Trolling comes in many forms. In general, I see trolling as provocative and/or deceitful attention seeking. Some is obviously fairly benign, a gentle reminder that it’s the internet and people cannot always be trusted. The worst of it is anti-social behavior which is destructive and harmful, not only to individuals but to social groups as a whole.

My thoughts on the anti-social stuff is that it’s perplexing. I’ve seen it tear online communities apart. The perplexing part isn’t necessarily why someone would want to do that. It’s easy enough to assume it’s about having control, being able to inflict harm on others, and other similar motivations. The perplexing part, to me, is that in sufficiently large groups, there are always other users who celebrate the drama and those who seem to lack any degree of impulse control to simply not feed the troll. So, it’s pretty much a guarantee that there will be people around to feed the troll(s). Without those essentially willful supporters, most troll(s) would be neutralized as they’d have no targets, nobody there to amplify their antics, and/or insufficient reward to continue trolling.