7 ms·

I think right now there are three main kinds of internet trolls in things like this. First would be the government sponsored ones who tend to post in unison or

by neaden 8y ago

I think right now there are three main kinds of internet trolls in things like this. First would be the government sponsored ones who tend to post in unison or have some theme. These seem to mainly be Chinese and Russian. Second are the freelance trolls, people in it to make money by building an audience for advertisements. A lot of these people are in Macedonia where they can make relatively good money spreading false blogs on Facebook or something. Finally are the home grown true believers who are just posting their honest views in an abrasive, hostile, or threatening manner. I think the majority of trolls belong to the last group, but the first two have an outsized impact at creating new stories and coordinating messaging that is amplified by the third.

tomatotomato37 8y ago
If you're going by the original meaning of troll you're missing the fourth category; the people who post something inflammatory because everyone freaking out and arguing at each other is amusing to them
- JeremyBanks 8y ago
  Back in the day, we just called those people assholes.
  - ineedasername 8y ago
    I like it, it's catchy!
- neaden 8y ago
  I think that type has mostly gone away/become the third. People "ironically" posting racism seem to all just be flat out racists now. As Kurt Vonnegut said “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
  - lohszvu 8y ago
    I strongly disagree. Look at the flatearth communities.
    - SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
      Shhh... people still think they are being serious. edit: Think about it this way... There are dumb people on both sides of anything, it's tough to say "only their side needs to own their idiots" when lots of stupid and people run around talking absolute nonsense about climate change when it's hot out. That doesn't mean everyone that agrees with them is as dumb or even wrong at all. If 10% of people believe it and the rest are acting - how could you tell?
      - rootusrootus 8y ago
        Only people who stop at the headline. If you go to the flatearth subreddit they're pretty clear about what they are doing. They don't quite say it explicitly, but you'd have to be pretty dense not to see the game they are playing. Though I have charitably believed in the past they are mostly having fun with each other rather than trying to troll the rest of the world.
      - PhasmaFelis 8y ago
        Sure, a lot of them are trolls, probably almost all of them at first. But the problem with pretending to be an idiot is that actual idiots will rally around you and take heart. Have you seen Beyond the Curve, the documentary about flat-earthers trying (and failing) to prove the earth is flat? You'd need pretty strong evidence to convince me that everyone in the film was in on it.
        Pharmakon 8y ago
        There is also the tendency of mentally unstable people not getting the joke and more or less taking over the meme. Then the profit-seekers and cult leader types emerge, and suddenly what was a joke is a movement. On a much smaller scale the same thing happens with satirist news outlets, and the process is: Outlet makes a joke (for a real example “Joe Biden is refusing to leave the White House and has armed and barricaded himself.”) Joke is spread devoid of context, still as a joke. Trolls get a chuckle by posting it to some extremist group. Extremist group doesn’t get the joke and adopts the narrative, fitting it into existing ideology. Pizzagate and QAnon are great examples of this process. The other process is that schizophrenics dig up old ideas to fit their current delusions, such as “Orgone” and “Chemtrails.” Some of these ideas fit into the delusional ideation of non-mentally ill groups and it becomes a widespread conspiracy theory. Note that this can all be very profitable, if you look at people like Glenn Beck, Alex Jones, and David Icke.
- ucaetano 8y ago
  If you're going by the original meaning of troll you're missing the fifth category: monstrous cave-dwelling creatures. :)
  - braythwayt 8y ago
    Well, actually... In the Internet sense of the word, the trolls in question live under bridges and spring out to surprise those who would cross with unpleasant demands and behaviour. Not cave-dwellers at all. —— Hey, this is Hacker News, if we can't bikeshed the etymology of "troll," what use is this medium?
