I’m convinced that for every one individual with a stupid point of view that causes a massive cascade of unpleasant posts, there are three trolls. This is based mostly on reading digg.com, which has some of the most infuriatingly noisy discussions of any site of its kind.

I was thinking about trolls on the internet, and then thinking about Usenet trolls, and then BBS trolls and war boards, and then my mind drifted back farther into the past to bathroom stalls.
I like graffiti in bathroom stalls. It gives me something to read and almost always improves the unsavory experience of having to use a public restroom. But there is always one…dude…who has taken a pocket knife and carved into the stall:

ASS

I often hope there is a literal Christian-style afterlife with a heaven where you can become privy to at least some of the universe’s mysteries. Presuming I make it into heaven, and God looks past all of the impure thoughts and acts, the river of constant profanity and taking his name in vain, as well as disgust and despair that is my life (there are also cookies there somewhere, so it’s not all bad)…presuming God lets me in despite all of this, I want to sit there in the clouds and look down into the world below and watch the dude who is carving ASS into the stalls of bathrooms. I want to *understand* him, because I am convinced that if we can uncover the motivations of the ASS dude, we can probably end war and disease and stuff. By then, of course, it will be too late, but the ASS dude nags at me, even now, and I desperately want to understand him.

The problem with ASS of course is that it doesn’t ordinarily start a flame war.

Even the dumbest among us must be puzzled as to the motivation of a person taking the time to scrawl ASS when he could have scrawled anything he wanted, such as the phone number, sexual proclivities, home address, or a primitive diagram of his enemies.

Beyond which, if you’re carving something into a stall, those “S”es are pretty complicated – as anyone with an Etch-a-Sketch knows, you want to avoid curves, especially if you’re in a rush.

Oftentimes they appear in KISS-like script, as lightning bolts, like Hitler’s SS. But this is so lazy, it rarely elicits a response.

What it does, however, is pollute the stall. Suddenly, it becomes *okay* for everyone else to start mucking it up, like a vacant lot in the inner city. One guy dumps his couch, and you have sanitation anarchy. I’ve watched it happen.

Crude diagrams, however, have started incredible flamewars. A particularly crude drawing in a bathroom at the Rutgers College library in the early 90s began a massive flamewar which descended (I kid you not) into arguments between conservatives and Marxists on the issue of homosexuality (homosexuality being a particularly popular issue of contention in public restrooms). Conservatives and college Marxists don’t really argue in each other’s idiom, so the discussion becomes about semantics, and you’re in for a very, very long ride. The thread eventually covered both walls of the stall, the cinder block wall at the back, and the door. It was only when every inch of space was gone and the conversation continued to the outside of the stall that building maintenance put an end to it but somehow cleaning it all off – which depressed and disappointed me, I might add.

The initial crude, faded, Bic pen drawing eventually drew people in so much that the two sides were bringing indelible markers with them to argue. The conversation participants actually *threaded* the discussion using different colored markers and clean spaces between point and counterpoint. The Marxist(s?) used a red marker, and the conservative(s?) used a black one. My least favorite phrase in the English language right now is the beyond-overused term “perfect storm,” so it is important that you understand that my use of it here has not a small amount of gravity:

This was a perfect storm of marker ink, ideology, sexual identity, and the human digestive system.

Somewhere in New Jersey, a bunch of ideological partisans (and me) prepared for a bathroom stall flamewar when leaving their apartment/dorm in the morning. People had to *remember* to bring their marketrs to give the nine yards to a bunch of Commies or Fascists *in a bathroom stall*.

I, of course, had to visit this stall daily to follow the course of the argument, so I am not being critical. You couldn’t tear me away. It was the most interesting bathroom stall I’ve ever done my business in, and the fact that I recall it to this day is a testament to that fact. You don’t see a lot of bathroom graffiti written *in paragraph form with proper indentation*.

Oddly, the toilet itself was spotless. It seems boorish to me to enter a bathroom stall for the purpose of a flamewar without also doing your business, but that’s a tangent I’m not going to go off on. It’s not fair to the lonely, neglected toilet, to begin with, and it is also bad form overall. I am unsure as to whether people were merely entering the stall for the purpose of debate and therefore not using the toilet, or whether they were being gentlemanly and sportsmanlike by cleaning up after themselves.

