Don't Feed the Trolls

A few days ago, I published a cartoon on this blog that spoofed the compulsive need of some internet forum participants to correct their fellows' every misapprehension. We can chuckle at those who always need to have the last word, because they exist on virtually every internet forum.

At the same time, most of us have engaged in this behavior on occasion. The urge to correct misinformation or call out a fallacious argument can be especially strong when the subject of a forum thread is something we feel very strongly about, or feel we understand in depth -- either because of personal experience, or because we have formally studied the topic in depth.

I mentioned the cartoon to fellow bloggers who participate regularly in the Discussions section at Blog Catalog, a forum that has been the scene of a number of contentious discussions in recent months. Their response was as you might think: They expressed instant appreciation of both the humor and the irony embodied in that cartoon.

One member of the Blog Catalog community took the kernel message of that cartoon and developed it further. Ender, whose Red Monkey blog is among my favorites, produced a clever derivative of the cartoon, tailoring it to the Blog Catalog group by incorporating several members' avatars into her drawings. She embedded it in a thread titled Don't Feed the Trolls - which is also the title of Ender's cartoon. I asked her if I could snag her cartoon and publish it here. That's it at right. [Click on the cartoon strip to make it enlarge.]

I didn't get around to posting this yesterday, due to a particularly demanding workday. Just now, while adding the links to this piece, I noticed that Ender posted her cartoon strip on her own blog very early this morning, along with a particularly interesting thought piece reflecting on the foibles of forum participants, and the machinations of internet trolls. Go and have a look at Ender's latest piece - Don't Feed the Trolls.