How Trolls Are Ruining the Internet
time.com
time.com
It's interesting. It used to be that the average American's 5-6 hours of daily media consumption was produced entirely by what 4-5 corporations? Thats literally ~400 million people's media coming from maybe a couple thousand people. How is that good? If "trolling" [which I think is really just a code word for "exposure to interpretations of reality with which I disagree"] is the price of more diverse, more informative media, then so what?
Simply asking how encouraging perpetual victimhood empowers women and ethnic minorities is more often than not met with incredulous outrage and accusations. There is no room for debate - one either is with them or against them. Nuance and honest debate are for privileged people dontcha know. Only POC, LGBTQ who buy into victim culture and "womyn" are allowed to express their opinions without interference. Check your privege buddy or GTFO!
Sensitivity to them is what's causing this current push back (and emboldening them). I'm not defending them as some of them go way out of line, but I feel like language policing is a large step in the wrong direction.
Yes, they have. But ordinary people have not. And I believe this is the biggest problem. The trolls have been setting the tone of a Internet that most people don't want.
I want a Internet without harassment and harsh/trololol comments. We need to fight back against the trolls.
My daughter wrote a paper about Gamergate and the crap around that, and she was afraid to publish it widely for fear of retaliation. A bandmate wrote a fantastic song about trolls hating on women in gaming, and we only play it live because she's afraid of what will happen if we release a recording. It's scary. Women are justifiably afraid of what will happen to them if they publicly criticize the trolls.
"Trolling" means different things to different people(just as what people find offensive), and legislating that is dangerous IMO.
> The alt-right’s favorite insult is to call men who don’t hate feminism “cucks,” as in “cuckold.” <snip> Trolling is the alt-right’s version of political activism, and its ranks view any attempt to take it away as a denial of democracy.
I honestly don't like this burden of trolling to be placed on the right, because both sides consist of people with emotional issues and incapability to handle them. And to be honest, such people don't deserve online access.
The 90's and early 2000's were refreshing where you had to be a certain geek to get to the web, which was a filter enough.
[edit] To clarify, my impression of the article is that it's not balanced between both sides. Might have something to do that "troll" doesn't necessarily mean the same, as user Fifer82 suggested in his comment "I don't mind trolls. There is a difference between a troll, a bully, a wanker and a psycho"[1].
On the other hand making up a name for people who fail to hate women doesn't have quite the same logic.
Mocking a powerful politician is fair game. Indeed, mocking the powerful is a necessary function in a republic or democracy, and should be practiced in direct proportion to the hypocrisy openly demonstrated by the target.
Mocking random members of the public (calling them cucks or faggots in threads on reddit) serves no function.
The 90's and early 2000's were refreshing where you had to be a certain geek to get to the web, which was a filter enough.
We should have never let the normals onto the Internet, and doubly never should have given them the time of day to talk about it. They've taken every disagreement that they discover online and cast it into onto the left-right spectrum (or some other bullshit narrative about who the people really are and what they really want). They make things intractable and will profit off complaining that they're intractable.
What are you talking about? Your quotes demonstrate that both sides do it. Are you suggesting liberals are to blame for trolls like Milo Yiannopoulos?
There are liberals and there are liberals, this is what I believe: http://www.physicsclassroom.com/class/newtlaws/Lesson-4/Newt...
Garbage journalism on the other-hand might actually have the power to do it.
Just like anything in life when it comes to the internet I think you have to use it for sometime before you can somewhat manage to spot whats right and wrong on the internet.
The author also mentions something about how the internet is eager to help with technical details and is bad for medical advice? Seriously? I mean, I once saw someone advice a guy to place his router higher than his computer, so that gravity will make the internet faster :) and I have seen complete strangers on places like reddit come together to help people who were having trouble with something, genuinely helping and making a better change in people's lives.
The damn internet doesn't care about trolls or there's no ruining these trolls can do to the internet. People are always going to be people, you are going to have to use some common sense when you are living your normal life and when you are on the Internet.
Time, as a print magazine, doesn't dare acknowledge this fact. They're in the same exact business as tabloids, just at different rungs on the respectability ladder. So they're both going to go after the trolls. The fact Milo works for Breitbart only gets a parenthetical mention. They don't stop to question the quality of Breitbart's content, just play a bit of guilt by association towards it's board.
