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Comment by CPLX | Hacker News Reader

I feel like an odd man out every time this topic comes up. Like I'm sure many others here I've been involved in online communities and discussions in some form or another since it was all green text on a black background, and I don't think things are any different now than they have ever been in any way that really matters.

The secret to dealing with internet trolling is some combination of ignoring it, turning your devices off now and then, and realizing that the character you are interacting with online is not actually a real person. Though -- like a character in your favorite movie or TV show -- it is of course created by a real person, it is still a fictional character.

With the exception of actual actions that come into the real world, such as fake reporting to the police, interfering with someone's ability to have a job, etc, the vast vast majority of online "trolling" is solved by ignoring it. Same as it ever was.

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These are good points on dealing with trolling as an individual. Ignoring it is the best, and most often ignored, advice. It's too easy to get emotionally drawn into a trolling comment, which is why I've always liked the idea of sandboxing trolls in a way that allows them to think their comments are being accepted while eliminating them from the rest of the participants of the site.

At a higher level, though, sites and moderators of discussion have to participate in the reduction of trolling. Failure to do so dooms a community. I've left my share of communities, mailing lists, usenet message boards and the like due to it being tiring to participate in a discussion that devolves into name-calling and wasteful trolling. My favorite example was Digg about a decade ago. At some point the trolling problem got so bad that you couldn't leave a comment of any kind without encountering a land-mine. I remember the "straw that broke the camel's back" was when I spent a few minutes leaving a multi-sentence comment and had copy/pasted part of a sentence to a place where it made more sense. I had accidentally doubled an "and". I was met with "Learn fucking English, asshole!" and was like "huh?!". The guy read my entire comment and grammar trolled me over an obvious typo? I deleted my account shortly after that. I wasn't angry -- I just came to realize that the site stopped providing me any value.

Yeah, it was also what led to the death of Kuro5hin.

I believe K5 also stopped accepting new accounts for awhile. It's a shame; there was a lot to like about how the site worked. The collaborative review process seemed like the future of how science and journalism ought to work on the Internet. Instead it became dystopian parable of how such things don't work on the Internet.

Yeah, that sort of happens when someone photoshops the founder's wife's head on a pornstar. Twitter style harassment before Twitter was a thing.

Not only that, but K5 also charged for accounts.

Right now, the login/password field is bugged so you have to type in the URL string to get to your account. ICU/brain dead is about right for K5 now, unfortunately.

As a younger internet participant, I'm starting to see this in Reddit (ironically, backed by Y-combinator, which i've now moved to). It seems as a site gets more and more popular, Sturgeon's Law takes effect and the site approaches a point where about 90% of everything is crap.

> the site approaches a point where about 90% of everything is crap.

90% of human interactions are crap ;) Pre-Internet people lived in isolated bubbles and the mess we have now is just a demonstration what happens when too many people from one bubble start interacting with another.

Funny you mention that. When I left Digg, I started participating in Reddit because it was far more civil at the time. Thinking about interactions in the last several years across several sub-reddits, it's long suffered from the same problems that wrecked Digg and as a result I've not participated in that community in quite some time.

Hacker News has been pretty rigid with its community standards and though there's (legitimate) complaints about the rigidity, the trade-off encoutered from a "downvote because I disagree" vs "downvote because comment is hostile" is well within my tolerances here.

Many internet forums are no longer community-organized or community-funded like they were in the early days of the internet.

Many media companies spend money moderating internet forums because their users and/or advertisers have expectations. Automatically detecting or predicting bad behavior decreases the cost of running these forums, whose purpose is profit rather than dialog.

It's not a change in the nature of trolling that makes moderation more necessary than it was in the past; rather, it's the monetization of forum-posting audiences.

I suspect a lot of the problems with trolling is inexperienced users not realising that the Internet is the technology equivalent of the wild west.

They sign up for services, post all their details and make the sort of off-hand comments that wouldn't be picked up in close circles, except they are using a global publishing platform (social media).

