I can understand the desire to get as many downvotes as possible on reddit. I don’t sympathize, but I can at least see where people are coming from. Because Reddit gives you that total and shows it to you.
And I’m sure it’s possible to use an API to really that number up on Lemmy, but “total karma” doesn’t seem to be something Lemmy cares about by default, so where is the motivation coming from?
Is it just the same reason people have always been trolls? Because I’ve never quite understood that, either
Trolls are just bullies, I guess. For some of them, getting a rise out of people strikes then as funny, probably because of superiority issues. The psychology is interesting, but those people likely aren’t leading very happy lives. Karma probably isn’t top of their priority beyond it being funny how many people have gotten a rise.
There’s also toxic people who hang around with trolls and other toxic people. They form social groups where some minority group becomes the butt of a joke, which then becomes an “in joke”. This historically has been against lgbt folks, certain nationalities, furries, disabled people and neurodivergent people, among others.
Then those people internalise those feelings, and spread them to other social groups, where they either land or the person gets confused as to why people hate them. If you run a community, you need to keep an eye out for this sort of thing and stop it before it takes hold.
Trolls attack people to get a reaction. Toxic people attack people out of indifference to their feelings.
There’s also a group of people that feel they have a moral imperative to help people. That is, they should actively spread their own moral views and opinions so that other people may learn from them. This may or may not be a problem depending on the views of you and the platform.
Anyway, that’s just me rambling a bit, sorry if it’s all nonsense.
Trolls are just bullies, I guess.
I guess that’s the root of it. I don’t really understand the mentality of bullies.
Like, the kid who gets picked on and stays picking on the smaller kids when he gets bigger because his home life sucks and that’s just always the way it’s been for him… I maybe get it, but I don’t think anyone thinks that’s a good way to be, and they can stop once they start interacting with a better social group and see how it can be better. Right?
Is it really just that but online, or what have you? Idgi
My conclusion is that many of those who act in a bullying or antisocial manner are negative attention seeking.
Everyone needs attention. It’s a human trait to seek attention. More or less attention depending upon the individual, but the need is always there.
Ideally, people learn how to garner attention through positive routes. These can include friendships, helping others, awards, competition, sports, or music/theater performance. As children and growing up, we learn strategies to get attention. This is hopefully guided by our parents, authority figures, friends, and society to teach you ways to get attention in a positive and socially acceptable manner, with the best forms helping other people in the process.
Unfortunately, not everyone either gets that formative training or just never understands. I thinks it’s more the former than the latter (instead discussion of sociopaths and psychopathy here). Many of the kids that I’ve been around who have bulling mentalities responded very well to an authority figure first standing them down, then working on attention positive strategies. They often just didn’t have the tools to integrate in a group without bullying to be seen. I’m not a trained social/psychologist professional, but I’ve worked with a lot of kids over the years, and this approach has worked the vast majority of the time.
Adults who never figured out how to get positive attention seek negative attention. That loud muffler? It’s about demanding attention. The yelling in a restaurant? Attention. They are frustrated at the world sometimes because people don’t give them attention and one of their only tools in their toolbox to get attention is to be annoying because negative reactions are still reactions.
I pity those people. That’s a sad life. It makes for bad transactional style friendships, hateful marriages, and leaves them ill equipped to raise children that will have positive tools in their own lives. If their children do figure out how to be positive in communities, that should also help them to see how their parents are toxic, so it’s a no win for the parent in that scenario.
There’s, of course, always exceptions such has narcissistic traits, sociopaths, and other mental illnesses, but for most people looking at their behaviors through a lens of attention seeking frameworks fits well enough. Trolls online are to be pitied because they’re sad and want attention, but don’t know how to get it without bullying and trolling in life.
I guess for some people there’s no “good” or “bad” way to be. There’s just the real world, and that’s it.
If people have been through abuse and trauma, they’ve been surrounded by people who think that power is the most important thing. And I guess that gets internalised to the extent that “strong” and “weak” becomes their axis instead of “right” and “wrong”.
