West is right; its time to stop thinking of trolls as idiots who are just seeking attention, and see them for what they are: Misogynists with a political agenda.
Trolls aren't a unified group. I'm sure that some are misogynists, and some are just attention-seekers looking to provoke a reaction.
There are people who will go onto a Star Trek forum and post that Trekkies are losers who need to get a life. Then they'll go to a cat lovers' forum and post that dogs are better than cats and all cats should be drowned. They'll visit the Sierra Club forum and recommend paving over the Amazon basin. They'll deliberately hop from forum to forum looking to get a rise. It's the same kind of entertainment kids get from kicking anthills.
I once accidentally trolled a video game forum. (I'll describe the situation below, for those who care.) I started a tongue-in-cheek thread to make a point, and I gave it a provocative title to ensure lots of people read it. A few people responded in a similar tongue-in-cheek manner, but then someone took one of the responses seriously. They flamed that person for not getting the joke. Several people flamed that person back. Suddenly my joke thread turned into an all-out flame war.
My joke thread took on a life of its own. It became the hottest thread on the forum. I was fascinated by this turn of events. I would check on it daily to see how much it had grown. It had over 1,000 posts. Over 20,000 reads. It was the largest, most read thread by an order of magnitude.
I was somewhat in awe of what had been created, and that had
never been my purpose. For the people who actually
are attention-seekers, I could easily see how they would get addicted to watching the ants scurry around like crazy.
There are attention seekers out there. They enjoy making people react. If a misogynist says something hateful and gets a reaction, an attention-seeking troll will see the reaction, then say something more outrageously hateful to get a bigger reaction.
The Story of How I Accidentally Trolled a Forum (for the few who care):
This involves the computer game
Diablo II and the forum for that game.
Diablo II has a five-act story (with multiple scenes per act), character development, challenging encounters and multiple ways to overcome those challenges. The developers also included (as a joke) The Secret Cow Level. The cows were easier than most encounters, but the rewards for defeating them were about equal to most other encounters.
People quickly decided to exploit this by playing The Secret Cow Level again and again to easily gain the rewards. Over half the threads on the forum were about The Secret Cow Level. People regularly asked advice about how to best develop their character to beat The Secret Cow Level (instead of designing their character to defeat the challenges that were far more difficult).
In order to make a point about how ridiculous this was, I started a thread and titled it:
"Secret Levels Found!" I started my post with the line,
"I was playing a game of Cows, and I stumbled across some secret levels...." I then proceed to name some of the rarely-visited non-secret levels.
People were so obsessed with the secret level, the possibility of more would definitely get their attention. Once they read my post, they would get the joke and perhaps consider how silly their obsession was.
Little did I realize the silliness that would ensue....
And I'm sure some attention-seeking troll later visited the Diablo II forum, looked at my thread, then tried to write a similar one in order to "accomplish" the same "success".
beats me but as far as I am concerned I only have this singular usage.
