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LJ, flamewars, and trolls
Jun. 4th, 2007 04:44 pmLiveJournal cracks me up sometimes. I cannot believe this post received 391 comments and continues to grow. Battle-hardened veterans of Usenet who were around before there was an Internet would have recognized that post as coming from a troll almost immediately. All of that group knowledge gets lost though in these little commercial micro-communities, and people who haven't been online for very long stumble onto them, and have to relearn the same old lessons.
What we need to save us is an emergent AI that takes on and remembers all of the tribal folklore and knowledge that has been floating around since ARPANET. I envision it's avatar looking something like a geeky Jerry Garcia wearing a tye-died t-shirt and birkenstocks. The younglings who are new to the ways of the online world could come and sit at it's feet in search of the knowledge from the before-time - before the Internet sold out to the corporations.
"Why yes, little grasshopper," intones the kindly hippy, "Trolls have been doing this since time immemorial. I remember once upon a time in 1988 when alt.punk and alt.gothic got into a flame war which lasted for months! And in the ruins of that great flame war, in the middle of the burned out husks of once-great newsgroup servers....a peace was finally achieved..."
What we need to save us is an emergent AI that takes on and remembers all of the tribal folklore and knowledge that has been floating around since ARPANET. I envision it's avatar looking something like a geeky Jerry Garcia wearing a tye-died t-shirt and birkenstocks. The younglings who are new to the ways of the online world could come and sit at it's feet in search of the knowledge from the before-time - before the Internet sold out to the corporations.
"Why yes, little grasshopper," intones the kindly hippy, "Trolls have been doing this since time immemorial. I remember once upon a time in 1988 when alt.punk and alt.gothic got into a flame war which lasted for months! And in the ruins of that great flame war, in the middle of the burned out husks of once-great newsgroup servers....a peace was finally achieved..."
