Ad exec driven to suicide (partly) by trolls | Hacker News Reader

Ad exec driven to suicide (partly) by trolls

nytimes.com

12 pointspg23 comments

I'm interested in what you say about trolls, but I don't think it's easy to know why this man committed suicide. We interpret these things through the filter of our own preexisting opinions. It's entirely conceivable that he would have done so even if people hadn't said harsh things about him on blogs.

Something about the phrase "driven to suicide" bothers me. It reduces the element of choice involved. Even if someone left a suicide note saying "Trolls made me do it," it wouldn't make it true.

Interacting with people online just doesn't feel real in the same way. I know I'm guilty of being trollish and harsh, and it can be very easy when the other person is just a handle. Without the tangible interaction of real life, impulses and the desire to act like someone else can get the better of me.

The other side of the coin is that internet culture is also addicted to low level trolling. To be noticed, you have to be cutting in what you say, just look at who gets voted up on reddit and digg.

I prefer AIM to voice chat. It's easier to write precisely than speak precisely. And it's easier to understand just what someone is saying when you can reread bits.

Cherish your privacy. The cost of fame (to any degree) is too high.

To the OP: be careful, you'll worry your peeps.

I want fame. The cost of having important ideas, and not being listened to, is higher.

Ideas are dead--it's all been thought before. Man is vain.

lol?

And if you're serious, I happen to have some already-thought-of ideas that are very important and not well known. Do those make you smile?

Ok, ok, I'll bite, again. What are these ideas you speak of?

For example of already-thought-of important ideas, William Godwin is very neglected. In part due to sexual scandal -- basically just sex outside marriage which was a lot worse then (1800ish). In part due to honest memoirs about his dead wife Mary Wollstonecraft (the first feminist). Partly due to the getting lumped in with French Revolution supporters. But in the long run, mostly because his ideas are not popular.

Of the few people who've heard of him, most only care because they like the history of England or anarchist political philosophy (he's sometimes called the first anarchist, but I don't think that's true). Most neglect one of his top 2 books:

The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature

(His other best book is called Political Justice, and the subject matter is the reason that it's better known.)

BTW, his books are out of copyright, so you can legally download them for free. See here: http://curi.us/main/godwin_download

Here's a quote:

Let us consider the effect that coercion produces upon the mind of him against whom it is employed. It cannot begin with convincing; it is no argument. It begins with producing the sensation of pain, and the sentiment of distaste. It begins with violently alienating the mind from the truth with which we wish it to be impressed. It includes in it a tacit confession of imbecility. If he who employs coercion against me could mould me to his purposes by argument, no doubt he would. He pretends to punish me because his argument is strong; but he really punishes me because his argument is weak.

Consider the consequences of this insight not only for spanking children, but also for ordering them about or punishing them. Restrict your reflections to children over age 6 if you want, just to make the situation more clear.

There's lots more where that came from.

Good stuff. Yeah, I think calling children unreasonable is taking the easy way out and a way of avoiding hard questions. But, I'm not a parent, I've only been a child.

The theory that you have to be a parent to make comments about parenting is really annoying. It's not a serious, logical position, it's just a way to shut people up.

BTW Godwin was a parent, so one can't say it about his stuff anyway.

True. I think there is something to be said for experience giving weight to opinion, but people use it to monopolize opinion too much. Plus, there's always the fact that it is hard to be objective about something you are experiencing.

I think experience is valid when means are being discussed, but much less significant when ends are being discussed.

BTW, I don't know if you've noticed, but I use upmods as a way of keeping threads alive. I know I always check my threads when my points increase, and I assume others do the same.

One thing about experience is if you learned something important from it, you can say so, and make it part of the discussion.

I've done the same thing with upmods. :)

But I periodically skim my whole threads page for replies, anyway.

You sure you don't mean influence instead? You can be very influential without any fame. Given the choice, I'd prefer influence.

For example, if I were sufficiently famous, I would be invited to give a TED talk. That's valuable.

Certainly there are different types of fame, and something more along the lines of 'influential' is better than the type where people want to know who you're dating.

"he was very intelligent, with lots of talents and skills, and this was not his whole life. Pointing to blogging and the media just trivializes a man whose life was not trivial.”

I'm not fully sure if bloggers drove him to this. On the other hand I have no respect for folks who cowardly publish information to smear others without identifying themselves. If I don't feel comfortable having my name associated with something I write then I probably shouldn't write it.

There are of course exceptions, but if you feel you need to remain anonymous let someone else post the information, someone who isn't ashamed to stand by what they write.

I don't buy it. You'd have to have some pretty thick skin to survive in the ad industry anyway.

It is unfortunate, but learning to disregard trolls (and serious personal attacks that you don't find helpful) is worthwhile. Getting upset about that kind of thing is a large cost (even if it just distracts you for a couple hours per incident).

Watching what happened at Reddit convinced me that the solution is not to learn to disregard trolls, but to exclude them. They poison the atmosphere of a community, and drive away the more thoughtful members. And while you can make free speech arguments for them as you can for spam, in practice trolls are almost as distinct from other posters as spam is from ordinary email.

Every successful community has rules of conduct. And rules are probably even more necessary when the members are anonymous.

Oh, we are talking about different issues. We can have a policy for a forum as a whole that aims to exclude trolls, and also develop personal skills to ignore them. I don't want to be personally dependent on effective forum maintainers, so it's important for me to be able to disregard trolls in the instances they get past the forum's safeguards.

The First Amendment (and the Bill of Rights) is a contract between the government of the United States and its citizens. Free speech doesn't really have a meaningful definition outside of that contract. Since you are the benevolent leader of this community you define the rules of conduct.

For forums that I moderate, I am very aggressive with locking threads when even an ounce of negativity is present. I prefer to be very terse with my explanations too. I have my standard set of reasons and try not to elaborate to much. I'll finish the thread with a very terse final post.

Locked: Spam. Locked: Negative. Locked: Troll. Locked: Offtopic.

But this probably wouldn't scale to reddit size. People would probably try to get threads locked on purpose to quell discussion about topics they didn't agree with (especially politics).

I'm hopeful that by changing the rules, you can transform the incentives for trolling behavior from a force of evil to something more productive.

We all have the troll gene. Whether it expresses itself is another story. Community-based principles seems one way to clamp it down. But radical changes in the product design is another. Making people less anonymous seems like one very fruitful path.

Really? Do you have a bayesian filter that can tell trollbait from irony? Some humans have trouble with false positives when it comes to irony...

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