Dances With Trolls

We all know them. We all hate them. On a good day, we may even feel sorry for them – because after all, being a troll can’t be easy.

Trolls are drawn to people with high visibility and trolls are always anonymous. They lurk in the shadows and spew out their bitterness in the hope that somebody will actually listen to them and take them seriously. Even though, of course, they always hide behind their troll aliases. Often they have several such aliases. Even in a single thread. They think that these multiple aliases makes it look like they’re not alone. Which they are. Very alone. If you look through some troll-rich threads more systematically and analyze the language you can often tell which ones are in fact one and the same troll.

So how do we handle trolls? It depends. If they infest a blog we control we can always moderate in some way or ban anonymous comments. If they mooch away in other forums, handling them is harder. Conventional wisdom says to just ignore them. This method has a lot of benefits, one being that it requires zero energy. But could we perhaps be more creative than that? Can we in fact USE trolls and train them to help us in our work? Can we dance with the trolls? Perhaps.

Depending on what you want to accomplish, trolls could perhaps be useful. If you, for instance, want to rank highly on comment-count top lists to attract more traffic, you can provoke the trolls a little bit. Their bitterness makes their knee-jerk reflex quite potent, and they will almost always answer. Often in several poisonous comments in sequence. This builds your comment count. If you don’t want to build up comment count, but rather want to clean up your stream, you can instead provoke them slightly to have them write more posts. After a while they’ll have become so smelly that even those who may usually be your critics will start defending you, giving you additional impact. And since trolls are by definition anonymous and bitter, their foul smell will inevitably push sympathies in your direction.

If trolls can be trained to perform these tricks, then perhaps they’re actually an underestimated resource rather than just a smelly nuisance.