Do not feed the troll.

Just spotted some ignorant trolling from a columnist, sorry "blogger", on a Mainstream IT Media web site. Nothing special, just the usual nonsense you get when you take an article from someone who hasn't looked up the necessary info, or asked someone. The kind of stuff that makes you skip the comments on sites that don't have a comment scoring system.

Linux people tend to look up and understand technical issues, and even legal ones such as the differences between patent, copyright, and trademark. If you've been reading Linux sites and software licenses for a while, you pick up the basics. And magazines don't hire fact checkers any more, and if a magazine pays a columnist less, doesn't edit his work, and calls it a "blog" they can hold it to a lower standard of quality anyway.

The latest trend in the IT Media is trolling as business model. In the old days, trolling was a hobby. How many users of newsgroup or other forum could you draw into a pointless argument? But when a participant in an argument is either (1) visiting a comment form and seeing an ad, or (2) linking in to a blog post and giving you some Google Juice, then trolling becomes a business.

Why sell one set of ads on a piece of accurate content when you could sell an ad on the troll content, an ad on the comment form, and another ad back on the same content with the comment? Turn up the ignorance and watch the hits roll in.

After all, when a publication runs something flat-out ignorant, the stick-your-hand-up-in-class instinct bites and you have to post a comment correcting it.

Please. Do not feed the troll. Comment forms equal hits and money. If you must respond, email the publication's editor (be sure to put in "NOT FOR PUBLICATION") and post your comments—use "nofollow" links if you choose to link—on your own blog or on a competing site. The Mainstream IT Media is becoming more and more driven by raw traffic numbers, and as editors see good results from trolling, they'll tend to rely on it more.

Now here's one for the editors out there. If you start cutting out even the basic bullshit filter for site content, what's the difference between an IT media site and a regular community chat site? Probably just that the community chat site has better comment moderation. And what happens when the advertisers figure that out? Why pay media site rates to put your ads on Joe Troll's blog when you could just advertise on freeblogs4trolls.com?

No match for "FREEBLOGS4TROLLS.COM".