This all labored out fine for English-speaking international locations, however as of 2009, more than half of the 1.6 billion internet customers worldwide spoke a language with a personality set other than the English (or Latin) alphabet [supply: Whitney]. To grasp what using the online is like for these people, imagine that you have to navigate the online using only Arabic. The content material in your favourite sites remains to be in English, however the net address for each site you use is made up of fully unfamiliar characters that will not even be discovered in your keyboard [supply: Ishida]. That scenario, in reverse, is essentially what the Internet experience has been like for web customers who read and write using not solely another language, but a wholly totally different alphabet or set of characters. (Visit a web site like Egypt’s el-balad.com, KNOWHERE Social-Fi for example, and the distinction between the positioning content, which is entirely in Arabic, and the net handle, which makes use of solely English characters, turns into immediately clear.)
In June of 2005, Dohring sold Neopets to MTV, a division of media conglomerate Viacom, for $160 million [ref]. He stayed with the company by means of the sale. As of the sale date, Neopets reported 92 million accounts. Adjusting that quantity for customers with multiple accounts, that represents about 30 million unique users. Kids below age 13 make up 39 % of these users, with 40 percent between the ages of 13 and 17, and 21 p.c over 18. As well as, 57 percent of customers are feminine, a very excessive quantity within the historically male-dominated online gaming market [ref].
Mattathias Schwartz of The new York Instances interviewed a number of trolls, together with the infamous Jason Fortuny. The trolls supplied varied causes for trolling beyond just a want to victimize individuals on-line. Some claimed they wished to show people a lesson about how harsh the online world could be. In other words, they felt it was for the victims’ personal good. Others tried to justify their actions by stating how rough their very own lives had been previously [source: Schwartz].