Anyone ever heard of people who hired themselves out to forum owners as professional trolls to increase the traffic, and therefore the advertising revenue of the site? The reason I ask is because its seems clear that even most well behaved members show up for the troll circus as their first or second reason for attendance. I have over 4000 posts on a guitar forum for example, which decided a year ago to mop up the troll situation on their site...and lo and behold, there were some unintended consequences. Blowback! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Roughly a third of the 'good' members stopped showing up...they just up and left!
Netvocate was a company doing exactly that, hiring people to troll forums, but it appears their website is no longer active. They wanted the individual to create at least 50-100 userids and post at least 5 per hour.
People pay me NOT to post on their site to increase traffic. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
So I'm wondering what kind of salary our own resident trolls should be pulling in? Merely causing trouble is not sufficient to the task at hand...one must also be entertaining. There are two types: The Crazies...who do nothing but come up with bizarre ideas, but who are otherwise inoffensive. The Malicious...whos trolling is primarily various modes of attack, disguised with some measure of insightful commentary to make it less obvious. I believe the crazies like OilisMastery, Duendy, MattMarr and Sandy are far more entertaining and bring in more advertising dollars by far.
It makes me think of the Sicilians hiring professional mouners to up the sadness response at funerals.
To me it makes more sense to pay to have women come to a forum. Or at least people who say they are women.
They keep it entertaining - they keep post count up - they create scandals that keep people posting - they increase traffic, which helps ad revenue.
And here I thought my 10.00 per month payment was done by everyone, I'm flabbergasted! I'm going to talk to Spurious Monkey why he told me to send him that money to begin with now. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
