#4. Don't Feed the Trolls

Children, you have been raised in a culture of sitcoms and movie comedies where the ultimate act of coolness is to really put a jerk in his place with a hilarious insult. Therefore, you instinctively think that every jerk needs to be insulted. But communicating online requires you to specifically suppress this urge.

The reason, is trolls. A "troll" is someone who tries to instigate an argument or otherwise get a reaction from you by acting like an asshole. They usually aren't like that in real life, they basically write as a character as a way to get attention. Online, they are usually pretty easy to spot, but most people don't have the ability to react in the one absolute surefire way to shut them down: cold, dead silence.

So, if someone on a message board, or in a chat room, or article comment section posts about how much that particular website sucks and how every member there is an idiot, he's not expecting agreement or for the community to change based on his feedback. He's looking for that community to attack him. He wants the attention. He can't get love from the group, but he can get hate, and even hate is better than apathy.

Therefore, screaming insults at him only ensures that he'll continue doing what he's doing. If nobody responds to anything he says, he'll simply get bored and go away.

It's so simple, yet incredibly hard to do. Every instinct in your body will scream for you to react, the same instinct that makes the other dogs in a pack attack the one acting like a fucktard. You must resist it.

Before you can even stop to think about what you're going to say, your fingers will be hammering out the perfect combination of letters to "put him in his place." Understand this: if you combined all of the languages from every life form on every developed planet in an infinite number of universes, you would not be able to construct a single sentence that would accomplish this goal.

He's not after an argument. He's after your response. Any response. If you hit that "enter" button, he automatically wins.

Of course it should go without saying that you should never allow yourself to be the troll. Again, it's harder than it sounds. You'll get bored, you'll run into a community that doesn't accept you and you'll see yourself as the wacky Animal House fraternity to their Dean Wormer. You're not. You'll just be the guy who draws dicks on the walls of public bathrooms.

Make some friends, get some hobbies, do something that gets you the right kind of attention so you don't have to resort to being the stain some bored moderator has to clean up.


Read more: 5 Internet Life Lessons Parents Need to Start Teaching Kids | Cracked.com http://www.cracked.com/article_18861_5- ... z1YCUF7I8I