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Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

The article assumes that everybody who "trolls" online is being deliberately vicious - and maybe the author was focused on discussing the people who really are trying to cause hurt online. On the flip side, though, I've learned to be very, very careful how I phrase things online because it's (apparently) really easy for somebody to misconstrue something that you said and assume that you meant offense.

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Completely agree, especially in diverse communities (such as HN) where people are coming from sometimes wildly different paradigms to exchange ideas in an inefficient medium that omits all non-verbal communication (which I was talk in a communication class can be 80% of inter-personal communication).

I also wonder how much is because people don't read. I sometimes get replies to comments that don't even make sense based on what I said. People jump to conclusions and read what they think is being said rather than what is actually being said.

I've even noticed snipe framing on HN. Replies being added very late to a comment, that completely misrepresent and negatively frame your statements leaving you with no retort.

That's definitely one aspect to it. When I played CS:GO briefly, some of the players are just down right toxic. I don't know if it is because they deliberately want to hurt people or they just think it's perfectly fine kidding around like that, but I just stopped playing. Other games have that element to them too, but CS:GO just seemed to have a lot more of it.

I think you'll find almost every community of a competitive game eventually turns into a mostly toxic one. I don't really understand why (it seems a little reductionist to say that most people are toxic and therefore as a community grows most of it will tend towards being toxic), but I keep seeing it no matter what kind of game it is (RTS, MOBA, RPG, etc)

They're dissatisfied with their performance measured by the time they put in. In turn team mates are blamed for hindering their progress in the ranking system.

I would even tend to generalize: The strong competitiveness of the game (or other places that are very competitive) is literally an incubator to make people very toxic towards each other.

You're playing apologist here and attempting to swat away responsibility in your final sentence. The article discusses death threats, harassment, and threats of violence. Your argument is that maybe they aren't deliberately doing those things? Sorry but, they're doing it on purpose.

When they discuss "trolling", the term is a form of purposefully attempting to enrage the victim. They're not innocent commenters posting on the internet.

> The article discusses death threats, harassment, and threats of violence.

SJWs tend to be very creative in redefining "harassment" all the time.

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