nowadays whenever someone’s talking about a “troll” online they usually mean some run-of-the-mill bigot spewing slurs and gore pics. Back In My Day, “trolling” was defined as “doing a bit on forums in order to draw a rise out of people”. unfortunately, it turns out the easiest way to “draw a rise out of” people is to be a bigot to their face, so it devolved into its modern incarnation as outright bigotry pretty quickly.
however, there was a brief Golden Age of Trolling where people would use cleverer methods to piss off and/or lie to strangers in noticeable but ultimately harmless ways, resulting in actual comedy. off the top of my head, highlights of this era include:
“Hearing the difference now isn’t the reason to encode to FLAC. FLAC uses lossless compression, while MP3 is ‘lossy’. What this means is that for each year the MP3 sits on your hard drive, it will lose roughly 12kbps, assuming you have SATA - it’s about 15kbps on IDE, but only 7kbps on SCSI, due to rotational velocidensity. You don’t want to know how much worse it is on CD-ROM or other optical media. I started collecting MP3s in about 2001, and if I try to play any of the tracks I downloaded back then, even the stuff I grabbed at 320kbps, they just sound like crap. The bass is terrible, the midrange…well don’t get me started. Some of those albums have degraded down to 32 or even 16kbps. FLAC rips from the same period still sound great, even if they weren’t stored correctly, in a cool, dry place. Seriously, stick to FLAC, you may not be able to hear the difference now, but in a year or two, you’ll be glad you did.”
bloodninja (major nsfw warning since he did his trolling in cybersex IRC channels)
the underwater weighing test thread. this is the best one imo. my favorite part is that im pretty sure the original thread was posted on a now-inaccessible ign forum, but googling it turns up multiple copies of the exact same thread crossposted across different forums (the linked one is a screencap of the 4chan version) where OP just copies and pastes the exact same posts in the exact same order from the IGN thread’s OP. the confused replies/questions from actual people in between the OP updates varies, but none of that has any input on what the next post from OP is going to be. truly the pinnacle of trolling
i’m not trying to no-true-scotsman the bigotry out of trolling or anything, i fully understand that the modern definition of the word is synonymous with racism and we don’t need to “reclaim” it or anything. i just miss this specific niche of fucking with people online
having pussy is gender neutral. having cock is gender neutral. having tits is gender neutral. using 3 in one body wash, shampoo and conditioner is for men though
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