Appeal to Authority on the Internet: DOES NOT WORK
Today I was reading the “In the News” section of Whirlpool Forums, where people discuss current news articles. It’s full of trolls, crazies and keyboard warriors, and as such leads to much personal amusement. One troll that i saw stirred some thoughts that i had been dwelling on for a while, that of the Appeal to authority, one of the standard logical argument components.
The basic idea is that you assert the source of a statement/idea is reputable or trustworthy, and that this increases its credibility or likelihood. Less commonly, the arguer is referring to someone/something else, but the usual case (especially with trolls) is that they assert their own reputation, which has the added effect of increasing the reputability of their whole argument (and their ego, ho ho). For example, this quote from Mussolini outlines how to pull off an appeal to authority:
TROLLING IS NOT GRIEFING
I swear to god, I’ve seen too many people mix these terms up.
from The Subtle Art of Trolling:
In Usenet usage, a troll is not a grumpy monster that lives beneath a bridge accosting passers-by, but rather a provocative posting to a newsgroup intended to produce a large volume of frivolous responses.
Yeah, it’s not trolling if it’s obvious.
In fact, any “trolling” where the recipient knows what’s up is no longer trolling, in my opinion. Instead it falls under the broader category of Griefing, which, although usually applied to activity in online games, can just as easily be used to refer to forum postings, blog comments and IRC conversations.
So just a “protip” for all you budding “trolls” out there: a true troll never admits to trolling, and will never boast about it openly. Keep it subtle, or you’re just another annoying person on the Internet.
Testin’
This wordpress thing is pretty cool.