Of course it only gives more power to Weev and Milo's actions. But Time needs the trolls to be powerful, because if they weren't Time couldn't teach you to hate them.
This is an interesting move, and a topic I've been discussing with friends. I've stopped using sites like Reddit, because the comment sections are just toxic. I've gone as far as installing Chrome extensions that make comment sections disappear from popular sites like YouTube. It's too easy to get drawn into the negativity, and I'm completely over it. "Social Networking" has reached it's low point as far as I'm concerned. Hacker News is about the only civil place I'm capable of contributing to a discussion to at this point.
See, it's not the negativity that gets me, or the political incorrectness. Neither of those things is ever truly a turn-off. It's the regurgitated slogans, and in particular the one-liner quip ad hominems. If I see a comment section and it's a hierarchy of one-liners, that's a clear cut sign.
I'm going to openly admit to being an elitist. I'd rather discuss a topic with an evil genius than an imbecile.
You know, I get this response every time I talk about this topic. I really dislike the "well no one is making you use / buy / watch / listen" to something. People can be critical of something they want to succeed. It happens a lot in certain game communities. What if I WANT to talk about politics, in a civil manner? Any sufficiently popular subreddit, just devolves into complete trash.
I definitely agree that many subs - and particularly front page ones - can be a cesspool, although amusingly they don't quite get as bad as just about every news and newspaper site I've seen. But really, /r/upliftingnews is just too toxic for you? /r/changemyview is too negative?
There's lots of great, very low-toxicity subs on Reddit. Abandoning the site because you're trying to discuss political issues - touchy in any arena, online or in person - seems a bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I've been a part of many forums and internet communities and chat rooms, and they always tend to go the same way:
The people who have been around for awhile get increasingly annoyed by the newcomers and their lack of decorum or 'idiotic statements' or whatever, so that segment of the group starts posting in a new more secluded place and use the other place less and less.
Eventually more and more people find out about the 'secluded place' and it becomes more and more cluttered with 'undesirables', (often a few people from the previous group are now part of the old farts, or have become the new old farts), so a chunk of them break off from that community or forum and start posting somewhere even more secluded. And eventually it happens again. And again. And it's turtles all the way down.
I saw the same exact shit happening in real life too with Meetup.com. People stopped posting stuff to meetup groups because they didn't want certain people to come, then there's a smaller group that's secret from the others, then either some people find out about it that shouldn't or one of the people in the secret group starts acting in a way that the other people don't want to deal with them anymore (for example, one time it was because they started dating someone who was a real jerk), so a new, smaller secreter group is formed, and so on...turtles all the way down again.
It's just another example of the tragedy of the commons.
The Meetup scenario is depressing. Thankfully the one Tech Meetup I attend every so often is positive.
The meetup thing started innocently enough a couple times (with a couple people I was told explicitly they didn't want certain people to come), it's like 'we found some people we like hanging out with now thanks to meetup and now we're just inviting them over to our place', but eventually they stop posting their normal stuff on meetup and it gets harder and harder to keep the group going.
I was a forum admin for way too long. Kinda glad I'm out of that now. Although now I'm an organizer for a meetup group, and it's not much different.
What you're looking for are strictly moderated subreddits with a clear set of rules. I've had good luck with r/NeutralPolitics and its sister subreddit r/NeutralNews.
Reddit isn't a community so much as a tool for people to form communities. The people who realize this get way more out of reddit than the people who don't.
The trick with reddit is to avoid the default subreddits. Everyone is subscribed to them at first, so the toxic comments are mostly there. If you just subscribe to niche subreddits about topics you like, you will not find toxic comments.
This is a major deficiency of the site. In order to avoid having a completely terrible experience, you must manually make significant changes.
Personally I think they should do away with defaults entirely.
Why not just ignore the comments and just read the linked articles?
I find the comments are more informative or more interesting than the articles most of the time, just like here.
Fortunately, a well moderated group is only as good as the mod team. There are well-maintained groups on reddit. None happen to be any of the defaults, however.
The difference between default and not is 4 million users... It doesn't matter how good the mod team: its just not tenable with the hordes.
