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shminux comments on Ritual Report: Schelling Day - Less Wrong
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Seems to me you misunderstand this aspect of trolling: someone systematically working to create an ugh field about some topic, person, or a blog. Pavlovian conditioning through online communication.
Imagine a situation where every time you speak about a topic X, someone kicks you in a foot. Not too painfully, but unpleasantly enough. Imagine that there is no way for you to avoid this feeling (except for not speaking about X ever again). Do you expect that in a long term it would influence your emotions about X, and your ability to think about X clearly? If yes, why would you want to give anyone this kind of power over you?
This is an art some people are very successful at. I don't know why exactly they do that; maybe it is deliberate on their part, or maybe they have some bad emotions related with the topic or person, and they can't resist sharing the emotions with a larger audience.
In the past I have left one website I participated on for a few years, just because one crazy person got angry at me for some specific disagreement (I criticized their favorite politician once), and then for the following months, wherever I posted a comment about whatever topic, that person made sure to reply to me, negatively. Each specific instance, viewed individually, could be interpreted as a honest disagreement. The problem was the pattern. After a few months, I was perfectly conditioned... I merely thought about writing a comment, and immediately I saw myself reading another negative response by the given person, other people reacting to that negative response, and... I stopped writing comments, because it felt bad.
I am not the only person who left that specific website because of this specific person. I tried to have a meta conversation about this kind of behavior, but the administrators made their values obvious: censorship is evil and completely unacceptable (unless swear words or personal threats are used). Recently they have acquired another website, whose previous owner agreed to work as a moderator for them. I happen to know the moderator personally, and a few days ago he said to me he is considering quitting the job he used to love, because in a similar way most of his valuable contributors were driven away by a single dedicated person, whom the site owners refuse to censor.
If you have a sufficiently persistent person and inflexible moderation policy, one person really is enough to destroy a website.
Retaliatory sniping like the one you described is common, both online and IRL, and is not easy to moderate against. It is present on this forum, as well, to some degree, and occasionally complained about. The problem is that it is hard to prevent, since each specific instance usually does not break the usual ground rules. A couple of places I know have an informal "no sniping" rule, but it is quite subjective and the violations are hard to prove, except in extreme cases. An enforcement attempt by the mods is often costly, as it often evokes the ire of the egalitarian rank and file, who only see the tip of the iceberg.
Interestingly, on karma-supporting forums it often takes the form of downvoting with impunity everything (or almost everything) written by a poster you don't like. Because of its zero cost it is hard to resist, and because of its anonymity it is hard to guard against. Fortunately, it is not as destructive as explicit sniping, since the hate-on downvotes tend to get overwhelmed by the relevant feedback, whether positive or negative.