Troll or merely brat?

[branchandroot]

Mostly for my curiosity.

Poll #5349 Fannish Pesticides

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 38

View Respondents

Your immediate response to a commenter who has chosen the user handle "Wandering Beta At Large" is:

View Answers

Troll.
13 (34.2%)

Oh god, not another entitlement-brat.
26 (68.4%)

Free beta-ing, how nice!
2 (5.3%)

Something else I shall mention in the comments.
4 (10.5%)

Your action upon receiving a comment from said user which attempts to "correct" you in some, most likely totally wrong, way:

View Answers

Smack them with a frigidly polite clue-bat and ignore them.
24 (63.2%)

Just ignore them.
14 (36.8%)

Tip off the archive abuse team to what may be a pattern of trollish behavior.
5 (13.2%)

Something else I shall mention in the comments.
4 (10.5%)

Me, I generally do the frigidly polite clue-bat, just to do my bit to discourage fannish idiocy, and move on. It's the user name in particular that is making me contemplate actually contacting the archive in this case, because that seriously rings my troll-alarm.

Comments

[annotated_em]

I take it you're receiving a whole bunch of comments from your would-be beta?

[branchandroot]

No, it's just the one so far, though they did respond to the brush-off which does tend to be another indication of troll-ish-ness. I'm just wondering how many /other/ people this self-proclaimed beta-at-large has hit up. With a name like that, you really have to wonder.

[annotated_em]

Hm. Trollishness, or maybe just being too stubborn to know when to quit. *headshake* I doubt it's deliberate trolling so much as it is someone who thinks s/he's doing a good deed by pointing out "weird" usages, and just doesn't understand why someone might be annoyed by the way s/he phrased that comment.

ETA: In other words, a critical failure on the audience awareness roll, and a concommitant inability to read tone very well.

[branchandroot]

*laughs* Indeed.

I have to admit, I'm wavering between "obvious troll" and "utter, idiot entitlement plus communicant of the Church of the Holy Concrit". They sometimes look a lot the same.

[staranise]

I think in this case intention is entirely irrelevant, since the behaviour is equally annoying no matter what; contacting the archive might be a good idea just to see if they want this happening at all.

[branchandroot]

*wry* A very good point. I do wonder how other corners of fandom culture are regarding this kind of "intervention" these days. For a while it was sheltered under the umbrella of "concrit".

If this one comes back for me, I'm /definitely/ reporting it, but if it's a one-off... mm. That might just be one of those intensely annoying examples of fandom culture clash that one runs into every so often.

[phoebe_zeitgeist]

My response to the poll might be misleading, depending on how egregious the would-be editing had been. If it was something where my grammar was better than the commenter's grammar, I'd go with frigidly polite, probably. Unless I were annoyed enough or sympathetic enough (depending on tone of comment) to go with warmly polite. As in, "Thank you so much, but before you go around telling others that their use of the subjunctive is incorrect, you might want to read up on it. Otherwise you're going to wind up looking silly. You may dislike it and find it old-fashioned and stuffy, but that's an issue of taste, not of English grammar."

If it had been annoying enough, though, I might be tempted to beta the comment. Or tell her that her use of language was so unclear that I was unable to determine what precisely she was attempting to say, although of course it was thoughtful of her to take the time to attempt to say it.

[branchandroot]

*laughs* My freezing reply did, indeed, point out that I don't take advice from strangers whose only claim to beta authority was an evident inability to capitalize or write grammatical sentences, and perhaps this would be a salutary lesson to her/him about "correcting" people uninvited.

[flourish]

The thing that would stop me from being like UGH ENTITLED would be: what is the context of the username? If they correct my grammar unasked, CLUEBAT + TROLL. If they don't, maybe they're just a person who really likes to beta?

[branchandroot]

Hmm. I think this fell into the former. It was a very brief "this isn't a real word" re one of my borrowings of Bujold's coinages, plus a "nice story though". All uncapitalized and ungrammatical. Not a real beta at all, just "look I'm smarter than you, despite writing worse!"

[flourish]

Guh. Cluebat!!

[branchandroot]

*grins* Yep. A nice big, cold one.

[ranalore]

My usual reaction to such a comment is "wannabe show-off," which may or may not fall under the umbrella of "entitlement-brat." It always reads to me like the commenter thinks fandom is a classroom and s/he desperately wants to demonstrate how much smarter than the teacher (author) s/he is. Inevitably, the correction offered is either incorrect or based entirely on personal preference (or both, like the kid who first tried to claim I'd completely made up an idiom, then that the idiom was too obscure to be successfully used in a story not confined to a regional forum, then finally admitted she "just didn't like idioms" in fiction, though by that point it was pretty clear she had no idea what an idiom actually is).

People who do this sort of thing certainly have no understanding of what beta actually means, or at least ignore that understanding to engage in this kind of pointless behavior. I'm all in favor of betas, critical feedback, and critical reviews, but they are separate things with separate skill sets and separate systems of etiquette. Beta is not done by leaving random comments on random stories, nor is it done by persisting when the author clearly finds your assertions without merit.

[branchandroot]

and s/he desperately wants to demonstrate how much smarter than the teacher (author) s/he is

That's exactly the feel I get from it. Right down to the smug look that turns into indignation when you tell them they're wrong.

Honestly, I think part of my instant bristle is taking the name of a beta in vain. People like that give the whole idea a bad reputation, which is just a crime against fic.

[ranalore]

Yeah, it annoys me that authors who don't know what a beta reader is might encounter such comments and never realize they're a complete misuse of the term. If you're seeing the thing after it's been released into the public arena, as it were, it's no longer in beta. Therefore, nobody can beta it.

[seagull2eagle]

Wow, that sounds annoying. o.o What an... um, yeah. For the comment, it would depend on how often said person does such things - if they did it often and annoyingly, to the abuse team they'd go. But the name... {shakes head}

[branchandroot]

Deeply annoying. And pretentious, which, in combination with the Very Wrong, just sets my teeth on edge.

[kaigou]

I guess I've just been around too long (or too long for me) because now I simply can't be bothered to reply. For pretty much any review (that isn't coming in as a comment on a journal-post), I glance at the first five or six words and if it looks like it's going in that direction, I just shrug and delete without reading the rest.

Now that I think of it, I pretty much do the same for all reviews that aren't comments on a journal-post. I just kinda register they exist, figure that's enough in return for the person's effort of the review, and carry on.

Hmm. Actually, I think that's been my modus operandi ever since I got the review that proclaimed I was the brillo pad of fandom. (No, I still haven't entirely figured out whether that's a compliment or insult, but it did seem like a good stopping place.)

[branchandroot]

Probably just as wise, yes. Perhaps unfortunately, I do regularly respond to all my commenters, so I'm in the habit of reading and considering my comments. Which, of course, means that these little snips get under my skin. Doesn't help that I have a special sort of indignation for being accused of getting something factually wrong when I am actually right (usually because I did my research and thought for ten consecutive seconds about it). Grarh.

[love]

It really does depend on the quality of said commenter's comment. If they actually do have a valid point in any way, I read it, and then depending on how I feel, thank them or ignore them. But if it really is wrong wrong WRONGOMGWRONG, I'd completely ignore them.

[branchandroot]

*dryly* Yeah, this one was definitely wrongwrongwrong.