Which came first — Twitter or the troll?

Law and Liberty ^ | 4/18/22 | Theodore Dalrymple

[untenured]

Theodore Dalrymple, along with Mark Steyn, Richard Fernandez, Iowahawk and a few others, is an author I love, and discovered through FR.

[Carriage Hill]

There were online trolls (in the 90s) long before the Twitter crap.

[DUMBGRUNT]

The trolls will always be among us.

[Magnum44]

I was going to say, Twitter was created in 2006. There were trolls here on FR before that.

[PIF]

There were online trolls (in the 90s) long before the Twitter crap.
—
Right - I had to shut the comments on my website back in the late 90s because of all their hate

[Carriage Hill]

I remember after finding & signing-onto FR, that there were fun things like “ZOT!”, “ozone” and “Viking Kitties”. I haven’t seen those in a long while.

[Carriage Hill]

Trolls will always be around, as long as there are leftists, communists, marxists, anarchists, liberals etc.

[untenured]

Of course that’s true, but his larger claim, that the Internet (with its ease of use and anonymity) and more recently social media (usually without anonymity but with the purging of subtlety that it seems to thrive on) has lowered the quality of our public conversation, is worth considering.

In the end his “deliberate cultivation of self-control” is unlikely to flourish anywhere it wasn’t already flourishing.

[SunkenCiv]

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

Frontpage Interview with Dr. Theodore Dalrymple: Our Culture, What's Left Of It interviewed by Jamie Glazov [August 31, 2005]

[Carriage Hill]

...“deliberate cultivation of self-control”...

Definitely NOT a leftist trait.

Our “public conversation” has been lowered into the sewer, from the gutter.

[ClearCase_guy]

Usenet had trolls in the 80s.

[Carriage Hill]

I got on, with DOS3, briefly to a Compuserve BBS in 1988-89, but didn’t pay much attention to the trolls, back then. I don’t remember UseNet at all.

[ClearCase_guy]

Science fiction author Neal Stephenson has written of a future with voluntary "tribe" membership rather than nations. Most specifically in "The Diamond Age" which is a fine novel. The dominant tribe are the Neo-Victorians who are technically adept with nanotechnology, but dress very carefully, have extremely refined manners, and are morally correct at all times. This behavior has been adopted by the tribe because it leads to great success. Other tribes have other behavior patterns, and are less successful.

I suspect that something like this will happen. Some people will simply choose to be much more restrained than others and they will reap benefits. People who prefer to live in the gutter can do so, but will be largely ignored.

[Carriage Hill]

Maybe it was DOS 4 or higher; hard to remember those “early days”. I remember we had 9 DOS commands, no graphics.

[Carriage Hill]

“People who prefer to live in the gutter can do so, but will be largely ignored.”

Hard to ignore them, when they’ve left their computers, and are out rioting, looting and burning down our cities.

[ClearCase_guy]

I’m suspect that there will be neighborhood protection groups. If the nation decides that there are no laws restricting the rioters, people will will just decide to act against the rioters. And if the police show up and cause trouble for the law-abiding people, I think the police will regret it.

Scenes like Portland work as a short-term shocking event. No one will be willing to live life like that on an on-going basis. Once people on rooftops just start shooting into crowds, the crowds will disperse.

[Scarlett156]

Asking for feedback is always a mistake.

[goldbux]

Paragraph 3 / sentence 1.

"Almost infinite" is an innumerate expression.

"Incomprehensibly astronomically huge" is nowhere near infinite.

There are magnitudes of infinity, as Georg Cantor famously proved with a straightforward diagonal illustration.

[discostu]

Trolls go way back. Just look up any good “question time” from British Parliament. 19th century political cartoons. Heck Luther’s 95 Theses throw some serious shade.

Only thing the internet has really changed is making it way easier to troll with a much larger audience.

[Carriage Hill]

In my condo complex, we’ve already formed-up into teams.