Jennifer Martinez | Main | WMD being moved out of Iraq??

October 1, 2003

Trolls

Way back in the early 90s, before the time of AOL, Prodigy (if anyone remembers) had these really nifty BBSs (or were they called forums?). They were all text (good thing since no one had a pc which displayed graphics yet) and divided into different interest groups, kinda like newsgroups.

I happened to meet John on one of BBSs - it was called the Rush Limbaugh forum, and people who had opinions on Rush, good or bad, spent a lot of time reading and writing and bitching at each other on Prodigy.

There came to be a group of people there who wrote the most on the boards. People would disagree and fun arguments would start that could go on for weeks. But then, I remember a couple of people who started going for the jugular.

I think one was named Mark something and there was another named Arachnia or something else spider like. They would post stupid rude things to people just to get everyone upset. Obviously, it was some kind of attention getting thing for them.

These days, trolls are getting even worse and more personal. Emperor Misha has run into a couple of really nasty ones - one of whom apparently tries to get those he disagrees with fired from their jobs.

People like that are beyond contempt. I can understand why Rachel Lucas and Instapundit don't have comments.

But I should say, I love to read comments on everyone's blogs, and occasionally leave them. I do wish those who didn't have comments available would reconsider, as I promise them that we would deal with the trolls, so they would not have to.

I think that Emperor Misha, AcidMan and others have better blogs than Rachel's or Instapundits because they are brave enough to face the faceless trolls.

They didn't add to the political discussions, they just tried to

Posted by Beth at October 1, 2003 6:45 PM