On Mon, 10 May 2004 19:01:58 UTC, Mark Richards marich712000@yahoo.com wrote:
As far as I can see, this is an attempt by an advocacy group to get their point of view to dominate certain articles - my understanding was that we were using the term 'troll' to mean users who post to deliberately stir up controversy.
[for its own sake. -- my addition]
We were; and that was the meaning when it was first used in newsgroups.
http://develop.consumerium.org/wiki/index.php/Driven_off_by_trolls
In applying the term to Larry Flynt's disreputable political move (I take no stance on whether it was a _bad_ political move) is helping to take away the meaning of a useful word; cf. hacker.