![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
It's kind of ridiculous and astounding to me, and also disheartening and frustrating, how so very few people on the Internet these days seem to understand the concept of trolls and the required lack of feeding thereof. Instead, they just continuously feed them, all day, everyday, well past the point of gluttony on the trolls' parts. If anything, when I see some asshole saying asshole things online, it is the people who try to "fight back" that annoy me even more than the initial asshole, because I know that the initial asshole is just sitting back and laughing and gloating, because they were completely successful in getting exactly what they came for.
If one responds to a troll, no matter the reason, no matter how "clever" or "biting" one may think their response was, it doesn't matter, because the troll just won, regardless. They got a response. They "triggered" someone. That's what they wanted, and that's why they won. One is not going to ever convince a troll of the error of their ways by responding to them and arguing with them and insulting them. Trolls don't care. They thrive on it, in fact. Their entire modus operandi is to get a rise out of people by saying asinine, inflammatory horseshit, the more rage-inducing it is, the better.
The proper course of action is to simply block the troll immediately and permanently, such that one never sees the troll's insipid blathering ever again, and thus one can spend time on more productive/positive/pleasant things. To paraphrase a thing I read somewhere: "Blocking someone on an Internet forum does not mean that you are afraid of that person or what they were saying, any more than throwing garbage in the garbage bin means that you are afraid of garbage. It just means that you think the garbage is disgusting and useless and that you don't want the garbage in your house anymore."
Of course, given the vast proliferation of trolls I've noticed in recent years, all due to the fact that nobody seems to know how to properly deal with them anymore, one could spend from now until the heat death of the universe doing absolutely nothing but blocking trolls, and it would still only be a thimbleful of water in the ocean compared to how many trolls remain and are born anew each day. If anything, these days, I see far more people arguing into the ethereal void of trolls I have already long ago blocked than I do actual new trolls. That is almost even more annoying than seeing whatever dumbshit fuckery the troll actually said, because you just know that it was dumbshit fuckery, not matter what it was.
If one responds to a troll, no matter the reason, no matter how "clever" or "biting" one may think their response was, it doesn't matter, because the troll just won, regardless. They got a response. They "triggered" someone. That's what they wanted, and that's why they won. One is not going to ever convince a troll of the error of their ways by responding to them and arguing with them and insulting them. Trolls don't care. They thrive on it, in fact. Their entire modus operandi is to get a rise out of people by saying asinine, inflammatory horseshit, the more rage-inducing it is, the better.
The proper course of action is to simply block the troll immediately and permanently, such that one never sees the troll's insipid blathering ever again, and thus one can spend time on more productive/positive/pleasant things. To paraphrase a thing I read somewhere: "Blocking someone on an Internet forum does not mean that you are afraid of that person or what they were saying, any more than throwing garbage in the garbage bin means that you are afraid of garbage. It just means that you think the garbage is disgusting and useless and that you don't want the garbage in your house anymore."
Of course, given the vast proliferation of trolls I've noticed in recent years, all due to the fact that nobody seems to know how to properly deal with them anymore, one could spend from now until the heat death of the universe doing absolutely nothing but blocking trolls, and it would still only be a thimbleful of water in the ocean compared to how many trolls remain and are born anew each day. If anything, these days, I see far more people arguing into the ethereal void of trolls I have already long ago blocked than I do actual new trolls. That is almost even more annoying than seeing whatever dumbshit fuckery the troll actually said, because you just know that it was dumbshit fuckery, not matter what it was.