The Internet continues to look less and less like the wild west, and as that trend continues (to torture the metaphor a bit), the expectation that users should go around with guns strapped to their hips will continue to diminish.

Yep. It's a gentrification that has been chipping away at different aspects of the Internet for as long as I can remember. A struggle between the pioneers who have learned to live (and even flourish) within the chaos, and the rest of society who want the chaos eliminated.

At an individual level, I agree. At the community level, I don't think it will be that easy. If trolls can destroy the SNR, the community will also be destroyed.

Exactly. If your solution is to "ignore trolls" then eventually you have to upgrade your ignore to the entire community.

USENET is dead because they couldn't keep the troll/spammer population in check. Smaller forums with more control survived because they were more resilient and didn't offer as big a target.

Nope.

Usenet died because of 2 reasons: The burden of carrying alt.binaries The burden of pirate media on distributed Usenet servers from alt.binaries

They made a great point of attack for the MPAA and RIAA member associations. And traditionally, ISPs provided these services. I think it was 2006 when Comcast finally pulled the plug. Most other ISPs doesn't even offer a connection at all, which is a shame.

But that's why it died.

It was dead long before I saw any copyright issues being raised or before binary newsgroups were a problem.

The infamous "Green Card Spammers" (http://www.wired.com/1999/04/the-spam-that-started-it-all/) shifted the tone dramatically, and from there it was inevitable that the whole community would collapse. There was very limited control over what people could post, USENET was intended to be free and open. This succeeded wildly in an academic environment where if someone was seriously out of line you could address their university and get their account pulled.

As soon as the general population came on and there was no accountability to anyone it was simply a matter of time before unchecked abuse started to happen.

Most providers pulled the plug because the only thing of any value left on USENET was binaries. The discussions were virtually dead.

No, no, no, no, no.

What you are missing is that human beings are social creatures, and our well-being is enormously dependent on how well our communities work. Every community has norms of behavior and ways of enforcing them. If trolling and cyberbullying are allowed, then either people in the community suffer unnecessarily, or the community collapses.

Let me add that you are disempowering yourself when you don't try to ensure that your communities are good.

Your "solution" means many people have to not use the internet. Sucks to be them, I guess. Meanwhile, people saying they want to rape you, or posting images of dead children to you, or posting your address and saying they're going to murder you, get to carry on without hinderance.

Those people you report to the police and if the police ignores you, that's the problem that needs fixing.

In the good old days, people used to send you such threats by anonymous snail mail instead of twitter.

And we can fix that problem by using wide-reaching and invasive surveillance that allows the police to de-anonymize anyone once they get the go-ahead.

But that's probably (definitely) a terrible thing to do, so maybe it's better to find other ways to solve these problems.

Parent and me were talking about hardcore cases. There is no technological solution for people stubbornly following you everywhere and sending death threats.

Furthermore, from some anecdotal evidence, I think most victims in such cases already know who is harassing them.

And in the good old days almost nobody was trolled because the energy required to send a message via snail mail (starting with "do I even own stamps any longer"?) is several orders of magnitude higher than composing a one sentence death-threat on twitter.

It's probably a crime, yes. Unfortunately, you'll be prioritized accordingly. When prioritizing a crime that involves some anonymous troll responding with a death-threat or threat of harm that was most likely done in a moment of stupidity/weakness rather than with an actual intent to commit a crime, you're going to show up pretty low against the list of rapes, murders, assaults and thefts that are currently being handled. Once you've identified that the threat is such that it actually is a crime and can be successfully prosecuted, you have to go through the trouble of finding out who actually left that threat. Should they successfully uncover that information, the likely penalty might be so minimal that it's not even worth pursuing. Because of all of those circumstances, all but the most extreme cases of these get completely ignored (and many of the extreme ones).

