. So pretending to go along with an online scam just to keep the scammers resources tied up isn't a bad thing. I believe in self-defense.
And just to be clear, when I read the parent comment, I did ask myself if it was a some sort of self-referential trolling attempt. Who really knows?
- zajd 10y agoTo be fair, he didn't say he was proud of it, he said he enjoyed it.
- gwright 10y agos/proud/proud or pleased/g Doesn't really change my point.
- BariumBlue 10y agoI'm a bit confused by what you're trying to say. If I make a joke, and the other person doesn't understand it as a joke, is that unethical? If I say something untrue, is that unethical, regardless of intent? It seems to me that you're saying that the only ethical use of communication is an emotionless exchange of concepts and pieces of data.
- gwright 10y agoI'm saying that being fraudulent and deceitful is a bad thing. Telling jokes isn't fraudulent in general but obviously telling a joke or pranking someone at their expense could be fraudulent and deceitful. I didn't say "intent" didn't matter, in fact I said the opposite. Intent is important and when you are fraudulent and deceitful in your intent you are being unethical. I didn't say anything about 'emotion'.
- BariumBlue 10y agoApologies, but I'm still a bit confused The way I understood your comment, is that saying something untruthful or presenting something in a way that the truthiness is difficult to determine is inherently unethical, unless it is very explicitly for a good cause. I personally enjoy ambiguity in my interactions with other people, online or offline. I'm not personally sure how misrepresenting yourself for no evil purpose can be considered inherently bad. You have a thought that I want to understand, but i'm just not sure how to read/interpret it to make sense. Perhaps your understanding/definition of "trolling" is so different than mine that it is incomprehensible to me.