soft troll

The soft troll is the counter part to the more provocative, traditional trolling used to incite anger and hostility. The goal of the soft troll is to inflate the ego of the reader and to gain readership. Commenters cannot resist displaying their superiority and even go so far as to display their comments on social networking sites. What results is a mass intellectual "circle jerk" of people who, while smart enough to correct the mistakes of the poster or point out the obvious joke the poster was illiciting, are not self aware enough to realize that it was all set up. There is no damage done to the posters themselves, they will go on thinking they are quite clever. The true spoils of such a troll go to those who ascertain the true goal of the poster. A symbiotic relationship emerges where all parties walk away feeling superior over the other.