Trolling is an art which clearly is not possessed by any of the trolls posting on this website .
As the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, famously once said, "Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud", and this applies equally to trolling.
The very best trolls are the ones who come across as a legitimate but offensive person - provocative, yet not so as to warrant a "This comment has been moderated” posting by the JC Webmaster or not so stupid enough to ensure people just ignore them. The very best trolls are the ones where no one is sure if they are a troll, ones who tread that fine line between a good jibe and a fatuous remark.
What this means is that the most visible trolls (and you see them here all the time) are the particularly bad ones, the ones who just spout racial epithets (you know like calling settlers “scum”), or recycle memes from OhInternet or the Guardian CIf website or engage mainly in vacuous ad hominem attacks.
These are the uninspired trolls that unfortunately inspire future trolls, first because they are extremely repetitive, (the number of times I have been told I do not live where I do live is now legend) and secondly because their approaches are crude. Feedback is involved too, because for the most part, this kind of trolling does pressurise new users to respond, since eliciting any kind of response is what feeds these particular trolls - but the more mature a community becomes, the easier it is to ignore the same trolling tactics.
Basically, a really good troll leaves you unsure if they are trolls in the first place, and the bad troll just spawns (a word used advisedly) more bad trolls – something with which the JC website now has to contend in ever increasing numbers. Sigh!
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