Lol! +1

I don't care one way or the other about trolling.

The way i see it, a post is either worth replying to or it isn't, regardless if it was from someone trolling.... If there is room for a useful answer (often there isn't) and you know the troller is not the only person who might read your answer, then why not?

What i do object to are people who post with some kind of commercial or political interest pulling the strings and you don't know that its not their own personal opinion and they try to lead you to see their product or whatever it is their selling.

Edit: that reminds me of a little trick they did on TV the other night..... There is a show on TV in Australia which is popular and i like it called 'The Project'. Then the female presenter on that show somehow managed to sneak her own show on afterwards and i did not even realize what had happened because i was used to hearing her voice speaking on the first show ....then after about 10 minutes i started wondering why the show was in a rut and no longer interesting,,,, because it was a different show!

Interesting. I've always been honestly curious about trolls. What are they getting out of it, and what do they think about themselves?

Hey, I love the UP. I used to spend two weeks in Paradise every summer. Went to Whitefish Bay, saw Tahquamenon Falls, got a cottage off the beach, hit up the blueberry festival, etc.

This. I always filled "anonymous" school surveys with random outrageous shit, and the assholes always called me out and/or phoned the relatives. It didn't impact my studies in the slightest.

Yeah, that's what I thought too, well, not quite, but almost.

Some news agencies bought the report itself. Saw this in the newspaper on-line ( http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/12/study_shoes_that_online_comment_trolls_are_sadists/ ) and so came back to post it. (Well, also to look at the weekend promo. :P )

It discusses how the research was done. They used a dummy questionnaire with implanted questions--a method for keeping the respondents from knowing what the survey was really about and get either honest answers or expose those who give garbage answers deliberately. It can be seen if even the garbage answers, if not done skillfully, are malicious/haughty/arrogant or not. Even giving a "yes" answer to the blunt questions about enjoying trolling is a giveaway--why give a dishonest "yes" but for "just screw it up" or "just cuz it sounds nasty" motives, which are sadistic in the first place. So, there is some protection in the research on that side. On the other side, a dishonest "no" would actually screw things up and thwart that protection. Eh, they tried. Part of the research was narrowed to Americans. Their basis for finding sadism, narcissism, etc, is not trolling itself, but buried in the other "dummy" questions. Read for yourself.

The Register's version is linked above and pasted below. Like the Register, Slate and others also had a deeper article than CNN. (No surprise that the US would have shallower articles. The news at night only helps me know what to go look up elsewhere for real information.)
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/climate_desk/2014/02/internet_troll_personality_study_machiavellianism_narcissism_psychopathy.html?wpisrc=burger_bar

Enjoy! :)
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A group of Canadian researchers has given the imprimatur of social-science recognition to a fact that many of us who spend time in internet comment forums have suspected: there's a strong correlation between online trolling and sadism.

"Both trolls and sadists feel sadistic glee at the distress of others. Sadists just want to have fun ... and the Internet is their playground!" write Erin Buckels, Paul Trapnell, and Delroy Paulhus of the Universities of Manitoba, Winnipeg, and British Columbia, respectively, in a paper to be published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.

The researchers define trolling as "the practice of behaving in a deceptive, destructive, or disruptive manner in a social setting on the Internet with no apparent instrumental purpose," referring to trolls as "agents of chaos on the Internet, exploiting 'hot-button issues' to make users appear overly emotional or foolish in some manner. If an unfortunate person falls into their trap, trolling intensifies for further, merciless amusement."

The Canadian psychologists' paper is entitled "Trolls just want to have fun", which is not merely a bit of boffinary humor at the expense of Cyndi Lauper, but rather a reference to one of the researchers' findings. "We found clear evidence," they write, "that sadists tend to troll because they enjoy it."

The paper was based on pair of online studies in which statements from such psychological reference standards as the Short Sadistic Impulse Scale (SSIS) and Varieties of Sadistic Tendencies scale (VAST) were embedded into a larger battery of questions designed to reveal personality traits.

The 418 participants surveyed were recruited from Amazon's Mechanical Turk website, and were restricted to respondents in the US. [Perhaps UK trolls might be less sadistic? Just asking...—Ed.]

The participants were provided with a choice of what they enjoyed most about participating in online comment forums; 23.8 preferred debating issues, 21.3 per cent liked to chat, and 5.6 per cent said that trolling was their favorite comment-forum pastime. The remainder either preferred another activity or didn't participate in online comment forums.

The questions embedded into the larger "dummy" questionnaire were designed to reveal characteristics that social scientists define as markers for the "Dark Tetrad" of personality traits: sadism, psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism – the latter being the tendency to unscrupulously exploit others. Of those four, sadism was split into two versions: direct and vicarious.
Results from online-trolling survey

{SEE THE ATTACHED GRAPHIC}

'Mean' in the y-axis label is used in its arithmetic sense (click to enlarge)

"As expected," the paper reports, "the Dark Tetrad scores were highest among those who selected trolling as the most enjoyable activity." Also interesting was the finding that the more time that the respondents spent in comment forums, the higher their scores for each Dark Tetrad trait except narcissism.

That latter trait, however, was positively correlated with those respondents who had chosen "debating issues that are important to you" when asked "What do you enjoy doing most on these comment sites?", a choice that also positively correlated with vicarious sadism.

Although the researchers' studies point to a correlation between sadism and online trolling in comment forums, they didn't attempt to establish a causal relationship. The paper does note, however, that "Antisocial individuals have greater opportunities to connect with similar others, and to pursue their personal brand of 'self expression' than they did before the advent of the Internet."