Taking the focus away from myself for a change, I think today I will talk about the Internet critter we all know and loathe, The Troll.

For those not up on the patois, a troll is someone who prowls the various comment sections, message boards, and other such regions of the Internet with a single intention : hurt people with words. Say whatever you can to cause the most anger, pain, sadness, and distress in those who read your words. The angrier and more upset they get, the more you like it. You thrive on outrage and misery, and there is no kind of response that does not increase your pleasure, because your greatest joy is to create as big a mess as possible.

In other words, you are pond scum.

What got me onto this subject was this bit of investigative journalism from news.com.au about the subject of trolling and the trolls who do it.

Now before I totally launch into the subject, let me draw a distinction : there are two kinds of troll – there are the combative and unpleasant people who cause a lot of problems wherever they go because they have short tempers and obnoxious personalities… and then there are the real hard-core trolls whose only aim is to cause harm, intentionally and with great zeal.

I am only talking about this second group of people. The first group is problematic, but lack intent to harm, so they are another subject.

First, it should come as no surprise that the article states that trolls tend to be people coming from a state of weakness, often people with no other power in their life but their ability to inflame and destroy on the Internet. Anyone familiar with the basics of the psychology of abuse would have predicted it would be so. People become abusers not simply when they become angry, but when they feel a lack of power and control in their lives.

The abusive act, then, whatever form it takes, is an act not just of rage but of hyper-controlling someone and using your power to dominate them, to push them so far below you that you feel elevated and powerful and totally in control.

It is a malfunction of the volatile social dominance hierarchy of our primate pasts, meant to establish our position in the hierarchy, not provide an anger outlet and psychological release.

My father controlled my childhood household via his anger, and he has someone (I learned later in life) felt he has very little power or control in his work life, so he came home and took it out on us.

But where does this leave our trolls, who take it out on strangers?

That is the beauty of it, in a way, from the troll’s point of view. They can just hop on the Internet and vent all their anger and bile and hatred on total strangers who have no power of retaliation. The Internet throws the door wide open for the potential abuser, giving them billions of victims, none of whom can fight back in any meaningful way.

The targets of abusers are often simply targets of opportunity anyhow. They take their rage out on whoever is near them, be it spouse, child, subordinate, or what have you. Whomever they feel they can abuse and get away with it. So trolling makes sense in that sense of the word.

Often, the troll has a rather impenetrable set of beliefs which might not be consistent with one another, but which makes them extremely difficult to reform. They tend to have a sense of self-righteousness (like all abusers), feeling that their actions are somehow justified, either directly by “deserving” it, or at least by leaving themselves open to attack.

They tend to also believe that what they are doing is a harmless sport even while also reveling in the harm they do. They justify this to themselves with the notion that people “take this whole Internet thing too seriously”, so in a sense, they are blaming their victims.

This, despite the fact that if people did not react as they did to the troll, the troll would not enjoy their trolling nearly as much.

This is the meaning of the constant refrain of “do not feed the trolls” on the Internet. The only way to deal with these people on an individual basis is remarkably similar to how to deal with children who throw tantrums (and that is no coincidence) : ignore them. All responses, no matter how angry or witty or piteous or especially outraged, make the troll happy. Their goal is to have as large an effect as possible. The only way to not be part of the problem is to ignore their comments completely. Give them absolutely no response whatsoever.

Unfortunately, that only works if everyone does it, and not everyone is going to (not that I blame them, they are only human), and that is why this sort of thing cannot be handled on the individual level alone.

The best solution I have seen that does not involve the labor-intensive solution of people hand-moderating every comment or post is a rating system for individual comments, where each comment starts with a score of zero and other users can either add a point or subtract a point.

Add in a default setting where users do not see comments with negative scores, and you have a workable system where trolling comments are pushed out of view rapidly.

It is not a perfect system, by any means. People can vote down comments simply because they disagree, and there is the problem that if someone acts fast enough, someone can vote a comment down right after it is posted, thus keeping anyone else from seeing it.

But it is the best solution I have seen so far. Mob justice is certainly not the best justice, but it is certainly efficient and it suits the Wild West nature of the Internet.

And it robs the troll of most of their ability to do harm.