If you noodled around the internet long enough in the 1980s, sooner or later you’d get scrolled. It was a known hazard. You’d be innocently playing Colossal Cave Adventure, minding your own business, throwing axes at dwarfs, and someone on the network would flood your screen with ASCII.

Popular among scrollers was an ampersand-only rendering of the Old Man of the Mountain, the distinctive rock formation in northern New Hampshire. Maybe that was because our mainframe was also in New Hampshire, on the PDP-1-based Dartmouth Time-Sharing System, which had been implemented in 1963 by Basic authors John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz. I’m glad the Old Man of the Mountain was memorialized—even briefly—on the ancient internet. Fifteen years ago, the cliff face in Franconia Notch collapsed; centuries of freezing and thawing had cracked the Old Man’s brow. Granite into ampersands into dust.

Virginia Heffernan (@page88) is an Ideas contributor at WIRED. She is the author of Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art. She is also a cohost of Trumpcast, an op-ed columnist at the Los Angeles Times, and a frequent contributor to Politico. Before coming to WIRED she was a staff writer at The New York Times—first a TV critic, then a magazine columnist, and then an opinion writer. She has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia and a master’s degree and PhD in English from Harvard. In 1979 she stumbled onto the internet, when it was the back office of weird clerics, and she’s been in the thunderdome ever since.

Quaint Reagan-era scrolling was a precursor to and eventually a subset of trolling, today’s modish rhetorical performance, which was invented in Usenet groups at the end of the ’80s. Judith Donath, a Harvard professor who has studied early internet deceptions, spotted a grassroots definition of trolling in 1995 on a wedding newsgroup, where a troll named Ultimatego had been upbraiding women for their vulgar wedding plans. Another user enlightened the upset brides. “Trolling is where you set your fishing lines in the water and then slowly go back and forth dragging the bait and hoping for a bite. Trolling on the Net is the same concept — someone baits a post and then waits for the bite on the line and then enjoys the ensuing fight.” (The fine points of the confounding trolling-trawling distinction are best left to fisherfolk, but in short: Trolling uses lines, and trawling uses nets.)

This early definition of trolling stands as a warning to the rest of us—potential fish. Where scrollers labored to bedevil one target and made their pranks clear, trolls cast indiscriminate lines for chumps and hide their intentions. They bait those fishing lines with what Donath calls a “pseudo-naive” idiom: “I was just asking!” Standing on that plausible deniability, they sit back and wait for tempers to flare.

After nearly 30 years, traditional newspapers have finally discovered trolling. They’re like retirees new to Adderall. Almost every week, editorialists at high-profile joints electrocute Twitter with a new your-liberal-views-are-vulgar sally. What’s more, they dress up this stuff as good-faith argument in a way that would have done Ultimatego proud.

Just this week in The New York Times, Bari Weiss defended a grab bag of thinkers, including Christina Hoff Sommers, the self-styled Factual Feminist, who makes barbed videos about discrimination against boys and women’s essential shortcomings in math. Hoff’s YouTube entries take stock trolling memes (domestic violence is exaggerated, Gamergate guys were kinda right, etc.) and aims them at the easily trolled, many of whom can be found on college campuses.

As college kids often serve as a proxy for the tenderhearted, ill-informed idealists in all of us, Weiss in her column seemed poised for a double axel: She could revel in Sommers’ trolling and troll her own readers when they bit the line on Twitter. But then the fish fought back, lighting into Weiss for a significant error. It all turned pretty bruising. One hopes Weiss still enjoyed the ensuing fight.

Fortunately, the content of these cyclical showdowns is mostly dated and immaterial. But it’s been depressing this year to discover how many serious journalists are new to the lulz—or what Mattathias Schwartz defined in 2008 as “the joy of disrupting another’s emotional equilibrium.” And newbies who can’t hold their lulz keep seeking higher doses. While it’s fun to call readers who dislike the Factual Feminist fascists (because it makes them freak out), it’s less fun to be cited for an error and forced to correct it. You then have to regain your own equilibrium enough to re-throw off the equilibrium of your trollees by calling them, maybe, double-fascists, and … what were we talking about again? Trolling is a nonadventure computer game. We should have stuck to Colossal Cave Adventure.

I miss getting scrolled. It felt a little like getting Rickrolled would feel 20 years later. It was a nuisance, and it was funny. Your whole screen shot up. Your messages, which were not saved or searchable in the DTSS “conferences” (think Slack on a WarGames interface), flew into the heavens. You did have to confront your vanity. My messages! My precious banter! In the last line, at the bottom of the screen, the vandal would gloat: YOU ARE THE VICTIM OF THE MAD SCROLLER!

But scrolling was more than enough trolling for me. Humiliation came easily in middle school, and when the online masquerade turned spiteful, the antics of bona fide trolls brought a lump to my throat. The disingenuous questions of those days—“Hey, did you know a new study shows girls rape guys more than the reverse?”—were clearly a prelude to something I couldn’t handle, and yet, like a Bari Weiss reader on Twitter, I could hardly keep from responding. Not every time, but too often, I would get taken in, and tell myself that I was going to clarify something about, say, sexual violence, because as an American I appreciate free and open debate. Instead, I’d feel the walls closing in with every word I hotly typed about the fake new study, knowing with growing certainty I was making a fool of myself.