I have very brilliant readers and commenters. Here is how one of them, musteryou, has explained the nature of trolldom with one concise and beautiful definition:
The structure of a troll’s consciousness is the same as that of a sado-masochist. He lacks access to emotion, so he tries to get others to exude it for him, so that he can feel emotion. This is a dependency structure.
I think this is absolutely spot-on. Trolls’ emotions are blocked, so they try to provoke others to feel anger, frustration, annoyance – anything, in short – on their account in order to experience at least some form of emotional life.
When I think about the trolls I’ve had stalk my blog, I recognize that all of them seemed to beg for an emotional response like their life depended on it. They also had a variety of tricks at their disposal that never varied from one troll to another. And they all figured out very soon what would bug their interlocutor the most. For me, for example, the most annoying thing in the world is when people repeat the same thing like brain-damaged parrots. It’s actually very traumatic for reasons I don;t want to go into right now. So my trolls would soon slip into the broken-record mode.
For the longest time, I was sure that the trolls are socially inept and simply have no idea how to communicate productively. For obvious reasons, I feel very compassionate towards people with poor communication skills, so I tried helping the trolls to be better communicators. After musteryou’s explanation, however, I realize that this is a very conscious strategy on the part of the trolls.
Clarissa's Blog 
That is brilliant.
The worst kind of troll in my opinion is the so-called “concern troll,” who pretends to have your best interest at heart and warns you not to alienate your readers by your strident tone. The concern is entirely false, a mask for hostility.
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“The most annoying thing in the world is when people repeat the same thing like brain-damaged parrots. It’s actually very traumatic for reasons I don;t want to go into right now.”
Don’t you find it very difficult to comprehend even without a personal trauma background? A few comments on my blog have recently been bothering me, because they’re precisely this: irrational, inaccurate and self-righteous repetitions of the same pet theory. What’s bemusing is that these are often also demands I reject all possibly readings of the text — especially mine — and accept their completely misreading as the authorised version.
This doesn’t just feel like a needing for response. It feels like a desperate quest for a tiny scrap of power.
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