For those venturing into any form of online discussion, “do not feed the trolls” (sometimes simply abbreviated to DNFTT) remains one of the oldest and best pieces of advice around.
In the pre-web days of the 1980s internet, “trolling” originally meant logging into online forums and posting deliberately naive or provocative questions, in order to bait people who didn’t realize they were being “trolled” into long, frustrating discussions.
Over time, online trolling came to refer to ever-worse behavior, and the use of trolls as a noun arose to describe anyone who maliciously attempted to sow digital dissent through their words. Hence the injunction not to “feed the trolls”—that is, not to respond to malicious provocation.
This latter sense of the word aligns it closely with its mythological Scandinavian namesake. The Old Norse term troll referred to a wide class of demons, monsters and malefactors, linked to an entire taxonomy of magic-wielding troll-women and others able to bewitch the hapless. There’s even a modern Swedish word, trolla, meaning “to charm or cast a spell upon.”
Despite these common resonances, however, the online term didn’t begin as an imitation of Nordic fiends. Rather, “trolling” can be traced back to the Old French verb troller, meaning to wander around aimlessly: a term that by around 1600 was being used in English to describe fishing from the back of a moving boat, and thus ranging freely across a body of water in the hope of attracting a bite.
By the late 1960s, this kind of trolling had extended its metaphorical reach to people wandering around in the hope of a sexual encounter. And it was this sense of a seemingly casual but in fact strategically targeted enticement that helped consolidate the use of trolling as a description of dubious online enticements.
Since then, the birth of the troll as an internet bogeyman has brought its other associations into play, and cartoon illustrations of vile “internet trolls” abound online. Inexorably, too, trolling’s intensification as a phenomenon has included a migration from the strictly amateur domain of mischief-makers to what’s sometimes known today as “professional trolling.”
A professional troll is someone who posts material online—from blogging or journalism to speeches and interviews—that’s expressly designed to provoke controversy and comment and to bait an audience into discussion.
It’s a habit that connects some modern trolling to another fishing-related metaphor on the darker side of the internet, link-baiting: using words, topics, arguments, and ideas on your website expressly in order to attract attention and to try to get other people to link to you. This can range from the crudest tactics (“sex!”) to more sophisticated attention-seeking arts (monitoring and then dropping the name of anything that happens to be trending on social media at a particular moment).
All this has also helped push the idea of trolling beyond strictly online activities, allowing the word increasingly to be used as a description of any form of cynical attention-baiting—from self-publicists on TV news deliberately courting controversy to authors making outrageous claims. Given the internet’s rise as the engine driving all other news and attention cycles, it perhaps shouldn’t be surprising that teaching the world to troll may prove one of its most enduring legacies.