I think it’s rather telling that the narrative that these people lay out usually revolves around the idea that people should get a thicker skin or learn to deal with it.
And sadly, I don’t think people that have gone through those things are able to find and maintain a good social group of positive people.
That tracks, I suppose. Kinda makes me want to help somehow…
I’ve found that unless you already know someone at a personal level, someone that thinks they don’t need help is unable to accept it. In their mind, needing help means they weren’t strong to begin with. It’s a show of humility to ask for help. Humility is often misinterpreted as weakness.
That’s actually a really interesting theory
I don’t think it was ever honestly about the points, even on reddit.
There was a couple novelty accounts that stated their purpose was to get as many down votes as possible; but they also gave up pretty quickly (or got banned).
The vast majority of trolls just want to piss people off and/or think they are funny.
I think they’re under the unfortunate delusion they’re being funny.
I think it’s just human nature to get enjoyment at making other people upset. It comes from a lack of empathy, understanding, and perspective.
When I was young, my cousin and I would hop into randomly chosen public chatrooms on MSN, or Yahoo, and just start typing stupid messages. We’d spam the chat with constans messages of “booger” or “poopy fart” and watch people get annoyed with us. Sometimes we’d pick a random message from someone and call them out telling them “hey {username}, shut up stupid.” The whole chatroom would get mad and tell us to leave, or to stop, and that made us keep doing it more. For a good half hour to 45 min, the entire chatroom was having a bad time except us, who were laughing out heads off at how mad they got and how compeley powerless they were to stop us.
We were also 10.
We haven’t experienced how annoying and frustrating that actually is. We didn’t understand or even care just how disruptive we were being, nor did we care about our contribution to making the space a bad space to be in. We, as children, didn’t have the empathy, compassion, or perspective of experience to care about that, and were just reveling in the attention and the power to force a group of strangers to focus on us and not what they originally wanted to.
Some people eventually develop empathy, self awareness, gain perspective on the world, or otherwise come to understand how immature these acts areof getting joy at being annoying, and stop. Other people don’t. The internet is home to people in all different stages of their life’s journey, and a lot of them haven’t reached that point yet.
Some troll because they’re immature. Some do it because they actively dislike a community and pettily get joy at annoying them. Some people just like the attention. People are complicated and weird, and often hard to understand. There is just one thing that will always be true:
As long as people exists, so too will trolls.
Excellent write up on this.
Same thing I’ve been wondering about the spammers. Like, ok, you thought you left a mark? But few people will remember your username and the mods will just bulk-delete your shit. I don’t get it. Too much effort, time and probably some money for literally nothing.
Who spams obvious malware/scam links here? Facebook, I get it and expect it to work there. If you found your way here, you at leas have some understanding of what spam is and how to avoid clicking the melt my PC button.
Who clicks on those? Who pays for those? How is it actually profitable? Who the hell is moving that many boner pills?
The one I’m thinking of was recent but wasn’t related to a scam afaik. It seemed like they just wanted to annoy the admins, but their act got cleaned up rather quickly after going scorched Earth by spamming nonsense because their original account got banned or whatever. It was petty af.
Someone recently spammed a popular community with about a hundred copies of a hate message + an unmarked nsfw image. I reported it as I’m sure everyone else who saw them did, taken down very swiftly, thanks mods.
But in that case as with many others I think the goal literally is just to put hate and the threat of violence before people’s eyes. Even if only for a few minutes, maybe a vulnerable person sees it and it ruins their day. Real scum of the earth mentality
In addition to what others have said:
Since Qanon and covid conspiracies, it became clearer that trolling is not just a past-time to engage recreationally in. It is something that can actually have policy effects in democratic societies.
As a result, it begins to make sense for an international rival to exert itself to inexpensively cause disruption in unfriendly powers.
This sort of troll cannot be simply ignored, unfortunately.
I like to think my trolling is more fun and whimsical, but I guess I mostly just troll bigots and whatnot.
