Something occurred to me the other day: flaming and trolling are the equivalent of griefing in the context of message boards, blogs, USENET groups, etc.
The objective of a message board is productive discussion of whatever the board's topic is. Flaming and trolling subvert that purpose by abuse of the "game mechanic", i.e. posting to the message board. If the victim replies, he or she is just contributing to the problem, lowering the signal to noise ratio further... and flaming and trolling "negatively impact the game play of another person".
I wonder whether anyone's compared flamers and trolls with griefers. Griefers rationalize their behavior: supposedly they're on a mission to keep people from taking themselves too seriously. Trolls are purely interested in destruction. Flamers, on the other hand, might see themselves as having a mission as well. One can certainly come up with examples of that.
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