Quote:
Originally Posted by Worldwalker
Nobody, at least nobody who thinks about it, expects to tell a troll anything. That's kind of the point of trolling; they'd say the sun was purple if it would get people wound up. Rather, people are talking to the lurkers -- 6x as many, in this case, as active users. If people leave a troll's statements unchallenged (especially if they're carefully couched to sound not too outrageous at first read) then that appears to be the consensus of forum users to outsiders, visitors, Google, and so on.
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Exactly-- last year, when a certain person was evangelizing the idea that ebook readers were a fundamentally horrible thing that would lead to a generation of people unable to think (because for some reason reading from a electronic display of any type affected the brain in a way fundamentally different than "real" books) I actually made comments "to Google" pointing out the lies and sockpuppeting. (Of course, that only has any meaning when someone is trying to build a reputation as an authority to be taken seriously using their real name.)