Dear trolls,

You know who you are. In fact, there’s a little bit of troll inside of all of us—that little monster that feeds on all the little frustrations in our lives; ignorance, unfairness, traffic jams. But when you get onto the world wide web, that monster is unleashed to wreak revenge upon the world.

I suppose there have always been trolls lurking in our world, under bridges and in toll booths, waiting for unsuspecting prey that can’t take a joke and takes itself too seriously. But when the Internet was born, you suddenly found a place to thrive.

What you do seems harmless. You intentionally type ignorant things to frustrate the knowledgeable. You punch in hate speech without context, just to get the masses riled up, and in doing so, prove there are people who don’t accept it.

And perhaps, in some ways, it is harmless. A little service to provide levity to the serious conversations that emerge from comment sections and online forums. A little self-service to alleviate the frustrations in your life.

But as you gleefully watch an intellectual debate on property rights or kitten behaviour spiral into a nonsensical mess of foul language and text-based screaming matches, please take a moment to consider some of the damage you’ve caused.

Slowly, one by one, we are seeing the online versions of newspapers and magazines close their comments sections. They are wary of your kind, and won’t or can’t spend the funds required to vanquish you by way of a live, full-time moderator.

These comments sections were a great new invention. The salons of the world, where people who would never meet in person could debate the ethical and philosophical dilemmas brought about by an article, or explain why they thought that superhero movie wasn’t nearly as bad as the reviewer made it out to be.

They were an opportunity for conversations to happen that could never have happened before.

And now, they’re closed. Those conversations are the figurative babies tossed when you sullied the metaphorical bathwater.

Sure, we can all migrate elsewhere, into the world of Facebook and Twitter, sharing links and discussing them with friends. We can hop on Reddit and hope there’s a sub/ that will meet our needs. But it’s just not the same. We can’t have a conversation there with strangers with no more connection than having read the same article.

I know this letter is making your fingers itch. You want to respond in some way that will make the author’s cheeks turn red, and make some hapless victim respond in defence, to which you will return a comment to make their cheeks pink as well. And fortunately, on wellingtontimes.ca, you can still have that exchange.

But consider instead, judiciously choosing where to carry out your trolling activities. The salons of this world no longer exist the way they once did. Don’t endanger their descendants. Instead, stick to YouTube. Most of us have already learned not to read the comments section there.

mihal@mihalzada.com