Trollonomics

Kottu has seen an increase in 'trolls' of late. At least, iv not seen as many trolls as we seem to have around right now. And by trolls i mean those whose main activity is to take the piss out of other people. First there was the Maharajah, then the tweets of YourBlogSucks and now apparently the self-proclaimed 'infamous' Padashow seems to have made a reappearance.

Style wise they differ. The Maharajah is more laid back and tries to project an air of bored indifference, probably hard to keep up and has something to do with the low volume of his output. YourBlogSucks and Padashow follow a similar pattern of direct insults and mass writings trashing things left right and center. YBS is on twitter exclusively, while Padashow seems to have revived his trolldom on twitter and re-embraced his old blog on wordpress. Even the Maharajah seems to have diversified his portfolio and is tweeting away, albeit at a rather slower pace. Also worth a mention is Podipada, probably a groupie off-shoot of Padashow trying to capitalize on the brand. Or maybe Padashow is also diversifying.

Some bloggers just blog for the fuck of it, others just want to get their views across to whoever might be interested, but trolls are specifically in it for the buzz. They need the thrill of controversy, they revel in being the centre of attention and will continue trolling until attention wanes and people drift away or until a conscience materializes and they feels sorry for thieir sins so to speak, given the unlikely prospect of the latter though, we can safely conclude that the chief motivator of a troll is 'attention' and that attention will figure higher on a trolls list of motivators than it will on other bloggers'. It doesn't have to be 'good' attention. 'Good' and 'bad' are merely subjective terms and no one knows this better than a troll who revels in unscrupulousness.

Therefore we can conclude that there is a reason for the existence of trolls in the 'lankanosphere' (term again coined by RD I think) and that is attention. There must be a 'need' for their existence, and that 'need' is the need of the rest of the blogsphere for whatever services a troll may offer, which are highly speculative, but interesting to mull over.

Disclaimer - deductions arrived solely based on reasoning based on observation and the general principle of supply and demand.