Please DO Feed the Trolls.

Over the past couple of weeks, I've spent part of my time talking and having decent lengthy conversations with many "trolls." "But Dancy, why have conversations with some anonymous asshole behind a computer?" The short answer is, I love talking to people. This isn't a new fact about me. I love people and I hate people at the same time. Now these aren't your naked, gem for a belly button trolls, but your "die nigger die" type trolls you see in the comment sections of YouTube and select Facebook groups.

Trolling has been around for as long as the internet has. In the beginning, trolling was a art form used to stir up controversy. It's like going to Glen Becks rally as a raging bible thumper and quoting outrageous things from the bible. You're going to have you're ultra-conservatives who agree and your Libertarians who don't. Thus, causing an argument. But when the people look around, the guy who started the argument is gone. His trolling is done. This is a more general definition of trolling. 

With the advent of YouTube and Facebook, trolling has become less an art form and more of a boredom buster. And, like the Tea Partyers, people took their trolling to the streets. The Tea Party is to politics as Anonymous is to internet. Trolls/Anonymous aren't all bad. They have many goals including the stop of censorship, fear mongering, and idiots on the web. They're a pretty successful bunch. That girl who was dubbed "the puppy thrower" was "caught" just a few days after the video went online. You don't eff with these people.

With the positive, there is of course the negative. There are the trolls who enjoy going to websites, and videos and group pages and saying things like "the fags deserved to die."  These are the trolls I'm interested in. Why? Because these trolls obviously have a reason for spouting their rhetoric and I wanted to find out. Everyone has a story. Even David Berkowitz had a childhood, family and friends. I just like to humanize people. People aren't bad. People just do bad things.  

Here's an example of a conversation I had with Mr. Jerck Meyhoff. It's obviously a pseudonym but you'd be surprised how many people use their regular Facebook accounts to troll.

Now obviously in some case I have to use the trust system to know if these guess are telling the truth. What they do and who they are don't matter to me as much as WHY they do it. So far, I don't think anyone has lied. A few told me to eat a bag of dicks when we first started talking, but once we got the ball rolling, these people were generally very nice and conversational and opened right up like Mr. Meyhoff did. 

(Note: With a little digging, I found the real life versions of a good number of the people I talked to and their stories did indeed match up.) 

I'm going to continue to talk to more trolls and compile everything I've learned into a nice essay that'll probably be a Tuesday post in a few weeks. It's fascinating what I've discovered so far. The trolls are the guys at Best Buy fixing your computer, at Starbucks making your coffee, at the movies taking your tickets in labs working new artificial flavors and even your closest friends.