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Comment by javadocmd | Hacker News Reader

I think anyone remotely familiar with the internet won't be surprised by these outcomes. Of course the occasional reality check is always good.

I wonder to what extent plucky startups expect abuse when they put pop-up chat dialogs in their products. I imagine it's inescapable that some percentage of your user base is going to see it as an invitation to respond poorly. Something door-to-door salespeople and telemarketers learned long ago. I suppose abuse filtering is still an unsolved problem waiting to make someone rich.

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I'm using the net (As a guy) for 20 years now, and I was surprised. This is taking place at an alarming scale. Some parents really missed the mark in teaching their kids basic human manners, and I'm not even talking about the golden rule...

I am really curious. You say you have used the net for 20 years now, so how can you be surprised about this? Have you not exposed yourself to other anonymous forums? They're all filled with vitriol and disrespect.

As another surprised guy I'm aware people post bad things on the internet but I wasn't aware of the degree of difference between having a male and female picture as I haven't tried that.

Surprised here also (I'm a guy in my 40s; 25 years online) - I know there are people online with no manners, and I go out of my way not to interact with them, but the sheer level of abuse shown here (and sadly elsewhere too) constantly amazes and upsets me.

The obvious thing to do is to remove anonymity from the Internet. However then what do we do about peoples rights[1] to free speech?

---

[1] Not every country gives this right to it's populous.

> The obvious thing to do is to remove anonymity from the Internet.

That would force this woman to put her real name and photo up there. I could imagine she might not be comfortable with that.

Facebook is a fantastic example that lack of anonymity does not solve anything. It takes 5 seconds to find groups where people openly say that all women are bad, immigrants should be shot, black people are responsible for all the crime etc etc......even though all of their friends and family can see those posts. It solves nothing.

See also YouTube comments when the real name policy was a thing.

China is solving this problem. Every citizen will have it's own score (by 2019 or something) and you get points taken away if any of your online friends or family say bad things about the communist party. It's a solution... but i'm not sure if it's the right one:)

here's the article: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/chinese-government-social-cre...

> China is solving this problem

China is run by a authoritarian oligarchy that wants to suppress any challenge to it's power. The planned "social credit" system is part of that suppression.

FYI, this oligarchy has a list of "perils" that include:

> “Western constitutional democracy”; others included promoting “universal values” of human rights, Western-inspired notions of media independence and civic participation [1]

It's not trying to solve your problem with people's online lack of manners, and any imputation to the contrary is part of a smokescreen.

> It's a solution... but i'm not sure if it's the right one

It's the wrong solution, full stop.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/world/asia/chinas-new-lead...

The fact that China as a whole is an authoritarian oligarchy does not mean that they can't do things better than the US.

> The fact that China as a whole is an authoritarian oligarchy does not mean that they can't do things better than the US.

You're missing the point. The US should not emulate China's authoritarian systems of control, regardless of how well China can do them or how they might seem applicable to some aspect of American life. They are the tools of authoritarianism, and to bring them here is to allow authoritarianism to creep in.

Not sure why you're being down voted. You're absolutely right. The current state of affairs in China should have everyone in a panic. I fully believe that they are leading the way into the future tech-wise, and that before long, all major metropolises will be fully automated with real-time systems that track faces, vehicles, purchases, movements, vacations, etc and then cross-reference all of that data with online activity.

In China right now it's being touted as making everything in life seamless.

To me it's the most terrifying form of the future.

I feel like we've crossed from "Simpsons did it" to "Black Mirror did it", as Black Mirror has an episode (Season 3 Episode 1) which is a similar world that everyone now inhabits.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive (warning, contains spoilers)

Whether a country "gives" someone the right to free speech is irrelevant, it is still a right they have as a human being. That's sort of the entire point of "inalienable," in that it's not in the government's power to bestow or take away.

Hi. Yes. I didn't go to any anonymous forums. I didn't have any reason to go there. For me, It's like visiting the ghetto for the trill of being mugged..

> I'm using the net (As a guy) for 20 years now ...

Early on people said "There are no girls on the internet," and the sentence was supposed to embody the anonymity of the internet and the renaissance notion that a person should be judged by the merits of their arguments and not the labels attached to them. Someone claims to be a girl? No, you are talking to a middle aged dude having a chuckle. Maybe I have rose tinted glasses here, maybe it was always jerks saying there are no girls on the internet.

It morphed into "Tits of GTFO," because, given the anonymity of online dialogue, it seemed to some pernicious few that the only reason to mention being a woman was to seek attention.

Online dialogue grew vitriolic, "Its only the internet," trolls would throw at anyone trying to inject civility and good manners into flame wars. "I f'ed your mom," became a bit of a goto for a general passing derailment since it got to most people. If OP mentioned any detail about themself, (racial, gender, age, relationship status, mental issues) this was used to make more specific insults. Moderators struggled to keep up.

