What makes a Slashdot troll do it? What’s the motivation? I’m talking about the tech-savvy and bright troll here rather than just the pointlessly abusive troll. There’s an interesting discussion on Everything in Moderation in which a self-confessed troll explains some of his methods and motives.
One highlight:
“let me just say that, as a slashdot troll, i have a firewall which allows me to dynamically modify my o/s fingerprint, a highly adaptive cookie manager/poisoner that can decode many cookies in realtime (stop using urlencode!), a browser plugin that lets me modify my entire http header including user agent, a database-driven transparent proxy tracker which harvests new proxies 24/7, scripts to generate free email accounts by the 100’s, good web scripting skills, and on a good day around 500 moderation points on slashdot from over 1,000 monitored accounts.”