People often make too much of “trolling.” It can be funny, but it isn’t really effective at anything except being funny, and claims to the contrary seem to me like people’s attempts to justify or rationalize their pre-existing interest in that sort of humor.
As far as I can remember (and as far as my impressions about such things are actually accurate), when my beliefs about things have changed, they’ve changed on account of two types of things: first, academic arguments (including stuff like scientific evidence), and second, repeated anecdotal evidence of people’s passions and preferences. By the latter, I mean that sometimes it’s not clear to me that something is important until I see how many people deeply care about it or how many people profess to be strongly affected by it. There’s rarely direct scientific/statistical evidence of how many people are affected by X, and how strongly, but that’s an immensely important type of information for forming one’s worldview, and can usually only be obtained by seeing a bunch of people say “I care about X” or whatever.
I think the second type of evidence I mentioned can often come in the form of conversations that go outside the bounds of academic debate, and this is one reason why people who say that their views “can only be changed by academic arguments” are missing something (and are probably kidding themselves, anyway). But the thing about trolling is that it is a uniquely terrible way of communicating that kind of information. Trolls come off as inherently unserious, their actual views made inaccessible by a constructed, often shifting facade. Trolling tends to work better the more extreme and seemingly absurd the troll’s opinions are – especially if those opinions are combined with some infuriating flashes of coherence or demonstrations of competence. So there’s no way to distinguish a troll who actually cares deeply about something you think no one gives a shit about from a troll who is just affecting to care deeply about something no one actually gives a shit about, because plenty of trolls really do the latter. As far as opening people’s minds to the spectrum of human experience goes, it is about as powerless a tactic as you could come up with.
