trolls and stalkers
Sep. 4th, 2008 07:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xelaI just sent a "please don't feed the troll" zephyr to a friend, and it occurred to me that that rule reminded me of a thread in ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
siderea's LJ a few weeks ago, that linked to an article about dealing with stalkers. A stalker (paraphrasing from memory¹) gets positive re-enforcement from any contact with the victim — and depriving them of all such contact is necessary if not always sufficient to getting rid of them. A troll gets positive re-enforcement from any response — and not responding to them is necessary if not sufficient to getting rid of them.
Do people think this is more than a superficial analogy? Is the troll a species of stalker?
¹ I wrote the post before looking up the URLs: I had entirely forgotten that the title of the article.
siderea's LJ a few weeks ago, that linked to an article about dealing with stalkers. A stalker (paraphrasing from memory¹) gets positive re-enforcement from any contact with the victim — and depriving them of all such contact is necessary if not always sufficient to getting rid of them. A troll gets positive re-enforcement from any response — and not responding to them is necessary if not sufficient to getting rid of them.Do people think this is more than a superficial analogy? Is the troll a species of stalker?
¹ I wrote the post before looking up the URLs: I had entirely forgotten that the title of the article.
