December Days 02025 #21: Troll
Dec. 21st, 2025 11:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptIt's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.
21: Troll
Both in where I grew up and where I am now, there's a rather famous bridge associated with the place. And therefore, I often think of myself as a troll, i.e., one who lives underneath the bridge. (If your folklore and stories don't have trolls, mostly the point is that these particular beings live under bridges and often appear to demand tolls of those who attempt to cross the bridge above. Trolls are not generally considered that intelligent, but they are fiercely strong, and therefore your best bet in dealing with one is either to pay the fee or to use your considerably greater intelligence to trick or otherwise get the troll not to attack you. In the story of the Billy Goats Gruff, the first two goats successfully trick the troll into delayed gratification by saying that the bigger brother will be by shortly, and he'll be a better meal. The biggest of the goats, however, is both ornery and strong, and therefore simply butts the troll off the bridge and the problem is solved.
There is also a sculpture of a troll underneath a bridge in the Fremont area of the city of Seattle, with a Volkswagen Beetle embedded in the hand of said troll. Its intent, according to The Other Wiki, was to create hostile architecture for those who were using the underneath of the bridge to camp, which certainly douse some of the whimsy associated with said troll. If only it were so that in a place like Seattle, and everywhere, people didn't need to camp underneath the bridge to stay dry and relatively protected. Fremont is also the area with the large statue of V.I. Lenin, as well as the signpost of the Center of the Universe, so it has a reputation for being a lot more communism-leaning than other places in and around the city, but I suppose that might be people who are more interested in the idea of it rather than the actual execution or true mutual aid. They might just be trolling the rest of us about their supposed support for sensible left-wing democratic socialism or even more things like that.
In addition to the humorous meaning of "troll" for someone living under a bridge (geographically rather than physically), I also have to mean that sometimes I run into trolls in my other pursuits, and with the proliferation of automated tools and statistical probability models, those trolls are finding ever more novel ways to say nothing constructive and evade various filters that might be put in place to stymie them.
After running out a significant number of my Fandom Trumps Hate offerings, I received a nastygram as a comment from a guest that very clearly had been generated by a machine. I'll replicate it in full so you can also laugh at it and see how obvious it is that it's machine-generated:
Most interestingly, of course, was that this was not the one posted in the triple that was wither of the M/M pairing fics, but the meta essay about Steven Universe, and the ways that Homeworld approach things like fusion, and how it stands in for transphobia and the society itself is modeled on white supremacist ideas about how to have a social network. I used the word Queer in the title, so I'm guessing some bot was keyed in to the word in the title or the text and left the guest comment with the text above, specifically to spew this kid of trolling to people who might be in marginalized groups or caucusing with them. There's significant hilarity to "you must have spent so much time on this for it to suck this bad," when the trolling comment itself is generic, inaccurate, and contains basically nothing of the work itself that would indicate it was actually read by the account supposedly leaving the comment, or a human behind that bot. It was created in a moment, and it was disposed of through a click of the spam button to report it to the Archive's spamwhacking team. It holds no power over me, specifically because there's nothing for it to dig its claws into. I'm employed, I have people in my life who care about me, and while I say that I don't particularly chase number go up, I can also look at my statistics page and see what kinds of numbers I've been doing over all the time and the works that I've been doing. This might have been an effective insult to the me that was just getting started in fic-writing, but as an established and published essayist who does this fic stuff for fun, it's breaking teeth on my shell. It's a fire-and-forget missile, with the hope that someone will be hurt by it, instead of it landing as a dud and being disposed of. If you're going to be a troll about my work, you have to demonstrate the competence and capacity of having actually read it to form your insults with.
