TED Conversations

griffin tucker

TEDCRED 10+

This conversation is closed. Start a new conversation
or join one »

are we feeding 'trolls' the wrong food?

often i find in anything where an extremely popular website or part of a website has a functionality to comment anonymously, no matter the topic, 'trolls' appear.

of course if you knew they were 'trolling,' you would not feed them anything, right?

i think this is the wrong way to go. these people are not 'trolls,' but in fact human. feeding them the wrong food is one thing, but not feeding them at all could be considered just as bad.

what suggestions do you have to 'feed' or talk to someone who is trolling, and curb their behaviour?

Topics: anti-social behaviour moral psychology psychology troll trolling trolls
+2
Share:

Showing single comment thread. View the full conversation.

  • Evaristo Rivera

    • 0
    Oct 14 2011: first off i mean no insult when i say that you mean curve not curb. it is merely the troll within me. but i have had this troll within me (note i do not use quotation marks as i acknowledge it as a very real terminology since it is used by a vast amount of people) since i can remember. The question that should be posed here is not how should we change trolls but better yet should we attempt to change trolls. For within all humans is there not a troll within us all and within those who have a higher capacity to troll is there anything wrong with this? it is an innate instinct for humans to cause unnecessary conflict among one another. Here is the origin of the troll, basic fact, no matter where you go you will find someone who has an opposing mindset, in the case of most trolls it is merely using false and usually unfunny retorts but it remains nonetheless a human condition, other more advanced trolling methods are simple discussions like these on the TED forums i would hope to be able to say that the majority of us on here have a intellectual keenness to us and poke fun at each other (although we do not know each other, we do it for the same cause, this being to impose our beliefs upon someone else) by stating our beliefs/counterarguments. trolls have always existed within humanity and i dare to say it is only due to the advent of the internet that we have discovered just how many trolls there are. The internet has given us the power to survey websites with vast amounts of information. When speaking in terms of a survey you want the biggest possible sample group, where in the 1990's and prior we as a world were stratified by our location hence we could not survey the amount of trolls that existed, and now we have the internet where we have a sample group by the millions if not billions it comes with no doubt that we would find more and more trolls as more and more people gain access to the internet, i ask why change what, most likely, has always existed?
    • thumb

      griffin tucker 10+

      • 0
      Oct 16 2011: it seems, Evaristo Rivera, and correct me if i'm wrong, that you don't wish your behaviour to stop, but in fact you want to spread your behaviour to other people.

      do you think your trolling on the internet affects your quality of life in the real world?

      • Evaristo Rivera

        • 0
        Oct 16 2011: i shall correct you since, as i have dully noted, trolling ,as it has now come to be known as, is merely a higher degree of a natural behavioral response of wanting to either make oneself recognized through a feeble effort or as others might say merely a bit of a fit just for the hell of it, i never stated that i wish for such behavior to expand and extend around the globe. Seeing as you have misinterpreted i shall make my statement in a less complicated way, i understand that my explanations can sometimes be rather odd; since we are able to take note of more people's behavior rather than a small groups behavior (as a result of being unable to sample a larger group in the past due to a separated world) we now view not through a key hole but through the window(due to the internet) the real prominence of trolls throughout and around the world.

        I feel that yes it does change life in "the real world", but so does everything else i am a very high believer in the creation of alternate futures or ,as some view it, in the theory that every decision eliminates other alternate universes as they are no longer possible due to their elimination via a key action, in this same thought process i find that every single action and breath, any thing, no matter the insignificance, causes our future to change. These changes are more so like a snowflake rolling down a hill gaining a momentum and the increasing mass being the amount of change caused by the first small rolling snowball, where as a deliberate and profound decision starts out big and ends up beyond comprehension, hence the smaller is never noted as our small attention spans are drawn towards the greater more noticeable changes. So in the end i find the question of whether or not it is affecting me or another irrelevant.

Showing single comment thread. View the full conversation.