    - ucaetano 8y ago
      > In the Internet sense of the word But that's not the original meaning :)
      - braythwayt 8y ago
        It depends on "how original," stories about trolls under bridges go back a long way, but if we go WAY back, we get the word applyimng to many different mythical creatures: "The term is used to denote various beings, such as a jötunn or mountain-dweller, a witch, an abnormally strong or large or ugly person, an evil spirit, a ghost, a blámaðr, a magical boar, a heathen demi-god, a demon, a brunnmigi, or a berserker." I think that over time, and thanks to various "fairy tales," we have settled on Trolls as he mountain/riock/cave-dwellers who are turned to stone if exposed to sunlight. Sadly, the Internet Troll multiplies when given attention. Sunlight does not disinfect social media.
    - kps 8y ago
      The internet sense comes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolling_(fishing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolling_(fishing) rather than the bridge dwellers. “Trolling is a method of fishing where one or more fishing lines, baited with lures or bait fish, are drawn through the water.”
      - 8y ago
- giancarlostoro 8y ago
  That's part of the premise of that one South Park episode / season about the 2016 elections[0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skank_Hunt#Plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skank_Hunt#Plot
- howard941 8y ago
  Let me gently disagree. The internet etymology is based on the fishing activity.
- mcphage 8y ago
  How can you distinguish between the 3rd and 4th categories? How do they behave differently?
basch 8y ago
conflating employees of propaganda machines with "watch the world burn" in bad faith circus-goers is an unfortunate abuse of language. i mourn for our loss of a good word that used to mean something. whatever they are, they are much closer to shills than trolls. do words with specific meanings usually become meaningless when they become global mainstream? the world picks up a communities word and doesnt bother to use it in the old context? reminds me of decimate maybe?
- bloopernova 8y ago
  That makes me think of Hacking vs Cracking, and the confusion that laypeople have when a programmer refers to "hacking something together quickly"
qwerty9876 8y ago
The biggest group of government sponsored trolls is those of US politics related. Go to any "mainstream" politics subreddit eg /r/politics and I guarantee you half the commenters are paid shills. The most "reddit addicted city" is Eglin Air Force base. https://redditblog.com/2013/05/08/get-ready-for-global-reddit-meetup-day-plus-some-stats-about-top-reddit-cities-and-languages/ https://redditblog.com/2013/05/08/get-ready-for-global-reddi...
Xixi 8y ago
Trolls are not persons, they are characters. There were a lot of trolls in the old days of newsgroups, and none of them fit in any of your categories: they were neither in it for the money, and they certainly were not true believers. They were in it for the entertainment. The best way to fight them was to ignore them, hoping that the lack of reaction would bore them. In 1997, imagine that you are arguing with the user Voldemort on comp.sys.mac, as he is claiming that the Mac is awful, that Mac users are idiots, and that surely Apple will be dead by year 2000. Maybe J.K. Rowling agrees with you that the iMac will save Apple. But that's completely irrelevant because you are not arguing with her: you are arguing with the evil character she created, that wishes death upon the Mac world. What you need for Voldemort to calm down is not to win the argument against him, but to convince the author of altering the behavior of her character. An entirely pointless endeavor... EDIT: that said, I agree that the internet landscape has massively changed since the nineties.
- neaden 8y ago
  I think Serdar Argic is possibly the earliest example of a kind of troll that is being discussed in this article, someone who drops in to new places when they are discussing something even tangential to their hobbyhorse and dropping in their screed.
ksec 8y ago
You vastly underestimate the first group. And they are well paid for it as well, ( I assume because of the English Requirements ). And since China has a huge population, even a small group percentage of people would be gigantic on Reddit.