Other places that I take part in occasionally have unwanted visitors showing up to spew insults, spam, or other such things. One bot in a Discord group joined, then spammed a channel with screenshots of a monitor, hawking some crypto scam that supposedly had a great big bonus available for those who signed up. When someone else wondered why screenshots, I said it was because we could have automated tools that could automatically delete text from being posted, like the first crypto bot that joined, spammed, and then was spamwhacked, but machine tools have not yet progressed to the point where they can analyze a screenshot for forbidden text. OCR is better, certainly, but that doesn't mean it's perfect. (And the pictures were also taken at non-striaght-on angles toward the monitor, probably to make any OCR that much more difficult to do.) It's a numbers game to lots of these actors - if they spam a hundred thousand places with robots, and get banned a hundred thousand times, they're only out the runtime needed to do the spamming. If they get one person to bite on the scam, that can pay for the next several billions of attempts to find another. There's not really any craft to it, and it's often meant to catch the people who are less savvy or whose filters haven't yet fully kicked in to screen them out before they get the opportunity to show up in an inbox. For as much as my workplace gives me deepfake videos about how deepfakes, voice cloning, and AI-based attacks are the new wave of cybercrime, I suspect that if we were to get pwned again, it would be something more like a social engineering phish of some sort, or it would be an exploited vulnerability in something that we are using to serve our public pages. (Our website runs on Wordpress. I suspect there are quite a few tools out there meant to exploit unpatched or underpatched Wordpress installs, and several more that are taking advantage of vulnerabilities that have not yet been found and patched.) We've been rushing to get as much of our infrastructure into the cloud, where we think we'll be safer because we'll have the might of a bigger corporation keeping us within their walls, but we'll see how that goes over. I don't want it to happen again, but I also won't be surprised if it does - it's not like we have the funds to hire top-tier talent on our own. (We do participate in coalitions and other such joining of resources, so it's not that we're completely undefended, it's just that I don't expect us to be able to afford top-of-the-line solutions to the matter.)
The point of these attempts, both the crypto scam and the generic hostile comment, is both the law of numbers part of it, looking for someone who actually will be affected by it and therefore can be messed with further, but also as one more pebble on a pile of harassment. By itself, it can easily be brushed off, as yet more nonsense. It takes a little bit of effort to get rid of it. And dealing with one on occasion is not really a problem. Dealing with hundreds of them, and people who use those kinds of tools indiscriminately and repeatedly to send floods of those kinds of messages as fast as they can manage it through whatever portal they have set up, that's the thing that starts driving people off of platforms, or to lock down their works so that only registered users can see and comment on them, or to otherwise reclaim their time and energy by choosing not to engage with spaces and people that are hostile to them, are letting hostility happen to them, are claiming not to see the hostility to them, even with all the examples thereof, or who shrug and say that it's not their problem to deal with the hostility.
Sometimes there's also the part where not having the tools to deal with it becomes a problem, as well. As much as we hate to think of it as being necessary, the people spewing these things from their bots and scripts have made being able to cull and otherwise prevent the great majority of those kinds of messages from reaching their intended users part of the ground floor of hosting a place where people can interact with each other. The cost of having a place for people to gather is having to have someone to moderate the space and make sure that it doesn't become toxic, or a Nazi bar, or otherwise becomes hostile to the type of people that it would like to have as part of the community. As it turns out, even the places that are a cesspit have to have community standards, and a line where someone becomes too much for even them. (These days, that seems to mean that the person will move on and find themselves a community that's even more of a cesspit, but that's a diversion.)
It would be entirely fair to say that the culture of the United States has an endemic bullying problem, for as much as parts of that same culture try to highlight those parts and steer the culture on a better heading than the one it is currently on. While most of the focus in the States is on children and teenagers being bullied, because they are often at greatest risk of either suffering or perpetrating permanent consequences due to the bullying, adults still have to deal with trolls and bullies in their work lives (and sometimes in their home lives, as well.) Petty tyrants, everyday sadists, and abusive partners all exist, and so do the people they get gratification from through their bullying and abuse. Sometimes those people are in high office and try to legislate, or write rules, or make court decisions that say it's okay to bully certain kinds of people because those kinds of people, through their very existence, an existence that does not cause harm, are so undesirable that the State itself should do its best to make them either hide or not exist any more. (Those people should be removed from office expediently.) There are some sadists that work at lower levels than the federal or state government, and we've had at least a few county clerks making high-profile decisions not to exercise civic functions to certain people because they believe their existence is that dangerous. Most of the time, though, the petty sadists aren't quite so open in their desires and actions. They do things that they can justify as within their authority and judgment, or they're prone to "losing" things or rejecting them for tiny reasons that they wouldn't enforce on others.
