Hello Reddit. I have a confession to make. I am a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Fordham University. But you may already know me as one-half of the account known as BAD_SEXUAL_COMMENT, in all its forms and variations. About four months ago, I was approached by a friend with questions about trolls, and their function as part of an internet community. I was intrigued, and so we discussed the issue at some length.

I already know that due to this account's reputation, the legitimacy of this post will be called into question. I have provided two pictures of proof, here

and here

. In the end, it is probably not particularly meaningful whether or not you believe me, so I will let my data and hypothesis speak for themselves.

My friend had originally asked me if he knew of any strategies to keep trolls from invading his subreddit, so I proposed a sort of "catch and release" program, where trolls would be allowed to operate freely, but their posts would be able to be clearly identified as disingenuous if the need ever arose. Since then, I have been taking notes on my observations about how trolls affect the reddit community at large.

NOTE: From here on out, 'BSC' will refer to the troll, not to myself. Although I did participate in some of the games.

As part of my research (strictly out of curiosity at this point) I was introduced to the real man behing the troll that is BSC. If anyone is interested in his side of the story, I leave him free to tell it. Know that he won't take it as an insult when I call him a borderline sociopath. He takes pride in it.

Now that I had a plan and a willing participant with an extensive experience (half of it pestering me for "tit pics") I began work on what would become my thesis.

Throughout our games, it quickly became apparent the Evolutionary Game Theory

model fit almost every aspect of our experiment. Reddit is a diverse and growing community whose base commodity is attention, usually recognized with upvotes and replies. This resource can be measured in time absorbed, and is not infinite, but for the purposes of this research it will be measured using replies, upvotes, and community action. Anthropologically speaking, there are many aspects of group behavior dynamics that allowed us to gain far more attention than a group so small deserved based on its size alone.

Some facts and stats. Some of them are rough estimates, and I am waiting on confirmation from a few subreddit moderators to confirm their accuracy:

Game of Trolls = GoT

Number of total trolls active between creation and banning - 40

Average number of trolls active at any given time - 18

Number of freelance trolls who posted games in GoT - 132

Number of trolls in on the experiment - 4 (myself, BSC, a psych major friend of mine and another troll who we confided in that knew the ins and outs of Reddit)

Number of games played (not all published) - 447

Number of mentions in Reddit (not including the word "GoT" which we became known by) - 27,980

Including "GoT" we estimate somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 mentions

Number of times people called unaffiliated trolls or non-trolls GoT trolls - 1,987 threads (number is probably much higher)

Number of times GoT took credit for other trolls work - 62

Number of times GoT denied credit for trolling they did - 55

Number of unique visits in June - 73,860

Number of unique visits in July - over 100,000 by day of banning

Highest number of subscribers - 4,702 at time of banning

Most successful trolls in terms of readership/attention - SisterofBlackVisions and BlueJay

Number of non-GoT trolls banned from subs for being accused of being GoT - 102

Median age of GoT troll (from those who answered) - 27

Number of trolls to go rogue - 14

Threads created on other subs warning of GoT trolls just by posting * their sub on GoT - 48

Largest - /r/LucidDreaming 1,238 up votes - highest volume - /r/Portland - 16

Once GoT fairly established it became evident that we were on a suicide mission with that sub. The amount of attention that we were getting, mostly negative, was soaring out of our control by the beginning of July. Our plan was to inch along further into extremism, constantly excalating the levels of hostility and level of offensivness.

The point was never to game or troll a sub then hide, it was always to bring attention back to the sub. During the first five weeks we gamed AskReddit and IAMA multiple times. At this point, the focus was simply to attract readers to become emotionally invested in a story before changing direction to become a very offensive/shocking troll fest. In smaller subs, we would identify an element likely to provoke an emotional response, and create games that spanned several threads. The reactions between each subreddit were quite different.

In larger subreddits, such as AskReddit and IAmA, moderators had a tendency to overreact, removing not only troll posts, but many other legitimate posts as well. In smaller subs, users tended to consolidate based on their familiarity with the other users, and shun any outsiders, whether they were affiliated with the subreddit or not.

LucidDreaming and Portland both worked themselves into an uproar over nothing more than a carefully placed "bounty post," calling out any posts that variated too far from the norm. Skepticism, cynicism and paranoia abounded at only a mention of trolling in most smaller subreddits.

In the interest of keeping this post short and to the point, I'll try to wrap this up.

Here is a quick, basic quote from Wikipedia that I found particularly poignant in light of these events:

"The key point in the Evolutionary Game Theory model is that the success of a strategy is not just determined by how good the strategy is in itself, it is a question on how good the strategy is in the presence of other alternative strategies, and on the frequency that other strategies are employed within a competing population."

I assert that in a study of group behavioral dynamics in terms of interactive epistemology, Game Theory is demonstrably applicable to the field of Anthropology. Game theory, or in this case Evolutionary Game Theory, has already extended into the fields of politics, psychology, biology and philosophy. I want to extend it further. In fact, I think the two are quite relevant in studying past and future cultures, and how we can predict the lifecycle of certain groupings of communities.

/r/Gameoftrolls2 lives on. I apologize for the length, but there is quite a bit more to this, especially about our banning.

So there it is, ask me anything. AMA.