P
Pauls nemesis
Guest
I thought it may be time to come clean to some extent. I registered on this website in December 2004 as user "Quentin". I created a yahoo email account called cometsense 2003 specifically to register here. For proof of this please see my account http://www.morrissey-solo.com/~Quentin/ My email is publically displayed here. If you require proof this is me ask me to post a certain message you wish me to post, or email me and I will reply.
I am a Morrissey fan, that was 50% of the "draw" to me for coming to this site. The other 50% was to create an imaginary character that debated things in the capacity of devils advocate in a civilised manner, (purely in the role of devils advocate) I instantly looked for someone to target to do this with. I had previoly done a similar thing in a more ham fisted fashion on another web forum, so this time I knew exactly what I was doing. I studied the style of a user here called "Broken" I saw that he specifically clashed with certain users on this board. (Including Freeyourself). Whilst I anaylsed the on line personas of both of these characters, I decided the user freeyourself was the polar opposite to me, and emulated the internet"speech style" of Broken, I decided to target him freeyourself, to agitate and stimulate him, to get him to expose his real thoughts, to incite him into revealing himself. To do this my posts had to be over exaggerated, to push him to explosiveness and obsession with me (which I suspected he would.)
To make the game more interesting I gave my password for the Quentin account to some users on this website - whilst still remaining in control. (ones which I suspected held opposite views to freeyourself) Explosion and extremeism the occurred, as I earlier suspected. I basically then did not visit this website for about 1 year (I revisited about 2 months ago) I have only ever posted from my BTcentral plus IP address, as proxys were not part of my game, I saw no point, I was not a real character in the first place, just an imaginary one.
It has panned about with freeyourself, and other people on this site more or less as I thought it would have done. A text book case to be honest given the right players in the team. I guess I expand around an average of 10 minutes per day creating posts, most of the work is done by others after seeds were planted. Freeyourself is the only one that can account for his actions here, I am not/was not a real person posting, but an actor. (in the case of moz-solo and him).
Many thanks to the people that have helped me do this, and again, it was only the revelations of a certain freeyourself, his attitudes, the way in which he expressed himself that have really created the negativity, I just agitated it to happen.
I am the ringleader of his tormentors.
I will quote this text written about people like me & or freeyourself etc:
Motivation
Self-proclaimed "trolls" may style themselves as devil's advocates, gadflies or culture jammers, challenging the dominant discourse and assumptions of forum discussions in an attempt to break the status quo of groupthink — the belief system that prevails in their absence.
Some critics claim that genuine "devil's advocates" generally identify themselves as such, out of respect for etiquette and courtesy, while trolls may dismiss etiquette and courtesy altogether. Most discussion of what motivates Internet trolls comes from other Internet users who claim to have observed trolling behavior. There is little scholarly literature to describe either the term or the phenomenon. The comments of accused trolls might be unreliable, since they may, in fact, be intending to stir controversy, rather than to advance understanding of the phenomenon. Likewise, accusers are often motivated by a desire to defend a particular Internet project, and references to an Internet user as a troll might not be based on the actual goals of the person so named. As a result, identifying the goals of Internet trolls is most often speculative. Still, several basic goals have been attributed to Internet trolls, according to the type of disruption they are believed to be provoking.
Further complicating the issue, many accusatory labelers fail to first question whether the alleged "troll" material actually is disruptive (a requisite component of trolling behavior) before being declared as such. Thus, many "trolls" are born of a second party's too-quick own inference of intent, accurate or not.
Proposed motivations for trolling:
Trolling can be described as a breaching experiment, which, because of the use of an alternate persona, allows for normal social boundaries and rules of etiquette to be tested or otherwise broken, without serious consequences. This may be part of an attempt to test the limits of some discourse, or to identify reactive personalities. By removing identities and histories from the situation, leaving only the discourse, some scientists believe that it is possible to run social engineering experiments using troll methods. However, few believe that troll organizations are engaged in science, and a few scattered individuals, with no particular method or thesis, cannot be described as scientists. They might however be engaged in research.
Anonymous attention-seeking: The troll seeks to dominate the thread by inciting anger, and effectively hijacking the topic at hand.
