troll Generally annoying people on the internet, whose primary motivation is to cause disruption, distress or anger. The name comes from the grumpy and chaos-loving character from folklore and fantasy. Trolls typically have no interest in the topic or thread under which they are posting. The usual advice when encountering trolls is to ignore and/or block them, but this is sometimes not an easy solution. When unleashed within a forum, stream or mailing list trolls can quickly cause enough dissarray to destroy communities which took years to build and as such they should be recognized as an existential threat to software projects if they're not quickly dealt with. Hired trolls may also be used for political purposes by governments or corporations to disrupt rival organisations and spread fear, uncertainty and doubt. Also see shitposting.