A couple weeks ago, The New York Times ran a pretty interesting piece about vicious web trolls. Kinda disturbing in a "kids of today" manner, but it didn't actually seem timely. (I was also surprised by how little attention the article got actually... nobody even emailed it to me!)
The thing is: trolling is basically dead.
Perhaps I should say "casual trolling is dead".
It used to be easy to take a shot at someone with a bitchy, mean comment. It was totally trivial to participate in early iterations of social software by using handles that didn't reveal any personal info. Yahoo chat let you come up with multiple screennames and profiles pretty easily. In 1996, my friends and I published a zine (kind of like a physical version of a blog, for you young'uns). Our little website is still up, but mainly it was a print pub.
Man, we spammed every frigging usenet group there was promoting ourselves. Like seriously: We put up a post about ourselves on newsgroups about French cooking. Sure, some folks got pissed off, but big deal, what were they going to do? Actually, a friend of mine did at some point get a warning from his dial-up ISP to knock it off. Part of it was that nobody had online identities back in those days. Sure, you had handles and nicknames, but rarely was there any of "you" online. So right there, it was much easier to be a jerk and get away with it. You didn't have any reputation to care about. Nothing that could get damaged. Everyone was the invisible man.
My spamming days ended pretty much as soon as they started. And by the middle of high school, I was a reformed mind. Actually, I think our spamming was limited to one night of mischief while doing copy editing. And I've never done it since. No regrets though. No regrets.
Besides spamming, there was a lot of great mischief to be had back in message board days. People would post requests like: "What's your favorite way to make antipasto?" or "Can anyone help me with this paper on bizarre facts about the assassination of JFK?" I used to love posing as an expert and writing up long-winded responses. The goal was to maintain a veneer of credulousness, while pushing the limits of absurd content. It was a fun game and I was good duping people. AGAIN: I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL. (buzz off if you were planning on saying something about how now I do that professionally)
---
These days I'm an exemplar web citizen. I try to contribute thoughtful content as much as possible. I respect others, and I'm generally encouraging. Some people use their blogs to take shots at others. I don't. It's lame. I'm really not a hater in any way, shape or form.
But from time to time, one does get the urge. The problem is that it's too hard.
So much of web interactions are with real names. It is impossible to anonymously lop shots at people. Absolutely impossible. Say you see a picture of someone doing something that you find totally lame or cliche. You want to tell them off, but not so much that you actually want to stand behind your comments. It's impossible. There's just no way to do it. A few months ago, I wanted to make a lighthearted (but potentially feeling-hurting) comment towards someone on Twitter, but there was just no way to do it without them knowing.
Sometimes, I want to make a comment on someone's blog saying "sorry sir, but you're an idiot and here's why...". People just need that sometimes. But it's frequently too much of a pain in the ass to do in a way where your tracks are completely covered. By the time you get around to figuring it out, your motivation to make the comment is usually gone. It's especially tough if the comment is on a site where normally you'd want to comment with nice things to say.
This might be a good thing... but sometimes someone needs to be told that their breath smells bad (it's for their own good) and sometimes the best way to tell them that is to leave an anonymous post-it note on their desk. If someone had to go through ridiculous hurdles to leave the post-it note, or if there were no mechanism for leaving it anonymously, the person with bad breath would suffer for it -- as would everyone else.
--
More and more, internet content is moving towards brightly lit neighborhoods of the web. Facebook is the big one, but there are others as well. Blogs are increasingly using federated comment systems, like Disqus, which push people to claim a real identity to leave a comment.
You still have your hate-filed message boards, like the one mentioned in the above NYT article. But they're kind of their own ghetto on the web, without much connection to the outside world.
All this is good, but sometimes (rarely) you just want to watch out. And it's getting tougher and tougher.
