1) Responding to the them repeatedly bumps the thread to the top with **my** message for all to read, and it sinks and buries their message.
2) They serve as a backboard against which conservatives can sharpen, simplify, and condense the conservative message.
3) A troll's posts give conservatives and opportunity to share conservative talking points with conservatives.
4) Most often the troll is an idiot and their logical fallacies are plainly out there for all to see.
5) And...Sometimes the troll gets mad enough to start calling names and using profanity ( a natural state for all Useful Idiot communists) and makes **them** look bad.
So....The trick is to not taking them at all personally. Your posts help other conservatives, and it wastes the paid-professional troll's time and money, and gives **you** an opportunity to get **your** message out there.
Sometimes, when they get absolutely **furious** with me, I laugh and remind them that I don't give a twit about their opionions. I am here to share ideas with conservatives and find them very useful for doing exactly that. They get even more sputteringly enraged after I tell them that. :-)
Trolls are **great**great** fun!
I see you’re used to the onesie-twosie trolls. What I’ve seen in the last 2 years are tag-team trolls. First on the Tootyfruityrudy threads, then on the Certifigate threads. I noticed it on the Terry Schiavo threads before that but I didn’t engage at that time.
Regular trolls like the education trolls are fun, as you say. But tag-team trolls are allow openings for obamabots and others; they’re an incredible annoyance.
There are a lot of single-issue trolls as well. There were tons of them on the Crevo threads, and those threads were some of the most heated discussion on FR. But eventually, JimRob started noticing that one particular side didn’t really actively engage on other conservative issues and he started to key up on them in the same way they’d been treating their FR counterparts. They didn’t last long, and started Darwin Central, which has about 1/20th as many participants as FR.
Since this has been an interesting discussion, I’m going to repost it at the Trolling 101 thread.
COINTELPRO Techniques for dilution, misdirection and control of a internet forum. (Trolling 101)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2165967/posts