I’m not a troll on Lemmy, but there’s another internet forum where I let it out a little. That one’s a hobby forum, and it happens to be a hobby that a lot of people are trying to monetise. The forum rules are clear that you’re not welcome to advertise your product unless you participate in discussion as well. Of course, a lot of advertisers post without bothering to read the rules first. They’re engaging with us in bad faith, so I feel justified in doing the same to them. I like to ask disingenuous questions and pretend to be stupid while stringing them along with the possibility of a sale. So:
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It’s fun to mildly bully people who’ve done something to deserve it.
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You could have bought a banner advert, Scrooge.
Would you mind dming me that forum sounds fun? Oh on our Instance we have internet trolls anonymous community you can posts your trolling screen shots to
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Sociopaths like to antagonize and cause distress as a means of exerting control over others. In the case of online trolls they aren’t just sociopaths but also pathetic losers who can’t antagonize others in person without getting their heads handed to them.
How does one define a troll here?
Oh, or “just asking questions” and sealioning. I’d pretty much universally consider those to be trolling.
Not sure how dumb a question this is, but could someone give me a ELI5 on this “sealioning”? I am no stranger to being accused of it (perhaps almost 95% of the time by people that are banned by the end of the week), yet I look up the term constantly and the definition always seems like a good thing. It’s almost as if it’s the next big buzzword. Where is the line drawn?
It’s bad because of the, like, stalking/prodding people until they engage part of it. Just like JAQing, it starts with a pretense of doing no wrong. This means sometimes it’s possible to accuse someone of it when they’re acting in good faith because what they said closely resembles others who have acted in bad faith.
As someone who believes in the concept of benefit of the doubt, this seems against anything I would call someone out for then.
I’m with you. I wouldn’t think it was happening until it already happened.
Commenting with the goal of being disruptive rather than constructive (or at least funny).
I don’t know. I was thinking about, like, bad takes argued for in bad faith, or at least bad form. Constant straw-manning and ad hominems to support an argument like “women are inferior to men” or some other bs
Oh, you’re talking about the dark and tragic trolling. That is because they are very sad people.
Yeah, I guess. I can take a joke pretty well, even when I don’t think it’s funny, so other kinds of trolling are just pretty whatever to me.
Comedy is hard.
Oh, those. I always just shrug at the idea people might disagree with something, it’s not the same as malice.
Disagreeing is fine, but fallacious arguments aren’t. I feel it’s important to be able to understand why you believe what you do, or at least not to expect others to agree with you if you can’t. Fallacious arguments are not good reasons to believe something, and outright false ones are even worse.
Holding an opinion I disagree with is fine, it’s when you tell me my opinion is wrong and offer only bad reasoning to convince me that it’s a problem.
Usually by their usernames, their name is whining about mods or leftism or some pathetic tate-ism.
Genetically Modified Skeptic has entered the chat.
Trolls are trolls. The number is an excuse on Reddit, but it’s not the reason they really do it. If it were, why are there trolls on Twitter, Facebook, and in the YouTube comment section?
Trolls have existed as long as social spaces have. No one really knows why trollers troll; it is one of the great mysteries
As long as I get some amount of engagement, the points really don’t matter to me. I once posted something in an attempt to call attention to misogyny. The post broke no rules, but given my intent, I suppose it could be considered trolling. Most people (and probably some of their sock puppets) didn’t agree with me and I got quite a few downvotes on the post itself and in the comments, but if it made one person reconsider their position, it was worth it to me.
I think in my mind trolling has to be perpetrated in bad faith, i.e. your stated intentions and actual intentions are at least different and quite possibly contrary. Doesn’t sound like you were trolling.
Darn. I really need to buckle down and climb back under that bridge. 😆
The lulz.
That is all.
Some people just want to watch the world burn.
yea, we do.
yes. its human nature to push boundaries. mostly the more immature humans, but definitely a human issue not even really tied to forums.
