trolling

In general, it's not the approved way of behaving, but there are circumstances when it can be useful, such as in order to demonstrate that a group of people are just too concerned about something unimportant. If alt.buttons becomes a wastland when you suggest that men's and women's shirts should have buttons on the same side, it suggests that they're a little too concerned.

1. Political trolls. Political trolls are all about bad logic and cognitive dissonance. Ideally, parts of the troll should grind against each other so badly that readers are faced with a serious ontological clusterfuck. In practice that's not always easy, and it's always a fun consolation prize if some third party starts defending the troll out of sincere convictions. You meet some really scary people that way -- or are they just co-trolling? It's all part of the fun!
   
   
   1. The Right Wing Maniac (RWM), with whom we may be familiar; these can be blatant or relatively plausible. The relatively plausible ones are often hard to differentiate from sincere people why may or may not have issues.
      
      
   2. The Left Wing Maniac (LWM) is, for some reason, less common. Successful LWM riffs on Slashdot include: The radical notion that women are people (always a winner!); any suggestion in favor of "big government" -- or any attack on any adolescent libertarian shibboleth; anti-Americanism. These ideas strike me as less maniacal than common-sensical, but on Slashdot they're viewed as full-bore insanity, so how can I complain?
   
   
2. Perl
   
   
3. Surrealism: The original Natalie Portman troll is a classic and frequently brilliant surrealist troll; the cheap imitations are boring.
   
   
4. Social Commentary: At the risk of nodevertising, may I offer my own Nodevertising Metanode as a handy (albeit poor) example. MEEPT!!ian social commentary is, like, social commentary but much funnier.
   
   
5. Cretinism: In the last few months, Slashdot has been plagued with idiots who post obscene one-liners and copy'n'paste crap. For some reason, these critters get called trolls. It's depressing. (update 4/16/00: We've seen a few of them here recently, too. Just ignore them, like sensei says.)

granted, it's not a very nice term.. as it requires that one must be a troll (usually a subjective term, but often means fat, ugly or old gay man) in order to be trolling. i suspect this term was developed by the oh-so-precious and flippant bitchy, vain gay men who complain about getting hit on by men 20 years older than they are. but there's a word to describe what they do, as well..