Well, your "dragging the conversation into your own cave" does qualify. Trolling is a spectrum of behavior. But it all goes back to *provoking* a reaction. If one's intent is to provoke, then one's trolling.
But trolling isn't bad. I lump it into other provocative roles like Devil's Advocate, gadfly, contrarian, etc. At its best, trolling is a kind of critique, like irony or sarcasm, where the provoked reaction depends on the sophistication of the provoked person. An emotional cripple like Trump responds like a child when trolled. The people on FriAM are mostly adults who are either immune to trolling, or respond with the layered reactions one would expect. On 3/4/20 1:00 PM, [email protected] wrote: > > I think of trolling as attempting to destroy an internet conversation by ad > hominems or other forms of harsh dismissive argument. > > But when I think of trolling as a metaphor developed on the child's story of > the Three Billy Goat's > <https://americanliterature.com/childrens-stories/the-three-billy-goats-gruff> > gruff, then perhaps lurking under interesting arguments in order to provoke > arguments only of interest to the troll fits the bill. > > The one is a kind of cruelty; the other is a form of cluelessness. -- ☣ uǝlƃ ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
