How I Perma-Trolled Reddit(oppugn.us)
oppugn.us
How I Perma-Trolled Reddit
http://oppugn.us/posts/1276025130.html
8 comments
If only he knew that reddit is really a honeypot set up to catch would-be trolls like Zed.
I'm actually rather disappointed to read this post. I've always taken Zed's derision of Reddit and praise of HN to have at least some grain of truth.
Instead, this just makes him sound sociopathic and manipulative. And to what end? Just cause he could? :\
Instead, this just makes him sound sociopathic and manipulative. And to what end? Just cause he could? :\
It may make him sound sociopathic and manipulative, but I don't think this makes him either of those things. All social experiments have a manipulative component in them because you want to see how people react to some kind of external influence. This doesn't mean Zed is a manipulative person, though.
Sociopathic and manipulative people are subtle and subversive. They don't tip their hand and they hide their true intentions. I'm not that familiar with Zed's work but nothing I've read suggests he's sociopathic or manipulative. If I had to put a label on him I'd pick impulsive and stubborn.
In my opinion this was a pretty innocent experiment. Juvenile? You bet. But that's not the point, really. In this case I think you're disappointed about the experiment because the results turned out be uninteresting/mundane, not because you really think the experiment was evil.
Suppose Zed would've discovered (accidentally) that his rants against Reddit go unnoticed if he puts them in the 3rd paragraph of an article but result in rabid attacks if he leads with them. Why? Hypothesis: people who make it to the 3rd paragraph of an article are less likely to draw knee-jerk conclusions.
In this case I'm pretty sure we would all applauded the experiment and make a mental note that whenever we have to discuss something controversial to add a bunch of fluff as introduction to avoid a backlash.
This is probably way out there, and I'm probably giving Zed too much credit, but I think it's conceivable the experiment would've returned some interesting insight. Since no harm was done, I think that means this specific kind of trolling has to be a net positive.
Sociopathic and manipulative people are subtle and subversive. They don't tip their hand and they hide their true intentions. I'm not that familiar with Zed's work but nothing I've read suggests he's sociopathic or manipulative. If I had to put a label on him I'd pick impulsive and stubborn.
In my opinion this was a pretty innocent experiment. Juvenile? You bet. But that's not the point, really. In this case I think you're disappointed about the experiment because the results turned out be uninteresting/mundane, not because you really think the experiment was evil.
Suppose Zed would've discovered (accidentally) that his rants against Reddit go unnoticed if he puts them in the 3rd paragraph of an article but result in rabid attacks if he leads with them. Why? Hypothesis: people who make it to the 3rd paragraph of an article are less likely to draw knee-jerk conclusions.
In this case I'm pretty sure we would all applauded the experiment and make a mental note that whenever we have to discuss something controversial to add a bunch of fluff as introduction to avoid a backlash.
This is probably way out there, and I'm probably giving Zed too much credit, but I think it's conceivable the experiment would've returned some interesting insight. Since no harm was done, I think that means this specific kind of trolling has to be a net positive.
I hate the whole "internet trolling" thing. It seems like such a waste of time, although admittedly when I was younger I did it a bit too. Zed's a reasonably smart guy, he's made some decent software and generally, when he mouths off about something, he very much follows through on some sort of solution - the most recent example that comes to mind being the attempt at a Python book. This post makes me respect him less :/.
Regardless of which crowd I identify with (both), the whole concept of trolling - intentionally making a group of people dislike you, for no ostensible reason other than you feel like being a wanker - is dumb.
Regardless of which crowd I identify with (both), the whole concept of trolling - intentionally making a group of people dislike you, for no ostensible reason other than you feel like being a wanker - is dumb.
Your conception of trolling is totally inadequate.
What you want to do is state something obvious (inflammatory or not) and see who is self-righteous enough to correct you on it.
Sure, it's easier to troll with inflammatory material, but it's more fun with the banal.
This sort of thing even has a little merit. Given people's propensity to pick on the first, most obvious point in any given article, you just throw them a bone up front, put in something about how "Windows Sux" or whatever, and let that be a lightning rod for the Instantly Hostile Crowd. You can just delete or ignore their comments. Anyone who passes up the lightning rod probably has something thoughtful to say. Or at the very least can keep their temper.
What you want to do is state something obvious (inflammatory or not) and see who is self-righteous enough to correct you on it.
Sure, it's easier to troll with inflammatory material, but it's more fun with the banal.
This sort of thing even has a little merit. Given people's propensity to pick on the first, most obvious point in any given article, you just throw them a bone up front, put in something about how "Windows Sux" or whatever, and let that be a lightning rod for the Instantly Hostile Crowd. You can just delete or ignore their comments. Anyone who passes up the lightning rod probably has something thoughtful to say. Or at the very least can keep their temper.
It's easy to inflame passion on the net, most people just never try.
You should get out of the house more often.
I expected something more interesting given the title. I do see what you did there, sir, and it was mildly amusing, but not nearly as epic as the title suggests. Not really trolling reddit so much as exacerbating an existing condition; or so it seems to this one.
tl;dr
1. He describes a social engineering experiment (a kind of hacking).
2. It's partially about the interesting idea of organizing your writing so that two different readers will interpret the same text different ways. (Literary steganography?)
3. What better way to for HN readers to respond to this than to dispassionately analyze it and then move on? The fact that he used HN and reddit itsef as part of a hack is amusingly recursive - and also irrelevant.