Emotional investment in lolcows is inevitable. The trainwreck that they call their personal lives conjures within us feelings of laughter, aversion, fondness, sadness, disappointment, pity, anger, joy, fear, bemusement, and frustration, often simultaneously or through a cycle. That human connection is what makes following them so compelling and keeps us coming back. Depending on the lolcow, my feelings towards them vary greatly. I find myself quite fond of some, whereas others I find to be irredeemable human beings. The only thing in common is that I find myself entertained by an eccentric weirdo who can't manage to stay off the Internet.
Having said that, I find that those who experience genuine rage or seek to actively harm lolcows or encourage others to do so, however abhorrent they are as people, completely baffling. At the point where you're that negatively engaged, you need to step away from the keyboard for a while and just stop following them. A bit of schadenfreude is understandable if it's an organic occurrence wherein the lolcow brings it upon themselves by picking a fight; it's quite another to go out of your way to visit a lolcow in person seeking to provoke them and do them physical harm. Swatting and premeditated physical assault are not funny in the slightest, as it takes the lolcows out of their organic cycles of behavior. It's sadistic, at best, and completely unproductive.
Rioley getting pushed out of his wheelchair after picking a fight with somebody who has no lengthy history with him? Hilarious.
A mentally retarded guy being provoked into a physical confrontation after a weirdo obsessed with him goes across the country and spends thousands of dollars to antagonize him for attention? Pathetic, sadistic, and unfunny.
A clear line in the sand needs to be drawn, both with actions behaviors are featured and with which actions are celebrated in general. I absolutely love the Kiwi Farms. It's the very last website on the Internet that I actually enjoy taking part in, and embodies the spirit of the "old Internet". But if it was a community that went out of its way to feature swattings or celebrate, encourage, or revel in behaviors like this, I would want no part of it.