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Trolling, like hacking, has hat colors. I started out as a gray hat troll and became more white-hat over time. We have nothing in common with the black hat tro

Trolling, like hacking, has hat colors. I started out as a gray hat troll and became more white-hat over time. We have nothing in common with the black hat trolls and the bullies. Online bullies are (like all bullies) horrible people, but trolling is a different thing entirely. It can be done in a way that doesn't hurt people. The first rule of a decent troll: don't fuck with peoples' IRL.

herokusaki 13y ago
Can you define what you mean by a "white-", "gray-" and "black-hat" troll? The obvious parallel with security hacking doesn't seem to quite work for me if I think of "white-hat trolling" as a kind of human pentesting because humans who know they are being trolled are unlikely to get trolled by definition.
- gbog 13y ago
  White hat trolling has positive outcome, it helps people to consolidate their ethical immune system, like a vaccine.
  - growupkids 13y ago
    Is this like a muffler return spring?
- saraid216 13y ago
  My personal version of white-hat trolling involves stepping into threads and redirecting someone's attention onto me by provoking them. It (mostly) doesn't work on a forum like HN with heavy threading, but on a vBulletin-style forum, you can hijack the conversation away from going somewhere nasty or reveal snake oil of whatever brand. It's a vigilante kind of outlaw justice, and is especially useful when the mods are stuck in a gray area and can't act authoritatively. (Accusations of censorship or favoritism, for instance.) Done well, it helps prune back the negative elements of a community. It's insanely easy for such a thing to get out of control, though, which makes the "vigilante" analogy apt: same community, I was both thanked by the mods for steerage and given warnings for lashing out too much. (I was also offered a mod position, but turned it down.) It's like any other kind of trolling; the difference is wholly in your target choice. It is not the mark of a good person.

herokusaki 13y ago

Can you define what you mean by a "white-", "gray-" and "black-hat" troll? The obvious parallel with security hacking doesn't seem to quite work for me if I think of "white-hat trolling" as a kind of human pentesting because humans who know they are being trolled are unlikely to get trolled by definition.

gbog 13y ago
White hat trolling has positive outcome, it helps people to consolidate their ethical immune system, like a vaccine.
- growupkids 13y ago
  Is this like a muffler return spring?
saraid216 13y ago
My personal version of white-hat trolling involves stepping into threads and redirecting someone's attention onto me by provoking them. It (mostly) doesn't work on a forum like HN with heavy threading, but on a vBulletin-style forum, you can hijack the conversation away from going somewhere nasty or reveal snake oil of whatever brand. It's a vigilante kind of outlaw justice, and is especially useful when the mods are stuck in a gray area and can't act authoritatively. (Accusations of censorship or favoritism, for instance.) Done well, it helps prune back the negative elements of a community. It's insanely easy for such a thing to get out of control, though, which makes the "vigilante" analogy apt: same community, I was both thanked by the mods for steerage and given warnings for lashing out too much. (I was also offered a mod position, but turned it down.) It's like any other kind of trolling; the difference is wholly in your target choice. It is not the mark of a good person.