Needless to say, by the time of Facebook and Youtube booming to popularity, I was well versed in trolling. Not that I did it myself, but I could sense it from a mile away.
See some of the people that weren't accepted into those elite circles were mad. Mad at the people who wouldn't let them in, and most of all mad at themselves for not being smart enough to get into the groups in the first place. So they had to do something. Some started creating their own groups. Some started going off and doing something completely different. Some forgot about the internet all together, and then some decided to fight back.
Being able to be anonymous on the internet holds a lot of benefits. If you try online and fail at something, you can start all over again and no one would know you were the same person. I've done it more times than I can count. It's a beautiful thing. But this wonderful privilege causes people to virtually yell and scream with no consequence for their actions. If someone doesn't like your YouTube video, they are going to tell you. And it probably has something to do with your mother.
They don't even have to watch the video, they are going to tell you what they think. They probably think you are gay, or that your mother is attractive. God forbid you ASK for help or criticism on a web forum, because you are going to get it. I remember posting a screen shot of a design I was working on, asking for opinions. One person spent four paragraphs telling me I was gay because I used they color gray. Because gray has the word "gay" in it. Since day one that response made me laugh, but what I wouldn't give to actually see what that person looked like. Was he an immature adult? A child who just felt like lashing out at me? Someone who doesn't use English as a first language and just got every word he wrote wrong? This was probably my first interaction with a troll, and ever since I don't so much as look at comments unless they are from close friends or maybe a fellow employee.
The comments on websites like YouTube are unfortunately not nearly as well crafted. Because of the amount of content, trolls have a lot more typing to do, so their responses usually consist of nothing more than "Hey, you suck. Fag."
I get asked about trolling all the time. How to stop it, how to block them, all sorts of stuff. I know people who still get angry and bothered by trolls, and even one or two people who have gotten emotionally upset because of them. I don't find these people stupid, and in the one or two cases where people cried, I actually empathized with them.
Remember those "E/N" website I mentioned? Yeah, well, while I helped a lot of people set their own websites up, a few of them were girls. In high school. With a public and anonymous guest book. I'll save you my illustration and I'm certain you can guess what happened. So no, if you were thinking that some 26 year old nerd from Chicago was the one crying, you were WRONG. ;)
Because those "E/N" websites weren't linked by any specific community, chances are if anyone trolled your guestbook, it was because they knew you personally. They most likely weren't serious, but never the less a fourteen year old girl probably shouldn't have her own website which serves are an online diary.
In case anyone was wondering, we totally lied when Angelfire asked us our age.
So why, after all this time, are trolls still allowed to roam free? If you ask me on a long enough time line, you would think they would become extinct. People would just start ignoring them, and once they lost the attention they so desperately craved in the first place, they would just go away. It's what should happen. Anyone who has spent more than ten minutes on any website with a comments section should know to take almost EVERYTHING on the internet with a grain of salt.
So how does this problem solve itself? Will trolls ever disappear? With technology moving as fast as it is, will everyone eventually have a YouTube page with the comments section disabled? I prefer the former, as I like to chat with the many people that are lucky enough to be connected to the world wide web.
I certainly hope that one day, everyone, and by everyone I mean even my mother, will "stop feeding the trolls".
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