A theory of forum trolling

**K...** · 10-12-2015

The following is an excerpt from Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker magazine (regarding school shooters)

A riot was a social process, in which people did things in reaction to and in combination with those around them. Social processes are driven by our thresholds—which he defined as the number of people who need to be doing some activity before we agree to join them. In the elegant theoretical model Granovetter proposed, riots were started by people with a threshold of zero—instigators willing to throw a rock through a window at the slightest provocation. Then comes the person who will throw a rock if someone else goes first. He has a threshold of one. Next in is the person with the threshold of two. His qualms are overcome when he sees the instigator and the instigator’s accomplice. Next to him is someone with a threshold of three, who would never break windows and loot stores unless there were three people right in front of him who were already doing that—and so on up to the hundredth person, a righteous upstanding citizen who nonetheless could set his beliefs aside and grab a camera from the broken window of the electronics store if everyone around him were grabbing cameras from the electronics store.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...ds-of-violence

My theory is that the player fan crews start the same way. There are one and two true player fan haters who then attract trolls, sociopaths, and then autistic types and beta male followers.

This thread isn't meant to demean anyone, but hopefully people will look at their posting and figure out whether your motives are bankrupt. Many people are getting angry over the dumbest things.