Slashdot

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.