Getting back to YouTube, I’ve noticed that there is an equivalent of the ASS scrawler. In the past year no less than 10 unrelated videos I’ve watched have had flamewars attached which started with someone writing:

your gay

And always with wrong form of “you’re”. Someone usually responds with “Real intelligent comment, dickhead.” and then it snowballs from there. The original “your gay” guy rarely shows up anywhere else in the thread, which often goes on, sometimes, for hundreds of messages. It is unclear as to whether the poster is addressing the person who posted the video, or someone else in the discussion, but it clearly doesn’t matter.

And as you pointed out in your blog entry, it’s often not even specifically directed at a point in the story these discussions are attached to, nor, as a thread evolves, are the responses even directed at the people who started the controversy. It is always respondents to respondents who start bickering with each other, generally over nothing to do with the story the discussion is attached to. Then others jump in, and then, metastasis.

The aliens who pick through the ruins of our civilization will write an interesting report. I have no doubt that the ASS dude will at least be a footnote in the “inconclusive” section of the report (and I would add that ASS in the context of the high scorer on your local Asteroids arcade game makes far more sense than the bathroom scrawler; at least we can understand that the high scorer was limited to three alpha characters).

Reports of analysis of the internet will indicate that threads were split into two categories of people – those who have “no life” and “need to get out more and kiss a girl” and people who spend an equal amount of time on the internet haranguing people about having “no life” and encouraging them to “get out more and kiss a girl.”

They will puzzle over the two camps of people who are involved in trolling incidents. (The troll himself will be a footnote; I have no doubt that every intelligent civilization in the multiverse is fully familiar with, and overrun by trolls, though they may take different forms.) The analysis will say that there has always been a greater volume of text posted on the internet identifying trolls and insisting that people regard the poster as a troll, and not to respond to them, as there is actual trolling text itself.

The aliens may in fact make an error in their analysis, missing the initial troll altogether and concluding that, in fact, all flamewars begin with the term *plonk* or a more verbose equivalent of it.

If anyone asks me about this (and they won’t), my statement on these matters would simply be that while I think everyone has a right to use the internet, the vast majority of people on it *don’t deserve to.*

Elitist? I don’t care; that’s how I feel.

As for graffiti, it pisses me off, except in bathroom stalls, where I encourage it.

Except for the ASS guy. He’s an enigma. Some have theorized that perhaps humanity is on the cusp of evolving to a new kind of form and that the growing incidence of Asperger’s Syndrome and Autism are markers for this, but it seems to me equally possible that we’re headed in the directio n of idiocracy. Perhaps Asperger’s is a sign of genetic despair, and that in fact, the ASS dude is our future.

Internet message boards such as digg’s, do not make me hopeful.

The number one excuse I see for people trolling forums and causing trouble is, “what’s the big deal? It’s not real!” My fairly common retort to that is it should be equally okay for you to call your mother a whore over the telephone — hey, it’s not real, it’s just digital bits representing your voice!

I don’t think this noise in the internet, which can be seen anywhere is always “cancer” when you ask for the egoism criteria. Spam is much more cancerlike. Flame wars in forums is much less cancerlike, because you can simply turn it off if you don’t like it. On the contrary, for many people flame wars in forums is entertainement. The german IT-newsticker heise.de is a good example. There are many so call Troll-postings there with no constructive sense at all. That’s much fun for many people hitting at each other. There’s the Microsoft/closed source vs. Linux/open source flame war and any news concerning the one or the other issue results in endless threads with no meaning at all. But if you learned to separate the trash, you can find interesting background information, correcting or enhancing the given information. I prefer news sources with public comment function or forums, because then things can be discussed critically. That’s the fantastic thing about the internet: we are not only listeners, but also authors. An information spread on the net with independent pros and cons has much more value than an information with no comments at all.
So with a noise filter comment functions and forums are progres and don’t get destroyed by trolls.

There are also different levels how noisy a forum is. If you know about the psychology of a forum or mailing list, you can set up a charta with fair but strick rules of behaviour. Having the worst case always in your mind, this can reduce the noise in a forum and create a special kind of culture. I do run many forums and mailing list as an admin. They are small, but not noisy, because my charta separated the usual suspect who just want start flame wars and telling each other names.
So even in this respect forums are much different from cancer: there is much cure, but you have to remove the cause, not the symptom.