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Put away your fishing gear
For hundreds of years, a troll was a small creature that lived under a bridge — and trolling was what fishermen did to catch fish, Then came the internet, and like so many words in the English language, troll and trolling were bestowed with new definitions. Let’s take a look.
Oh, it’s that guy
In internet parlance, a troll is a person who posts things that are deliberately inflammatory, off-topic, or extraneous to the topic at hand in an online community. This can be a forum or bulletin board, chat room, blog, Facebook, or pretty much anywhere there can be discussion. The purpose of this activity is to provoke the reader into an emotional response or simply to disrupt the flow of the discussion — or both. (The term troll can also be used as a noun to describe the message itself, as in, “That was an awesome troll you posted.”)
Where it came from
Trolling (in the internet sense) can be traced as far back as the 1970s, as the behavior was observed on a series of open-access forums in California on a series of modem-linked computers. At the time, the behavior was referred to as flaming — now considered a subset of trolling.
Since then, as the phenomenon has become more commonplace,psychologists have looked into it and found several possible root causes. In most cases, it seems to be a combination of deindividualization, the freedom of near-complete anonymity, and possibly a way for a user group to express its social identity.
Care and (non) feeding of your troll
So what to do if you get trolled? It’s simple, really. People troll for reactions. They want you to get angry, upset, pissed off, whatever. Don’t give them the satisfaction. Don’t reply angrily — don’t even reply at all. Just ignore them, no matter how much you want to fight back. Arguing on the internet is the ultimate exercise in futility.
Simply put, don’t feed the trolls. Eventually they get bored and either go away or find someone else to pick on.
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