Or they're the person at dinner who always seems to take things the wrong way, or who says provocative things because they like it when someone gets mad at them, and they can play innocent or claim their viewpoints are being repressed, or otherwise make someone else expend more energy trying to correct them, explain to them, or otherwise get them to come around. They like watching someone try, and the effort expended is their prize. They like seeing someone wound up about something they're passionate about, and that the person making the trollish comments could not care any less about. Minimal effort expended, lots of drama created to watch and enjoy, while not having to worry that their own beliefs will ever be challenged in such a way as to make them think or rethink about whether they're being the bad guys. (They couldn't possibly be. They have the moral high ground, or they were just playing and everyone is overreacting to them, even if other people actively avoid them and leave when they enter.)
I realize that disagreement is a normal part of interaction in the world, but people who do it just to rile other people up, or who spew insincere things out into the world with the hope they'll cause hurt, are people I'd rather not associate with, and I prefer to block them from my life wherever I can. I'd rather we only ever used the word to describe being geographically south of a bridge.
And, as if to provide perfect counterpoint to the original trolling message, I got a comment on one of my other fics that just says
21: Troll
Both in where I grew up and where I am now, there's a rather famous bridge associated with the place. And therefore, I often think of myself as a troll, i.e., one who lives underneath the bridge. (If your folklore and stories don't have trolls, mostly the point is that these particular beings live under bridges and often appear to demand tolls of those who attempt to cross the bridge above. Trolls are not generally considered that intelligent, but they are fiercely strong, and therefore your best bet in dealing with one is either to pay the fee or to use your considerably greater intelligence to trick or otherwise get the troll not to attack you. In the story of the Billy Goats Gruff, the first two goats successfully trick the troll into delayed gratification by saying that the bigger brother will be by shortly, and he'll be a better meal. The biggest of the goats, however, is both ornery and strong, and therefore simply butts the troll off the bridge and the problem is solved.
There is also a sculpture of a troll underneath a bridge in the Fremont area of the city of Seattle, with a Volkswagen Beetle embedded in the hand of said troll. Its intent, according to The Other Wiki, was to create hostile architecture for those who were using the underneath of the bridge to camp, which certainly douse some of the whimsy associated with said troll. If only it were so that in a place like Seattle, and everywhere, people didn't need to camp underneath the bridge to stay dry and relatively protected. Fremont is also the area with the large statue of V.I. Lenin, as well as the signpost of the Center of the Universe, so it has a reputation for being a lot more communism-leaning than other places in and around the city, but I suppose that might be people who are more interested in the idea of it rather than the actual execution or true mutual aid. They might just be trolling the rest of us about their supposed support for sensible left-wing democratic socialism or even more things like that.
In addition to the humorous meaning of "troll" for someone living under a bridge (geographically rather than physically), I also have to mean that sometimes I run into trolls in my other pursuits, and with the proliferation of automated tools and statistical probability models, those trolls are finding ever more novel ways to say nothing constructive and evade various filters that might be put in place to stymie them.
After running out a significant number of my Fandom Trumps Hate offerings, I received a nastygram as a comment from a guest that very clearly had been generated by a machine. I'll replicate it in full so you can also laugh at it and see how obvious it is that it's machine-generated:
It is honestly tragic how bad this writing is, especially considering how much time you must have spent on it while being unemployed. You are wasting your life on this nonsense when you should be trying to find a way to not be so isolated. While others are sharing a kiss under the mistletoe this Christmas, you will be single and alone, with only your bad writing to keep you warm.
