am currently feeling much respect and admiration for trolls, those masters of Making People Get Mad on the Internet

a crucial class in our information ecology

polluter of the commons? no. they keep us fit

if something someone says on the internet makes you Mad and it ruins your day, you deserve it

it's a tradition as old as the medium - culture in battle-hardened spaces reflect this

on 4chan "nice bait" is standard jargon; bad/unsuccessful trolling is acknowledged by a rebuke of "i am not mad, try again next time"

also why members of such spaces have stronger memetic immunity - a realization that getting mad = losing implies that to Win is to Have Fun, turning finite games into infinite ones

a race to have as much fun as possible - beautiful

above all for the master troll, nothing is taken seriously - to do so opens them up to getting Mad (which would ruin their day and not be fun)

radically cynical, yet they understand something the tiresomely earnest do not - about what is Good in life