Trolling as a tool of community management

Fight is a sign of life

The following is a very concise account of the vision that I acquired during my many years of communication with the community of multiplayer games - perhaps the most capricious, uncontrollable, and interesting communities of the entire history of the World Wide Web.

It so happened that the meaning of the phrase “Internet community” I felt in my own way back in 2002, when I discovered the famous browser project “Fight Club”. Poor by the standards of the time, the game process was more than compensated by the fact that any action in the game led to a conflict of interests of users. And only then did communication begin. For the sake of this, people returned to the project again and again. And therefore, the chat was the cornerstone, and the moderator “silence” was a very severe punishment.

Now, nothing has changed in this regard. Communication on the Internet has moved from chat rooms to social networks and forums. And conflicts are still the generator of the much-needed and desired phenomenon. And the struggle in the community is a sign of his life, his pulse.

Involuntarily trolls and cheap Chinese fakes

Since even the most inexperienced user can visit the Wikipedia page and read what trolling is, everyone has a chance to become a troll. To do this, in the midst of a discussion, it’s enough just not to go beyond the bounds of decency and write a well-reasoned and articulate post, putting your opponent in a logical dead end. Why is this statement true? Because no one likes to lose arguments. And one who will be right too often will inevitably become the owner of the green ticket. And if the user often touches on topical issues and cuts the truth-uterus without embellishment, then he is guaranteed to earn the dislike of the majority. After all, the truth is usually ugly.

Modern users are so used to trolls that they feel a lack of troublemakers. Therefore, if they are not on your resource, users will come up with them themselves and hang a green label on the most lousy sheep in the herd. Or even a shepherd.

The irony is that many users are happy to call themselves trolls. At some point, the word “troll” became prestigious. But do not worry; when silence calls itself by name, it will contradict its essence. So the vulgar and rude, primitive and narcissistic comrades, who are frankly proud of what they are called trolls, are not dangerous, because they voluntarily take the position of semi-outcasts. And it is right.

Jedi will not pass

For the most part, the community considers trolls to be negative figures. However, do not lose sight of the fact that a negative figure is primarily a figure. What would Star Wars be without such vivid representatives of universal absolute evil like Darth Vader and Jabba the Hut? The question is rhetorical.

Every time interesting content appears on the site, people will wait for the reaction of the local Vader. They know: as soon as HE arrives, a freak show will begin, which will help them pass the hour or two of working time. And the behavior of such a troll will largely determine the community's attitude to content. After all, people on the Internet have always craved spectacles, leaving bread for their green brothers to eat.

The dark side of the force or a new era of community management

Achilles heel of any community manager - corporate policy. With luck, this thing ties only one arm to the hero of the front office. In other cases, not only both hands are connected, but also eyes, ears, and the mouth is shut up. And the community manager, this layer between customers and the company, becomes completely useless, becoming like a bot broadcasting to the masses faceless and dull messages starting with the words “Dear users! Please be advised that ... ".

In these situations, only one thing is good: many community managers are not disturbed by the limitations mentioned above, because they are armless, blind, deaf and cannot connect two words initially. But these will not be able to take advantage of the method described below. Therefore, we will continue to talk about those KM-s who are something of themselves, and who are seriously limited in their ability to influence their wards officially. For them, the only way to cope with other situations is to use the dark side of the force.

In fact, this is nothing fundamentally new. Firstly, every sane community manager has alternative accounts. And secondly, Trout wrote about such a thing as an attack on himself. All we have to do is become a prominent troll of our own community. Become a black queen and one of the leaders of the community. And where the manager will be forced to give up because of the rules of communicating with customers or because he is a “sneaky admin”, the troll will lead the masses along and will be able to direct the negative energy of popular anger in the right direction.

And then everything is like in the Lucas universe: once having embarked on the Dark Path, your CM will hardly want to give up the benefits that he will receive. He will no longer need buttons, silence, and moderators recruited from the people - these comrades, on the contrary, will become an obstacle, because you can’t share an insider about the origin of the troll with them at all (and if your volunteers can watch IP users, this function will need disable). Alas, moderators consider trolls to be direct competitors in pursuit of forum glory.

In the end, the good old tactic of “Good and Evil Cop” only works when you control both cops.

From theory to practice: why troll yourself is necessary

I was engaged in community management in two companies - in IT Territory in 2006 and most recently in Game Insight. And I did it according to the strategy described above. The main plus is that no one can harm you more than you yourself. In addition, you and your battle trolls are not only community content generators, it’s also an extra line of defense when unwanted users come to visit you.

Remember: the user can always tell the community something that the representative of the administration can never afford to say. And imagine what will happen if the community starts promoting the troll as a moderator or as a representative of its interests? This I once achieved. What could be more useful than a phenomenon when people want to make an administrator undercover their trustee?

From theory to practice: why not trolling yourself is dangerous

If you do not troll your own resource and your users, someone else does it. If this happens in an organized way, then everything can end very badly.

In my practice there was an indicative episode. In 2008, together with one comrade, we joined forces and organized opposition to the administration of a certain project. The goal is to rid the community of abusive employees. The measures that were taken against us and our many supporters are bans and moderation of posts (an attempt to hide the problem). Countermeasures on our part are the creation of an independent resource on which all collected evidence of abuse was published. As a result, our activity was the last straw and overflowed the patience of top management. After the dismissal of the head of the support service, our campaign achieved its goals.

Now imagine what damage negative figures and opinion leaders are capable of doing and what risks they may pose to your reputation if you, of course, do not control them. In the mentioned case, we fought for a just cause. But for a company’s image, both a lie and a truth can be a comparable danger if this information is not presented to the community in the way you need it. Therefore, everything could have been different if the place of the key negative figure had been taken by his person.

Thank you for attention. See you online.