From: bubblewrap@THRWHITE.remove-ipn-this
To: alt.bbs.allsysop
You know, I remember a time before the wide-spread use of the term "Troll".
Really, I do. I stopped doing much of anything online for a while, and when
I came back, there it was! I'm not sure the two events are directly
related, but as I recall, it was right around the time some group took it
upon themselves to police Usenet on the whole, banning messages from servers
that weren't on their special list, stuff like that.
I remember thinking at the time that it would most likely come to pass (and
this isn't far off from the way it was then anyway) that the term "Troll"
would become a generic catch-all for anyone who decided to have an alternate
opinion.
Bad analogy? Sure. Still expounding on a point that several others have
proven wrong? Depends on your point of view.. Trolling? As in "taking a
stance specificly to aggravate you and get you to jump in and escalate,
potentially to a flame war"? I don't see that happening here. Now, I
started this thread, and it seems just about everyone mis-understood what I
was saying. Well, publicly anyway. Privately I got exactly the result I
wanted in emails with several thoughtful and reasonable individuals who,
notably, don't actually post here (Yes, that is what's known as an
"implication", but you can feel free to call it "trolling" if that's what
makes your cheerios taste better). And while TimeWarrior is at least
drawing near the median on people agreeing or disagreeing with him, it's
looking a lot like he isn't allowed to have a unique opinion either for some
reason. That doesn't change the fact that I can count 45 new messages from
this thread, largely spurred by the two of us having less-than-popular
opinions, that aren't advertisements or spam. This is not counting messages
I've seen in this thread via other systems that for some reason don't make
it as far as my ISP, and it's a record in all the BBS related newsgroups
I've been monitoring for the last month, excepting a.b.bbs.doors, and that's
probably episodes of Barfy the Vampire Slayer or something.
Now, I'm going to make a statement about activity of BBSs and BBSing in
general. Most of you seem to have lost your dictionaries immediately before
the last time I made similar statements, so I'l be a little more
descriptive. I'm not saying that BBSs are dead. I'm not saying that they
aren't making a comeback. In fact, if either condition was true, I likely
wouldn't be here bothering to say anything at all. I AM saying that they
came perilously close to extinction, and not for the first time, and that
they've been on life support until relatively recently. I mean, we're
talking about something that has spanned over 25 years, even three years ago
can be considered relatively recent. And we know about the obvious
elements, the leechers and the spammers and the assholes and all of the
undesireable users that came and did most of the damage each time.
What about those who started calling free thinking and alternate opinion
"trolling"? They did no damage? And they aren't capable of doing the same
damage again? This thing we call BBS isn't going to die and come back to
life too many more times, people.
Now, you can call this trolling. You can call it wrong. You can call it
whatever you want, frankly, that wasn't one of my major concerns when I
decided to post. I think I'll just call it another 45 messages.
oOoOoOo
bubblewrap
"Anthony Perez" wrote in message
news:wWHQa.2995$PG6.2585@newssvr16.news.prodigy.com...
>
> "RhythmNp" wrote in message
> news:20030714193015.23754.00000273@mb-m22.aol.com...
> > >It's kinda like all the crap that Windows has pre-installed that isn't
> > >optional.
> [...]
>
> Trolls, don't know any better Rhythm... ;-]
>
>
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