So, I have never accused someone of being a ‘Troll’…(other than when I knew the person who stole my tack and was up for the Grand Jury indictment kept posting…but she’s still around in her latest gazillionth alias I know)
ANY WAY…I was on another board and someone simply asked what others felt about fly masks on at night, yes or no. (please, don’t take this one to that specific topic)…as it got ugly, it made me think “Do some of us thrive on this?” Are we ALL TROLLS? hahahahaha…no, don’t get me wrong. I love to READ them and shake my head. But some love CREATING them? Am I that gullible to know better than ‘bite’ hook line and sinker on a topic only meant to create entertainment. wow. I am learning, but I guess I still trust too much that questions are real and heartfelt.
I always assume people want a genuine answer. Living in a place of assuming people have bad intentions is draining. I’d rather be gullible than jaded. There have been a few very obvious exceptions but it has to be pretty blatant for me to even think about trolling.
would the troll in your example be the person asking the question or the respondents who perhaps took it in the ugly direction?
I do think that some people like drama (which i would categorize an “online argument about flymasks that turns nasty” as).
I also don’t understand folks that get into heated disputes online when it is clear neither person will come around to the other’s point of view. at some point you have to walk away and just agree to disagree because it’s the internet, and we are not curing cancer.
totally agree. sometimes I wonder if I get sucked in to something everyone seems to want to build up and never find an answer or any reason for discussion in the first place.
I differentiate between a “troll” and someone who is just dramatic.
A troll is someone who purposely goes out to argue with people and argues in bad faith for the purpose of upsetting others. I don’t see much of that at all on this board, but it common on other social media (question examples: “do minorities deserve rights?” or “why can’t I just yell slurs online?”). Trolls are people who will happily lie, exaggerate, or make up entire stories to further their goal of making other people unhappy. Many trolls enjoy trolling SPECIFICALLY because they take pleasure from other people’s outrage and displeasure.
Conversely, someone who just likes arguing just likes to argue. There are many reasons why someone likes to argue, stemming from always needing to get the last word, genuinely thinking someone else is wrong/needs to be educated, enjoying argueing, the need to always be “right”, etc.
On this board, more people fall into the second category than the first. Given that two horse people can easily come up with five “right” ways to do something, I’m not surprised that argueing is common. There are people on the board who I (personally) find to have a rather rude way of expressing themselves but there are people like that in the real world too! COTH posters can also comeoff as somewhat trolly in that it is easy to accidentally dogpile. /Person A/ makes a post asking a question, then /Person B/, /Person C/, and /Person D/ all chime in to say that /Person A/ is wrong, ignorant, going about something the wrong way, or overreacting. Anyone else who wants to add their own two cents about agreeing with B, C, and D later will just be adding to the “A is wrong” train which gets old by the 5th post, regardless of how nice the later posts are.
