They need to hack Reddit.
- In away they did.
  
  Yeah reddit and Lemmy are just auxiliary troll communities to the OG forums like 4chan.
  Same people. Same shitty behaviour just slightly different topics and levels of trolling.
  
  People know what 4chan is. There's no illusions about it. reddit and its derivatives are were the real trolling goes down.
  
  Then why are you here? Are you also a troll?
  
  I thought it would be a legitimate niche forum for sharing information. And reddit leaned further into trolling and bad behaviour.
  A systems purpose is what it does and this platform has not shown much outside of being a place for fights and self held superiority stroking.
  TL; DR I am mostly here for news links and B-Movie-Bananza cause it has some good recommendations. Not to interact or pretend this is more than the sum of its parts.
  Also the top communities are memes mostly so, yes? Is not jokes a minor form of trolling?
  
  We have a different definition of troll I think. To me trolls are bad faith actors hiding racism and other disinclusive speech behind humor.
  
  Ah. It used to be just someone that would say something so inflammatory or provoking that it would force interaction or responses from the people witnessing it.
  Like an obvious joke or quote of an earworm that it creates replies. Or sometimes something rude or just wrong on purpose. Modern bad actors adopting trolling tactics is not necessarily the same thing.
  You could say trolls are like onions, they have multiple coatings.
  
  No no, ogres are like onions.
  
  Weren't ogres more like cake though? Everybody loves cake.
  
  Or parfaits!
  
  A definition I saw many years ago was something like a troll tricks you into feeling a certain way or doing a specific thing. Could be positive, mostly done for humour, but the ones we hear most about in the media or whatever are the upsetting ones.
  
  Yeah the best ones are just taking advantage of our empathetic neurons to initiate a conversation. The terrifying ones then use that opening to inject their own thoughts on others.
  
  I've been online since usenet. I try to use the current meaning of words. I fully understand that trolling has been coopted by bad faith actors.
  Originally it was a fun little bit of sarcasm or an inside joke that became a proto meme or some copypasta to share around.
  Now it's a path to the US presidency.
  
  I guess it's like "hacking." In the good old days, a "hacker" was a particularly clever software developer, now it's someone who breaks into computers.
  Can we please stop ruining the good words?
  
  Hacking is using something in a manner in which it was unintended by hacking parts of it, as with an axe.
  Good discussion of it here with etymological references.
  https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/70658/what-does-the-word-hacking-or-hacker-come-from
  
  Exactly!
  Hacking into a system is like hacking your way through a door to steal stuff. Hacking around hardware or software limitations to get what you want is creative and more similar to creating furniture with an axe, you're doing things the tool was never meant to do, and doing it incrementally until you get the desired result.
  
  Trolling is a lot harder when you're not anonymous to other users.

205 comments