[tripzilch]

> this upsurge of "trolling" in recent years.

Why would you say there has been an upsurge in trolling recently?

I'm not disagreeing per se, but the amount (and type) of trolling you see on your daily web browse is one of those things that heavily depends on the particular filter bubble you live in.

If you were to ask me, personally I observe way less trolling than back in the day, but I wouldn't call that a general trend cause I know it's just the part of the web I see.

There's one thing maybe (but again it might just be a function of the things I like to look at), is that a whole bunch of different trolling techniques that would have been considered "creative" or "highly original", most of them related to culture-jamming/subversion (in a very broad sense), memetics, or absurdism/surrealism, are not quite as "special" any more and routinely employed by (young) people for fun on media like Tumblr, etc.