When most people get home from work, class, a hardy night of drinking, whatever, they usually want to kick back and unwind, and different people have different means of doing this (that should be fairly obvious enough, right?). Some people snack on junk food while watching TV, some go for a run, some take a nap, and some catch up on their Facebook stalking. Some people, like me, use the Internet as a way to unwind. And this isn’t a fairly new or fascinating phenomenon or anything, I mean someone out there has to be watching all those YouTube videos and forwarding those e-mails about the bad luck in love you’ll endure if you don’t forward them back. What I often find myself doing, however, can be summed up in the following image macro:

I think in this picture I represent the braying ass more than I do the little Asian girl, to be quite honest.

I surf Internet community sites such as Livejournal or Deviantart.com (an art community site) looking for interesting or entertaining “conversations” to have. Conversations is in quotes because while some online discussions I engage in are more along the lines of casual, friendly dialog or well thought-out, genuine debates, most often divulge into train wrecks of mud-slinging between Internet users caught on either side of an irresolvable issue. And these types of arguments are, needless to say, pure lulz.

In my experience of engaging in these types of discussions and developing an e-reputation at sites I most often frequent, I have been called a “troll” on more than one occasion. On Sheezyart.com, a site that began as an experiment by two business students as an interactive art community but has since then deteriorated into a children’s cartoon site, I was even banned from their forums on the grounds of trolling. I have been called a troll for correcting people’s grammar and spelling mistakes, bumping threads (meaning I comment in a forum topic to bring that topic to the top of the list again) to revive moot arguments, posing counter-arguments against threads in which everyone is in overall agreement on the subject, and ‘following’ users from a given forum or community to their personal blog/site and beginning a new argument with them there.

Are all these acts really trolling? The problem in identifying a troll is knowing exactly what a troll is. Trolls are usually described as people who participate in online communities for the sole purpose of harassing or otherwise riling up its members. The term comes both from the mythical creature, something ugly and offensive that hides under bridges to come out and hit people with a big stick, and from the practice of ‘trolling’ a lure, in which a fisherman puts food on a hook and waits for fish to bite. So do these definitions describe my online behavior? Or am I someone who simply loves debate and considers being able to counter someone’s argument and maintain that argument as an enjoyable intellectual activity?

Obviously my bias lends toward the latter, but given how people have reacted to me this might not be true in all cases. Fairly recently I was called a troll when I followed someone who had an anti-Chief Livejournal icon to their personal blog and responded to a post they wrote about the Chief issue. I don’t describe myself as being pro- or anti-Chief, however I do have some opinion regarding how people discuss the issue, and I brought this up in this user’s post. A debate ensued, in which both of us used factual backing for our arguments (as opposed to a petty bout of opinion) until ultimately she (the journal’s owner) stopped the discussion short and insisted I was a troll for following her to her journal and beginning a argument on her blog. I responded that this wasn’t the case, because her journal was open to the public and she had every option of blocking me. She reconsidered, and the debate continued up until this happened:

(Click to enlarge)

Ouch. That’s what I get for being in a community like Drama_Awesome. Long story short, we sorted out this issue too after I convinced her that I really wasn’t going to make a big deal to some lulz community like Drama_Awesome about our private debate— it was just for us to discuss the Chief and just because I was interested.

Being called a troll can be both an honor and a disgrace. On the honor side, people acknowledge your ability to predict people’s emotions and get them riled up in that way, to maintain an argument against any offenders no matter what that argument is, and overall to give everyone a good laugh about it. On the disgrace side, people consider you a loser who sits around online all day and gets off on harassing people over inane issues, and generally gives people who come to forums to find friendship and have a conversation about something they’re interested in a bad experience.

Thoughts on trolling (or what is perceived as trolling) within a community usually depend on the attitude of the site that hosts the community. I wanted to bring this up because a few instances of trolling (some from myself on a lesser degree, I’ll admit) have been appearing on dailyillini.com in various forms, most notably in user “Sagatious”‘ response to the retirement of the Chief. Is this necessarily a bad thing? Why have posts like these been appearing on dailyillini.com? I believe this is because dailyillini.com, with its current lay-out and commenting feature, is still fairly new. This means people coming to the site will react to it the same they would other communities (online or otherwise) that they’re familiar with, and this includes myself. While I would say that most people are taking advantage of dailyillini.com’s commenting feature in a positive way to discuss campus issues with their fellow students, some are bringing in pre-existing modes of behavior from other sites they frequent and speaking their mind in whatever belligerent and inflammatory way they choose, often because they know exactly how to get their fellow students riled up on issues they know equally well.

Different online communities exist for different modes of discussion, and I strongly believe that dailyillini.com has the potential to become a medium for students to discuss and debate with one another their thoughts on issues that affect our campus, and I think that students who use dailyillini.com should push for this direction. Until this type of unspoken agreement about the purpose of an online community can be reached, trolls like Sagacious (and even me, if you think I deserve to be placed in that category) will appear and continue to test the waters…and the people in them.

Are trolls bad for a community? More specifically, are trolls bad for dailyillini.com? I think this entirely depends on how dailyillini.com develops as a medium of discussion for students, what types of trolls might appear as a result, and how the community will want to react to those trolls, be it by taking their bait or through administrative banning.

Suffice it to say, I really do believe dailyillini.com has the potential to become an online community for students in the way I described, and in that respects it might help to define the type of discourse allowed in the community. Should users be allowed to comment for the sole purpose of pointing out a grammatical error and insinuating stupidity on behalf of the writer because of these errors? Should users be able to write an entire page’s worth of anti-white bashing? Should users like me be allowed to start arguments with people, sincere or otherwise, for the fun of it?

What will you be using dailyillini.com for? Are you a troll?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 at 1:45 pm and is filed under Internet culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.