Dev.SN ♥ developers
Sections
Dev.SN
Members kef and einar have written about some recent research:
"A new study from the University of Manitoba has claimed that internet trolls might not be so nice or mentally stable in real life. While previous studies have shown that people with negative character traits are using the internet more frequently for their own amusement, not to socialize, the results seem to link trolling to sadism. Two surveys among amazon's mechanical turk users were conducted which allowed creating a character profile of the participants. Based on the profile, internet behavior could be correlated with different character traits. Trolling appears to be correlated to sadism.
From the study:
... correlations, sometimes quite significant, between these traits and trolling behavior. What's more, it also found a relationship between all Dark Tetrad traits (except for narcissism) and the overall time that an individual spent, per day, commenting on the Internet. ... To be sure, only 5.6 percent of survey respondents actually specified that they enjoyed "trolling." By contrast, 41.3 percent of Internet users were "non-commenters," meaning they didn't like engaging online at all. So trolls are, as has often been suspected, a minority of online commenters, and an even smaller minority of overall Internet users.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by TheloniousToady on Tuesday March 04 2014, @09:21PM
I used to participate a lot in a Usenet newsgroup about 10 years ago, and we had one troll who was very successful at it over a long period of time. He (it?) was very good at pushing people's buttons, and I'm sure there was an element of sadism in it. That said, I think there also was an element of masochism in those who responded to him (myself excluded, of course. ;-) Basically, his trolling gave those who responded an excuse to participate in some way, mostly negative. And of course, on Usenet, there's no mechanism of modding or banning to slow him down.
Trolling was a concept I hadn't previously been familiar with, but it didn't take too long for me and others to figure it out. But long after that point, he continued to get a lot of attention. The troll was a bit of an artist in his way. I always wondered why somebody who clearly had something to offer didn't use his powers for good instead of evil. But I guess that's where Sadism comes into it.
(Score: 2) by Debvgger on Wednesday March 05 2014, @08:17AM
Many times the best and most intelligent commenters love to have an alter ego for trolling. A prime example of this was Barrapunto, when they somewhat got rid of the trolls the general level of the site rotted to death. A troll is not the same thing as an asshole: A troll is a social engineer who enjoys pushing people to see what happens, not someone trying to sabotage the site, quite the opposite! The more they like their forum/mailing list/etc the greater the quality of their trolling. I see real trolls as necessary on every site out there. REAL trolls, not assholes. 99% of the time real trolls just try to make other people think and laugh, but as they say, humor is a sign of intelligente :-)