Every once in a while, I get an inquiry about an article I wrote a while back. Believe it or not, just last week someone tweeted a ClickZ article I wrote back in 2001. But this week's historical inquiry came from a reader who wanted to know more about internet trolls. Specifically, the reader wanted to know about the "wide variety" of behaviors I alluded to here in this piece from two summers ago.
I've experienced the havoc wreaked by trolls as both a moderator and a participant in various online communities. There are a great number of similarities in the various personality types and approaches to trolling -- the art of disrupting online communities by deliberately posting inflammatory material or materials designed to get a rise out of other participants. It doesn't matter if it's a community designed to discuss gardening or car engines -- trolls tend to fit a certain mold and display certain types of behaviors.
Some of the trolls in your online community might fit these molds, and by understanding what motivates them, you might be able to better defend your community against trolling. See if you recognize any of the trolls I'm about to describe:
The Contrarian
The Contrarian's opinion blows with the wind but usually in the opposite direction. When momentum begins to build behind a particular point of view in a threaded discussion, you can count on the Contrarian to show up to take the opposing point of view -- just for the sake of doing so.
Contrarians tend to be very proud of their debating skills and their ability to make their point within a digital forum. These things, in and of themselves, are actually desirable traits if you're trying to run a civilized discussion on just about anything. The problem comes, though, when everybody else in the community notices the inconsistency in the Contrarian's opinion from discussion to discussion, or questions why the Contrarian always seems to show up in a thread to torpedo the status quo. That's when things can get ugly.
Most Contrarians are people who are just awfully proud of their ability to put arguments together. As a community moderator, if you understand that motivation, you can turn Contrarians into productive members of the community.
The Grammar Nazi
You'll find the Grammar Nazi hopping from thread to thread within a community, correcting everyone's spelling and grammar with the supposed goal of making everybody's communications just a bit easier to understand. Every once in a while, the Grammar Nazi will melt down over the rest of the community's seeming inability to grasp the difference between "its" and "it's."
While the Contrarian is generally motivated by their skill at debating and constructing arguments, the Grammar Nazi is similarly motivated by their command of written language. Maybe they got a perfect score on the verbal portion of their SATs, or they just think they communicate really well. What matters is that the Grammar Nazi takes pride in their written communication to the point that the ideas behind content posted by others takes a backseat to how well they've managed to articulate those ideas.
You can disarm most Grammar Nazis by sending them a quick private note to remind them that ideas are more important than how people express them. If they don't knock it off, public warnings can follow.
The Drama Llama
Drama Llamas evidently can't get enough drama from daytime TV and their own personal lives, so they spend time within digital communities trying to create some of their own. They frequently ascribe hidden agendas or motivations to other community members, often fabricated out of whole cloth. You might read a few posts from a Drama Llama and conclude that they're suffering from some sort of martyr complex or persecution anxiety, as they're quick to stir up the pot and then claim that any other community members who level criticism are out to get them.
Don't waste too much time pandering to Drama Llamas. They troll almost solely for personal attention and probably won't stop until someone calls them on their behavior, or the whole conversation is derailed by accusations of persecution or by coddling behavior from other community members. They are motivated by the want to refocus the discussion on themselves, rather than on the topic at hand. Don't let them. If you're a community moderator, create a new place for the side discussion and keep it out of the original thread.
The Rules Lawyer
The Rules Lawyer will drive your community moderators absolutely mad with their behavior, unless you understand it and address it. A typical Rules Lawyer thinks they can moderate better than you can, so they're out to prove it. You'll find them arguing about the rules of the community, and pointing out any inconsistencies in how the rules have been enforced historically. They'll ask for clarification on any rules that involve any kind of subjectivity on the part of the community moderators.
Their goal is to find out where the line is between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Rules Lawyers will annoyingly stand right on the line and poke a toe over, seemingly just to see what will happen. They'll also show up in any discussions concerning community members who have been sanctioned for inappropriate behavior, mainly to strut around like Corbin Bernsen in an old episode of "L.A. Law."
In most cases, the Rules Lawyer is trolling to show off what they consider to be their superior knowledge of how a community ought to run. Often, you can disarm them and get them to give up their overly critical behavior by asking them to volunteer for moderation duties. Ask them to fulfill their fantasy of being one of the folks to help enforce the community's rules and you can sometimes turn a negative into a positive.
The Ad Troll
Ad Trolls try to work whatever it is they're hawking into discussion threads. Spammers and bots are easily recognized and can be kept out of online communities with a little preventative maintenance, but Ad Trolls look like real community members. Their primary contribution, though, seems to be posting links to things they're selling, or articles they've written about things they're selling.
While you want to be fair about how you treat your community members, nothing can stop discussion dead in its tracks like unsolicited ads. Your community should clarify and enforce its rules concerning commercial speech, unless you want it to be raided by every work-from-home MLM marketer out there with crates of overpriced hair care products piling up in the garage.
If you don't want to ban commercial speech altogether, there's also nothing wrong with calling out specific members if commercial posts seem to be the extent of their contribution to the community. Online communities thrive on two things -- content and connections -- and if your little ad troll isn't contributing beyond a link to their latest "get rich quick" scheme, they probably don't deserve posting privileges.
The Griefer
"Some men just want to watch the world burn." -- Alfred, Batman's butler, describing the motivations behind the Joker to Bruce Wayne in "The Dark Knight."
This is an accurate description of what motivates the most dangerous of internet trolls. The Griefer wants to cause a train wreck, or worse, and fiddle while Rome burns.
In reality, the true Griefer is one of the rarest things you'll encounter on the internet. Few trolls are satisfied by simply cutting down what you've built up. Most Griefers are doing it because they want a funny story to tell later, usually somewhere else. They want to be able to come to their community in some dark corner of the internet and tell all their Griefer buddies that they successfully derailed a serious conversation about developmental disabilities within your parenting community. They're doing it for the laughs they'll get once they've caused the train wreck and everyone can see the result.
The good news is that hardly any of them will do so to amuse themselves. They do it to amuse others. Much of the Griefer's behavior is so egregious in stepping over the line that you'll have no problem deciding what to do in response. Just don't overdo it. Griefers want to point and laugh at the (over) reaction to their trolling behavior. If you can avoid pouring gasoline on the fire, do so. Deny the Griefer the satisfaction, and keep emotions under control.
While trolling might seem incomprehensible to people who use and moderate communities, there's usually a discernable motivator behind it. The key to defusing it is understanding those motivators and addressing them. A good moderator can do this and keep his community growing, while accepting trolls and their behavior as something all communities need to put up with and address.
Tom Hespos is the chairman and president of Underscore Marketing and blogs at Hespos.com.
On Twitter? Follow Tom at @THespos1 or @_MarketingLLC. Follow iMedia Connection at @iMediaTweet.
