
How trolls are born: Research on why people turn bad when they go online - ohjeez
https://mosaicscience.com/story/why-good-people-turn-bad-online-science-trolls-abuse/
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russdpale
The definition of an internet troll has been tainted badly. Everyone thinks it
means going on twitter or facebook or reddit and being an ass hole. That is
what used to be called "flaming" in old internet jargon, but now a days it
should be ushered under the umbrella term of "shitposting". Instead, it has
been related to trolling, I feel like because primarily many people don't
understand what a true internet troll is.

A troll is simply someone who infiltrates a social group by ingratiating
themselves into the group by some manner, and then works to decisively split
the group in two with inner political turmoil before "disappearing". This
entire scheme is much easier to perform online with relative anonymity where
none of the other cues that humans might use to sniff out a troll in their
group are present, such as reading body language or by hearing antagonistic
speech patterns. A clever and witty actor with a strong grasp of the target
language can manipulate peer groups and break a social group apart rather
effectively. This is more difficult in real life although there is precedent
for real human social trolls: the Khans of Mongolia used them to great affect
in towns and villages they planned to raid. Sometimes the Mongols didn't even
need to fight when they got to the town.

Anyways, I don't really have any objection to the article per say, but its a
pet peeve of mine. Know your internet jargon m8s!

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romanovcode
I think your interpretation of "internet troll" is way too narrow and
therefore not correct.

IMO troll is someone on the internet who just want's to trigger some emotional
response from other peers (usually negative). That's it.

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owlninja
Agreed, that is a very tight definition that I've never heard of. I just
remember it always being used for someone saying things they didn't really
believe just to get a group of people riled up.

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commandlinefan
The article assumes that everybody who "trolls" online is being deliberately
vicious - and maybe the author was focused on discussing the people who really
are trying to cause hurt online. On the flip side, though, I've learned to be
very, very careful how I phrase things online because it's (apparently) really
easy for somebody to misconstrue something that you said and assume that you
meant offense.

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flounders
That's definitely one aspect to it. When I played CS:GO briefly, some of the
players are just down right toxic. I don't know if it is because they
deliberately want to hurt people or they just think it's perfectly fine
kidding around like that, but I just stopped playing. Other games have that
element to them too, but CS:GO just seemed to have a lot more of it.

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krageon
I think you'll find almost every community of a competitive game eventually
turns into a mostly toxic one. I don't really understand why (it seems a
little reductionist to say that most people are toxic and therefore as a
community grows most of it will tend towards being toxic), but I keep seeing
it no matter what kind of game it is (RTS, MOBA, RPG, etc)

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nuclx
They're dissatisfied with their performance measured by the time they put in.
In turn team mates are blamed for hindering their progress in the ranking
system.

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wolfgke
I would even tend to generalize: The strong competitiveness of the game (or
other places that are very competitive) is literally an incubator to make
people very toxic towards each other.

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jabgrabdthrow
Anonymity lets you induce cognitive dissonance in people you disagree with
without real life social consequences. The troll derives pleasure not just
from anger or frustration, but knowing they’ve left a logical knot which will
require untangling a whole region of knowledge.

