I’ve been running through possible scenarios in my mind that could explain some of the behaviour I see on certain DIY forums.

The buzz I’m on right now is making Printed Circuit Board (PCB) prototypes at home. From designing the circuit, to etching the copper blanks, to soldering components etc. Naturally, with any complex multi-step fabrication at home comes a lot of research, and learning from others who have walked the path, tried, cried, failed, cried again, and succeeded before you.

So, imagine my surprise when, on Hackaday – you know, THE website for people trying novel stuff at home and sharing their experiences – I see the following reply on a VERY detailed and useful post about using toner transfer paper for PCB-at-home manufacturing.

Peter:

If you WANT TO MAKE PCBs as a DIY thing, good. If you WANT PCBs, please order them, there’s no point. The only reason would be needing something right now!!!

Link to the post – This will take you to Hackaday in a new window.

Bots or boredom?

I’m no stranger to the internet. Being a proud millenial I saw dial up progress from 2400bps to 56kbps, then ISDN, ADSL, through fiber – a 400,000x bandwidth increase in a few short years.

From the very first newsgroups about physics and engineering I joined as an impressionable tweenager, there have been trolls.

Bots however – automated farms of machines that scour the internet to reply to posts to push certain agendas to… well I assume profit somewhere – are relatively new.

Perhaps Peter is actually a last-gen cellphone in some Indian bot farm hired by some custom PCB-to-order service (or secret society where they all get together in robes in underground catacombs to plot their profit maximalisation). He was tasked to search for posts and dissuade naive and curious wannabe PCB DIYers from even trying in the first place, and instead just order from one of the secret society’s existing services. Considering more than half of the internet’s traffic (about 57% at the time of writing – 40% of that “bad” bots), I’d say this is a plausable scenario. Then again…

Perhaps Peter is retired. With the random CAPS spread and triple exclamation, I put Peter in the age bracket where perhaps he feels very strongly about the “just pay the professionals whose trade is their life” movement that many Aged aren’t aware is now decades past peak relevance. He now has the time to look down through his bi-focals and single-finger type a passionate post about leaving trades to the thing they’re good at and no-one else without the same belt-whipping, grumpy master and apprentice style, not allowed to touch a real screwdriver until 5 years down the track training may step on their turf.

Perhaps, Peter is between the ages of 15 and 60, male or female, in one of the worlds two-hundredish countries, and is simply bored. They thought, being devoid of other curiosities and hobbies such as, I don’t know, making circuit boards at home or touching grass:

“Let’s look how I can illicit a reaction today on some unsuspecting genuine internet folk!”

The Formula

Most of these posts follow a formula. It’s tempting to try build a post myself from this DIY troll-post recipe, but I either don’t have that gene activated in my DNA, the right kind of trauma I need to express on the world wide web or the time (as I’m busy writing posts like these instead).

Anyway, here’s my 5-step recipe to a winning DIY forum troll post:

1) Find your target

Find a friendly, useful and active post or article telling people they can do, or improve something.

“Take Your PCBs From Good To Great: Toner Transfer”

1b) Find the core philosophy(s)

This is really a part of #1, as it’s your main target. Find the core philosophy, purpose, and perhaps more esoteric “feeling” that caused the post to succeed. Preferably two – we’ll see why soon. Some examples from this post specifically:

• Purpose: The time was spent by the OP to help others, to help them avoid the same mistakes.
• Philosophy, culture: DIY is more satisfying than spending money on and waiting for a 3rd party manufacturer, and buying into capitalism.

Now you have them, we can build an attack.

2) Miss the point

Vital here is making it feel like you “missed the point” of the post. It should illicit the question from readers that is the title of this post – “Wait Peter, whose side are you on??”

Our example is rife with this. Attack the points specifically.

• Time saving – “The only reason would be needing something right now”. This is precisely a major purpose of advocating for DIY at home – you can prototype fast, and, with practice, accurately.
• “There is no point” carries a few layered meanings, but one is focussed on the outcome of receiving a functional PCB, and nothing else. How about the satisfaction of doing it at home? Learning something new? Using your hands? Having hobbies?
• This post tells people what NOT to do, so other’s efforts may be successful the first time. This is a guess, but Peter seems via his “WANT” phrase to indicate that regardleses of the information contained in the post, that failure is still an inevitable outcome. Either that, or he didn’t read to the point of success, and just saw a string of failures, perhaps mirroring his own, and his righteous indignation could no longer be restrained.

3) The element of confusion

While the intent and nature of the message may seem clear on a first reading, try and separate it into parts and see if it still stands.

Hint: it shouldn’t.

