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

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.