less_retarded_wiki/trolling.md

Trolling

Trolling (as a verb) is a fairly recent term that has evolved alongside the Internet and whose meaning ranges from an activity of purposefully causing drama (mostly on the Internet) for entertainment (the original, narrower meaning) to just shamelessly abusing rules of any system for self interest on the detriment of others (wider meaning, e.g. patent trolling, pre-election media trolling etc.). Core value of the narrow-sense trolling is simply fun on the detriment of others -- usually making someone angry -- but not every fun making can be called trolling -- bullying weaker, for example, isn't trolling, despite it bringing some fun; trolling has to have a bit of cleverness in it, it typically finds a way of legally do something nasty, i.e. hacking the rules of the game. Trolls are those who before the Internet would be called something like jokers or pranksters, however real life pranks have limited potential -- on the Internet on the other hand trolling can flourish (likely owing to the aspect of anonymity, lack of nonverbal communication, lack of consequences and responsibility and so on), so this art has evolved into something more, it is by now an inseparable part of Internet culture (and should probably become protected by Unesco). Some forms of trolling provide so much fun they're even illegal. Trolling is not about being evil, it is about having fun, it is cherished by cool people who don't take things too seriously and can make fun of themselves and is therefore embraced by forums like 4chan; on the other hand it is demonized by those without sense of humor, those who fear the power of humor (e.g. dictators and fascists) and those who mostly get butthurt by it (reddit, Wikipedia and other "safe space" networks). Evil is always afraid of fun.

Trolling is a very entertaining, healthy and refreshing activity, unfortunately spoiled by mentally retarded people who have no idea about how Internet works -- they come to the Internet and try to behave like it was real life. That's extremely stupid, it's like trying to behave normally in a video game or coming to a jungle and behaving like it was a city, the man who does this absolutely doesn't understand what's going on and fucks everything up. If you are one of them, leave the Internet now please, or at least stay with your grandma on Facebook.

In modern times trolling is started to be demonized and even criminalized, similarly to demonizing "conspiracy theories", politically incorrect jokes and other forms of free thinking and art, that's why it's important to support trolling more. Back in the day trolling may have been seen as annoying at worst, nowadays people will try to push laws for punishing "trolls" and promote the idea that it's a dangerous, possibly life endangering mental illness, labeling someone a troll is quite close to labeling him a psychopath or terrorist. Don't fall for this, let trolling prosper, it's simply fun, people's culture, folklore, humanity and art.

NOTE: That who performs trolling is called a troll, a word taken from Nordic mythology where it stands for a fantastic, weird kind of creature that lives in forests, caves or under bridges. Trolls are often a race in many fantasy universes (e.g. Warcraft, LOTR, Harry Potter, ...) -- there their appearance isn't very unified, some make them big, stupid giants, others paint them as tall but human sized creatures with tusks and so on. Further on we'll just be discussing trolls as related to trolling.

Trolling is highly associated with the troll face meme -- the face has become a universal trolling symbol.

A typical example of troll occurred e.g. circa 2006 when in the game World of Warcraft some guys pulled the world boss Lord Kazzak into Stormwind, one of the game's main cities, where of course this beast towering above all buildings proceeded to assrape the whole city and anything that stood in his way -- the boss couldn't even be killed because he healed every time he killed someone and with so many low level noobs and NPCs in reach he was just healing constantly. This was an ingenious move but of course, Blizzard like a huge unfunny pussy just stepped in, restarted the server and stopped all the fun because constantly dying several hours in a row was making some of their customers potentially unhappy. Blizzard is full of imbeciles who only listen to money of course.

Trolling in chat rooms and forums typically starts with so called bait, a deliberately provocative post that's meant to plant a seed of a heated discussion (see also flame war). Such bait will intentionally say something controversial, stupid, logically faulty etc., exactly to provoke a response, it wants to attract some smartass like a fishing bait wants to attract a fish. However the art is in striking the correct balance between stupidity and seriousness, the bait mustn't be too obvious otherwise it will of course be spotted and fail (4chan calls this a "low quality bait", a famous image of highly JPEGed fishing bait is typically attached).

