“Oh, David Thorne. You give trolls a good name.
For those who are unfamiliar, David Thorne is in the business of giving people the business. Someone emails him something, often an asinine request of him, and he takes them down a terrible, horrible rabbit hole.
What he does is what people would call trolling, although I’m not totally sure that’s what’s going on.
First off, let’s get something straight. For some reason, people who engage in trolling online are called “trolls.” Which is stupid. Trolling isn’t what trolls, the mythical creatures, do all day. It’s not like those creatures say, “Just livin’ dat troll life, trollin’ it up!”
Trolling is a term that comes from the boring, awful, stupid world of fishing. Which is probably why we’ve mis-associated it with Lord of the Rings shit. Fishing is boring and stupid.
What trolling is, in fishing, is casting your line out and letting it trail behind a boat. The bait slowly moves through the water, and you see if you can get something to bite. To connect it to the online internet, you’re putting some bait out there, and sort of lazily waiting to see if something bites.
So, shouldn’t someone who trolls on the internet be called a fisherman? Instead of saying “Don’t feed the trolls” shouldn’t we say, “Don’t bite the bait?”
Anyway, David Thorne isn’t really a traditional troll in that he doesn’t put stuff out there with the intent of getting a bite (most of the time, anyway). He responds to crap he gets. Sort of like he’s not even fishing, he’s just walking around a lake when a particularly stupid fish jumps out of the water and bites down on his pant leg.
The book provides a great lesson for all of us in how to avoid being trolled. I’d like to summarize these lessons in a simple X Point Plan [I’m putting X because I’m making this up as I go, and I don’t know how many points I’ll have. Maybe I’ll come back and fix this. But probably not].
1. Oh my god, just shut up!
When someone is trolling you, all you have to do is stop talking to them. A troller can’t really troll unless you keep up the momentum. Because the troller only cares about your reaction, not the actual issue at hand, if you remove your reaction, there’s nothing left. It’s amazing to see how people always, ALWAYS want to have the last word with Thorne. And then they end up in his book. And their last word is usually a stupid one.
2. Having an argument is fruitless when the other person’s goal is to piss you off and waste your time.
There’s nothing to be learned. You won’t walk away with a new understanding, and neither will the other person. In this book, the more someone argued with Thorne, the more passionate and wordy they were, the better it was for Thorne.
3. If you’re thinking of starting a reply or comment with some form of “I don’t know if you’re a troll or what,” then don’t make that comment at all.
Seriously, that’s all you need to know. If you think someone is a troll, they’re almost definitely a troll. Or they’re so profoundly stupid that their actual comments seem like trolling. Either way.
4. Don’t troll the troller.
Sometimes people try to pull this off, but I don’t think it works most times. It seems like it’d work, like reversing a practical joke so the bucket full of red hot screws falls on THEIR head (anyone? just me?), but when it comes to complete insincerity, butting up against more complete insincerity doesn’t make for hilarious fodder. It’s like watching a slam dunk contest where the contestants both give zero fucks about slam dunking. The idea is funny, but the enjoyment wears off quick.
5. Kill with kindness. And dumbness.
If you’ve got a troller that you have to address for whatever reason, there’s no way around it, the answer is to be the sincerest, kindest idiot on the planet. If you’re willing to resign yourself to looking stupid on the internet for a minute, then you can be this good-hearted idiot who not only doesn’t know they’re being trolled, but genuinely things the troller is trying to ask a question or express something. The thing is, a lot of the most successful trolling comes about because the person taking the bait is unwilling to look stupid, unwilling to have anonymous strangers think they have been bested. Even when they realize they’re being trolled, they cannot let go. And these are the absolute best people to target, by far the most fun. You know who’s not fun to target? Someone who only seems to be nicer, kinder, and stupider the harder you go at them. Just be a nice dum-dum. Some people will see what you’re doing, some won’t get it, and most will not care at all. Meanwhile, the troller will be completely exhausted.
6. Just accept that this is part of the world.
Getting your goat, taking the piss out of you, there are all these terms that mean the same thing as trolling, and there are all these terms because people have been doing it forever. And we all do it. Some jerkoff pulls up on your bumper, and you just slowly let off the gas. You go to a party and see how many beers you can open, take a single drink of, and then leave sitting around (this happens with such alarming frequency, even with adults, that I have to assume it’s intentional). You heat up a whole pack of screws until they’re red hot, put them in a bucket, balance the bucket between the cracked door and the frame, and then call someone into the room. Seriously, am I the only one who knows about this hilarious prank?
The alternative is to try and correct the trolls, which is exactly what they love.
Face it, they’ve got us by the short hairs. “