Simon Barnes, “multi-award winning Chief Sports Writer”, has written a humorous little piece about Trolls. It is found at Times Online. But what is humorous was the comments below the article as people tried to define what is a troll.

The strange behaviour of my blog trolls

Er, trolls? And he explained. You, dear reader, no doubt infinitely more assured and knowledgable about the internet than I am, will doubtless already be aware of the term for those people who specialise in posting mocking, sneering, cynical and hideously negative remarks.

It’s an aspect of the medium, I suppose, though not the most useful. But it’s one of the facts of life: if you write for your living, you are going to find yourself coming up against sneerers and mockers every now and then.

Now I am lucky in that plenty of people have said nice things about my stuff from time to time: thanks to all who have, because it’s mightily cheering.

But I have also attracted a fair number of mockers and sneerers of a curiously relentless kind. And frankly, between you and me, I find it rather tedious. Naturally, every one is entitled to disagree with me. Any one is free to dislike what I write. But the act of sneering is another thing altogether.

I confess I find it rather disturbing: that people turn destructive energy in my direction. (Proper famous people obviously get this a million times worse.) In my case, I suppose the problem is that some people can’t come to terms with the idea that intelligent people like sport, and might want to read someone who tries to write about sport in an intelligent way. My attempts to do so have met with a bewildering hostility in some quarters.

Different writers have different ways of dealing with the inevitability of mockery. Mine is to shut my eyes and my mind to it all and pretend that the sneerers don’t exist. That way I can get on the job of writing the way I see it. Sneering letters get torn in half at the first sneer, sneering magazines go unread, and as for trolls: how blessed I am never to have heard of them.
 

But what I found amusing was the various comments of the readers below. Continue reading the article HERE.

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