Why do people troll?
The reasons are many. In brief, most trolls just like causing trouble. However, it has been suggested that trolling, like spamming, is often used as a way to break up the continuity of a newsgroup and make it less readable by provoking floods of responses. These floods, in extreme cases, can destroy older messages in the newsgroup by causing smaller Usenet servers to discard old messages before they are read to conserve disk space. In this way, trolling can be used as a sort of “guerilla warfare” against a newsgroup. However, it’s generally a bad idea for several reasons; one, if the troll is crossposted to other newsgroups, it can have the same effect on those groups – including groups you didn’t intend to effect. Two, trolling is prohibited in the Terms of Service, or TOS, of many Service Providers; therefore it’s a good way to get your account terminated.
