Kdogg’s Stance: Trolls

Trolling: The art of deliberately, cleverly, and secretly pissing people off.  A Troll who just uses rude, vulgar language as their means of trolling, is just a low level troll.  They are trolling, just not very good at it.  I do not consider spamming your twitch, website or anything else as trolling, it is just lame and pathetic.  Trolling requires deceiving.  If your victim knows you are trolling or you are just swearing or insulting, then you’re an unsuccessful, low level troll.

–kDoGG3n4

 

Why do people troll?  From my experience, trolls troll for several reasons. But whatever the reason is, the root purpose is always the same: they want attention. A troll wants to hijack your stream.  They want the focus placed on them.

What should you do when you are being trolled?  The majority of the people just ignore/ban the troll.  Nip it in the bud and BOOM you do not have to deal with it.

That is not how I deal with trolls.Troll-face-problem I handle them in a different way. Consider this: you may be able to turn that troll into a regular viewer in your stream.

This is how I handle trolls: embrace them, love them, and caress them.  Give them the attention they so badly crave.  Kill them with kindness.  They are mice and I bat them around like a cat.  In my mind, a troll is a viewer that is helping keep my chat active.

Here are some of my favorite techniques for embracing trolls:

  •      Keep them talking. They will quickly run out of stuff to say.
  •      Counter-Troll.
  •      Do not ever let them piss you off.
  •      Purge or timeout, but never ban*.  Banned trolls might not come back.

* I will ban a troll if they are insulting my Mods or other viewers.  Troll me all you want, but I do not stand for trolling of my other viewers.

I do not let my trolls get to me, EVER.  I just bat them around and play with them.

My way of handing trolls and being trolled has been successful for me. I remember my first troll like it was yesterday.

I was on the XB1 playing really badly at COD:Ghosts and someone named Hexidecimals was playing against me.  He showed up into the stream to watch my “strats”.  Well after he beat my team, he started talking all this crap about how we are no good, my stream is no good, etc.

I kept him in the chat.  I kept him talking.  I did not ban him.  Trolls are viewers.  Trolls are chatters and trolls fire me up, and that in turn makes my stream better.

troll4
At the time, I did not have any philosophy about trolls. I did not think to myself, “this is how I will deal with people like this”.  Instead, I thought, “I had nobody in the chat before, but now I do!  Now I have someone to talk to, so why ban him? Then I will be all by myself again.”

The smaller your audience, the more important any follower/viewer is. I would rather have a lot of trolls than no viewers at all.  Remember that as your stream grows, you will encounter more trolls. How will YOU handle them?
 
 
If you have your own input on how to handle trolls, I am happy to discuss it with you guys on my stream or #GSCLateNight.  One final message to all of my favorite trolls:

Thank you for popping into my stream, and thank you for being interactive! I cannot wait to hear from you guys/girls again!
 
 
kDoGG3n4
Director of Hype
GSC