

Trolling To Win: Can trolling work better than asking for help? - tc
http://bash.org/?152037

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petercooper
The egotistical urge to correct misinformation appears to commonly be stronger
than the philanthropic urge to help.

~~~
ardell
This seems to be changing on sites like HN and Stack Overflow. The only
difference I can see is that the moderators intentionally guide the discussion
away from trolling. Are there other factors here that I'm missing?

~~~
petercooper
I think the points systems on such sites give a different incentive. Many
people help just to help, but others take part primarily for the point gaining
(which rapidly becomes addictive) or to gain some sense of achieving more than
others. Despite these motivations, if the ultimate result is a good one, I see
no harm.

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thorax
"Frequent Troll Statements" might work better than FAQs for some projects.

 _jQuery is hard to use for remote AJAX requests_

 _django doesn't even support memcached_

 _PERL has the worst support for SOAP of any language out there_

~~~
tocomment
FTS "Frequently Trolled Statements" ?

------
tc
I have to admit that I reliably fall for this one, particularly in one-on-one
exchanges with friends or acquaintances. Perhaps the best reply would actually
be, "yep, you're right, Linux/Lisp/Emacs does suck," but even just typing that
now rubbed strongly against my natural evangelism.

~~~
lallysingh
Sometimes all I can do is say "Excuse me," and walk away.

Then I call my therapist/support vendor for the next three hours, sobbing
about deep emotional scarring I had from DOS when I was a small child.

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rdrimmie
A slightly less trollish alternative, which I attribute to Penny Arcade but
can't easily source, is to post the wrong answer to a question. This prompts
people to prove themselves smarter than you by providing the correct answer.

In the example I remember, it was related to finding quest details in World of
Warcraft. If you ask in General chat "where is the foo?" you will be met with
flames and rtfm-style responses, but if you say "the foo is in [wrong
location]" out of the blue, you'll receive a cacophony of corrections.

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antiform
When I first moved to the Bay Area, my roommate told me that the best way to
find good places to eat and drink was to go onto a foodie forum like Chowhound
and say something along the lines of "At [X], I had the best [Y] I've ever
had!" because before you know it, you would have dozens of responses saying
how wrong you were and among those responses, you'd find the best places to
get [Y].

Is this trolling? Probably. But now I have an extensive list of great Bay Area
eateries.

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ntoshev
The RTFMan responses are one of the worst things in Linux culture. Man pages
are an exhaustive reference about what you can do with commands, that's true.
But they are not written in a helpful way: you pretty much have to read it all
every time in order to see what you need. If Google had the same attitude with
their search, they would be satisfied with a query for "george bush" that
returns the page of some random George Bush out there, you would have to add
"US president" to get what you need.

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silentbicycle
This is really unfortunate, on several levels.

It's probably also self-reinforcing once it starts, because once a mailing
list, IRC channel, etc. has a reputation of being populated by abrasive know-
it-alls, new members have less of an incentive to bother being civil. Also,
people mock-trolling to get useful answers is incredibly irritating to
everyone else, which probably makes the overall attitude even less patient
with newbie questions.

I don't know of a better way around this, either, but it reminds me of an
offhand comment somebody made recently about how once cultural forces take a
certain amount of bribery and corruption for granted, doing things honestly at
all becomes much more difficult.

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byrneseyeview
It doesn't always work. Watch:

news.ycombinator doesn't even let you downvote warmed-over reddit stories.

~~~
MaysonL
Oh, yeah? I just saw one of those with 0 points! (How did that happen???).

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raphar
It's a technique very used by some bosses (that dont know shxt). It's
specially effective with young/big-ego !! developers. The modus operandi would
be saying thay some work you did is crap. After that you provide a detailed
report on the advantages of your work. And after that, he can tell his own
boss what are the wonders he is acomplishing, all without reading a single
line of the related documentation.

!! replace young/big-ego with any of these: ninja, guru, hacker, elvis, etc.
:D

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ruslan
In my IRC days saying word "linux" aloud on #unix will get you kicked
instantly no matter what you say about the OS. And yes, asking for obvious
will get you kicked as well ;-)

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time_management
That's not trolling. It's abrasive as hell, but the ultimate purpose of that
behavior is to improve discussion.

