it's sad that people like this exist in the world. what could possibly motivate someone to spend their time doing this?
It seems like parasocial relationships can swing both ways. You know how some fans develop a creepy, obsessive sort of love for creators? Well, the same goes for hatred. They feel slighted by that person that doesn't know them, and they retaliate from behind their keyboard.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_type...
First time I bumped into this was in the DAOC MMORPG. Some players were deliberately annoying others, to the point of "wasting" their online time doing stupid shit that annoyed people. It really shocked me.
Thing is, there's lots of griefers in any online game. Which means there's lots of people out there in the real world who would do this if they could get away with it. Anonymity allows them to do this online with very little repercussion, so it shows how many there really are. But now every time I do an interview, or look at a rental, I'm thinking "is this person a griefer? are they going to enjoy making my life a misery?"
> (That's life)
> And as funny as it may seem
> Some people get their kicks
> Stomping on a dream
> But I don't let it, let it get me down
> Cause this fine old world, it keeps spinnin' around
- That’s Life
By Dean Kay and Kelly Gordon. Most famously recorded by Frank Sinatra.
Probably being between the ages of 10-14 years old. Bartle Killer-explorer?
It also left me wondering why that person would spend an hour or two each day for several days in a row, filling out online forms. What’s the motivation?
My suspicion is that the person doing it works at the company and was trying to mess with their systems. But I’ll never know for sure.
safety is the hard part of ugc products but is left to figure out after scale and ossification.
But some quick references... One approach is to avoid algorithmic surfacing of UGC outside of one's own network (or secondary connections etc), which makes discovery harder (must be compensated in other ways). Twitter may explore similar ideas with pluggable algorithms (though I don't trust them). Another approach is to constrain UGC: eg a music/audio community which has barriers to sharing new audio outside your network, but which freely allows remixing and promoting remixed audio of known good audio without as much safety control over the remixes because the operations allowed on the "good" source material make it difficult to subvert. This kind of idea is at the core of a product concept, not an additional layer to tack on later. I believe that finding these kind of cheaper ways of managing UGC and lending discovery to UGC can be a huge competitive edge.