Alan Is Good

According to the Rolling Stone and other entertainment news sources, Trent Reznor threw in the Twitter towel last week.  A few weeks ago I wrote about the ongoing trolling by Twitter users from across various message boards and forums.  Reznor said he was going to use Twitter solely to announce news and tour dates, but the @ reply trolling didn’t calm down, and succeeded in frustrating him further.

I’m truly surprised at the number and intensity of anti-Reznor blog posts and comments.  It seems like every time someone posts that “Reznor is God,” a troll is born.  Even though I disagree subjectively with a lot of the angles, I respect this post written by AndreaUrbanFox, which fully details and maps out the Reznor vs. anti-Reznor trolls saga.

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(A good video to play/listen to while you read this)

Bite The Hand That Tweets

Nine Inch Nails vocalist Trent Reznor explains in a recent message board post that he’s done with online communities and social networks due to a large amount of negativity and trolling directed toward him.  Apparently there was an unmanageable amount of hateful comments and replies posted to Reznor on NIN.com and Twitter that set him off and resulted in his Twitter ‘vow of silence.’

Reznor explains, “The problem with really getting engaged in a community is getting through the clutter and noise. In a closed environment like nin.com a lot of this can be moderated away, or code can be implemented to make it more difficult for troublemakers to persist. It’s tedious and feels like wasted energy doing that shit, but some people exist to ruin it for others – and they are the ones who have nothing better to do with their time.”

While the moderators of the NIN boards were doing a good job deterring trolls and hateful posts, it’s the nature of the troll to circumvent and persist despite active policing.  Nine times out of ten, if you ask an internet troll, “Why?” the response is, “To waste someone else’s time.”  Sad, but true.

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