by neaden 8y ago

tomatotomato37 8y ago

If you're going by the original meaning of troll you're missing the fourth category; the people who post something inflammatory because everyone freaking out and arguing at each other is amusing to them

JeremyBanks 8y ago
Back in the day, we just called those people assholes.
- ineedasername 8y ago
  I like it, it's catchy!
neaden 8y ago
I think that type has mostly gone away/become the third. People "ironically" posting racism seem to all just be flat out racists now. As Kurt Vonnegut said “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
- lohszvu 8y ago
  I strongly disagree. Look at the flatearth communities.
  - SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
    Shhh... people still think they are being serious. edit: Think about it this way... There are dumb people on both sides of anything, it's tough to say "only their side needs to own their idiots" when lots of stupid and people run around talking absolute nonsense about climate change when it's hot out. That doesn't mean everyone that agrees with them is as dumb or even wrong at all. If 10% of people believe it and the rest are acting - how could you tell?
    - rootusrootus 8y ago
      Only people who stop at the headline. If you go to the flatearth subreddit they're pretty clear about what they are doing. They don't quite say it explicitly, but you'd have to be pretty dense not to see the game they are playing. Though I have charitably believed in the past they are mostly having fun with each other rather than trying to troll the rest of the world.
    - PhasmaFelis 8y ago
      Sure, a lot of them are trolls, probably almost all of them at first. But the problem with pretending to be an idiot is that actual idiots will rally around you and take heart. Have you seen Beyond the Curve, the documentary about flat-earthers trying (and failing) to prove the earth is flat? You'd need pretty strong evidence to convince me that everyone in the film was in on it.
      - Pharmakon 8y ago
        There is also the tendency of mentally unstable people not getting the joke and more or less taking over the meme. Then the profit-seekers and cult leader types emerge, and suddenly what was a joke is a movement. On a much smaller scale the same thing happens with satirist news outlets, and the process is: Outlet makes a joke (for a real example “Joe Biden is refusing to leave the White House and has armed and barricaded himself.”) Joke is spread devoid of context, still as a joke. Trolls get a chuckle by posting it to some extremist group. Extremist group doesn’t get the joke and adopts the narrative, fitting it into existing ideology. Pizzagate and QAnon are great examples of this process. The other process is that schizophrenics dig up old ideas to fit their current delusions, such as “Orgone” and “Chemtrails.” Some of these ideas fit into the delusional ideation of non-mentally ill groups and it becomes a widespread conspiracy theory. Note that this can all be very profitable, if you look at people like Glenn Beck, Alex Jones, and David Icke.
ucaetano 8y ago
If you're going by the original meaning of troll you're missing the fifth category: monstrous cave-dwelling creatures. :)
- braythwayt 8y ago
  Well, actually... In the Internet sense of the word, the trolls in question live under bridges and spring out to surprise those who would cross with unpleasant demands and behaviour. Not cave-dwellers at all. —— Hey, this is Hacker News, if we can't bikeshed the etymology of "troll," what use is this medium?
  - ucaetano 8y ago
    > In the Internet sense of the word But that's not the original meaning :)
    - braythwayt 8y ago
      It depends on "how original," stories about trolls under bridges go back a long way, but if we go WAY back, we get the word applyimng to many different mythical creatures: "The term is used to denote various beings, such as a jötunn or mountain-dweller, a witch, an abnormally strong or large or ugly person, an evil spirit, a ghost, a blámaðr, a magical boar, a heathen demi-god, a demon, a brunnmigi, or a berserker." I think that over time, and thanks to various "fairy tales," we have settled on Trolls as he mountain/riock/cave-dwellers who are turned to stone if exposed to sunlight. Sadly, the Internet Troll multiplies when given attention. Sunlight does not disinfect social media.
  - kps 8y ago
    The internet sense comes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolling_(fishing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolling_(fishing) rather than the bridge dwellers. “Trolling is a method of fishing where one or more fishing lines, baited with lures or bait fish, are drawn through the water.”
    - 8y ago
giancarlostoro 8y ago
That's part of the premise of that one South Park episode / season about the 2016 elections[0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skank_Hunt#Plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skank_Hunt#Plot
howard941 8y ago
Let me gently disagree. The internet etymology is based on the fishing activity.
mcphage 8y ago
How can you distinguish between the 3rd and 4th categories? How do they behave differently?

basch 8y ago

conflating employees of propaganda machines with "watch the world burn" in bad faith circus-goers is an unfortunate abuse of language. i mourn for our loss of a good word that used to mean something. whatever they are, they are much closer to shills than trolls. do words with specific meanings usually become meaningless when they become global mainstream? the world picks up a communities word and doesnt bother to use it in the old context? reminds me of decimate maybe?

bloopernova 8y ago
That makes me think of Hacking vs Cracking, and the confusion that laypeople have when a programmer refers to "hacking something together quickly"

qwerty9876 8y ago

The biggest group of government sponsored trolls is those of US politics related. Go to any "mainstream" politics subreddit eg /r/politics and I guarantee you half the commenters are paid shills. The most "reddit addicted city" is Eglin Air Force base. https://redditblog.com/2013/05/08/get-ready-for-global-reddit-meetup-day-plus-some-stats-about-top-reddit-cities-and-languages/ https://redditblog.com/2013/05/08/get-ready-for-global-reddi...

Xixi 8y ago

Trolls are not persons, they are characters. There were a lot of trolls in the old days of newsgroups, and none of them fit in any of your categories: they were neither in it for the money, and they certainly were not true believers. They were in it for the entertainment. The best way to fight them was to ignore them, hoping that the lack of reaction would bore them. In 1997, imagine that you are arguing with the user Voldemort on comp.sys.mac, as he is claiming that the Mac is awful, that Mac users are idiots, and that surely Apple will be dead by year 2000. Maybe J.K. Rowling agrees with you that the iMac will save Apple. But that's completely irrelevant because you are not arguing with her: you are arguing with the evil character she created, that wishes death upon the Mac world. What you need for Voldemort to calm down is not to win the argument against him, but to convince the author of altering the behavior of her character. An entirely pointless endeavor... EDIT: that said, I agree that the internet landscape has massively changed since the nineties.

neaden 8y ago
I think Serdar Argic is possibly the earliest example of a kind of troll that is being discussed in this article, someone who drops in to new places when they are discussing something even tangential to their hobbyhorse and dropping in their screed.

ksec 8y ago

You vastly underestimate the first group. And they are well paid for it as well, ( I assume because of the English Requirements ). And since China has a huge population, even a small group percentage of people would be gigantic on Reddit.