I think the solution will lie as much with law enforcement as with the social media platforms. In examples as extreme as yours, they should be treated like any other credible threat and reported to the appropriate law enforcement agency right away. Unfortunately, I have a hard time imagining my local PD will even know what Twitter is, much less how to pursue a case involving it. I think social media platforms need to ensure that law enforcement can easily (through the appropriate legal channels) access the necessary information on the sites to pursue such cases.

Unfortunately, far more cases are less extreme than yours. The line gets blurrier when you get down to persistent low-level harassment, where individual examples will look relatively harmless to an outsider but the victim is forced to face them as a whole. In those instances, it's the responsibility of the social media platform to allow the victim to properly document and report the harassers, and most definitely put up the appropriate barriers to prevent future harassment. Twitter's biggest failing on this point is in how easy it is to create "sockpuppet" accounts, such that as soon as one is banned they can continue uninterrupted from the next.

That behavior is illegal regardless of the medium. Report it to the police. It has nothing to do with the internet.

It has everything to do with the internet -- fundamentally, the last ten years of online technology are the story of previously borderline behavior types demonstrating emergent properties at scale. The ways in which people are regularly, even commonly, harassed online now are life-destroying. If you think the cops have the resources to follow up on thirty thousand death threats from all over the world you're being willfully naive at best.

Wait, parent post is saying to just ignore it. You're saying to report it to police.

Which is right?

Thousands of reports are made to police each year. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-24160004

> About 2,000 crimes related to online abuse are being reported to the police in London each year, according to new figures.

Over a thousand reach the threshold for court action: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23502291

> More than 1,700 cases involving abusive messages sent online or via text message reached English and Welsh courts in 2012, the BBC has learned after a Freedom of Information request.

The criado-perez trolls were enabled by the Internet. They saw other people trolling and thought it was okay; they were able to create many accounts rapidly; they were able to send very many messages.

You're discounting the possibility that there's a difference. There's varying levels of harassment, and it should be up to the victim's discretion as to how severely it should be treated. If person A calls person B a jerk on Twitter, that's easily enough ignored (unless there's a pre-existing personal or parasocial relationship between persons A and B that would make "jerk" sting more than it otherwise would), but if person A organizes a campaign involving all of their followers whose sole intent is to make person B feel threatened then that's an entirely different matter.

The hardest part of dealing with online harassment and "trolls" seems to be drawing that line, or even acknowledging that it exists.

> Report it to the police

Since when does that help? http://www.adistantsoil.com/2011/12/18/stalked-someones-watc... http://www.themarysue.com/zoe-quinn-drops-case/

> Your "solution" means many people have to not use the internet.

Where was that said? I don't see this comment at all. "turning your devices off now and then" is akin to stepping out of a discussion when you start to take things personally. That doesn't mean you are banned from all conversations. It's healthy to take a break.

Given that modern harassment (particularly on Twitter) involves being targets by thousands of accounts over a period of months or years, how long do you think would be appropriate to turn your devices off for?

This isn't about someone "[taking] things personally" -- this is about organized groups making existing platforms unusable for their targets.

I think that's called DDoS, not trolling.

Who is targeted by that and why? Who organizes that - I mean, why would thousands of people suddenly have reason to hate you?

One scenario: A celebrity with a million followers says something. A non-celebrity tweets an opposing response. 0.1% of the celebrity's followers take that as an attack on their idol and start heaping abuse on that person. (numbers sourced from rectal data repository, for illustrative purposes)

In that case, it's not really "organized" by anyone in particular.

The real-life equivalent of that scenario is a random Joe showing up at some political rally shouting "you're WRONG!". Of course shit will fly; the best realistic scenario is being corteously manhandled out of the venue. Why would you expect it to be different on teh intertubes?

As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the issue is that the scale of these phenomena on the internet produces emergent qualities that don't exist in real life, which makes attempts at analogy particularly fruitless.