Most interestingly, of course, was that this was not the one posted in the triple that was wither of the M/M pairing fics, but the meta essay about Steven Universe, and the ways that Homeworld approach things like fusion, and how it stands in for transphobia and the society itself is modeled on white supremacist ideas about how to have a social network. I used the word Queer in the title, so I'm guessing some bot was keyed in to the word in the title or the text and left the guest comment with the text above, specifically to spew this kid of trolling to people who might be in marginalized groups or caucusing with them. There's significant hilarity to "you must have spent so much time on this for it to suck this bad," when the trolling comment itself is generic, inaccurate, and contains basically nothing of the work itself that would indicate it was actually read by the account supposedly leaving the comment, or a human behind that bot. It was created in a moment, and it was disposed of through a click of the spam button to report it to the Archive's spamwhacking team. It holds no power over me, specifically because there's nothing for it to dig its claws into. I'm employed, I have people in my life who care about me, and while I say that I don't particularly chase number go up, I can also look at my statistics page and see what kinds of numbers I've been doing over all the time and the works that I've been doing. This might have been an effective insult to the me that was just getting started in fic-writing, but as an established and published essayist who does this fic stuff for fun, it's breaking teeth on my shell. It's a fire-and-forget missile, with the hope that someone will be hurt by it, instead of it landing as a dud and being disposed of. If you're going to be a troll about my work, you have to demonstrate the competence and capacity of having actually read it to form your insults with.
Other places that I take part in occasionally have unwanted visitors showing up to spew insults, spam, or other such things. One bot in a Discord group joined, then spammed a channel with screenshots of a monitor, hawking some crypto scam that supposedly had a great big bonus available for those who signed up. When someone else wondered why screenshots, I said it was because we could have automated tools that could automatically delete text from being posted, like the first crypto bot that joined, spammed, and then was spamwhacked, but machine tools have not yet progressed to the point where they can analyze a screenshot for forbidden text. OCR is better, certainly, but that doesn't mean it's perfect. (And the pictures were also taken at non-striaght-on angles toward the monitor, probably to make any OCR that much more difficult to do.) It's a numbers game to lots of these actors - if they spam a hundred thousand places with robots, and get banned a hundred thousand times, they're only out the runtime needed to do the spamming. If they get one person to bite on the scam, that can pay for the next several billions of attempts to find another. There's not really any craft to it, and it's often meant to catch the people who are less savvy or whose filters haven't yet fully kicked in to screen them out before they get the opportunity to show up in an inbox. For as much as my workplace gives me deepfake videos about how deepfakes, voice cloning, and AI-based attacks are the new wave of cybercrime, I suspect that if we were to get pwned again, it would be something more like a social engineering phish of some sort, or it would be an exploited vulnerability in something that we are using to serve our public pages. (Our website runs on Wordpress. I suspect there are quite a few tools out there meant to exploit unpatched or underpatched Wordpress installs, and several more that are taking advantage of vulnerabilities that have not yet been found and patched.) We've been rushing to get as much of our infrastructure into the cloud, where we think we'll be safer because we'll have the might of a bigger corporation keeping us within their walls, but we'll see how that goes over. I don't want it to happen again, but I also won't be surprised if it does - it's not like we have the funds to hire top-tier talent on our own. (We do participate in coalitions and other such joining of resources, so it's not that we're completely undefended, it's just that I don't expect us to be able to afford top-of-the-line solutions to the matter.)
The point of these attempts, both the crypto scam and the generic hostile comment, is both the law of numbers part of it, looking for someone who actually will be affected by it and therefore can be messed with further, but also as one more pebble on a pile of harassment. By itself, it can easily be brushed off, as yet more nonsense. It takes a little bit of effort to get rid of it. And dealing with one on occasion is not really a problem. Dealing with hundreds of them, and people who use those kinds of tools indiscriminately and repeatedly to send floods of those kinds of messages as fast as they can manage it through whatever portal they have set up, that's the thing that starts driving people off of platforms, or to lock down their works so that only registered users can see and comment on them, or to otherwise reclaim their time and energy by choosing not to engage with spaces and people that are hostile to them, are letting hostility happen to them, are claiming not to see the hostility to them, even with all the examples thereof, or who shrug and say that it's not their problem to deal with the hostility.