Here are some potentially entertaining ways of trolling (they'll be written from the point of view of a fictional character so as to avoid legal responsibility for potential crimes they may inspire lol):

• Link troll: on my website I randomly put dangerous links that look like normal links, for example "back to homepage" leads to a Google search of "free CP" or "how to get a bomb on the plane". This way anyone who clicks it automatically gets on the NSA watch list :D
• Crime troll:
  • Evidence troll: before committing crime I go to a barber shop and collect hair on the floor. Later I scatter all this hair all around the crime scene so that investigators get overwhelmed with DNA evidence of dozens of unrelated people :D This is also know as DNA DDOS (or just DOS?).
  • Crime without motive: criminal investigators always look for a motive in a crime, if there is none they get greatly confused, so for example as an extremely rich man owning 10 Lamborghinis I like to just steal some shitty car from time to time -- even if clues point to me they are always like "why would this rich man steal such a shitty car, it doesn't make sense". I just laugh :D
  • Irrational crime: similarly investigators usually suspect some basic rationality even of the most stupid criminal -- you want to behave even stupider than that. For example I break into two stores and then just relocate goods from one to the other, then leave :D
• Seizure troll: when in some kind of lecture where the students are allowed laptops (typically in a compsci uni) I take a seat somewhere in the front row, near the lecturer, open my laptop and start a program that just rapidly flashes wild colors in fullscreen -- I leave it like that for the whole lecture so that everyone sitting behind me is forced to watch the flashing and can get an epileptic seizure. For educational purposes code for such a program can be written in a few lines of browser JavaScript (it may coincidentally possibly even be found in that JavaScript article).
• Eco whoring troll: I take a bag of plastic trash, go to the forest, find some nice, clean place, take a thumbs up selfie photo with it, dump the trash in there, take another photo, then post the photos in reverse order to Twitter with something like "today I worked tirelessly to clean this garbage dump, for our children!", get a million eco likes for literally dumping plastic trash in a forest.
• Stack overtroll: I love to perform this troll on sites like programming advice subreddits where wannabe soydevs try to roleplay as authorities on programming -- these deserve to be trolled the most :D This gets me banned every time but it's totally worth it, I use this to leave social network sites with style once I get bored with them. I make a piece of code that looks like some noob attempt at making a game, but it's secretly an obfuscated code that when run does something nasty like delete all files on the computer, create one trillion subdirectories or set goatse as a wallpaper (bloat languages like Python are actually great for this as they can do nasty stuff like execute a dynamically constructed string and they can also download stuff from the Internet and basically do anything they like). Then I post it with a question "hello fellow programmers, I am trying to make my first game but my code doesn't work, can u help me plz?" If the code is well made, i.e. not trivial and quite hard to understand just by looking at it, chances are the first thing people are gonna do is simply copy paste the code and run it -- that's why I prefer to make the code completely destroy the computer so that the guy has to take at least a few hours to reinstall the system to be able to warn others it's a troll. Whenever some comment pops up saying it's a trap, I immediately downvote it and report it for hate speech (I also use puppet accounts here to spam the downvotes because I'll get banned anyway). The good things about this is that I actually teach people about muh security, those who step on this mine will never run a random code from the Internet again.
• The raycyst gayming streamtroll: As a famous vidya streamer I love to do this to cause lulz, if done right I just cause drama and won't even get banned. I pick some convenient game, for example GTA or Obvlivion or something, then I just play the game, audience is watching, the catch is that I'll be making slightly racist or sexist choices in the gameplay, for example when driving between mission if I run over pedestrians, I'll only be killing black ones :D I will never buy anything from a black NPC or woman, I will never steal a black car and will prefer taking only white cars I can and so on. BUT... I won't be open about it of course! And I'll be denying it if someone starts to notice, in turn blaming him for being racist for making such observations. I can make this very subtle, for example I'll sometimes run over a white pedestrian too, but I'll keep the ratio biased towards black in such a way that it's noticeable but that it leaves them scratching their heads if it's intentional or not :'D Now if the chat starts to make drama out of it, I'll just say they're paranoid, I'll even do whatever they want me to to make them believe it's not intentional... and then I start slowly doing it again :'D Now this is funny because they can prove you nothing, and it's hilarious if you get reports and some mod literally has to go watch your streams and count the ratio of blacks versus whites you run over LMAO. Nice thing is also that if someone accuses you of racism, mod reviews it and says unconclusive, you can just ban the accuser for trolling, further scaring people from stepping in, at which point you can start being slightly more racist in the gameplay and so on, see how long you can balance on this fine line :D Another idea: play some MMORPG and be racist/sexist towards the races in the game, for example refuse to trade with female characters or speak to gnomes or whatever.
• Troll the troll: Advanced mastery of trolling allows one to troll other less experienced trolls -- an encounter of two trolls can be quite fun and educational. Imagine for example troll A setting up the above mentioned stack overtroll bait -- troll B, an experienced player of the game, notices the bait, but of course he doesn't bring this up -- no, he pretends to take the bait and responds with something like "wait a minute, let me run the code". Troll A is happy because he thinks he won, but then troll B responds: "yeah, here on line X you got this wrong, here is the correct code...". Troll A is now confused, he's unsure if he's been spotted or if troll B simply skipped running the code, troll B is now in advantage of controlling the game -- a best result here is if troll B actually somehow gets troll A to run the "fixed" code which however breaks his computer; here troll B succeeded in deflecting the troll back and catching OP into his own trap -- this kind of outcome is the best you can wish for and a showcase of true trolling mastery.
