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this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025
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We have a different definition of troll I think. To me trolls are bad faith actors hiding racism and other disinclusive speech behind humor.
Ah. It used to be just someone that would say something so inflammatory or provoking that it would force interaction or responses from the people witnessing it.
Like an obvious joke or quote of an earworm that it creates replies. Or sometimes something rude or just wrong on purpose. Modern bad actors adopting trolling tactics is not necessarily the same thing.
You could say trolls are like onions, they have multiple coatings.
No no, ogres are like onions.
Weren't ogres more like cake though? Everybody loves cake.
Or parfaits!
A definition I saw many years ago was something like a troll tricks you into feeling a certain way or doing a specific thing. Could be positive, mostly done for humour, but the ones we hear most about in the media or whatever are the upsetting ones.
Yeah the best ones are just taking advantage of our empathetic neurons to initiate a conversation. The terrifying ones then use that opening to inject their own thoughts on others.
I've been online since usenet. I try to use the current meaning of words. I fully understand that trolling has been coopted by bad faith actors.
Originally it was a fun little bit of sarcasm or an inside joke that became a proto meme or some copypasta to share around.
Now it's a path to the US presidency.
I guess it's like "hacking." In the good old days, a "hacker" was a particularly clever software developer, now it's someone who breaks into computers.
Can we please stop ruining the good words?
Hacking is using something in a manner in which it was unintended by hacking parts of it, as with an axe.
Good discussion of it here with etymological references.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/70658/what-does-the-word-hacking-or-hacker-come-from
Exactly!
Hacking into a system is like hacking your way through a door to steal stuff. Hacking around hardware or software limitations to get what you want is creative and more similar to creating furniture with an axe, you're doing things the tool was never meant to do, and doing it incrementally until you get the desired result.