So the recent revelation that the serial killer RL was an unusually involved troll has got me thinking. What's wrong with these people's brains?
There's a subset of people on the internet who seem to take great pleasure in trying to invoke negative emotions in others. I've always found this kind of thing outside my comprehension, and it's not for lack of trying. From Goonsswarm in EVE whose stated goal is something along the lines of "We're not here to destroy the game, we're here to destroy your game." or something along those lines to this SKRL thing I often wonder what kind of mental problems could cause someone to expend such effort just to get a negative emotional response from people.
A) You're confusing trolling and griefing, and B) that's EVE, everyone who's not a lowly carebear plays for more or less the same reason (I also seem to remember the modern goonswarm being no different from any other major power (and something yet more recent about goonswarm collapsing, but I hardly follow the politics of EVE so I don't know any details)).
Of course, a lot of people broaden "troll" to include everything from "generic prankster" to "griefer" to "anyone who disagrees with me". For the sake of brevity, I'll only talk about actual trolls here. (Despite the fact that you're talking about, specifically, a prankster and griefers...
)
In my view, it's generally a positive thing (even moreso because people also like to include "lighthearted bullshitting" in the definition of trolling) that usually serves to punish people who are highly opinionated, naive, and overly sensitive by causing them stress and wasting their time. And then there's the mass wrath enacted against particularly
loathsome and
anti-social individuals, although that stretches the bounds of "trolling", being more an example of "mob justice" in a modern form.
Oh now this bastard is saying that Bay12 unfairly bans people, lets put his head on a pike.
Well, there was Neruz, who got banned for getting flamed by the Archfiend Pathos... And a friend of mine who got permabanned without a word for linking to a torrent of some shitty audiobook (oddly enough, same person I got in a drunken fight over a couch with last saturday, and whom I haven't spoken to since, because he's acting like a child and holding a grudge over a drunken scuffle he started and eventually won when I got sick of trying to injure him into getting off me and went outside, and which put no one in the hospital).