And rightly so. Trolls are, for many internet users, harmful. One does not need to be a wallflower stereotype to shrink from this nastiness - just tired, stressed, depressed or otherwise vulnerable.

As an author, I am used to public condemnation, and I can usually sort intelligence from idiocy. But I can still be saddened and angered by the daily slitherings of venomous dunces.

And let's be clear: trolls do not raise the standard of discussion or debate - they provoke others into equally foolhardy conflict, or encourage cooler heads to go elsewhere.

So Twitter, blogs, bulletin boards, forums become sado-masochistic bullrings of mutual verbal torture, while more civilised voices retreat wounded, or simply turn off in horror or dismay.

So putting trolls on notice is quite different to wishing away criticism.

One of the immediate replies to Charlotte Dawson was to charge her with hypocrisy: she ''bullied'' contestants on Australia's Next Top Model.

While I am no fan of this program, I recognise that skilled and well-meaning criticism of trainee models should not be conflated with calls for someone to kill themselves or jokes about their childlessness.

The difference is very simple: trolls are malicious.

Malice is not frustration or anger, nor is it simply causing offence - rightful criticism of religious myths might be offensive to the faithful, for example, but this does not necessarily make secularists malicious. Malice is a desire to cause harm, and pleasure in achieving this.

While the more civilised critic might unknowingly or unwillingly cause offence, this is rarely the point, and almost never a pleasure. Yes, tempers can steam and logic soften, but this is usually seen for what it is: a failure. I know few scholars and writers who are proud of petty spats and spiteful spits. The troll, by contrast, wants this - worse still, needs this.

This need is worth a little psychological microscopy. Despite the rhetoric - my own and others - trolls are not monsters. They are, in fact, boringly human. Indeed, this fact is often behind their desire to hurt: a heightened feeling of their own ordinariness, smallness, ugliness. Malice rarely comes from confidence, joy, pride; from pleasure in oneself. Instead, it is born of pain.

This is either because one sees one's own psyche and achievements as pitiable and petty, or because they seem so next to a hated other's.

Often this is because of rivalry - the reporter trolling the up-and-coming columnist, for example. But it can also be the absurd envy of the pop culture consumer, who is oddly diminished by the glamour, fame and income of a celebrity who is a stranger to them.

In each case, the common drive is revenge: this somebody highlights my shortcomings, and causes me pain, and so I will seek my pound of electronic flesh. It is a pathetic but common lurch at equilibrium; an animal protecting itself.

Perhaps the internet worsens malice by surrounding small people with ''success stories'', and then giving the former a carriage service to canter alongside the latter, throwing rotten eggs.

It allows for virtual communities of trolls - giant hives of insects, resonating with one another's pitiable buzz. It allows for anonymity and publicity, so that the troll's pleasure is heightened by being witnessed - but risk-free, because one's name is safe. And it does so quickly, so there is no time for actual sympathy.

But reading the sometimes vicious correspondence and conversations of authors like Voltaire and Rousseau reminds us that malice and envy are more permanent features of psyche and society; that trolls are just a modern version of more common vices.

And now, as then, the remedies are legal, editorial and existential.

The first takes us to the courts, the second to moderators, and the third to the most difficult: encouraging the envious and malicious to become stronger, prouder, and more sympathetic human beings; beings not driven to harm by their own chronic or acute pain, and the groupthink of their virtual mates.

Put another way, I doubt we can ''fix'' trolls.

We can silence, shame or punish them, and we can exemplify how to be otherwise. But the real work is theirs: to become less petty, broken human beings.

Dr Damon Young is a philosopher and the author of Distraction: A Philosopher's Guide to Being Free.