Amusement: To some people, the thought of a person getting angry over statements from total strangers is entertaining. This could be categorized as a form of schadenfreude - trolls with amusement motives deriving pleasure from the actual frustration/anger/pain (or what they may perceive in their own minds as such) from their targets.
Anger: Some people use trolling to express their hostility to a group or point of view.
Cry for help: Many so-called trolls, in their postings, indicate disturbing situations regarding family, relationships, substances, and school — although it is generally impossible to know whether this is just simply part of the troll. Some believe that trolling is an aggressive, confrontational way by which trolls seek a sort of tough love guidance in an anonymous forum.
Self-proclaimed trolls, and their defenders, suggest that trolling is a clever way of improving discussion, or an alternative method of viewing power-relations.
Setting oneself a challenge, simply to see if one can do it, and be successful: One member of an online forum, for example, joins under an unrecognizable identifying name to see if the other members of the forum can be fooled and, if so, for how long.
Wasting others' time: One of the greatest themes in trolling is the idea that a troll can spend one minute of time posting a troll, causing multiple other people to waste several minutes of their time, catalytically affecting others. Most trolls enjoy the idea that they can waste others' time at comparatively little effort on their behalf.
Domino effect: Related to amusement, but in a more specific fashion, it starts large chain reactions in response to one's initial post. Achieving a disproportionately large response to a small action is the general theme. This is similar to how a young child that goes "missing" (but is actually hiding) may act with glee, seeing a large number of people conducting a massive search in response to the supposed disappearance.
Suppression of information: A particularly nihilistic troll often aims to curb the sharing of helpful information between forum participants. For example, the skilled troll can turn an informative discussion about tips and techniques on coping with disease X... into a completely useless flame fest. This can keep essential information out of the hands of those who need it most, thus proliferating human suffering. A slightly less hostile variant is the supression of a discussion the troll does not like or finds offensive. A troll trolling a thread of sexist jokes would fit into this category.
Effect change in user opinions: A troll may state extreme positions to make his or her actual beliefs seem moderate (this often involves sock puppeteering or duals, where the bad cop is a sock-puppet troll) or, alternatively, play the role of the devil's advocate to strengthen the opposing convictions (with which he or she actually agrees).
Test the integrity of a system against social attacks or other forms of misbehavior: For example, blatantly violating terms-of-use in order to see whether any action is taken by the site administrators.
Overcome feelings of inferiority or powerlessness by getting the experience of controlling an environment.
Self-promotion.
Fight "groupthink": Many trolls defend their actions as shocking people out of entrenched conformism.
Klerck, also known as Kevin Ealy, was an Internet troll and Slashdot troll before his 2005 death.Satire: In these cases, the individuals do not think of themselves as trolls, but misunderstood humorists or political commentators.
Satisfaction gained from personal attacks.
Harassment: following a person — who has been targetted for harassment in one forum, but who has chosen to escape being victimized by moving on — and trolling the forum as a means of making that new "home" an uncomfortable place for that person to be online.
Lowering signal to noise ratio: On Slashdot, moderation points, that could be used to moderate up alternative posts, are wasted on moderating down things like ASCII pictures of the goatse man. At certain thresholds, this lowers the quality of comments.
Anonymously testing an alternate persona.
Emptying a forum: this is usually only feasible if the forum is small.
Attempting to discredit a group by posing as a member of that group, and posting inflammatory messages to give the appearance that the group espouses such opinions. This type of troll usually gives him or herself away fairly quickly.
It is difficult to gauge the motivations of trolls, since most of the justifications offered by alleged trolls for their behavior are nothing more than ruses concocted to continue whatever mischief they imagine themselves to have started. This is unfortunate because, as the above list supposes, there are legitimate reasons for engaging in the sort of actions for which trolling is known. Still, etiquette is simple and straightforward enough that most people can advance the aims professed by self-exculpatory trolls, without actually resorting to these methods. Since there is a wide spectrum of possible motivations for trolls, some of these functions being benevolent and others, clearly malevolent, to typecast users as trolls in the negative sense is often rash.
