Around twenty years ago when I first set foot on Usenet, trolling had a much gentler meaning than it does today. Trolling was the art of saying something wrong, but in such a way that everybody except the target of your trolling could tell you were being deliberately obtuse.
Trolls ranged from the throwaway jokes like the deliberately typo-ridden spelling correction, to elaborate long-term performance art; for example the jokers who completely derailed the Star Trek newsgroups by dragging half the readers into a choreographed argument about whether sound (and, when that got too boring, light) could travel in a vacuum.
On one hand this kind of trolling was elitist and exclusionary, often a way for forum regulars to one-up newbies who didn't know the pecking order. On the other hand it served to discourage the very common nerd trait of wanting to one-up the world by leaping in to correct the most trivial of errors, a defence against the kind of knee-jerk pedantry that can clog otherwise interesting discussion.
âDonât feed the trollsâ was a warning as much as anything else. Donât jump into a newsgroup discussion before youâve read enough to know who is who; donât make it your job to correct every trivial, irrelevant misteak. Learn the ropes first, and you might just avoid being the butt of everyoneâs in-joke.
Some people claim that the troll (sense 1) is properly a narrower category than flame bait, that a troll is categorized by containing some assertion that is wrong but not overtly controversial. â The Jargon File
As the early 90s drifted on, the definition of trolling broadened to encompass anyone who acts like an asshole on the Internet just to get attention. By the end of the decade, few people even remembered the original definition.
The reason for the sudden shift? The rise of the consumer Internet and with it, easy anonymity.
Anonymity on the old-school Internet of shell-accounts granted by universities or employers was a rare currency, mostly limited to âanonymous remailersâ like anon.penet.fi, addresses that made it obvious that the author was making a deliberate effort to hide their identity. In the 90s, with the rise of dial-up Internet and subscriber online services, throw-away anonymity became the norm rather than the exception. And with anonymity came the ability for anyone to be an asshole without fear of repercussions.
America Online, with its âfeatureâ of granting all users an infinite supply of screen-names, caught a lot of blame at the time.
The accepted wisdom was that the best way to react to the influx of assholes was âdonât feed the trollsâ. Starve them of attention and they would get bored and go away.
Looking back from 2012, I canât see any evidence of that tactic having worked. What happened was the opposite. By propagating the notion that the only way to deal with assholes is to pretend they arenât there, we made the Internet a safe space for sociopaths.
This is a problem, because anonymity is also an indispensible component of free speech. Without guaranteed anonymity, the oppressed can't speak up, minorities can't find a voice, and unpopular opinions are suppressed. Stifling this vital freedom is unacceptable.
âDonât feed the trollsâ is the wrong approach.
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