My dear trolling friends, acquaintances, those I have never heard of,
those I never hear of and those I shall never hear of, we, both the
Slashdot community, super-Slashdot community and the trolling subcommunity
are facing a mass crisis upon all levels. Crapflooders, article text
trolls, and representatives of what few organisations there are are currently
scattered and weak, possessing none of the puissance necessary to overturn
the vast heap of articles and book reviews. All of the teeming subcultures
of Slashdot and the websites and ideals it represents or provided the
prototype for are being shredded and ripped apart in the grinder of
commercialisation, corporation and the valuing of technology over humanity.
Our attempts to provoke discussion, highlight the folly and foolishness
of editors or simply to berate and irritate others being pulled down below
the surface of lackadaisical karma whores, slashbots and other useless
automata, grist for the propaganda mills of "Taco" and his crew.
Only occasionally do the great (or simply repetitive) trolls
rupture the calm, mildly bubbling surface of the Slashdot crew and cohorts'
discussions. What was once orgiastic, vivacious, vibrant, active and edgy is
now limp, lifeless, listless, passive and slack. All but a few ragtag,
fleeting, fly-by-night trolling associations have been massacred or left for
better pastures, and those which remain are collapsing and tumbling into the
totality of disarray. To quote the low-cultural yet astonishingly accurate
Sexual Asspussy, "TEH NEW AEG OF TROOLING HAS COME AND GONE". In a cruel
twist of humour poignantly illustrating our shortsightedness, this selfproduced catastrophic failure has been predicted since 2002. We have the tools to
resolve the situation, but lack the motivation, with those who can do
something content to fight amongst themselves in ineffectual pigpens such
as trolltalk or Geekizoid.
Old generations of provocateurs are falling into disrepair and fading out,
with classic trolls dropping from the face of the World Wide Web for the
cosmopolitan relic known as Usenet or, worse still, setting up unsuccessful
websites which have always degenerated into mere talking shops,
inconsequential, signifying nothing and running at deficit for a fleeting
few moons before the inability to afford bandwidth runs, purges the last
remnant from the consciousness of the mainstream. Ancient faithfuls such
as Adequacy have been reduced to flitting HTTP errors, a ghostly echoing
shadow and reminder of our own inability to fix this shambolic state of
affairs.
The new are no better, incompetent, howling; they tend to be more bombastic
but derivative and reiterative and so lose one's interest as opposed to the
subtle classics. The gentle art of producing attractive and fragile
yet incendiary comments has been lost and buried in a tidal flash flood of
advertisements for nascent trolling groups, ASCII 'art', and other
postprepostmodern neo-Dadaist detritus. The production of the "slashflood"
script merely indicates that the mechanisation and industrialisation of
trolling is draining the emotion and spirit of itself. Though the automation
of trolling is a thoroughly understandable response against the face of
the seemingly otherwise unsurmountable automated filters, barriers, sinks
and guards of Slashcode, it has not proven to be a solution; not even a paltry
one in one hundred stories is successfully crapflooded to the point of
dozens of comments, and the reduced manularity of Perl scripts as opposed
to the Ctrl-R/F5 key combo has given all of us an excuse to forget the
craft of omnipollent inflammatory rhetoric.
This excuse has become so stubbornly entrenched in troll subculture that it
may not be cleansed from the minds of some, but we must make an effort!
Otherwise, we will cease to be able to post without fear of modbombing
due to dull, obvious and tired material! Therefore, it is vital for the
continued wellbeing of the profession of -1 Flamebaiters and +4 Insightfuls
alike that we continue to push the envelope beyond all boundaries.
I do not claim that this will be easy but it is above all most necessary.
Plagiarised and constantly repeated material will not make the cut. The
flooding scripts must be destroyed and creativity must once again pour
from our bosoms, with spectacular visual imagery being painted upon the
blank canvas of the comment box with our dexterous verbage! There is no
doubt that we may be sorely tempted to fight fire with fire, code with code,
and servers with servers, but an escalating arms race is not the answer!
An action-reaction war of attrition has no casualties but ourselves!
Only skilled oratorical loquacity and armies of wordsmiths can break the
hardened hearts of our moderatorial oppressors who crush us, branding us
"Overrated", to which we reply with seemingly perceptive posts, containing
a veneer of respectfulness, crammed with Biblical, literary, musical and
trolling references, a tasty nugget of misinformation, generally inciteful. The only successful route is shrewd and insidious, a corrupting
influence which crawls through the undergrowth of -1, 0, 1, gradually
creeping into full view with no one noticing, no one falling for what is,
to an outside observer, an obvious joke, a planetary pun besmirching the name
of stupidity. The fox will outwit the wolf.
Notice my usage of the phrase "armies of wordsmiths" in the previous
paragraph. The implication of this statement is that one gifted speaker is
not sufficient; since we are working towards a pre-industrial, pre-21st
century ideal of manual trolling, we need hundreds of users posting one
comment, as opposed to one user posting hundreds of comments. This is a
major difference, requiring more effort, but more rewarding in the long term,
rewarding innovation and not crushing it with mindless repetitious babble.
A throughput of a mere dozen high quality trolls per story could smash the
already flimsy yet flexible moderation system into a tailspin - fifteen such
comments yo-yoing like a sine wave from +5 to -1 to +5 to -1 ten times over
will act as tremendous sinkholes, black holes in the fabric of M1, sucking
away the points of ten users each in the space of hours, eliminating
first level moderators from consideration and worry.
This segues into the third prong of this multitined attack, namely,
metamoderation. Metamoderation has no metametamoderation level to regulate
itself and is completely anonymous and untraceable. It is also less likely
to be revoked than standard moderation and presents itself as an opportunity
up to three times a day for the luckier. By moderating all upwards moderations
as "Fair" and all those which drag down anybody's karma as "Unfair" virtually
all moderators will be weeded out, leaving only those who unconditionally,
spastically mark all useless posts of hot air inexorably to the golden five
to continue doing their valuable work and to overcome the grand but
substanceless edifice of anti-troll conformist hype presented in the FAQ.
We can move forward. The right wing maniac, left wing maniac, and Joe Sixpack
characters (amongst others) have served their purposes, but the time has come
to retire them, build on them, endlessly textually recycle them to produce
new candidates for the Perfect Troll. A testament to the idiocy of human
reflexes, the ideal windup, the flawless debating topic, preying upon the
simultaneous and diametrically opposing instincts to bash Microsoft acolytes
and anti-Microsoft partisans, ignorant computer users and abrasive geeks.
What is wrong with open source software? Why is gun control an idealistic
liberal societal construct which fails? Who really did write the
GNU/Linux/X/BSD system? The answers to these questions, and innumerably more,
stretch through the darkest, innermost recesses of our writing minds. We can
surpass our roots and ancestors, transcending the Cicero of past times,
mashing, twisting, flexing words to our own ends. We must continue, take
steps, and beat on, boats against the editorial current, borne out
ceaselessly, into our paradise.
This document is released into the public domain. No rights reserved. James A. A. Joyce, Slashdot user number 681634, is not the real James Joyce. There is no warranty provided by or associated with this manifesto.
