Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected] or [email protected]
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
I think it's just human nature to get enjoyment at making other people upset. It comes from a lack of empathy, understanding, and perspective.
When I was young, my cousin and I would hop into randomly chosen public chatrooms on MSN, or Yahoo, and just start typing stupid messages. We'd spam the chat with constans messages of "booger" or "poopy fart" and watch people get annoyed with us. Sometimes we'd pick a random message from someone and call them out telling them "hey {username}, shut up stupid." The whole chatroom would get mad and tell us to leave, or to stop, and that made us keep doing it more. For a good half hour to 45 min, the entire chatroom was having a bad time except us, who were laughing out heads off at how mad they got and how compeley powerless they were to stop us.
We were also 10.
We haven't experienced how annoying and frustrating that actually is. We didn't understand or even care just how disruptive we were being, nor did we care about our contribution to making the space a bad space to be in. We, as children, didn't have the empathy, compassion, or perspective of experience to care about that, and were just reveling in the attention and the power to force a group of strangers to focus on us and not what they originally wanted to.
Some people eventually develop empathy, self awareness, gain perspective on the world, or otherwise come to understand how immature these acts areof getting joy at being annoying, and stop. Other people don't. The internet is home to people in all different stages of their life's journey, and a lot of them haven't reached that point yet.
Some troll because they're immature. Some do it because they actively dislike a community and pettily get joy at annoying them. Some people just like the attention. People are complicated and weird, and often hard to understand. There is just one thing that will always be true:
As long as people exists, so too will trolls.
Excellent write up on this.