For example, in your analogy, they're not being manhandled out of the venue. Someone at the venue is taking their picture and following them home, distributing that information, then random people are showing up at their house for the next eighteen months or more. Then people are showing up at their family's house with threats, and their boss's house demanding that they be fired.

Is this the type of "shit [flying]" that you think people should be prepared to expect when they post things online?

What I mean is that "there will be consequences" is a thought that should cross one's mind before doing or saying anything in a public forum. Why should one not accept any responsibility for what he says in public? Can I walk around Harlem with a racist sign without expecting to be roughed up at some point?

(Btw yes, that sort of reactionary persecution can happen and does indeed happen in all sorts of places. It's part and parcel of meaningful political activism anywhere in the world.)

If you're making an innocent comment, it's horrible that you should have to worry about long-term consequences purely because of venue.

> Why should one not accept any responsibility for what he says in public?

Why should the consequences be so completely out of proportion to what was originally said? "In public" covers more situations than it used to, and the size of your audience isn't always intuitive.

> Can I walk around Harlem with a racist sign without expecting to be roughed up at some point?

Probably not. Will you be roughed up by thousands, be followed home, and be stalked and harassed for years? Probably not.

Proportionality is "in the eye of the beholder", unless you enshrine a measurement in law.

The fact that "in public" situations might have expanded (and sometimes replaced more private ones) is a problem that can (and should) be fixed with education. NBD.

Just because some people seem unable to comprehend the (massive) scale of internet space, it doesn't mean that we can magically make it a paradise where real-world behaviour honed in thousands of years simply does not happen. Internet space is a new all-encompassing dimension, the scale of which we've never seen. One should think carefully before acting in such an environment. It's not like interacting with press or peers in a given niche; it's like broadcasting on all channels in all countries at all hours. The chances of getting reactions you might not like are higher than with any other media or venue; but on the positive side, the chances of getting reactions you will like are also disproportionately higher than anywhere else. Continuously complaining that the glass is half empty will just provoke someone in smashing the glass to solve the problem -- because "you didn't like it much anyway, always complaining".

Caroline Criado Perez noticed that UK banknotes were changing. Bank notes have an image of a notable person on one side, and the monarch on the other. Criado Perez noticed that the new designs didn't include any women (apart from the queen, and she's only there through luck of birth).

Criado Perez started a petition to ask Bank of England to consider including a woman on the notes, and to remember to include women in future re-designs.

That's not much.

For that she was subjected to months long campaigns across all her social media accounts, extending to her AFK addresses, with severe threats of sexual violence.

One man was sending 50 messages an hour over 12 hours across multiple accounts.

It's disappointing that some people are defending those who make death threats. It's common over a keyboard, but AFK a death threat is serious business.

https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/JCO/Document...

> Here there were a series of communications (not just a single one as referred to in the guideline) where extreme language was used and substantial fear was caused.

> Indeed it is hard to imagine more extreme threats (death, rape, and worse [Sorley]) and rape [Nimmo]. The harm is, and (despite what is said on your behalf) must have been intended to be, very high.

> The fact that they were anonymous heightened the fear. The victims had no way of knowing how dangerous the people making the threats were, whether they had just come out of prison, or how to recognise and avoid them if they came across them in public.

And about blocking:

> The messages were posted on a number of different sites, and continued after being blocked and or warned

Agreed. There needs to be a point where authorities step in, identify the individuals and arrest the one making the threats.

So you are calling a harassment campaign "trolling" and then are surprised that people are dismissing you?

As I said in response to your other post, this is something you report to the police. And I bet she did.

  And about blocking:

  > The messages were posted on a number of different sites, and continued after being blocked and or warned*

Exactly. This isn't trolling. Your social network can do nothing for you. You accidentally pissed off many people, now you are in trouble, you go to the police for protection, prosecute those who are serious and, unfortunately, ignore the rest because little can be done about thousands of people hating you personally for their insecurities.

"I mean, why would thousands of people suddenly have reason to hate you"

Because you're a woman on the internet, and said something.

