I've been thinking about this all morning.
The article rings true inasmuch that the behavior of trolling often is sadistic.
Beyond an urban dictionary, though, I've never been clear exactly what a troll is.
I guess if an evangelistic minister were to weasel into the TER VIP crowd (buy a membership) and then log onto the forum so that he could expound to us how immortal our lives were and threaten that we were all going to burn in hell unless we did as he instructed and repent, amend our lives, and join his church, I would consider that guy a troll.
On the other hand, we have one guy whose only contribution to the discussion board is to zip around and comment how everything we say is "a stupid dumbass post." Is he a troll? Or is he just a regular hobbyist who isn't very articulate and has probably been called stupid and a dumbass so often in his own life that he responds that way to us as a way of getting back at the world? If is indeed a monger and an active hobbyist, does that take him out of the category of troll and simply make him an annoying jerk, or an unfortunate human being with serious cognitive challenges?
There is a funny person who poses as a mute and only responds with short posts like: "Tsk!" "Ooh!" or simply, "??" I always get a laugh at this, consider it quite witty, would like to see more of him (or her, no way to know), and would never call him/her a troll. But is he?
I really wish someone would write out a comprehensive response as to what makes a troll and what doesn't.
Getting back to the article after saying this, is the hurtful nature of a post a defining characteristic of trolling? And if so, if I respond to a post as an interesting viewpoint, but someone else finds it painful, wouldn't that mean that trolling is only in the eye of the beholder?
Now, I do believe that there are people who go online, seek out forums on things they don't like, and simply try to disrupt and condemn the people discussing the topic. I would call them trolls. But are there really so many of these types? We would all agree that some forums would draw more of this ilk than others.
Trolling is one of those terms that everybody assumes everybody understands, and you're obviously so unhip if you ask any questions about it that you don't deserve an answer, so the real meaning gets kind of slushy. I suspect the Candian psychologists who did the study delved into it and defined the term quite strictly for their working purposes, but the article didn't really go into all that. So I think the study would make quite interesting ready as well, and am not too surprised at the conclusions.
