twitter's Journal: My own Personal Troll

Since January of this year, I've had an AC troll following me around and I'd like to know if others have the same kind of problem. The troll has posted the same boring and nonsensical diatribe. In six months, they have made one modification to it. They also post a cloud of other senseless abuse and insult, but that takes more effort and is less frequent.

I'm not going to bother to refute the silly thing. Anyone who cares can page through it and see for themselves that the abuse is groundless. The whole point is to annoy me and waste my time. Further, I doubt anyone really cares and that's the interesting part.

What kind or person would dedicate their time to annoying someone like me? Sure, I've pissed some trolls off. I've enjoyed looking at poster's history in just the same way and pointing out Microsoft apologists. It's easy to do and it forces the astroturfers to create many accounts and make filler posts to hide their activity. A six month effort to annoy a single Slashdot poster is excessive for normal person.

It does waste my time, but it's flattering really. I look to see what people think of my posts and this AC makes it hard for me to see legitimate feedback. I have to check each and every post I make and ignore all of my own filters each time. Reasonable comments can be lost in the torrent of bullshit and the whole Slashdot experience is dimminished for me. Indeed, there are so many bogus postings from astroturfers and outright anarchists that most of my friends don't even bother to read comments anymore. I've seen the same kind of ugly garbage around prominent posters such as Bruce Perens, so I'm flattered that someone thinks I'm important enough to waste their time on.

I'm going to look for similar attacks against other people and I'll post them here. Just about every reasonable post has half a dozen astroturf replies these days, but I'm going to look for consistent attacks in other people's posting history. I welcome others to list examples here too. If the comments get filled up with toll posts, no big deal, there time waste here is time they can't spend disrutping other conversations.

In the end, I could care less. I've got another account that is free of this garbage and I can make new ones as required.

Yep, Bruce still has trolls.

[twitter]

An good example of this kind of attack [slashdot.org]. A reasonable post is answered with insults and stupidity. Bruce, if he cares to read what people write to him, will have to look at the crap. Bruce does care and does read. Of course, Bruce is bright enough to ignore AC posts.

interesting

[freejung]

That is rather odd, that someone would go to so much effort. But it is also to be noted that you have a rather large number of foes and freaks, so it's hardly surprising that someone is out to get you. Not that I think this sort of thing is cool, of course, but it's not terribly surprising.

Not a personal troll, but...

[Feztaa]

I don't have my own personal troll, but it seems like no matter what I post on any story anywhere, I'm attacked as either being wrong, stupid, or both, no matter what I say.

Sometimes it makes me wonder why I still bother to post here.

Aside from that, reading with a threshold of 3 and with highest scores sorted first, the first few screenfuls of any story's comments are interesting to read.

If you were SCO or MS or Alexis D T...

[donnz]

you'd be crying blue murder about being harrassed by those nasty anti-capitalist terrorists, subversives.

Why not issue a press release!

PJ over at Groklaw.net did a recent article describing similar harassment (only much much more personally threatening).

No matter, I noticed your AC troll recently and decided to counter it with mod points, at least your Karma is safe :-)

Now they are working twice as hard.

[twitter]

My personal troll has promissed to redouble their effort. I wrote a few posts defending the excellent Gnome 2.6 interface here [slashdot.org]. This apparently offended my troll, as does this journal. They wrote this beautiful post [slashdot.org] and immediately started posting two cut and paste flames to my posts rather than one.

Suits me just fine. Keep it coming on, trolls. Your posting bots will be that much more burdened and you will use that much more bandwith. Feel the suck, losers. I hope you are getting paid twice as muc

But...

[Jon Erikson]

... you are a rabid Linux zealot who posts one-dimensional arguments full of strawmen and other such logical fallacies. 99% of your posts are nothing more than "hur hur M$ sucks!".

I've had the exact same troll

[yuri benjamin]

I've had that exact same troll in reply to my own comments, except with 'yuri benjamin' in place of 'twitter'.

Not very often - but hey - this is /.
As long as you don't run into them IRL who cares?

No surprise

[jmulvey]

Hi Twitter,

After you personally attacked me because I harbor some pro-Microsoft beliefs (I work for a MS Solution Provider, and make a decent living doing it, so I think I'm entitled), I decided to watch you. Mostly for entertainment purposes... to see how and where you'd go "off the deep end". Once in a while I'd find a post I felt obliged to respond to. To my best knowledge I always did so as myself, however.

No, I'm not the troll posting the repetitive, monotonous AC postings, but maybe you'd consider m

M$

[twitter]

I type M$ to save myself keystrokes. Microsoft is a long and stupid name.

Stop giving us a bad name!

[mrchaotica]

I don't like Microsoft either, but it's not going to do us any good to go on nonsensical, childish rants about it. Try to come up with something constructive to say, rather than the equivalent of "OMG teh M$ $uX0RS!! Linux is L33T!! And anyone who says otherwise is a F&*#in' LUSER!!!"

It's seriously not helping.