Originally posted by Guest
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Come on, fellow trolls! Have some pride in your trollcraft. Bernie's way too easy. Tryouts are over. We have to be better than this! -
[QUOTE=Guest;n4632800 ... posts with some thought behind them that suggests that someone actually has a kid playing soccer, has a board or administrative role, or knows what's happening on an actual pitch somewhere ...
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Monday afternoon, there appeared to be some "authentic posters" (as defined above) back on this chatboard, intermixed with some trollposts. Tuesday morning looked like dueling trolls, suggesting that there's more than one.Comment
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The huge drop in authentic posts in the few days after tryouts, leaving only the trollposts, provided a clear view of the prevalence of trolling activity on this forum. It's impossible to say how many trolls there are; the troll (or trolls, likely more than one) are pretty good at their trollcraft. They have been monitoring long enough to have developed a good working knowledge of the local soccer landscape, fill in the gaps in their knowledge from online sources, and are using a mix of posting styles. Their strategies of resurrecting old posts and creating new threads based on content found by searching the web seems to have worked, getting authentic posters who are actually involved in real-world youth soccer re-engaged. With the posting activity getting back to normal, they'll be able to blend in better in this anonymous forum. Spotting them in the old Washington Premier Soccer forum was easier.
A quick re-cap of the thinking around trolls: Trolls feel powerless in their own lives, and trolling online gives them the sense of power over others that they lack in the real world. The troll's goal is not to share information, make a point, or win an argument; the goal is to get others to post and the more emotional the response, the more reward the troll feels. Therefore, the best way to deal with a troll is to not feed it, however, this is easy to say but impossible to do, especially on an anonymous forum. Someone is always going to respond and give the troll what it craves. Another tip for dealing with trolls is to not respond directly, but indirectly by talking about the troll. Trolls hate this, because it takes their power away.
The trolls are never going to go away, they NEED to troll. So, be skeptical, especially when someone comes back with an in-your-face post to goad you into a response. This forum is toxic enough, even without the trolls taking advantage of authentic posters' passions for their kids and the game. To the authentic posters who are actually involved with the game in the real world and turn to this forum to share experiences and seek information, good luck; you'll need it.
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Replace the s with a f and ers with the word heads then it’s perfectOriginally posted by Guest View PostComment
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I'm involved in youth soccer and I'm trolling the poop out of this forum. I post on so many threads as soany different people I'm practically trolling myself half the time.Comment
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Apologies. Next time, I'll have a few drinks first, work myself into a pissed-off rage, then walk the deranged pit bull with the leash and cellphone in one hand while I use the other to post from the phone. Cellphone spellcheck language option will be set to "lame troll".Originally posted by Guest View PostComment
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The drop in postings over Memorial Weekend with the majority of soccer families focused on other things provided an opportunity to sniff out what's been going on with this forum. It appears there is a set of posters, perhaps four or five, who post just to amuse themselves. It's unclear whether they have real-world involvement with youth soccer but the vast majority of posts over the long weekend could have been posted by anyone who reads this forum closely and/or has the time to gather information from online sources. Only a few handfuls of posts over the long weekend have suggested actual knowledge of things that are happening on the ground and are authentic. Since these posters rely a fresh supply of authentic posts that they can play off of, they resorted to digging up old threads and seeding new baitposts with stuff they found online, trying to get some real soccer parents to post. A few did take the bait.
They're injecting fiction into the forum. They sometimes pose as actual parents and adopt contrarian positions, and keep threads going with lame commentary. Moreover, because they're doing it for their own amusement, they have no problem just making stuff up or assassinating the character of someone they've never met. Their activity explains the unrealistic longevity of a few of the threads here. It also explains some of the over-the-top vitriol and repetitiveness of the Titans/Gunners postings; they undoubtedly got involved and amplified it several times over.
On Memorial Day and on into Tuesday after, with soccer families returning from whatever they were doing, the number of authentic posts has ticked up and with it, some of the nastiness. When authentic posters are talking about youth soccer in the real world, these posters will still be here, injecting their fictional background noise into this forum. These posters are posers, taking advantage of real-world soccer parents for their own online amusement and making it difficult to tell fact from fiction here.
