6 Things You Learn Getting Paid To Troll People Online

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Re: 6 Things You Learn Getting Paid To Troll People Online

Postby JamishT » Sat May 30, 2015 12:36 am

FaceTheCitizen wrote:There's a FIFA scandal?


Yeah there is. And do you know who can't stop talking about it? NPR, obviously. I listen to Morning Edition and All Things Considered pretty much every day, and they have had at least two stories related to the FIFA fiasco in each show. And here I thought NPR was white American radio!
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Re: 6 Things You Learn Getting Paid To Troll People Online

Postby iMURDAu » Sat May 30, 2015 12:44 am

Liberals love soccer?

I think I just set off alarms in the controversial subject and trigger threads. Its a joke! I swear it!
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Re: 6 Things You Learn Getting Paid To Troll People Online

Postby KILLACAN_II » Mon Jun 01, 2015 1:48 am

A while back, Cracked ran an article about comedians who were trying out new material and flubbed it hardcore. The general theme was that one should give them a chance to realize that what they tried didn't work and possibly offended people (for good reason), acknowledge it and move on with making people laugh again. And that's a fine way of looking at it; when a person or group is constantly trying to entertain an audience there's going to be some misteps. Acknowledge it, learn from it, and move on.

All that gets to my biggest complaint with Pell's article, which isn't even that the article is pretty atrocious. The almost universal reaction has been some combination of disappointment and confusion. But instead of acknowledging that most people outside of their clique thought that the article was kinda garbage, they got defensive, accused those who expressed disappointment of "just not getting the joke", and shut down a lot of the discussion about it. Humor is a very subjective thing, and it's quite arrogant to malign those who happen to not share your specific viewpoint on it, particularly when those you're antagonizing are the people who provide the basis for your paycheck.

Cracked is in the business of making people laugh or informing them in an entertaining way. Pell's cerebral defecation failed to do that. They need to accept that and proceed in a professional matter. I don't particularly care if they do it privately on PWoT or if they make some sort of public apology, but if they continue to be so derisive of their readership they're going to find their precious pageviews to be a dwindling resource.



Popinki wrote:When a bear in a yarmulke tells me to go over to a certain messageboard or get a maulin', I listen.

At first I had high hopes for this article because I've always sort of been fascinated by good online trolls, who manage to keep up a trolly persona consistantly for a long time until they either get found out, flame out gloriously, or (rarely) 'fess up of their own free will just to watch everyone else on the forum go bugfuck insane over the revelation.

One of the best I've ever seen was on another messageboard I used to post on quite a bit. The troll put on this persona of a perky California girl quadriplegic, with rich parents and her own custom-built Quad Barbie Cali Dream Home, perky boobs, and a relentlessly perky attitude. She perkied onto the boards and was oh-so perkily willing to answer questions about everything from the tragic ski-jump accident that broke her neck to her mad blowjob-giving skillz. She grated on some but a fair number of posters literally fell in love with her, praising her to the skies and back for her positive attitude, pluck, openness, and perky boobs. There were skeptics who either kept quiet because it'd be pretty low to pick on a young lady who was just making the best out of a tough situation, or the ones who did speak out got shouted down by the adoring legions. Minor details like her contempt of poor people and refusal to talk about anything but herself and how she could compose lengthy posts quoting multiple people complete with emoticons and formatting so quickly were handwaved away.

Longs story slightly less long, everything was fine until she hinted around at being ill, then vanished for several days... Then a SECOND troll posing as her brother started a thread saying she'd died :shock: and people were actually crying in meatspace over her, trying to find out where to send cards/flowers and even make a trip to the funeral. Then the original troll had to come back and say she warn't dead after all.

The most skeptical skeptics gathered on a splinter board and found out that this troll had pulled a very similar stunt on a pregnancy/childcare board a few months previous, and only got found out when she posted a picture of "herself" (a pic she found online, who was actually someone known to someone on the mommy board). THere was enough similarity in posting styles and stories to convince the administration of the main board that she was a trolly troll troll and her perky ass was banned.