• The richfag: As a rich faggot I can do literally what I want so for example I bought a forest and started a company that employs people who's job it is to just run around a tree for 8 hours every day -- my goal is to have every tree have one man running around it eventually. The company is not profitable, in fact it loses money but I don't care about that, I already have infinite money. The fun thing is the people are actually grateful because I created jobs basically for all nearby villages :D
• Creative Wikipedia vandalism aka Creative TrollLolz: for example funny redirects or categorizations (put Bill Gates to "famous homosexuals" category or something), also consider vandalizing other wikis that usually don't have as much protection.
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• Stream/game raids became very popular with the onset of streaming and child abusing MMOs, maybe the most iconic was the Habbo Hotel "Pool's closed" raid. 4chan is one of such raid enjoyers, however very specialized groups such as soyjak.party emerged who live off almost exclusively of organizing such raids. A stream raid mostly goes like this: some toxic tranny prostitute is making children masturbate on Twitch and figures out it will steal more attention (money) by forcing audience interaction in form of some gayme in which the audience can participate -- this is where the fun begins. There are shitty games that for example let people write rap songs that are then read by text to speech synthesizer or choose titles for albums or the marble racing game where users can set their avatar pictures etc. Of course here comes the party that just storms this with images of goatse or some nigger quotes, the streamer starts to rage because he is now showing an image of protruding hairy asshole to 10000 toddlers who just wanted to watch overwatch or roblox, while in a robotic voice in the background is quoting Hitler and calling for the final solution, which of course is not very good for the streamer's career :D In best scenarios the streamer gets banned. { See for example these video clip gems at https://soyjakwiki.net/Jackbox_Raiding#Clips :D ~drummyfish }
• Classic trollz revolve around creating drama on forums -- this is kind of an art as you have to keep the right balance of seriousness and stupidity; too much of the former and you're not trolling anyone, too much of the latter and you're just spotted as obvious troll. It's definitely not about logging on a starting to drop the N-words and insulting everyone, that's just an instant ban that ends the fun; you rather want to start slow, get many people seriously involved in the discussion, be polite and then slightly steer the talk towards something controversial (nice if you pretend to be part of some "oppressed minority"). Then you just make it look like you're just an uneducated simple minded individual who kind of happens to lean towards an opinion the others truly hate, but you have to keep their hope that they can convince you to change your opinion, so still try to be polite, just so you keep arguing with them and wasting more and more of their time until they start losing their shit and the thread explodes into hitler arguments etc., then just watch and enjoy.
• Having fun with the surveillance: Our modern, bleeding edge technology combined with ultra modern capitalism achieved the amount of surveillance that cavemen could only dream of -- today we can enjoy being watched 24/7 everywhere and feel the warmth of sharing our private correspondence with some kind stranger so that we don't feel so alone. We can thank these good people and censors by hiding nice surprises in our correspondence just for their pleasure. The downside here is that we won't see his reaction, but just knowing about it can warm one's heart. For example when I'm sending something to another continent I know all packages come through border control to achieve great degree of PROTECTION^TM, those people just have to go looking through the things you're sending and spend lengthy days asking themselves questions such as "Why would he be sending this kind of item? Could it be suspicious that a 20 year old man is sending a dildo to a 60 year old woman? We have to think about this deeper to find reasons behind this." I know these people must be bored checking the same kind of items every day over and over, so I make unique, creative challenges for them. For example I create something that looks like drugs: I make a suspicious looking box with removable bottom and in there I put plastic bags with sugar, but that's not all of course -- this will just raise the possibility of them having to CAREFULLY check all the items I am sending, and that's where I hide all the surprises. I print out images such as goatse and photos of suicided children (in high resolution) and create a small novel sized book out of it captioned: top secret steganography information, knowing someone will have to go through it all and analyze every single picture to see if there is some kind of hidden list of drug business partners or something; then I add some weird machine, a bunch of randomly assembled gears and microchips and puzzle toys, that will make some highly paid engineer busy for several months, it'll make him scratch his head and try to figure out what the device is for (spoiler: it does nothing) -- sometimes for the border control you have to list all the items contained in the boxes, capitalists just assume that every item in the universe can be classified by their shitty tax categories, so I just create these weird unclassifiable things and invent names for them like "quazi orthosplitter gene rotator" or something (using random word generator on the Internet). A cheaper version of this act of kindness can be performed by embedding "interesting" links into one's unencrypted emails that contain "interesting" keywords such as "BOMB", "ALLAH" etc. For example I may drop in some gay porn so that the surveillance worker can literally watch porn on his shift: this will make him very happy.
