Trolls are not just pranksters on the margins. They are in replies, DMs, comments, and email inboxes, sharpening their knives for humiliation, baiting those with whom they disagree, and blurring the line between a joke and a threat.
In a 2006 story about the evolution of Wikipedia, the writer and historian Marshall Poe recounted the tactics of a prominent early user known as "The Cunctator," who spammed pages, left inflammatory comments, and baited co-founder Larry Sanger into a prolonged edit war.
Trolling is also a rhetorical strategy, and in that sense examples of it predate the internet. In a 2016 story titled "The First Troll," my colleague James Parker highlighted trollish echoes in the work of Thomas De Quincey.
De Quincey, early in his career, would lavish praise on his literary idols Wordsworth and Coleridge, but later turned on them, hurling insults about Wordsworth.
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