Some users of Internet forums are considered to be "trollhunters", or "trollbaiters". They willingly enter into conflicts when trolls emerge. Often, trollhunters are as disruptive as trolls. A single troll-post may be ignored, but if ten trollhunters "pounce", following a troll, they will drive the thread off-topic.
I am a Morrissey fan, that was 50% of the "draw" to me for coming to this site. The other 50% was to create an imaginary character that debated things in the capacity of devils advocate in a civilised manner, (purely in the role of devils advocate) I instantly looked for someone to target to do this with. I had previoly done a similar thing in a more ham fisted fashion on another web forum, so this time I knew exactly what I was doing. I studied the style of a user here called "Broken" I saw that he specifically clashed with certain users on this board. (Including Freeyourself). Whilst I anaylsed the on line personas of both of these characters, I decided the user freeyourself was the polar opposite to me, and emulated the internet"speech style" of Broken, I decided to target him freeyourself, to agitate and stimulate him, to get him to expose his real thoughts, to incite him into revealing himself. To do this my posts had to be over exaggerated, to push him to explosiveness and obsession with me (which I suspected he would.)
To make the game more interesting I gave my password for the Quentin account to some users on this website - whilst still remaining in control. (ones which I suspected held opposite views to freeyourself) Explosion and extremeism the occurred, as I earlier suspected. I basically then did not visit this website for about 1 year (I revisited about 2 months ago) I have only ever posted from my BTcentral plus IP address, as proxys were not part of my game, I saw no point, I was not a real character in the first place, just an imaginary one.
It has panned about with freeyourself, and other people on this site more or less as I thought it would have done. A text book case to be honest given the right players in the team. I guess I expand around an average of 10 minutes per day creating posts, most of the work is done by others after seeds were planted. Freeyourself is the only one that can account for his actions here, I am not/was not a real person posting, but an actor. (in the case of moz-solo and him).
Many thanks to the people that have helped me do this, and again, it was only the revelations of a certain freeyourself, his attitudes, the way in which he expressed himself that have really created the negativity, I just agitated it to happen.
I am the ringleader of his tormentors.
I will quote this text written about people like me & or freeyourself etc:
Motivation
Self-proclaimed "trolls" may style themselves as devil's advocates, gadflies or culture jammers, challenging the dominant discourse and assumptions of forum discussions in an attempt to break the status quo of groupthink — the belief system that prevails in their absence.
Some critics claim that genuine "devil's advocates" generally identify themselves as such, out of respect for etiquette and courtesy, while trolls may dismiss etiquette and courtesy altogether. Most discussion of what motivates Internet trolls comes from other Internet users who claim to have observed trolling behavior. There is little scholarly literature to describe either the term or the phenomenon. The comments of accused trolls might be unreliable, since they may, in fact, be intending to stir controversy, rather than to advance understanding of the phenomenon. Likewise, accusers are often motivated by a desire to defend a particular Internet project, and references to an Internet user as a troll might not be based on the actual goals of the person so named. As a result, identifying the goals of Internet trolls is most often speculative. Still, several basic goals have been attributed to Internet trolls, according to the type of disruption they are believed to be provoking.
Further complicating the issue, many accusatory labelers fail to first question whether the alleged "troll" material actually is disruptive (a requisite component of trolling behavior) before being declared as such. Thus, many "trolls" are born of a second party's too-quick own inference of intent, accurate or not.
Proposed motivations for trolling:
Trolling can be described as a breaching experiment, which, because of the use of an alternate persona, allows for normal social boundaries and rules of etiquette to be tested or otherwise broken, without serious consequences. This may be part of an attempt to test the limits of some discourse, or to identify reactive personalities. By removing identities and histories from the situation, leaving only the discourse, some scientists believe that it is possible to run social engineering experiments using troll methods. However, few believe that troll organizations are engaged in science, and a few scattered individuals, with no particular method or thesis, cannot be described as scientists. They might however be engaged in research.
Anonymous attention-seeking: The troll seeks to dominate the thread by inciting anger, and effectively hijacking the topic at hand.
Amusement: To some people, the thought of a person getting angry over statements from total strangers is entertaining. This could be categorized as a form of schadenfreude - trolls with amusement motives deriving pleasure from the actual frustration/anger/pain (or what they may perceive in their own minds as such) from their targets.
