I think that’s right, which is why methods aimed at containment through some kind of engagement are the right way to go strategically. Basically you want to identify what the emotional payoff is, and find ways to attack that, because that’s what keeps them coming back. One is obviously the perpetual tit-for-tat in the comment thread, The Search for the Perfect Killer Zinger that traps everyone in the flame war spiral. So you ban them, but then the payoff becomes the even more gratifying game of subverting the ban and coming back in through another crack in the edifice.
In our troll’s case the big emotional payoff was that he was all about casting himself as a Revolutionary Outlaw Liberator and Exposer of Injustice and Corruption. Deleting his posts and closing his accounts just confirmed him in that role. It was totally gratifying for him, so he kept sneaking back in, which also made him feel like the guy in the Guy Fawkes mask. But the vulnerability he’d left open was that we had any amount of discussion on his pet topic. Lots of members had pointed this out to him, but to no visible effect because he could keep the thread spinning along, collecting flags (further validation that he was being oppressed), and happily pushing it to the limit until he was banned and his content deleted. Victory! For him. And he’d activate a new sockpuppet, rinse and repeat.
My defense was to reply to one of his posts with a long LONG list of links to discussions dealing with the exact issue he claimed we were suppressing, then lock the discussion and freeze his sockpuppet account without deleting it. That was key: it meant that his claim and our response remained visible but he couldn’t do anything about it. “You show up, we’ll show you’re full of sh**, and leave it open for all to see.” Creating a new sockpuppet was no answer because there was no way he could resist playing the same game and we could ensure it would end the same unsatisfying way.
His vulnerability was that he was making factual claims that we had the ammunition to disprove. He compounded it with one of his in-thread challenges to us: “You’ll see, my post will be deleted within a day!” Well, that was easy to disprove too. We didn’t delete it, we left it there for anyone to read, along with the counter evidence and no further discussion allowed. Not allowing him to respond left him no way to recover his self-image, and sent the message that further attempts would end in the same emotionally unsatisfying dead end.
A lot of the time, of course, it’s really hard to deprive them of whatever their kick is. Few admonitions are less effective than a blanket “Don’t feed the trolls.” But if you can figure out their inner motivation at least in some cases it may be possible to act in ways that deprive them of what trolling does for them. At least in this case there was an angle that seems to have been fairly effective. His efforts did sputter after that and we haven’t seen him in weeks now.