There's a big difference between trolling and stalking. The problem is that what happens to pass as trolling today isn't even trolling it's just plain stalking. When you post someone's address, a photo of their house, or call someone's local PD to coax them to send the SWAT to their house then you're not a troll. A troll is all about flames and absurd reactions from people.

A person who is not comfortable with an anonymous, fictional, and harmless interaction with someone who uses curse words or claims they will rape them can avoid this problem by not engaging in the specific components of internet usage where that may happen. Browsing their favorite news sites, shopping on Amazon, or booking airline tickets will likely be unaffected, meaning your comment is obvious hyperbole.

Some online behavior that crosses into the real world will and has always been illegal and actionable of course, as I noted in the original comment. Most of what people consider "online abuse" isn't in that category.

If you don't want to see rippling abs and cleavage you have to avoid nearly all advertising these days. If you don't like guns you can't watch movie trailers. The modern world has many such dilemmas. Ignoring the things you find objectionable shouldn't be discounted as a simple solution.

As I said, I realize I'm out of the mainstream. But I've been called horrible things and even doxxed and stalked and threatened in the real world by online commenters a couple times over the past 20 years. I've found that "not caring about it" has been a shockingly useful and effective tool.

but see, this is the issue with it happening today - back when it was all random IRC channels, ICQ chatroom or worse, if anyone was trolling you, it was easy to switch off and walk away and continue your life unabated, because it was just the internet. Even if it was real life, it was easy to avoid - you just don't go to wherever it was that these people hung out. It was easier for us to have (and I hate myself for using this word, but) a "safe space", it was usually at home.

For younger kids today, a overwhelming majority of their lives are online, so it's so much harder to escape - both for work/education purposes and entertainment, so it's so much easier to keep up the waves of harrassment, so simply saying "just ignore it" doesn't really work these days.

"Just ignore it" is the same as recommending someone leave a party when they're being sexually harassed, as if that's a satisfactory solution. It's punishing the wrong person.

Kick the jerks. Ban them if they are repeat offenders. Provide mechanisms for people to shrink or expand how much information is shared and how easy it is to contact them.

I'm actually dismayed that to this day very, very few sites enforce a system where you must be recommended by someone in order to join, or by a friend to ask to be friends/communicate with someone.

Those that get perpetually harassed would be far less likely to have to deal with trolls if those trolls had to be a "friend of a friend". Is vouching so technically complicated we haven't done it yet?

There are social structures and conventions that haven't really seen much traction in software. Someone's totally out of control at a party? Kick them out and kick out the person that invited them too.

I've written a response about three times here and just deleted it because I rambled for paragraphs something that could be summed up by saying: i have no fucking idea what the correct answer is.

I know services like Slack are kinda helping this along a little bit - I'm a part of one or two Slack groups that I've been invited to by other people, with a bit of a pep-talk at the start of like "here's the sort of shit that WON'T fly here..." that are just small single-interest focussed groups that have kinda organically grown, but it's definitely a rare situation.

I think it's just education for new users (kids), and making sure they fully understand how the internet works and being mindful of what information they share where and with whom. Trolls (in all their levels of extremity) will always exist - anyone claiming they know how to "get rid" of them are fooling themselves

It's less a problem of "getting rid" of trolls and more a case of giving people control over them instead of it being such a one-sided deal where trolls get to dictate where, when and how you can socialize.

If people feel like they have tools to push back against trolls they'll use them. If they feel like they're powerless, they'll leave. If they leave the troll to user ratio skews a bit higher and might end up poisoning the entire community.

"The secret to dealing with internet trolling is some combination of ignoring it, turning your devices off now and then, and realizing that the character you are interacting with online is not actually a real person."

No. Gamergate has proven that "ignoring it" and "turning your devices off" is NOT the way to fix it. Neither of those things does anything.

I learned about the Gamergate drama from HN, well after the fact.

This solution seems to have worked for some people :)

Not the people being targeted.

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