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spriteless comments on The Dark Arts - Preamble - Less Wrong
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Comments (139)
Dark Arts done right... people need to get used to being manipulated a little to at least get the feel of it happening, or to learn a bit of it if that doesn't work. Experience as a net troll does wonders to keep me from getting riled up. But honesty does not have the least collateral damage trolling does.
This is true for me, as well. The groups who are easiest to troll are never who I think they will be.
I'm intrigued. Which groups have low troll-thresholds?
For some reason technology websites are very easy to troll. Atheism-themed websites are so easy to troll it's slightly embarrassing.
I have found websites devoted to physical fitness and bodybuilding are much harder to troll than average. I would have thought that "smarter" (maybe just more nerdy?) groups would recognize trolling more or at least have more experience dealing with trolls.
Do you think it might be something to do with how eager the people on those sites are for a fight?
Certainly. Upon a moment's reflection, it seems obvious that websites are easy to troll if they have lots of people with self-identities that can be assaulted. I guess what is strange to me is that people form such a sensitive identity-affiliation with their preferred tech brand and non-belief in deities.
Wired.com is a great example. All you have to do is mention the words "Microsoft" or "Apple" and within 5 minutes the comment threads become a ridiculous flame war between entrenched camps making the exact same arguments they've made a million times before.
I'm trying to popularise the term Pro-Skub to generally refer to someone on the other side of a trivial but heated dispute.
Unfortunately I'm pretty confident that somewhere out there is someone trying to popularise Anti-Skub for the same purpose.
sixes and sevens, your comment is unnecessarily inflammatory for this forum; please use a less heated example. Nobody here wants to get into a skub debate - leave that for the bars.
You can't make the Skub issue go away by simply ignoring it. That's exactly the sort of tactic Pro-Skub folk use to protect their otherwise indefensible positions.
Uhm, looks good as invertible fact, by the way.
If there were solid data on the trollability of the various forums, that would probably qualify. As it is, I'd bet the bodybuilding.com forum is hard to troll because they're well-innoculated; the place is like a secondary /b/. Where the norm is more serious debate, violating that norm in a provocative way will be easier.
1) Any group of mostly men dedicated to any sort of hardware--guns, cars, for all I know chainsaws. For some reason men don't just form attachments to the specific tool they actually have (Cars, Guns, Hammers, scapels are all tools), they have to defend the BRAND and/or model (Mopar, 1911, Macintosh are the most vociferous defenders).
2) Any group that thinks unreasonably highly of itself. Atheists, Mensa, Vegetarians/Vegans, Hippies, Mac Users.
3) Any group that feels under threat, either from the march of technology, a conspiracy, or just reality damaging their world view like Socialists, Vegetarians/Vegans, 1911 owners and Mac Users.
I salute your ability to troll all of these groups in a post about what kind of groups are easy to troll. I almost started to argue on some of these points before I saw your game.
I don't troll. I never have. I will attempt to reasonably argue a point of view, but (as an example) I will not go to www.ar15.com and start a post containing my (slightly negative) opinion of it, nor discussing my preferences to that device (Sig 55x, AK etc.).
However I have been on the intarwebs since 1993 and have engaged in some fairly vigorous debates. I have also noticed who responds and why. This is not building interplanetary transport devices.
I will admit I should have put an etc. on the end of points 2 and 3.
In retrospect I should have put Linux Users in there as well.
I used to think I trolled all the time, but then I realized I wasn't looking for anyone else's anger or frustration, just trying to find their exact train of thought and get to reasonable arguments. Have you had worthwhile experiences probing for information in ways that could be misinterpreted as trolling or just by asking?
Even when there's no trolling going on, the discussions I've seen online are predominantly shouting matches where no one leaves happy. When there's a troll, at least someone wins. But when debates become rational, everyone wins.
There are times when I've made deliberately provocative statements to attempt to get someone to think and realize, but when you're dealing with mental children this doesn't work. Meaning it rarely works.
I can't decide whether our culture has created a great "under class" of people who don't want to deal rationally with the world, or whether it's just a 'feature' (or bug if you will) of the great masses of humanity. Either way I've come to the conclusion that the vast majority of people are basically peasants with varying degrees of technical training, willing and able to operate at fairly high intellectual levels within narrow areas, then going home, popping a pabst and watching prime time cop buddy shows for decades at a time. you know, as opposed to operating at high intellectual levels, then going home and getting on the internet and arguing about peoples intellectual levels.
There are places online where discussions happen, but these are often places where discussion of one category of contentious issues is disallowed by fiat, and forum owners and/or moderators screen or are very active in preventing those sorts of shouting matches. Whether you'd think these were rational discussions or not is another matter :)
He almost got me, too.