Sometimes there's also the part where not having the tools to deal with it becomes a problem, as well. As much as we hate to think of it as being necessary, the people spewing these things from their bots and scripts have made being able to cull and otherwise prevent the great majority of those kinds of messages from reaching their intended users part of the ground floor of hosting a place where people can interact with each other. The cost of having a place for people to gather is having to have someone to moderate the space and make sure that it doesn't become toxic, or a Nazi bar, or otherwise becomes hostile to the type of people that it would like to have as part of the community. As it turns out, even the places that are a cesspit have to have community standards, and a line where someone becomes too much for even them. (These days, that seems to mean that the person will move on and find themselves a community that's even more of a cesspit, but that's a diversion.)
It would be entirely fair to say that the culture of the United States has an endemic bullying problem, for as much as parts of that same culture try to highlight those parts and steer the culture on a better heading than the one it is currently on. While most of the focus in the States is on children and teenagers being bullied, because they are often at greatest risk of either suffering or perpetrating permanent consequences due to the bullying, adults still have to deal with trolls and bullies in their work lives (and sometimes in their home lives, as well.) Petty tyrants, everyday sadists, and abusive partners all exist, and so do the people they get gratification from through their bullying and abuse. Sometimes those people are in high office and try to legislate, or write rules, or make court decisions that say it's okay to bully certain kinds of people because those kinds of people, through their very existence, an existence that does not cause harm, are so undesirable that the State itself should do its best to make them either hide or not exist any more. (Those people should be removed from office expediently.) There are some sadists that work at lower levels than the federal or state government, and we've had at least a few county clerks making high-profile decisions not to exercise civic functions to certain people because they believe their existence is that dangerous. Most of the time, though, the petty sadists aren't quite so open in their desires and actions. They do things that they can justify as within their authority and judgment, or they're prone to "losing" things or rejecting them for tiny reasons that they wouldn't enforce on others.
Or they're the person at dinner who always seems to take things the wrong way, or who says provocative things because they like it when someone gets mad at them, and they can play innocent or claim their viewpoints are being repressed, or otherwise make someone else expend more energy trying to correct them, explain to them, or otherwise get them to come around. They like watching someone try, and the effort expended is their prize. They like seeing someone wound up about something they're passionate about, and that the person making the trollish comments could not care any less about. Minimal effort expended, lots of drama created to watch and enjoy, while not having to worry that their own beliefs will ever be challenged in such a way as to make them think or rethink about whether they're being the bad guys. (They couldn't possibly be. They have the moral high ground, or they were just playing and everyone is overreacting to them, even if other people actively avoid them and leave when they enter.)
I realize that disagreement is a normal part of interaction in the world, but people who do it just to rile other people up, or who spew insincere things out into the world with the hope they'll cause hurt, are people I'd rather not associate with, and I prefer to block them from my life wherever I can. I'd rather we only ever used the word to describe being geographically south of a bridge.
And, as if to provide perfect counterpoint to the original trolling message, I got a comment on one of my other fics that just says
i love itttt
Please consider continuing this cuz this is truly amazing
no subject
Date: 2025-12-22 11:36 am (UTC)Thanks for cutting your posts! It makes my reading page a bit easier to read, even on desktop, but I hadn't thought of asking you to do so myself.
If you're going to be a troll about my work, you have to demonstrate the competence and capacity of having actually read it to form your insults with.
That spurred me to try my hand at being such a troll, as you can see here:
"It is quite unfortunate that someone as talented and consistent at fic-writing as you has decided to turn essay-writing into a significant part of their output. These essays fall prey to a tendency toward turgid and florid prose that lurks in your other work, the inclusion of explicit politics—even in series that purport to be about personal issues—is off-putting, and the overall tone of self-importance does not incline me to read any further. Finally, posting these essays in Dreamwidth, a site famous for being almost dead, makes me think that you do not actually care about the quality of these essays."
I've tried to remove the sting from it, because I don't have bad intentions, of course, but it should still be recognisable as trolling, I'd say.
For the rest of the essay:
Thanks for the explanation of trolls; I don't think I've understood the phenomenon as well before now! That does remind me that the name for the internet troll actually comes from the fishing practice of "trolling" (via "fishing for reactions"), but I've only seen it associated with the creature, which I find a bit more logical.