Anger: Some people use trolling to express their hostility to a group or point of view.
Cry for help: Many so-called trolls, in their postings, indicate disturbing situations regarding family, relationships, substances, and school — although it is generally impossible to know whether this is just simply part of the troll. Some believe that trolling is an aggressive, confrontational way by which trolls seek a sort of tough love guidance in an anonymous forum.
Self-proclaimed trolls, and their defenders, suggest that trolling is a clever way of improving discussion, or an alternative method of viewing power-relations.
Setting oneself a challenge, simply to see if one can do it, and be successful: One member of an online forum, for example, joins under an unrecognizable identifying name to see if the other members of the forum can be fooled and, if so, for how long.
Wasting others' time: One of the greatest themes in trolling is the idea that a troll can spend one minute of time posting a troll, causing multiple other people to waste several minutes of their time, catalytically affecting others. Most trolls enjoy the idea that they can waste others' time at comparatively little effort on their behalf.
Domino effect: Related to amusement, but in a more specific fashion, it starts large chain reactions in response to one's initial post. Achieving a disproportionately large response to a small action is the general theme. This is similar to how a young child that goes "missing" (but is actually hiding) may act with glee, seeing a large number of people conducting a massive search in response to the supposed disappearance.
Suppression of information: A particularly nihilistic troll often aims to curb the sharing of helpful information between forum participants. For example, the skilled troll can turn an informative discussion about tips and techniques on coping with disease X... into a completely useless flame fest. This can keep essential information out of the hands of those who need it most, thus proliferating human suffering. A slightly less hostile variant is the supression of a discussion the troll does not like or finds offensive. A troll trolling a thread of sexist jokes would fit into this category.
Effect change in user opinions: A troll may state extreme positions to make his or her actual beliefs seem moderate (this often involves sock puppeteering or duals, where the bad cop is a sock-puppet troll) or, alternatively, play the role of the devil's advocate to strengthen the opposing convictions (with which he or she actually agrees).
Test the integrity of a system against social attacks or other forms of misbehavior: For example, blatantly violating terms-of-use in order to see whether any action is taken by the site administrators.
Overcome feelings of inferiority or powerlessness by getting the experience of controlling an environment.
Self-promotion.
Fight "groupthink": Many trolls defend their actions as shocking people out of entrenched conformism.
Klerck, also known as Kevin Ealy, was an Internet troll and Slashdot troll before his 2005 death.Satire: In these cases, the individuals do not think of themselves as trolls, but misunderstood humorists or political commentators.
Satisfaction gained from personal attacks.
Harassment: following a person — who has been targetted for harassment in one forum, but who has chosen to escape being victimized by moving on — and trolling the forum as a means of making that new "home" an uncomfortable place for that person to be online.
Lowering signal to noise ratio: On Slashdot, moderation points, that could be used to moderate up alternative posts, are wasted on moderating down things like ASCII pictures of the goatse man. At certain thresholds, this lowers the quality of comments.
Anonymously testing an alternate persona.
Emptying a forum: this is usually only feasible if the forum is small.
Attempting to discredit a group by posing as a member of that group, and posting inflammatory messages to give the appearance that the group espouses such opinions. This type of troll usually gives him or herself away fairly quickly.
It is difficult to gauge the motivations of trolls, since most of the justifications offered by alleged trolls for their behavior are nothing more than ruses concocted to continue whatever mischief they imagine themselves to have started. This is unfortunate because, as the above list supposes, there are legitimate reasons for engaging in the sort of actions for which trolling is known. Still, etiquette is simple and straightforward enough that most people can advance the aims professed by self-exculpatory trolls, without actually resorting to these methods. Since there is a wide spectrum of possible motivations for trolls, some of these functions being benevolent and others, clearly malevolent, to typecast users as trolls in the negative sense is often rash.
Some users of Internet forums are considered to be "trollhunters", or "trollbaiters". They willingly enter into conflicts when trolls emerge. Often, trollhunters are as disruptive as trolls. A single troll-post may be ignored, but if ten trollhunters "pounce", following a troll, they will drive the thread off-topic.
