Trolls are the graffitti artists of the internet.
I will admit that Trolls are more highly evolved that spamsters, but they latter is farily well dealt with on WordPress Platforms by tools such as akismet and captcha. Very few spamsters get through those nets.
Now, there are pseudotrolls. Pseudotrolls may have one or two hobbyhorses, and in real life are probably bores, but on their topic they are witty. When one of those arrives, one response is
*gets out the popcorn*
I’m just watching this one, as I’m enjoying not having to be the moderator for once. It’s definitely MWM again.
She is quite intelligent but seems to have some of the same bees in her bonnet as MWM.
I submit that it is because she is MWM. That’s my point. She has at least 4 handles that I can think of right now: MWM, Laverne and Shirley, Arranged Marriage, Crystal Meth. It makes me suspicious.
She can call herself whatever she likes, but she’d do well to respect the mistresses of this house when she comments.
But MWM is witty at times — often demonstrating the exact point she is protesting about in the incoherence of her own answer.
But humour does not always worm. Trolls spray their thoughts aroound, often setting up arguments for the sheer hell of doing it or trying to use the comments as some kind of denial of service attack to shut down conversation.
This happened at Stuff Black People Don’t Like. They publically banned a person, stating.
Someone named Desiree has been a great nuisance here for too long, driving away readers with her diatribes that make virtually no sense. She created a persona called “Professor Snape” and has recently been posting under the names “Jones,” “Dree,” and “Dreko.”You are now banned. We’d like to open up posts and allow anyone to contribute without censorship, but SBPDL has become a brand that must be protected.Seek help Desiree. Please. Creating multiple personalities in an attempt to change people’s opinion on Black people and the concept of Black-Run America – that a lifetime of real-world experience have unfortunately provided ample fuel for such views and derision toward a system that seeks to normalize Black pathologies – and writing long-winded comments only about 10 percent of her various characters posts get approved seems a strange waste of ones time.We wish you all the luck in the world as you finish your studies at UNLV. Time is ones most precious resource and you should always remember that it is finite. Don’t waste it anymore coming here; we won’t waste ours dealing with your comments anymore.
via Stuff Black People Don’t Like – SBPDL: Banning of the Trolls Starts Now.
In the end, the difference between graffiti and graffiti art is one of wit, craftsmanship and style. Even 4chan occasionally has wit (Lolcatz type wit, but there is some humour there). The only virtue of the blogosphere over real life is that a killfile can automate removal of trolls. You have to scrub the graffiti off your walls every. single. time.