After reading the article it is evident that trolls are a
large part of the online community and that they have a big effect on different
groups of people. In the online examples given it is true when one says that a
troll can ruin an online forum or page because many people use the Internet to
escape their daily lives and when they do not feel comfortable in their free
time it really ruins the experience. In the end of the article they showed how
a single troll could be overpowered in a large forum and I do think this is
true. Using both the Internet and other things like gaming consoles people are
able to troll and ruin others experiences but it is easy to see how a single
person can be overcome when people work together to rid them of what they are
ruining.
On my online community of choice, which is Soundcloud, an
online music site people do often troll others. Due to free commenting on
peoples posts, many people do turn the experience into a negative one and when
they do so some people do tend to shy away from posting. On the site many large
audiences view one single post so lots of comments tend to go unnoticed showing
how a large group can affect a single troll, but with many smaller groups
posting songs and music for a small audience one negative comment can ruin what
they are trying to share. I haven’t been able to view much negativity to date,
but it is evident hat if you search for negative comments and behavior there
will be lots to be found.
You can see the commenting on Soundcloud by viewing all of
the avatar squares underneath the music feed.
Soundcloud sounds like it should be a pretty good online community, especially since people can discuss music with one another and share music freely so that everyone can benefit. Unfortunately trolls can be found on many discussion pages and they are very hard to avoid. I can imagine that some people may really get affected by these trolls and like you said, it might diminish people's confidence and cause them to contribute less to the community. I experienced a similar problem on the online community that i did, due to the fact that some sections such as politics had a lot of trolls and flamers. The bad thing about this is that some of them got likes on their comments and it further encourages others to do it, until it pushes out more and more serious people from that community. In my opinion it is best to try and ignore them, some may just be doing it because they've had a bad day.
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