A Fable For The Internet
posted by Driusan on February 9th, 2004 at 2:35AM

Once upon a time there was a boy, a boy who we'll call Mister Coroaded. Mister Coroaded was a rather smart boy who always got high marks in school. He was particularly good at the maths and sciences and adults would always praise him for it.

"You're such a smart boy!" they would say.

Mister Coroaded wasn't particularly bad at other subjects either. He didn't like it, but he could tolerate English class. Read some Swift, write an essay on irony, and be done with it. At least he would come out of it knowing that he was smarter than all the other children. After all, his marks were higher. The other children would mock and tease him, but that's only because they were jealous, the adults would tell him.
One day, Mister Coroaded wandered out onto the internet. He found web sites where people discuss science and technology, and became very interested in these discussions. The people here are just like me, he thought. They're all very smart, and picked on by other people because of it. He learned to use the words "nerd" and "geek" as a badge of honour here. That's okay though, because I belong with people like me.

Occasionally people with other ideas would come along. People who would argue that technology wasn't the solution to everything in life, or that living in a Libertarian or socialist wet dream wouldn't be a utopia.

"Troll!" they would all scream, and eventually these people would find something better to do and leave.

The web sites grew, and the trolls would come more frequently. People complained about the troll problem. Not only people with different viewpoints (who were clearly stupid), but crap flooders who would surreptitiously link to graphic images of the insides of a man's rectum. Something had to be done!

The owners of the web sites heard these complaints, and noticed that it was becoming not uncommon for people to leave because of them. They decided to implement rating systems, allowing the communities to decide what was good and what was not. Furthermore they decided to reward those who were consistently highly rated by giving them powers above and beyond the normal users. These people would have the ability to not just rate a comment lowly, but rate it so low that it would determine whether /other/ people could even see it, let alone rate it.

The old time users were happy, they could now regulate the trolls and reward the good, thoughtful denizens of the web sites.

But then something strange happened. The web sites became boring, and monotomous. People would post something saying "I think that evil corporations are bad." and 327 people would respond saying "Yes, I agree" while another 753 would say "+1FP!!" and 1081 would give them the highest possible ratings. Every now and then someone would say "I disagree, they help the economy" and would quickly be rated down to the point where no one could see him.

Life went on, and the web sites stayed boring and monotomous. Occasionally someone would post something completely outrageous, something that no sane person could ever believe, for it went against everything that the web site users believed in. Since they were, after all, smarter than other people, they rated it lowly while shouting "Troll!" For some reason the name Jonathan Swift would occasionally pop into his head while reading, and he would pause for a minute before labelling it a troll, but nonetheless Mister Coroaded would do so.

Life continued to go on, and the web sites continued to stay boring. Eventually Mister Coroaded had enough of it, and decided to try his hand at trolling himself. He created new identities, and gave them each different roles to play. His main identity remained a fine, upstanding pillar of the web site community while others would play devil's advocate. The community members would predictably shout "Troll!" whenever his new identities trolled, without actually thinking about what he was saying. Eventually he got sick of the predictability of it all, and stopped contributing much other than supporting the groupthink with his main account, in order to retain the privileges that high ratings had given him.

He continued to play devil's advocate with his other identities, and continued to get shouted down. It stayed fun for a while, but eventually even that lost it's touch. He stopped caring about the web sites, and his trolling got more visceral. By this point other people were trolling too, and together they played with the minds of all the groupthinkers out there.

Eventually Mister Coroaded got bored, he left the web sites, but other trolls remained. Nothing much remained of value, because those who cared had long since left due to the troll problem. If they were lucky the web sites vanished after their decline, but more often they remained as a lesson in groupthink, a barren intellectual wasteland. All because Mister Coroaded and the other early adopters of these web sites felt a need to yell "troll!" whenever someone played devil's advocate, used irony, questioned the status quo, or most unforgivable at all, held views which were genuinely opposed to it.

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