How I Perma-Trolled Reddit
oppugn.us
oppugn.us
1. He describes a social engineering experiment (a kind of hacking).
2. It's partially about the interesting idea of organizing your writing so that two different readers will interpret the same text different ways. (Literary steganography?)
3. What better way to for HN readers to respond to this than to dispassionately analyze it and then move on? The fact that he used HN and reddit itsef as part of a hack is amusingly recursive - and also irrelevant.
Instead, this just makes him sound sociopathic and manipulative. And to what end? Just cause he could? :\
Sociopathic and manipulative people are subtle and subversive. They don't tip their hand and they hide their true intentions. I'm not that familiar with Zed's work but nothing I've read suggests he's sociopathic or manipulative. If I had to put a label on him I'd pick impulsive and stubborn.
In my opinion this was a pretty innocent experiment. Juvenile? You bet. But that's not the point, really. In this case I think you're disappointed about the experiment because the results turned out be uninteresting/mundane, not because you really think the experiment was evil.
Suppose Zed would've discovered (accidentally) that his rants against Reddit go unnoticed if he puts them in the 3rd paragraph of an article but result in rabid attacks if he leads with them. Why? Hypothesis: people who make it to the 3rd paragraph of an article are less likely to draw knee-jerk conclusions.
In this case I'm pretty sure we would all applauded the experiment and make a mental note that whenever we have to discuss something controversial to add a bunch of fluff as introduction to avoid a backlash.
This is probably way out there, and I'm probably giving Zed too much credit, but I think it's conceivable the experiment would've returned some interesting insight. Since no harm was done, I think that means this specific kind of trolling has to be a net positive.
Regardless of which crowd I identify with (both), the whole concept of trolling - intentionally making a group of people dislike you, for no ostensible reason other than you feel like being a wanker - is dumb.
What you want to do is state something obvious (inflammatory or not) and see who is self-righteous enough to correct you on it.
Sure, it's easier to troll with inflammatory material, but it's more fun with the banal.
This sort of thing even has a little merit. Given people's propensity to pick on the first, most obvious point in any given article, you just throw them a bone up front, put in something about how "Windows Sux" or whatever, and let that be a lightning rod for the Instantly Hostile Crowd. You can just delete or ignore their comments. Anyone who passes up the lightning rod probably has something thoughtful to say. Or at the very least can keep their temper.