“If you want to make PCBs as a DIY thing at home, good”

Great! Peter’s with us! But then he follows with…

“If you WANT PCBs, please order them, there’s no point”

This is a multi-faceted confusor. Let’s unpack:

1. Firstly, the capitalised “WANT”.
   This is seemingly in contrast to the initial “want”. I’m still not 100% sure of Peter’s intent (perhaps that’s intentional), but it seems he’s implying that the DIY process will not result in an actual PCB. To actually receive the PCB, DIY is not the way.
2. “please”
   The word is probably most generally used in polite requests, but has a darker cousin of imploring someone to do something with a sprinkling of condescension. I’ll let you decide Peter’s emotion behind pre-emptively helping you avoid failure here.
3. “there’s no point”.
   Here is a possible 4th Peter archetype that went though my mind. The despondent, sad, at the cusp of giving up on his DIY dreams after some failures of his own Peter. He’s on the cliff’s edge, ready to press the “Submit Order” button to PCBWay. He’s taking the normal(ised) human psychological step of shifting the blame from himself, to the wider DIY community. He’s expressing his frustrations through a post he wish he found a month ago, before his own journey began.

4) The key trigger – THE ANTITHESIS.

This is the “clever” part. Find the absolute opposite point of the post, and purport that as the REAL solution.

• Just pay a PCB manufacturer, there’s no point doing it yourself.

It goes without saying that this should NOT be expressed eloquently and with expected syntax and grammar, as this would negate point 3. There is significant, and dare I say, the greatest art in this step. It’s something that cannot be taught, but can be learned, and practiced. Perhaps some people are born with it. Regardless there is a repeatable, inexhaustable source of feedback available to wannabe internet trolls. The denizens of the internet.

5) (optional) Post-post (non)engagement

This is where a bit of personality comes into it. Post-posting, you have a couple of choices when the weaker-willed or righteously indignant community engages, indicating your comment’s success.

a) ENGAGE
I could dedicate another post entirely to this. Essentially you can use the same steps listed above. Some of the most successful post-post engagements simply use the “confusion” element. This has a wonderful psychological effect on the replier, disarming them, making them wonder if they had ANY impact, if they appealed to Peter’s sense of decency and emotion in the slightest. At the highest levels, they may start questioning whether what THEY wrote made any sense.

Peter did not choose this tactic, and I respect that. Let’s, just for fun, pretend he chose to respond to Simon’s reply, here for reference:

Um… that’s basically what it says in the article… AND it’s about systematic skill-building. Additionally, the above method can be applied to etching/marking of other NF metals like scales, labels or front plates…

I implore you, please, to try your own Peter-esque response. Embody him. Get in his headspace and mentality. Give it a shot, we’ve all got some Peter in us somewhere. Here’s my very quick attempt:

Um NO… it’s skill waste and toner CANNOT be applied to others the same. Please learn some basics!!

As you can see, and feel, this didn’t quite hit the mark. I would try and refine, but I’ve got PCBs to make. Perhaps picking apart why it didn’t work is a useful exercise for the audience.

b) RADIO SILENCE

My personal favourite. I love a good mystery.

It’s like the “cool guys don’t look at explosions” meme. Enter a room, cause chaos, and leave with a shit-eating grin on your face. You leave the participants in a state of confusion and emotional limbo, waiting, JUST WAITING, fists clenched, teeth grinding, wife rolling her eyes, for Peter to come back and double-down, expose himself as a troll, or clarify his meeting and continue the discourse after what must be a misunderstanding.

I feel dirty…

Just by reading that last one, you can feel the blood start to boil. I need a shower.

But think about it – Hackaday – a site, where DIYers come together, to share their knowledge, failures, projects and wins with each other. A place where people who would just build something they could pick up at the local Radioshack(RIP)-esque tech store for nothing other than the fun of the process.

Why?

To see if they can. To perhaps, just maybe, circumvent a limitation in resourcing, time, cost or satisfaction that other makers are running into. It’s wonderful.

I also feel dirty putting a step-by-step troll post guide into the world. I’m sure I’m not the only one. Like the well-known aphorism “guns don’t kill people, people do”, and its many cousins, one troll-post how-to guide doesn’t create more troll posts, trolls do is equally incorrect.

A gun makes a murderer’s job just that much easier, doesn’t it. And when we start giving AI and robots guns… well… I apologise for my part in this. Which leads to my conclusion.

The irony is not lost

Well done Peter, well done 👏

You have had a meta-post written about you and your excellent likely-to-be-trolling post. And, perhaps like your comment, is also a little tounge-in-cheek.

To be fair to your kin, it wasn’t just you. This has been about 30 years in the making. A culmination of disbelief, head shaking, brow-furrowing, “started-but-backspaced” comment replies, finally brimming over and making an imprint on my little corner of the internet.

The only thing that could possibly make the cycle complete…

Peter, would you do me the honor of commenting on this post?