I think trolling is actually a good thing; it serves as a reminder that the people on the Internet are no different than the ones in meatspace. People are not always nice. You wouldn't put your name, address, phone number, and a picture of yourself on a piece of paper and tape it to a wall in a busy downtown area because every sick fuck in the city would beat a path to your door. Why would you put it up on a website for every sick fuck in the world to see?

A lot of normalfags seem to come from an authoritarian mindset that assumes that they are always being protected by the Powers That Be - the same mindset that thinks the police are legally obligated to protect citizens. They think that a website wouldn't allow them to post personally-identifying information unless it had some kind of magical morality shield to protect them from undesirable attention.

Trolls, especially the worst kind of cyber-stalking trolls, destroy that illusion of safety and security and reveal the reality, which is that Facebook or whatever doesn't give a fuck about you or your safety, and that you and you alone are responsible for your own well-being, online or off.

That's actually one of my favorite things about 4chan. Even though I don't like the effect that its dark-and-edgy reputation has had on its own community, the fact that 4chan is synonymous with uncontrolled Internet dickery makes it easy to dissuade people that I know and care about IRL from doing stupid shit online. Sometimes it actually stops me - I once briefly considered trying to score some pussy over the intarwebs and immediately reconsidered when I realized that nine out of ten hook-ups would end when I ran into one of you maniacs.