Anyways, I have ecletic interests, where the communities are small and well behaved. The worst I see is a spammer or 2. And they are reported and deleted rather quickly.
Not just Reddit, HN stories about Microsoft are very toxic as well. These company sponsored trolls are like poison for the great HN community. It's completely unbelievable what's going on, and what some invest to destroy such a great community.
Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12319670 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12305598
HN is about venture capitalists, startups and Silicon Valley. How does their toxic behaviour fit in - any startup who uses expensive software for a startup is heading the MySpace way and has already lost. Their PR is offtopic and their corporate trolls toxic. Their usual tactic on HN is to overflow the comment section with blurb comments to increae the comment count. As soon as the comment count is higher than the story vote count, it acts like a flagging. (Plus the flag/downvote all non-flavour able comments.) IMHO a huge flaw with the current HN algorithms.
I'm all for correctional downvotes even if I get them myself sometimes.
Your proposal however will is likely to encourage unnecessary cowardice and political correctness from old accounts and a landslide of throwaways.
Aha, as long as you are talking about repeat real trolls. (No, I don't share the admiration that some parts of HN seems to have for the old trolls :-)
Care to explain?
Unfortunately pg was one of the first who started this when throwing the t-word at arc critics. Really sad.
> He served just over a year in prison for identity fraud and conspiracy.
This refers to his sentence for revealing AT&T's ridiculously lax security practices to a journalist. This sentence was overturned.
Using this as some sort of anecdote to illustrate weev's untrustworthiness without mentioning what it was for, or that it was overturned is the epitome of lazy and dishonest reporting.
Righteous, uptight, indignant, spiteful, entitled...I never knew how much I despised my neighbors until I joined my local Nextdoor.
I got friended on FB by a guy I did some volunteering with this summer (and will do so again next summer). Turns out he's a racist, transphobic bigot. So my question is, do I just start laying into him until he learns something (and damage relationship with someone I have to work with), or do I just unfollow and hold my nose later on?
A more important question is what drives so many people to attack non-white people and women online? Is it simply a reaction to a drop in status as traditionally oppressed groups assert themselves or is there more to this? We likely won't know anytime soon as the trend today is to dissect and discuss symptoms to the point of absurdity but talking about the causes or possible causes is almost taboo. E.g. Trump. Endless articles and opinion pieces bullshitting about how "evil" and "fascist" he is but serious discussions asking if, say, widespread economic disenfranchisement and the Democrats alienating the white working class in favor of identity politics has something to do with it.
The culture of outrage that identity politics has morphs into treats words as the fotemost evil in our world. "OMG Drumpf SAYS he's going to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it and HE SAYS he will "ban" Muslims from entering the US!! He must be stopped!" Meanwhile Obama is deporting so many illegal immigrants he earned another nickname from it (Depoter in Chief) and firing Hellfire missiles on wedding parties and other funny acting Muslim civilians. Thousands have been killed or injured by "mistakes". But never mind about that because Trump. And don't ask if the economic lot of black people has improved during Obama's eight years in office or what he has done to stop the deaths of young black men at the hands of police. That would destroy the fantasy of America's first black president as a hip, progressive dude who really cares...and we can't have that.
Back to trolls "ruining" the Internet. Instead of cutting off their oxygen (the only proven way to kill trolls) Time gives them a massive infusion of the stuff and a hysterical headline to go with it. Of course possible root causes won't be explored and government surveillance, censorship etc. of the Internet in conjunction with business interests (the MPAA and RIAA to name two very prominent ones) that sends American LEA to foreign lands to violate the liberies of people suspected of...sharing links to pirated movies/music and running a cloud storage service that may have been used to store and share the aforementioned files.
It does sometimes feel like the world has gone over a cliff and the media, the establishment political parties and their wealthy owners/donors have glumped together into a mass of crazy that is stealth infecting people around the world.
That being said, I think there are people post garbage regardless whether they're given attention or not. Kinda like the people who carve dicks and swastikas at bathroom stalls.
You've clearly never been the target of even a minor troll campaign. Hundreds of accounts each send hundreds of messages an hour across a wide range of social media and email accounts. If they can get your real world details they'll use those too. If they get your workplace details they'll use that to harass your employer.