Edgelord

Chat logs from an IRC room I was in nearly a decade ago were leaked to gamergate. To say the contents of those logs were not flattering would be putting it lightly. They are, in some ways, much what you’d expect from an early-2000’s chatroom of 4chan expats trying too hard to outdo each other for shock value. Even with that context, much of what I said was gross and disturbing, and I have no interest in defending it. An edgelord is a participant in an internet forum whose contributions are deliberately designed to be offensive. The term is mostly used in a pejorative sense to describe someone who makes outrageous statements in order to appear "edgy" or "cool", when in reality they come off as an idiot or troll, making baseless statements, in their mom’s basement, in order to disrupt conversations.

Edgelords may express nihilistic opinions, appear pretentious, and appear to be expressing their outrageous opinions solely for the purpose of getting others to notice and respond to them.

The general concept of edgelords originated in the dark corners of the internet and chan culture. The term appears to have thrust itself into the internet mainstream with the publication of transgender social justice activist Sarah Nyberg's article "I’m Sarah Nyberg, and I Was A Teenage Edgelord" in the fall of 2015, during the peak of the Gamergate shitstorm, and has been in steady use ever since.

Examples of edgelords

 * Joshua Conner Moon, far-right administrator of the Kiwi Farms cyberstalking/hate speech site.
 * Roosh V, sleazy manosphere figure and pick-up artist known for his overt misogyny
 * Milo Yiannopoulos, alt-right figure, Gamergate figurehead, and professional troll