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An interesting observation is that this activity is unique to the Washington sub-forum. Other active sub-forums (MA, NJ, FL, OR) have not seen a spike in activity with many old posts getting bumped.Comment
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"They're injecting fiction into the forum. They sometimes pose as actual parents and adopt contrarian positions, and keep threads going with lame commentary. Moreover, because they're doing it for their own amusement, they have no problem just making stuff up or assassinating the character of someone they've never met. Their activity explains the unrealistic longevity of a few of the threads here."
I want to make sure that I understand your hypothesis. Are you arguing that someone or someones are so board that they’ve happened upon a board in soccer and though they’re not involved in the sport, they’re feigning involvement and making false statements about administrators and coaches for entertainment without any context?
In general, this new turn seems like a psychological trap to move posters to authenticate themselves, but this thesis, in particular, might be true for superficial jousting but not for more penetrating observations or critiques.
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90% of the activity was just that, superficial jousting. And agree, it seems farfetched that someone would be that bored, unless they had some involvement in soccer. I thought that the Club America Cup postings were interesting, one or more of the active posters were looking at the results online but none of the posts suggested that someone was actually there, except for one comment that I couldn't imagine a team parent posting online. And that thread got the usual barrage of short, hit-and-run postings. And agree on penetrating observations or critiques, we can tell the difference when someone actually puts some thought to a post or provides additional information that seems credible. In the end, if folks just apply the sniff tester and ask "Wait, is information for real? "Is this poster for real or just trolling us?" before responding to a post, the time I spent observing and reporting was worth it.Originally posted by Guest View PostComment
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At some level, that’s the point, I think. Boredom is a factor.Originally posted by Guest View Post
The other thing that’s becoming apparent is that crossfire uses this form to promote their superiority and dominance. Every chance they get. It’s primarily focused on crossfire
The problem is that there’s no credible metric or rubric for assessing clubs. Not all parents or players have similar goals and there’s nuances to some of the information that they promote that you can’t perceive unless you’re intimately involved. In this world, and in these clubs for a longer duration of time. By the time you start putting the pieces together, it’s over. Hopefully, with the least amount of collateral damage.
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Doubt that any club, at any formal level, has staff resources devoted to posting to this chatboard. The posts are written by rank-and-file club supporters, operating independently.Originally posted by Guest View Post
Reason being that from a communications execution standpoint, this channel is too unpredictable. Too many trolls, too much reflexive counterposting. You can't control the narrative. You can't develop a social media strategy because if you put something out there, you then spend all your time dealing with the reactions to it. Better to focus the resources on the mainstream social media channels that let you get your message out, as opposed to this one which is about getting your message shredded by people with axes to grind.
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The four-day July 4 weekend which was a soccer-free weekend for most saw the usual drop in posting traffic. July 4 was all sh*tposting with lame comebacks to existing threads. One of the days, I think it was Friday, there were something like three posts, total. Sunday morning, someone sh*tposted and bumped 20 threads, some old and some more recent, in about an hour and after that, the sh*tposters returned.
New theory: The sh*tposters aren't parents, they're high school kids with time on their hands. They know the soccer scene well enough, but they're not out to communicate fact. They post to amuse themselves. The sophomoric humor in many of the posts bears that out, and in many of the threads they come across as suburban pubescents and post-pubescents playing a lame version of the dozens. They'll also assume or outright claim the guise of a parent, or a coach, or a club admin, or conversely, "out" people by claiming to identify who posted something. And while, amid the noise, a few of the posts on this forum started out based in some kind of fact, the sh*tposters will pick it up, run with it and amplify it with so much make-believe that so it's no longer possible to separate fact from fiction. They have no problem posting racist remarks, attacking individuals, and posting made-up sh*t about people they're probably never even met. Aside from the racist stuff and personal attacks, there's nothing wrong with kids using Talking Soccer to entertain themselves. It's an unmoderated chatboard with no rules and they can use it however they want. But just as one can't assume everything posted here is factual, one cannot also assume that the posters here are parents or other adults.
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