How the hell do people think it's okay to call and threaten/harass someone just because they didn't pick your favorite poll option for their project? Wow.
They will read this thread and think "hey, I helped do that!", and get a small buzz - just like most of us feel if one of our own projects is featured on HN.
They know it's "not okay", but they just don't care.
This is a massive oversimplification, but I think it goes some way to explain why these sorts of things happen.
Honestly, having sporadically visited the site since 2006 it's pretty much a cess pool now. It was never great, but since the mid 2010's it's more the negative, waste of time to read kind of deal.
The reason for that is the purging of threads that won't get bumped enough combined with the sorting by engagement not by actual votes like on Hackernews for example. This creates a high incentive to post controversial and upsetting stuff that will ensure the survival of one's thread and rewards trolls and extremists who are particuarly successful in employing that behavior. On small boards threads can exist for hours or even days. Whereas on large boards most threads will only last a few minutes, UNLESS the OP and the first few replies follow certain behavior patterns that have been proven to be successful for the survival of threads on large Futaba Channel type image boards. If the OP and the first few replies set the right tone for the following replies to follow, they will keep that thread successfully afloat.
The type of posts that will keep a thread alive on 4chan must be heavily transgressive, controversial, use in-group language and references that makes it easier to identify out-group "newf**s" etc, and be overall exciting and enagaging. It's tickling the short term reward system in the user's brains after all. This is how the mechanism of purging threads trains 4chan's user base to behave like the assholes of the internet. They are being manipulated by software design in an evolutionary matter. Nobody wants to spent time creating unsuccesful threads with little engagement that get deleted after just a few moments, it's frustrating, embarrassing and boring. So people who don't fit in either leave 4chan or adapt. That's why the site's "culture" and memes seems actually quite consistent and conforming (to only its own rules of course).
I find that's a huge mindfuck and manipulation of behavior, while not intended by the original designers of these types of image board software, it's still a thing to be aware of how these sites control their user's behavior. It's funny how this actually contrasts with the self-perception of their users as being based and elitist. They're actually in a huge online re-education camp that keeps them hooked via small bursts of endorphin.
The boards' topics have only in part to do with the toxicity of views and behaviors expressed on them. I propose the hypothesis that it's actually the limited amount of threads being kept at any single time that is a huge factor that increases evolutionary pressure on the user base. In result it's what rewards toxic behavior on sites like 4chan, and this board mechanism is responsible for training a subculture of young men to believe that this is acceptable or empowering behavior online. So they excert this learned behavior outside the mechanisms of image boards and also bring it into the real world and into politics where they are being used by political professional actors for campaigns of course since their previously trained behavior and thought patterns that get activated by those political manipulators are not based on reflection and introspection but on manipulation and getting rewards (in the form of "lulz". Thus "owning" your opponent takes the place of real intellectual political debates). Decreasing the amount of allowed threads and increasing the user traffic will both accelerate this behavioral re-education process in its users. 4chan and the like as a mass propaganda tool to manipulate a subset of the population is excellent! It's like an army boot camp for political trolls, if it didn't exist you'd have to invent and engineer it like 4chan.
Many of the old online communities still exist and often times the old conversations and interactions are still online. This would make for interesting and I think fruitful and enlightening material for social studies.
Ask anyone who has participated in various online communities and they can tell you pretty well how moderation and other users influence the overall social conduct in the respective online spaces quite differently. Most people can at least tell you about specific shifts in their online community and it would be interesting to find out what decisions of the site owners or software developers created this shift, if at all.
I think as a software user interface designer you have a responsibility to be aware of your creation's psychological and behavioral effects. Sadly only the big social media companies really invest in this research and weaponize it for profit maximization. But I think this knowledge should become more widely available and more people especially the users should be made aware of it.
To me people on Twitter and on 4chan aren't free in the sense of the enlightenment:
“Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another.”
