Moderating Communities

With our society becoming more and more advanced with technology, it has paved the way for us to do a lot more online communication due to its quickness and efficiency. Social media has reluctantly become part of the norm in society, as a result of the many advantages it has to offer; nonetheless, it has also brought many disadvantages to society. One major disadvantage that social media has brought to society, as a result of online communication, is trolling. Trolling is when a person or several people for that matter choose to make a mockery out of an online community by disrupting other members to get a reaction from them by saying hurtful and disrespectful things. Many individuals who belong to online communities choose to troll because the consequences do not hold as substantial to those people who choose to troll face-to-face.

With almost every social media network I’ve joined, I have witnessed plenty of trollers. What I have concluded from my observations is that individuals who choose to participate in trolling usually attack those who choose not to respond back. I think people who decide to troll on online communities often attack those who choose not to respond back because to the community it looks as though the individual who has trolled “won” in the sense that the victim has not responded back. However, to the individual who is trolling he/she is probably content that the victim has not responded because sometimes the victim’s rebuttal in response to the attack is better than the attacker’s troll and the individual who is trolling just ends up looking stupid on the online website.

The online community I decided to join is FML. Many people are probably already very familiar with this site and the way it operates. Essentially, how it works is people write daily entries of what has occurred in their lives that made them say FML. After posting it, several people comment on it to give their opinion on your FML moment, also, there is a like feature where you can like the “I agree your life sucks” feature or the “you deserved it” feature.