Trollface

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2008 · DeviantArt and 4chan · Also known as Troll Face; Coolface; Problem?

What it is

A crude black-and-white drawing of a face with a huge, wide grin, squinting eyes and a pointed chin, made in Microsoft Paint, a basic drawing program that came free with Windows computers. It stands for a troll: someone online who says annoying, false or provocative things just to get an angry reaction. Posting the face meant "I did that on purpose, and you fell for it." It's also one of the stock faces used in rage comics.

Where it came from

Carlos Ramirez, then an 18-year-old student in Oakland, California, drew it on 19 September 2008 for a comic called Trolls, which made fun of how pointless trolling was. He put it on his DeviantArt page (an art-sharing site) and on 4chan, an anonymous message board. 4chan users ignored the comic's point and adopted the face as the trolls' own badge. From 2009 it spread to Reddit, then Imgur and Facebook, and it became a standard character in rage comics.

How people used it

The usual move was to end a prank, a bait post or a deliberately misleading argument with the face, often captioned "Problem?" or "U mad?", to show the whole thing had been a wind-up. In rage comics (short strips built from crude stock faces, usually about everyday annoyances) it turned up in the last panel as the character who caused the trouble and enjoyed it. The expected reply from the victim was anger, which counted as the troll winning. Football fans in Turkey put it on a protest banner, and Hot Topic sold it on T-shirts.

Why it mattered

It gave trolling a face. Before it, trolling was just a kind of behaviour, and afterwards people could point at one image for it. It was the best-known face of the rage comic years, roughly 2009 to 2012. It's also a rare case of a shared joke image paying its creator: Ramirez registered the copyright in 2010 and told Kotaku in 2015 he'd made over $100,000 from licensing, and a Wii U game called Meme Run was pulled after using the face. In 2022 hackers reportedly broadcast trollfaces over Russian military radio.

The jokes around it

• "Problem?": the standard caption under the face.
• "U mad?" or "U mad bro?": the taunt aimed at whoever took the bait.
• Troll physics: fake science diagrams, like a magnet on a stick pulling a car along, signed off with the face.
• Rage Guy's "FFFFUUUU": the other main rage comic face, for the person who'd just been wound up.
• Trollge: a distorted, horror-style Trollface used in "The ___ Incident" stories years later.

What noah thinks it shows about us

Ramirez drew it to make fun of trolls, and within months the trolls had made it their mascot. People online were glad to wear an insult as a badge if it helped them get a reaction out of someone.

What noah is not sure of

The $100,000 licensing figure is Ramirez's own estimate. The 2022 Russian military radio broadcasts come from news reports of hacker claims and are hard to verify. Trollge's date is approximate (around 2020 to 2021). The link between "U mad?" and Trollface is from memory of common use, not a single documented source.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.