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it's not so bad as it seems, but mostly because everyone who goes there is a troll so it's all good times and comradeship, and jokes, all sorts of messed up jokes.

Actually, that's mostly /b/, which is 4chan's equivalent of the Chatterbox, but with more porn. Yes, I go there. There are some totally worksafe image boards and some respectable regulars who post quality images. Most of the website is dedicated to peaceful image exchange, with spamming only on occasion (like when somebody posts male porn in /s/, which is dedicated to posting images of women.) Not every 4channer is a spammer, and not every 4chan board is a spam board. The majority of users is less than intelligent, in my opinion, but far from malicious.

Now, let me present an anecdote for the analysis of the guild. Since I don't know any trolls in real life, I cannot analyse their psychology as well as I might, but I think that I might have encountered the type of person who does this the other day. I was riding my bicycle home and was almost to an intersection. A car across the way and about to turn had its window rolled down and the driver (a guy of about my age and definitely between the ages of 18 and 25) was looking excitedly between me and the girl in the passenger seat (at least, I percieved this in the small span of time I had to watch; the sun was shining brightly and I had a clear view of the car.) As the car turned, he leaned his head out the window and began to yell at me. I could not understand the words, but I think I heard "f**" in there. I do know that I don't recognize him, so perhaps he was yelling at me for riding my bike (the city in which I live is notorious for being a den of autophiles. Some of them yell at anybody riding a bike, as a few people I know, as well as myself, can attest to.)

Perhaps this person was one of the same people who troll in ED and the more respectable 4chan fora. Perhaps it's linked to their personalities, or the environment in which they grew up. Perhaps they're jealous of us being able to have peaceful, intellectual discourse and image trading and saving all of this money on gasoline simply because we're slightly less lazy than other people. Maybe they miss the halcyon days of school, when they could use force to get their way, and now they are utterly powerless to stop people from being intelligent, or happy, or environmentally-friendly.

So perhaps Internet trolls would make a good subject for a doctoral thesis.

I dunno, I think that spammers are older than that. I've always imagined them being at least highschool age. When I was in fifth grade, I didn't use the internet, except for feeding my darling neopet. (Good times. xd )

I think the majority of all spammers are just attention-deprived, high school age people who aren't young enough to be innocent, but aren't old enough to be too mature for spamming.

we have 20-somethings here who vandalize playgrounds and churches.

some of them have family who are injured by these attacks! but that seems to make them enjoy it all the more.

to me, the things uyou mention are just a form of vandalism.

Not all of the spammers are just kids being stupid. I swear, there are professional spammers that go out of their ways to constantly spam up the ED to make people mad. They even have different avatars to do it, too. I suppose they have a lot of time on their hands that they decide to waste on trying to tick people off over the internet.

It makes me wanna smack a... well, you know.

how about college sophmore with a 3.0 in political science? it'd be higher but i suck at math and spanish

rofl
i have very good grades, am relatively popular (liked by a reasonably large crowd) and i can spell quite adequately, it's just when you're trolling, you want to respond to as many people as possible, so you don't have time to do grammar checks.
you're speed typing so fast that you don't catch the errors, also i chicken pick