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This, and not simply invective, used to be what "trolling" was about. At least in my romanticized memory of it.

• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• lotharbot 13y ago
  When a comment is simply invective, we call it "flaming". Trolling is about triggering a disproportionate response -- particularly, causing the other person to invest either much more time or much more emotion than the troll did. Common forms include: - using subtle digs make people angry enough that they lash out (thereby making them appear to be the instigator) - introducing a tangential or irrelevant point, often in a short and snark-laded comment, to get people to waste a lot of time trying to respond - copying and pasting large blocks of text, especially lists of problems with a particular viewpoint, and criticizing responses for being incomplete (thereby provoking people into writing very long and thorough responses) - as a followup to the above, making vague criticisms like "you're missing the point" or "you keep dodging my question", so that people will spend time trying to figure out what you're talking about and maybe reworking their entire argument - implying details, facts, or answers that don't actually exist (or that you don't know if they exist), trying to get people to spend time investigating something you haven't bothered figuring out. The "law" referenced in the article is an example of this type of trolling.