I have read the article on trolls, flamewars, and how to moderate comments by Cory Doctorow, and i can see what he means with this article he wrote. He states that trolls can come and poison any community, and I also believe that the reason for that is the fact that they are trying to be tough or funny over the Internet to rise attention to themselves. My opinion is that there are two types of Internet trolls: the ones that try to start fights with everyone because they lack attention, and would like to get it any way possible, and the others are trolls who do it as a joke to try to aggravate one person while entertaining many. The second group of trolls most likely results from fanboys of famous YouTube entertainers who get paid to troll. I mainly agree with Cory's suggestions to try and moderate the community and see why all the hate is occurring, but i disagree with the method of asking the trolls for their numbers or actually giving out your number. My main recommendation would be to message them back in a professional manner to let them know their trolling or flaming isn't affecting you or just simply ignore them.
The community that i have chosen to become a part of is CNN, due to the fact that i find them to be the best news website across many fields such as politics, health, and living to name a few http://www.cnn.com/. I was actually a little bit surprised about the trolling and hate going on in these forums. Overall I have found these forums less professional than some of the other news discussion sites i have visited. I dug deep to find the best examples of trolling i could find throughout the sections and it would seem that the political section contains the most of it. Here is an example of how unfriendly some of the posters can be in relation to a political news update. This political update stated that Obama's approval rate is diminishing.
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/02/08/obamas-approval-rating-edging-down/?hpt=po_c2
This is a good example of a chain of people being sarcastic and adding their toxic onto the general forums. If the trolls and haters keep spreading, there won't be many professional forums for discussion left out there and the innocent will fall victims to the trolls attempts for attention. In conclusion I believe that we should all do our best to act the best we can to keep forums as nice and friendly as possible, to at least counter-act the trolls by a little bit, we can make a difference if we try.
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/02/08/obamas-approval-rating-edging-down/?hpt=po_c2
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ReplyDeletePolitics especially, can create an outstanding amount of controversy. so it doesn't surprise me that there are a number of trolls on the community. Since people are encouraged to avoid talking about religion, money and politics with family and friends; these types of communities offer people an opportunity to voice how they really feel, possibly causing the amount of emotion expressed through some of the posts. If we are more aware of the type of community we are engaging in and determine how sensitive it is, we can adjust how we approach it. Your suggestion to counter-act the trolls can defiantly work, especially by identifying whether or not the troll had all the facts about the topic before they commented about it.
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