• Satellite image vandalization: In this modern age we now have easily accessible to everyone satellite images of whole Earth surface in fine resolution, isn't that awesome? I like to use this fact for the lulz. I set for a desolate place far away from civilization where no one ever walks, and there I create funny pictures and texts from logs and rocks that will be recognizable in satellite images. Even if Google spots them and applies its masterful art of censorship, there are still many other competing services and photo sets where it will be overlooked and my creations will plague the Internet for a very long time -- and as one of my creations is being censored and destroyed, I am already working on another one somewhere else. It's a relaxing activity in the wilderness and a great motivation to go outside, spend some time alone in beautiful nature. Similar effects can be achieved by planting trees (you can even mask this behind ecology activism) or even building houses in funny shapes, but obviously I'll have to wait very long to see the results here. If my artwork is big enough, people don't even notice it when walking by, it will only be visible from above. Now there are of course simple funny words that immediately come to mind that one can spam this way, but we mustn't limit our creativity so easily: we have a publicly accessible canvas onto which we can ANONYMOUSLY paint WHATEVER we want. Someone needs to be doxxed? Revealed as gay? Illegal information wants to be shared? What's a better place than this? Best of all if anyone gets in trouble for this, it may be the creator of the satellite image.
• Weird life goal troll: This one requires extreme dedication and is a bit risky, but it might be one of the highest trolling peaks if performed successfully and well. So what's the troll here? We know that life goal cannot be objectively set, you can make your life goal whatever you want and no one can ever objectively refute it. So you can for example set your life goal to just walk forward -- you will dedicate everything to only walking forward as much as you can. You will stop going to work, you will only eat and drink if absolutely necessary, you'll just get up from the bed one day and start walking over the country in your pajamas -- if people ask you if you're alright you just say "yes, thank you". If you are starving, you just grab nearest food and eat it, if you need to sleep, you just lie down somewhere and sleep and then just walk again. Soon you'll probably be taken to mental asylum -- there you have to just prove you're completely normal, convince them you know what you're doing, that you're not feeling any anxiety or depression, that you hear no voices, you have only set walking as your life goal -- there is no objective way to refute this life goal. You will probably end up in asylum or jail anyway sooner or later, then just try to maximize walking, be nice and lie if you have to. If they lead you to the court, just turn around and start walking out of the building. If they put you in chains, just behave nicely and say you won't try to run away -- if they take the chains down, just start walking away. Whenever you get out of jail, just start walking again and so on. Now there is a risk that you may just waste your life without attracting any attention, but you may also become famous and then highlight the fact that current society is extremely retarded and is not ready for people who aren't conforming and just set their life goal arbitrarily.
• Prank calls to businesses can be cool, a traditional troll is for example calling two restaurants and letting them talk to each other :D This can fuck up two businesses at the same time, so it's even good for society, and the women behind the phone will be happy because it brings a little fun to their otherwise boring and repetitive slavery.
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{ I got asked a very good question: is trolling in fact fascism and how can I, a LRS supporter, like it then? This topic can get pretty complicated, trolling is probably like games themselves, it is a simulation of behavior that could otherwise be unethical, we always have to think about what's happening -- sometimes what's called "trolling" is just bullying without any creativity, which is not trolling in the right sense; other times trolling is seeking self benefit (fun on detriment of others) which is normally unethical but may be fine as a part of game, and other times trolling may aim to bring fun for everyone, in which case it may even be selfless. Seeking fun (a kind of self benefit) on the detriment of others is, at least by our definition, a form of fascism. I enjoy the acts of trolling, and though it may be partly an imperfection of me as a human being, I try to keep it compatible with LRS in the following ways. Firstly I never support actually very harmful trolling (such as "cutting for Bieber") to be DONE, though I do enjoy reviewing the cases that already happened and I may find them both funny and sad at the same time -- this is similar to how one can be a pacifist and completely reject violence while still finding some value in watching gore videos. Secondly trolling may be done to entities that aren't living beings, for example companies or states. Thirdly I may support acts of trolling that I don't think are significantly harmful, for example lighthearted pranks (the kind of joke you play on someone and it eventually entertains both of you, but it mustn't be taken too far, harm must be negligible), or Internet trolling. It's similar to sports or video games -- it is completely acceptable (and desirable) to create environments -- which must always be entered VOLUNTARILY -- that simulate amoral behavior and relieve some of our amoral animal needs, for example those for competition or fight, despite such behavior not being acceptable in other contexts. I.e. it is for example acceptable to kill each other in video games. Internet, or at least a great part of it, is such an environment -- it is a kind of playground anyone can enter voluntarily, that's known to have the kind of trolling game going on. On the Internet we only interact by speech and speech alone can never hurt anyone -- if one cannot bear reading something on the Internet, he can avoid using it (at least that's how it should be). ~drummyfish }

See Also

• troll personality disorder
• drama
• fun
• shitposting
• lulz
• Encyclopedia Dramatica