Introduction to the Art of Trolling

Good day, fine people of the world. Today you have witnessed the birth of a blog dedicated to the discussion, review and advancement of what I call the Art of Trolling. We are concerned with humorous examples of trolling, how to find them, and to discuss the methodologies and standards used to create these humorous works of art. For many trolls, the purpose of their trolling is to harass others, or to try to be as much a pain in the butt as possible. We are not concerned with this type of troll, as they offer very little humor and provide nothing but offense to the sensibilities of sensible people around the world.

While many of you have a colloquial understanding of what it is exactly to troll, or be a troll, nevertheless I am compelled to offer a definition of Trolling so that we are all on the same page. According to Wikipedia, an internet troll is:

"someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum chat room or blog, with the primary intent of provoking other users into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion."

Trolling is a phenomenon which is evident throughout the world wide web. You can find evidence of trolling in most every type of website, be it a commercial site, news site, social site or information site. There are various degrees of trolling, which vary from the very basic and elementary troll (calling someone a name to provoke a response) to the outright dangerous and illegal troll (calling for violence against an individual or attempting to obtain sensitive information which the troll is not authorized to have). While the former are boring and hardly worthy of being classified as trolling, and the latter being something to avoid and uncomfortable to observe, we have discovered a balance between the two, where the believability of the troll along with the participation of the targets creates a condition where great levels of humor abound. Please reference the chart below where you can see that the maximum level of humor reaches a peak of about 4.75 THU (trolling humor units) when the troll is perfectly balanced between the utterly weak and the blatantly psychotic.

We aim to find and provide for your pleasure, examples of trolling which meet the highest standard of humor. Each time we examine and discuss a particular example of trolling, we will apply a rating anywhere from zero to five THU (trolling humor units) in order to properly arrange our trolling examples into appropriate degrees of hilarity. In time, this blog will be a compendium of trolling comedy, a resource where one will be able to find examples and discussion of fine, humorous trolling. Our cry is that trolling is an art, an art attempted by many, but mastered by few. Welcome to the Art of Trolling.

Next time we will begin with examples of trolling which range from the weak to the psychotic, to better understand the differences between a good, humorous troll and a bad, not funny at all troll. Stay tuned!