The networks got faster, streaming voice became possible on games. Voice isn't anonymous. The online dialogue started giving away details (age, sex, socioeconomic background), when team mates in pick up groups got frustrated with one another they started to reach for the sexist, the racist, the particular insults. Women learned not to speak up in chat to avoid the onslaught.

A lot of us became inured to that "12 year old claiming to have banged our mom last night", but those ridiculous insults take on a nastier edge when that "12 year old" knows details about your life. If you regularly game with women, you will see it. The mere fact that people believe there are so few women gamers is due to their fear of speaking up, there are more than there appear to be on the surface.

I do think the insults become more frequent when the jerks know you are a woman. They also know you are inured to the generic insults. Few women are inured to rape threats I think. I'm a bit surprised Eric didn't get racist comments in the OP's unscientific study.

I'm happy you haven't experienced the internet as I have, it has always been a nasty place and a lot of us sat by and pretended like it was different than real life as if there weren't real live humans behind the keyboards. I've been guilty of that. I still don't know what to do when I encounter such nastiness, much to my dismay.

> Early on people said "There are no girls on the internet," and the sentence was supposed to embody the anonymity of the internet and the renaissance notion that a person should be judged by the merits of their arguments and not the labels attached to them.

No, it was supposed to embody the fact that there were literally very few women on the majority of online message boards and chat rooms for a long time...

"Where the men are men, the women are men, and the little girls are FBI agents"

But also, the percentage of the userbase responding poorly also responded almost an order of magnitude more when the person on the other end was a woman.

And I think we would all agree that the ideal amount of abuse heaped on your team is zero.

That's obviously true, but it doesn't detract from the point that women, in this case and many others, are unfairly targeted for abuse, particularly online.

Ms. Enthoven covered that point rather nicely, I thought.

I hear this all the time, but I'd love some stats on this. It's not like the internet is a great place for those who don't reveal their gender.

This article had stats. Several thousand interactions with a statistically significant difference. Exactly how many stats do you need?

I don't have a precise number, but I need more than one anecdote from one website. Preferably something with data that was rigorously obtained.

> the percentage of the userbase

That's not what their data is showing. That would be a valuable break-out to see.

What their data is showing is number of messages. If you look at the chats, it appears they're counting multiple abusive messages (one minute to the next and many within the same minute stamp) from single actors.

If one jerk sends eight abusive messages in one minute, they're counting all of those in the order of a magnitude you're referring to. It makes sense the abusive actors will send as many abuse messages as they can as quickly as they can, as one would expect that to get shut-down.

Simply put, the abuse they're showing, which is about ~14 rude + harrassment messages per week to Julia, could easily consist of just two or three individual jerks sending a burst of messages (which again appears to be the case based on the screenshots). By their numbers, they're getting ~4,500 visitors per week. Out of those, it appears that about 0.1% or less of those visitors are likely a problem.

No - I counted each thread separately. A "burst of messages" counts as 1

edit: and for the downvoters, I operate a service in the retail space that is exclusively for women. Information/data/blog posts of this sort are extremely valuable to me, that's why I'm asking for clarification.

Ok, then I'm confused. In the post it shows, for example this:

https://i.imgur.com/P4QCWO4.png

That says ~14 messages per week. So you're saying the labeling is wrong, that it should say chat sessions per week?

The overall math in that scenario is also confusing me, if that refers to sessions. If the average abusive session contained even just six or seven messages, times 14 abuse sessions per week, upwards of 100 abuse messages contained within the abusive sessions in a week, ~400 per month. Roughly half of your customer interaction messages, or more, at that time, were occuring in abuse threads? Or does "2,100 messages" actually refer to 2,100 individual chat sessions?

Yes, I'm using the word "messages" loosely in the article. Here, "messages" = message threads or sessions. - We got 2,100 message threads over the last three months. - We got 14 message threads or abusive sessions per week, a small fraction of the 2,100 overall

The average "abusive session" contained only about three or four messages, not 6-7. Otherwise, your math is right.

There was almost zero abuse on the male cofounder image. So by what this story presents as long as you pretend to be guys plucky startups don't have to worry.

Not really. The cat got the least amount of trolling. What these people are doing is really asking for their time getting wasted by a bot before being transfered to a human customer support operator.

Apart from logical reasoning of this phenomena, and being polite in general, I actually hate it when someone pops up and is like “hey, you have a problem”, on any site. Especially when popup covers content and/or site controls. Multiply that by someone’s low culture and voila.

I’ll not be wondered if this $10M problem solves with help me button at right top of the screen, instead of popups.

Strongly agree. Humans tend to respond negatively to what they perceive as an intrusion.

That said, what surprised me the most about the whole article was learning that sometimes there are in fact real people behind those random annoying chat boxes. I've always assumed I'd only get a self-help bot to reply so I would've never used them.

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