While others are sharing a kiss under the mistletoe this Christmas, you will be single and alone, with only your bad writing to keep you warm.
I find this line especially funny in its assumptions, because I don't really care for Christmas, and I'll most probably never kiss someone under the mistletoe!
As much as Dreamwidth can be slower than other social media (and that's quite relative), it does seem to make trolling that much more unpopular; or at least, I can't say I've actually seen it happen in my corner of the site, for what it's worth.
I quite like your analysis of the motives behind such trolling!
Please consider continuing this cuz this is truly amazing
That's indeed a nice comment, and a good way to say this without sounding demanding.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-22 08:51 pm (UTC)That trolling definitely has more sting to it. I can feel parts of my brain uncoiling and throwing up the hood to it, even though you're not actually trying to do it. So, yes, actually reading things makes the insult a lot more effective.
I'm used to the fishing verb spelled as "trawling" there, but I'm sure it also works as "trolling," since they probably sound alike.
While DW makes it possible to troll, they don't make it easy, and there are robust user controls to curb the influx of terrible things so that, if a storm is on the way, sealing off the ways in is relatively quick.
Also, because of the model of journals and communities that LJ and DW have, must of the wank and the Discourse happens in the communities, rather than in someone's personal space, and the moderation tools available to communities are similarly robust and easy to use.
The person giving the compliment will likely be disappointed, as I rarely get the opportunity to continue a series, or I've done all that I can on this matter and it will need someone else to collect the baton and run with it. But it is a nice request for more.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-23 09:16 am (UTC)It probably would make it a bit less discoverable for most people... On the other hand, cutting these entries means that more entries are shown per screen, and thus that people can see more variety (sure, there's the sidebar, but that only shows the titles). Further, in my own experience, a cut text like you have on your news posts always entices me to look inside.
That trolling definitely has more sting to it. I can feel parts of my brain uncoiling and throwing up the hood to it, even though you're not actually trying to do it. So, yes, actually reading things makes the insult a lot more effective.
Good to know you didn't mind all that much! Even though you were a willing subject, I did feel uncomfortable about having tried to make a nasty comment in something resembling a serious way (and that I'm not very familiar with you only makes it worse). All the same, that's certainly something I'll keep in mind.
I'm used to the fishing verb spelled as "trawling" there, but I'm sure it also works as "trolling," since they probably sound alike.
Hmmm, it actually seems that they're separate things: trawling goes with a fishing net, and trolling (which I'm not nearly as familiar with) goes with a fishing line with bait drawn through the water, which clears the analogy up for me.
(As for pronunciation, it seems they can sound the same in American English, depending on whether "troll" takes the short or long "o"; I personally have the second variant.)
moderation
I quite agree, and, though I haven't had to use those tools myself, they certainly seem to be effective! I remember Denise saying that Dreamwidth has a certain friction in engagement that other social media don't have, which also makes trolling and harrassment passively difficult... but I can't find it at the moment.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-24 12:34 am (UTC)Huh. Today I am part of the lucky 10,000 for funding out those two things are both fishing, but different technique. And it does coat up why it would be "trolling," then.
DW does have a lot of friction that makes for problems. I think one of the biggest ones is that user accounts don't get pinged when they get referenced. So you can't just drop an insult, attack a name, and flee . Unregistered accounts can be automatically screened, or lose the ability to comment altogether, and registered accounts can be blocked easily and their content reported, if it's warranted. To do insults, there's just so much composing and coding, and you still have to paste it in and press the comment button, instead of a reaction GIF or a dunk tweet. That DW hasn't really adopted any of the feature set of socmed magma that it's just that much harder to get anything through.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-24 08:58 am (UTC)Well, good, I'm glad I can wrote an enticing summary text for things like the news posts.
You can be sure that I've seen enough over time to be sure in making that call!
I'm happy to have allowed you to learn something new, then.
friction
Of these, I like the lack of pinging most; I don't care about every discussion I come up in, and it can't hurt to have a place to talk about people without involving them. (I'd rather like it if that didn't happen for me, but I can't make sure of that, so I'd rather I just don't have to know about it.)