Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by LaminatorX on Tuesday March 04 2014, @09:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the Is-feeding-them-masochism? dept.

Members kef and einar have written about some recent research:

"A new study from the University of Manitoba has claimed that internet trolls might not be so nice or mentally stable in real life. While previous studies have shown that people with negative character traits are using the internet more frequently for their own amusement, not to socialize, the results seem to link trolling to sadism. Two surveys among amazon's mechanical turk users were conducted which allowed creating a character profile of the participants. Based on the profile, internet behavior could be correlated with different character traits. Trolling appears to be correlated to sadism.

From the study:

... correlations, sometimes quite significant, between these traits and trolling behavior. What's more, it also found a relationship between all Dark Tetrad traits (except for narcissism) and the overall time that an individual spent, per day, commenting on the Internet. ... To be sure, only 5.6 percent of survey respondents actually specified that they enjoyed "trolling." By contrast, 41.3 percent of Internet users were "non-commenters," meaning they didn't like engaging online at all. So trolls are, as has often been suspected, a minority of online commenters, and an even smaller minority of overall Internet users.

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 1, Offtopic) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday March 05 2014, @01:21AM

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Wednesday March 05 2014, @01:21AM (#11100) Homepage Journal

    I rather enjoy that I get moderated zero or -1 about as much as I get moderated to five.

    I was puzzled by my Soylent News message regarding a "relationship change". WTF?

    It turned out that two Soylentils changed their relationship to me at about the same time, one to friend one to foe.

    Go look at what people say about Repeatible Hairstyle at Kuro5hin. That's my nick there. Many of them hate me with a furious passion, but I am quite seriously mentally ill, so from time to time I check into a nuthouse or even get arrested.

    If I don't post at k5 for a few days, they all go bananas trying to find me. If they can't find me, they lose all will to live.

    I honestly do try to contribute in a positive way to k5, soylent, slashdot, advogato and facebook. Really I do. I have mod points here and at Slashdot. I too take them very seriously; for example I only moderate posts that no one else has moderated yet, as I long ago noticed that many moderators are rather lazy, in that once a post is moderated to 2 or 3, it very quickly makes it to five, whereas many well-deserving 0 or 1 comments never get moderated at all.

    I generally bump up an otherwise moderated comment by just one, so as to draw attention to it by those lazy moderators.

    I also work hard to find deserving comments.

    Go have a look at my technical articles [warplife.com], and you will see I really do work hard to do right by others.

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   -1  
       Offtopic=2, Insightful=1, Total=3
    Extra 'Offtopic' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   1