{"id":443,"date":"2008-08-06T06:10:59","date_gmt":"2008-08-06T10:10:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oddempire.org\/weblog\/?p=443"},"modified":"2008-08-06T06:10:59","modified_gmt":"2008-08-06T10:10:59","slug":"the-trolls-among-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oddempire.com\/weblog\/2008\/08\/06\/the-trolls-among-us\/","title":{"rendered":"The Trolls Among Us"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One afternoon in the spring of 2006, for reasons unknown to those who knew him, Mitchell Henderson, a seventh grader from Rochester, Minn., took a .22-caliber rifle down from a shelf in his parents\u2019 bedroom closet and shot himself in the head. The next morning, Mitchell\u2019s school assembled in the gym to begin mourning. His classmates created a virtual memorial on <a title=\"More articles about MySpace.com.\" href=\"http:\/\/topics.nytimes.com\/top\/news\/business\/companies\/myspace_com\/index.html?inline=nyt-org\">MySpace<\/a> and garlanded it with remembrances. One wrote that Mitchell was \u201can hero to take that shot, to leave us all behind. God do we wish we could take it back. . . . \u201d Someone e-mailed a clipping of Mitchell\u2019s newspaper obituary to <a href=\"http:\/\/mydeathspace.com\/\" target=\"_\">MyDeathSpace.com<\/a>, a Web site that links to the MySpace pages of the dead. From MyDeathSpace, Mitchell\u2019s page came to the attention of an Internet message board known as \/b\/ and the \u201ctrolls,\u201d as they have come to be called, who dwell there.<\/p>\n<p>\/b\/ is the designated \u201crandom\u201d board of <a href=\"http:\/\/4chan.org\/\" target=\"_\">4chan.org<\/a>, a group of message boards that draws more than 200 million page views a month. A post consists of an image and a few lines of text. Almost everyone posts as \u201canonymous.\u201d In effect, this makes \/b\/ a panopticon in reverse \u2014 nobody can see anybody, and everybody can claim to speak from the center. The anonymous denizens of 4chan\u2019s other boards \u2014 devoted to travel, fitness and several genres of pornography \u2014 refer to the \/b\/-dwellers as \u201c\/b\/tards.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Measured in terms of depravity, insularity and traffic-driven turnover, the culture of \/b\/ has little precedent. \/b\/ reads like the inside of a high-school bathroom stall, or an obscene telephone party line, or a blog with no posts and all comments filled with slang that you are too old to understand.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2008\/08\/03\/magazine\/03trolls-t.html?pagewanted=1&amp;_r=2&amp;th&amp;emc=th\">[[[MOER]]]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One afternoon in the spring of 2006, for reasons unknown to those who knew him, Mitchell Henderson, a seventh grader from Rochester, Minn., took a .22-caliber rifle down from a shelf in his parents\u2019 bedroom closet and shot himself in &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/oddempire.com\/weblog\/2008\/08\/06\/the-trolls-among-us\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","WB4WB4WP_MODE":"","WB4WP_PAGE_SCRIPTS":"","WB4WP_PAGE_STYLES":"","WB4WP_PAGE_FONTS":"","WB4WP_PAGE_HEADER":"","WB4WP_PAGE_FOOTER":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oddempire.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oddempire.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oddempire.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oddempire.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oddempire.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=443"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/oddempire.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oddempire.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oddempire.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oddempire.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}