Friday, August 31, 2007

Of Berserkers and Vacations

No, I'm not going on a vacation, so don't worry too much about a shortage of new Doggerel entries. I've just been wondering about some of the larger cycles of skeptical bloggers out there.

I've heard of bloggers who just get so angry, they can't deal with the daily stupidity of trolls and quit. Some of you may have taken a break from blogging. I get really foamy for a few comments and post a !fooW entry to cool down, thinking of humorous answers to various questions. I suspect I could sustain a rage for a while, inspiring many, many strongly worded posts about how vile, depressing, etcetera, all the woos I encounter are, but I'd rather not risk getting too angry for too long. Hence, I do the cool down phase with humor.

So, what do you do, and why?

11 comments:

Tom Foss said...

I get, um, mildly obsessive. There's something in my personality which compels me to debate even the most obnoxious of trolls, and I'll stick out the argument until the troll packs up and goes away, or until someone closes the thread. There have been times when I'd be up to all hours of the night, refreshing every few minutes, so I could respond to the newest bit of drivel in a message board thread or blog comments.

But, eventually the thread ends, and I usually take a day or two away from the Internets, especially if it was a particularly time-consuming argument. If it wasn't, I often find myself itching for someplace to continue the ranting.

My blogging hiatuses usually have more to do with a lack of things to say or a lack of time than with my frustration and anger.

Bronze Dog said...

Just posting a thought that's keeping me a little too warm at the moment: I'm growing ever more convinced that woo isn't just a logical or educational failing: It's a moral failing.

It's the moral failings that get me into the foamy berserker state: Knowing lies, apathism towards the harm it does to other people, defeatism in the face of problems that look solvable.

Shalini said...

The number of posts on my blog per day has gone strikingly down not due to anger with the many trolls that infest my site. It is simply due to a lack of time.

O'Brien said...

Unfortunately, my blog has very few readers at present (as measured by the total of zero comments; I don't know how to get direct statistics offhand), which is likely due to sabotage by Emmanuel Goldstein. I wish I had your problem with the trolls; trolls are readers, after all, and I'd very much like some readers. Not that I'm linkwhoring or anything (drat, just broke character).

TheBrummell said...

After a couple of 3-hour comment-and-post sessions in response to some trollish foolery a few months ago, I made a conscious decision not to engage in such again.

Getting pissed off at some annonymous person on teh intarwub is about the least productive thing I could do, and I'm already procrastinating wildly; I don't need more ways to not get things done. This is one of several reasons my own blog rarely treads in sceptical lands - the other main reasons have to do with the excellent job in that field already being done by others, a general lack of time to devote to blogging, and several others I can't think of right now.

Anyway, Illegitemum non carborundus. Or something.

Infophile said...

Personally, I don't get enough trolls at my blog to keep things interesting. I pretty much have to scour the Recent Comments bars of other blogs to find active ones, and even when I do, it seems other skeptics have gotten to them first. The end result is that I just don't spend much time dealing with trolls.

I do tend to take breaks from blogging sporadically, but it's generally for entirely different reasons. Most of the time, it's a simple lack of inspiration. Other times, it's because I'm working on a single huge post that takes up all the time I can spare for blogging, without you guys seeing anything from it until it's done.

Bronze Dog said...

For me, it kind of depends on the troll. Cocksnack, Wetspot, and the like are fun to worry(2b, 3b) to death.

It's largely the ones that type in real paragraphs, filled with not-quite-copy-pasted arguments that annoy me. They're intelligent enough to express thoughts in an organized manner, but too stupid/closed-minded/malicious to realize they've been ignoring all the arguments we've actually put forth.

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