From the few comments I've read by the original creator of the site, Moot, he described the function of the site as a "survival of the fittest", where the best and most interesting ideas would stick around. He said this in the context of memes, as when the site used to be known for those, but I believe it holds some value, as people generally don't forget things even after the thread's gone, and it gets brought up again, or it gets saved in some image folder. Unfortunately, controversial content will always get the most engagement on any platform, be it through upvotes, bumps, or the sheer number of posts. You can see that on sites like this just as well, but also on the news on TV. Bad news reaches far and wide, that's just human behavior. Online this mostly becomes a question of how it's moderated and if you can even moderate it after a certain point. I believe Moot eventually gave up on this after events like Chanology and gamergate were really taxing on him, and I'm not sure the new site's moderator is very invested in regards to this.
It's interesting to note, that instigating raids is a bannable offense (rule 4), and I've witnessed many posts calling for this get deleted. But often, especially on this site, this cannot be contained once the cat's out of the bag, as just hopping on the next IP address is enough to continue posting, and people quickly move to other means of communication.
What I still don't understand is how we got to the point where it's not considered straight up illegal (like it used to be at one time in the not so distant past).
As recently as my own childhood (mere single-digit decades ago) vocalizing a death threat aloud with any sort of seriousness could get you in a mess of trouble with the law, and putting it in print could get you a night in jail to think about it at the very least.
On the Internet, you could be anywhere in the world. It's hard to track you. Not that hard, since most people don't even try to cover their tracks, but it's out of the hands of local police, and it's way, way, way off the radar of the FBI.
Unless you're a politician or perhaps a major celebrity, they don't even bother. They'll just assume that it's some rando in the middle of nowhere who didn't mean it, doesn't know where you are, and are content to just issue the threat. And 99.99% of the time, they're right. Comforting, huh?
It is illegal. And I personally think that if the FBI started taking these seriously, the number would drop substantially. Probably not enough to make the Internet a less bad place, but I'd be curious to see if it helped. I think that the anonymous death and rape threats are the core of all of the rest of the hostility, making it seem reasonable to merely use abusive language.
But I doubt we'll ever find out.
As to tracking the perpetrator, in some cases it's exceedingly hard to trace them down online, but in many of these types of cases, the person or persons making these types of threats make little to zero efforts to cover their tracks (of which there are many on the modern Internet), and would be child's play for law enforcement to trace down, especially with even the smallest bit of cooperation from ISPs.
That having been said, I'm actually against wholesale spying on the entire userbase by ISPs, even though many of them are guilty of that already, but when someone reports a crime to them that involves actual risk to the safety of others, turning over user records for the violator (easily determined who by simple time/date matching in the logs) isn't going too far really, I would think?
I dunno. Maybe I'm wrong. Perhaps I just need to accept that everything bad in the world is only gonna get worse no matter what anyone does or says about it. It's so hard to tell anymore from day to day…
I'm not surprised that they don't. But I really think they should.
Cookieengineer randomly decided to claim that "70 people" had called him to harass him. He's now deleted the tweet and there's absolutely no evidence that anyone called him or that his number was even accessible online.
Just because you want to punish someone for 'breaking a social contract' does not give you free license to become judge, jury, and executioner with any penalty you feel like at the moment.
The next step to that is maybe we feel like they are irredeemable sick f*ks already showing strong dark triad traits, and society is better off without them, so off with their heads. Since we can all dish out whatever penalty wwe feel like when we feel wronged, no problem, right?
That seems potentially proportionate but in general you seem to share (a lesser version of) their mindset - that disproportionate punishments are fine when it's against those who have wronged you.
So I was speaking more generally. I believe that the FBI should start taking Internet death threats seriously, even though the fact is that the vast majority of them aren't. They have a serious chilling effect and are already felonies. All that would be needed would be the will to enforce existing laws.
They're not prioritized because it would require a lot of work just to scare some kid (who would almost certainly be given little to no sentence). But the larger effect might be more significant.
I.e., they see X as appropriate punishment, they should themselves be subject to X -- let them live by their own rules. Currently, they do not - they make their own rules, make all kinds of threats, and then just laugh about it on their chats in their basements.
What is actually effective is highly reliable and under-proportionate penalties, but that would require massive tracking systems that almost none of us would be willing to even consider, much less implement. E.g., if every anti-social act resulted in a fine between $5-$500 (scaled for income/wealth so it wasn't just a license for rich ppl to be a*holes), it would rapidly decline. But it would require a nearly insane tracking and judicial system.