The board almost exploded with people mad at themselves that they'd been duped, others gloating that they'd known she was a fake from the start... and a small contingent of diehards insisting she had to be legit and we were a bunch of shitheads for running her off.

Getting back to the point, I saw that article and hoped it'd be insight into someone who'd create something like Quaddy McPerkyboobs. What do they get out of it? Why do they do it? How the hell do they keep all their lies and inconsistensies straight for that long? Why do they keep trying it over and over?

Then I saw the article was by the Hipster Doofus and was disappoint. Couldn't get through the first paragraph.


So this created some very mixed feelings for me. On the one hand, my ex-fiance was involved in a motorcycle accident that left her a quadriplegic (something which is devastating to the point of being effectively impossible to describe over the internet) and it rather pisses me off that someone would use an injury that's destroyed so many people's lives as a way to get their trolling jollies. On the other, though, I can actually perhaps provide some insight into that thought process.

About 10 years ago when I was a wee lad of 15, I got involved in the message boards of the Elder Scrolls forum (now the Bethsoft forums, I think). I was a pretty run-of-the-mill member for a while, just derping around and minding my own business. But after about a year, I decided to change up my online persona as part of a long-term "trolling" gambit. I basically declared that I was a woman and made that a substantial part of my online identity. As time went on I perpetuated the same lie on a splinter forum (it was very similar to TCS and its relationship with Cracked) as well as an unrelated forum. I kept adding and adding to the fake persona and actually kept an extensive Notepad document to keep track of all the details I'd put forth.

At first my persona was a mid-twenties, attractive, straight woman, but sometime around 2007 I think things changed. First, I wanted to up the ante; second, people had always been suspicious about whether I was really a dude; and third, a guy on one of the forums I was on started to send me private messages that indicated that he was legitimately in love with this fake person I'd created. So I managed to set up (well, fabricate really) circumstances wherein I confessed to a forum friend that I was, in reality, a teenage girl and also totally not straight. After that I played things in such a way as to carefully leak out this information across the communities in which I participated, which resulted in renewed attention (a theme I'll get back to later), almost all of the doubts people had expressed being eliminated, and the aforementioned dude backing off.

Over the next year, roughly, I kept up with that persona and continued to add various details and the like. Sometime in 2008 I had a bit of a medical scare in my actual life where it briefly looked like I had cancer, so I integrated that into my online character and basically killed her off. This actually worked out pretty well from my perspective at the time since I ended up joining the Army a bit later and simply didn't have the time to continue to maintain the lie I'd perpetuated for the last several years.

After I gained a fuckton of life perspective while in the Army and not even thinking about that whole episode for a while, I went back and analyzed it and tried to figure out why I did it, why I was such a little piece of shit. Naturally, while I was actively involved in doing it I thought of myself as a master troll, an erudite internet denizen who surreptitiously manipulated the emotions of the woefully ignorant masses. But quite obviously, that was just a smokescreen and a wonderful example of how one can lie to oneself so thoroughly to avoid confronting the underlying reasons. During most of my teenage years I was quite socially isolated and lonely. I had barely any friends and really, really wanted to just feel like people paid attention to me and cared about me (nevermind that my family and remaining friends did just that in real life, but hey, teenagers man). Every time I unveiled some revelation to those online to whom I'd been lying coincided with the times I was most emotionally distraught.

I'm not going to try to claim that all trolls who construct elaborate false personas on the internet are of the same mind as I was, but I will say that it wouldn't entirely surprise me. I truly believe that that nexus of loneliness, depression, and unconscious narcissistic tendencies led me to be the extreme shithead that I was, where I realized that I could suppress those notions of isolation and inadequacy with the adulations and attention of random internet denizens, but fail to understand that my actions potentially caused real emotional harm to others. I think for most people that behavior is a symptom of a depressed and socially clueless person.

(Sorry for that long and somewhat unrelated bit btw; drunk posting usually creates some odd results.)
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Re: 6 Things You Learn Getting Paid To Troll People Online

Postby BinaryStep » Fri Jun 05, 2015 2:42 pm

This article in a nutshell:

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