On Recognizing and Disarming Trolls

My piece on iMedia is getting a good deal of attention this week, particularly in the Twitter-sphere.  That’s good, partly because it’s a bit challenging to come up with new column topics and feedback drives topic selection in a lot of cases.  This week’s piece about Internet trolls is a good example of that, since it was an expansion on a prior piece that someone asked for additional detail on.

Trolls are a funny sort. The funny thing though (to me) is that we can almost instantly recognize trolling behavior, but we often have trouble articulating why we think someone is trolling.  It’s like spam – we always immediately recognize spam, but we have a hard time describing what constitutes spam to a spam firewall that can filter it out for us.  We just know it when we see it.

Trolling is much the same way.  We know when someone posts something to one of our online communities with the intention to cause an uproar or to get a rise out of a specific group of community participants.  Yet, we see the damage that trolls can do when it comes to causing valuable community members to quit, or community moderators to have to invest too much time trying to keep conversations on track.  So how do you combat Internet trolls when you can’t articulate what it is about their behavior that makes them trolls?

Well, the old DNFTT (Do Not Feed The Trolls) thing works, but understanding the motivation behind different kinds of trolling behavior is also a big help.  In the linked piece, I spent some time delving into the motivations for some of the most popular kinds of trolling behavior.  This could have been a much longer piece and wasn’t intended to be a comprehensive guide, but it should help some of you who are in charge of moderating and growing Internet communities.  I hope it’s helpful.