Reminder that Terry being hellbanned on this website was cited by those who tracked him down in person towards the end as very not good for his mental state/part of reason for his extreme decline towards the end.
Whether that’s true, no clue. But I like to think he deserved better.
The thing is, it never stopped him from posting, nor did it stop those of us with “showdead” enabled from seeing his comments. For me at least, Terry was a fixture of the old HN. Every story on the front page would have that one dead, greyed out comment at the bottom that didn’t make very much sense to anyone but him. I miss seeing those comments.
I feel bad for Terry, because by all indications those posts were driven by mental health issues rather than intentional bigotry, but the effect of allowing them in the community is the same.
Yikes. That's some serious deflection from the 4chan crowd, where the trolls came from who made it their mission to completely destroy this vulnerable person's life via the internet.
HN had nothing to do with assholes "gifting" Terry a drum knowing it would completely disrupt his elderly parent's home he shared, and was subsequently forced to leave for living out of a minivan.
Then they preyed on his internet crushes discovered through his livestreams, watching those same livestreams as he read spoofed emails they sent from said crushes.
Ultimately what really ruined everything for Terry IMHO was live-streaming. You can't have vulnerable people live-streaming like that. It's when everything went off a cliff for him. There was realtime live video feedback for everything the trolls were doing anonymously to him. Instant gratification and optimization for their end.
That affected him in many ways, and it was noticeable. Before, he was always shaved and clean. After becoming homeless that changed.
Someone sent him a drum set and the noise annoyed his parents. He also annoyed them in other ways. Trolls were entertained by stressing the relationship between Terry and his family.
It was all the work of glowposting trolls. A reminder that we should not hesitate to drive into the glow.
you're advocating joining the CIA?
That said, you can't just let someone with those issues spew awfulness even if it's caused by a medical condition. That's a rough situation for the person being banned but I'm not sure what the less bad alternative would be.
Who was actually offended by Terry’s schizophrenic ramblings? Is the n word really that disturbing when used by someone without a firm grasp on reality and in the midst of a word salad? Is it racist or just nonsense?
“Rule are rules”… well, people in wheelchairs get a different set of rules and I’m perfectly fine sacrificing some of my own personal comfort to make accommodations.
Why isn’t this the same with mental illness?
Are you saying we should un-ban them all too, just because they are obviously insane?
And that all you have to do in order to openly and repeatedly harass anyone you feel like with sexist, racist, homophobic, and anti semitic hate speech is to act insane?
That's convenient.
Yes. Absolutely. 100%. While I get what you're saying, it's not on the recipient of an n-bomb to look up the person who just called them the n-word to judge their mental competency.
> “Rule are rules”… well, people in wheelchairs get a different set of rules and I’m perfectly fine sacrificing some of my own personal comfort to make accommodations.
I vehemently disagree. I can't think of any way that making accommodations for wheelchair friendliness inconveniences anyone. The doors and aisles are wider? That's great when I'm carrying a large box! Text is printed largely and in high contrast for people with vision impairments? Yay, now I can read it more easily!
I'm not saying Terry was a bad person. However, his illness caused him to say some outlandishly awful stuff to people. Why should they have to endure having those epithets hurled at them?
Well, I've sacrificed a heck of a lot of great parking spaces to accommodate the differently-abled.
> Why should they have to endure having those epithets hurled at them?
I contest that the mere act of reading or hearing certain words could be construed as a task of "endurance" - one is perfectly free to avoid reading or hearing such things if one finds them overtaxing.
On the other hand, if one chooses to "endure" for a moment, one might realize that the schizophrenic delusions of a madman have little bearing on the exact epithets being "hurled" (hurled where? Nowhere in particular, unless one glows in the dark!)
Sticks and stones... RIP Terry. I also don't mind that he was banned from here though, as much as I'm for unfettered speech, if the person in charge decided they didn't wish to host his, that was their prerogative. Terry certainly had other outlets.
I'm sympathetic to Terry. His illness turned him into a right bastard, though. If someone's illness caused them to punch people, I don't want to be around them because I don't want them to punch me. It's not because I think it makes them a bad person. I still don't want to be punched.
And darned if I'm going to be the one to tell a black person that they have to let someone call them the n-word repeatedly without wanting that person to go away.
It's a completely different scenario. Someone with tourrettes knows what just happened. They're probably deathly embarrassed and apologetic.
In the schizophrenic case, they're being aggressive, hurtful, belligerent -- no one is obligated to sit through that. There's no reasoning with them, there's not even a discussion happening.
This is absolutely true, but the context of the conversation was how community members and leaders could/should "manage" such a person, not as much how should the victims of mentally ill drive by retorts respond.
Stabbing should either be okay for everyone or not okay for anyone.
> people in wheelchairs get a different set of rules and I’m perfectly fine sacrificing some of my own personal comfort to make accommodations
Only because wheelchair accommodations are not very harmful. If they were considered too annoying to implement, they wouldn't be.
Isn't this what happened? Terry was allowed to post all he wanted. We just didn't have to read it. Win-win.
Implicit in this question is the idea that everyone viewing the thread is on the same page about why the person is spewing racist crap. This is never the case.
Imagine you stumble upon a brand new forum, where you know nothing about the regulars or years of built-up social dynamics. You find someone making racist remarks, and everyone is just... fine with it. You have finite time before you die: you're not going to wait around to see if there's a good reason for it. The reasonable thing to do is write it off as a forum that tolerates racism and move on with your life.
What do you want to do, flair people with "kind of crazy, don't worry if they say racist shit sometimes" labels? How are you planning to verify these people and tell them apart from people who just want to say racist shit? I guarantee there are a lot more of those than there are Terry Davises. This is, to put it gently, not scalable.
I've seen this is at small scale, too. Tolerance leads to the problem getting worse over time. You need to stand up for your rules of conduct, and hope the offender learns the right lesson from it. If not, that's not your responsibility. Your responsibility, as a group leader or admin, is the environment everyone shares.
>The missing stair is a metaphor for a person within a social group who many people know is untrustworthy or otherwise has to be "managed," but around whom the group chooses to work by discreetly warning newcomers of their behavior, rather than address them and their behavior openly. The "missing stair" in the metaphor refers to a dangerous structural fault, such as a missing step in a staircase; a fault that people may become used to and quietly accepting of, is not openly signposted or fixed, and that newcomers to a social group are warned about discreetly. [...]
>Meaning: The analogy of the missing stair makes it clear that the problem is the predator (the missing stair) and that the solution is stopping the predatory behavior (fixing the stair).
>An article about industry sexual harassment on comics news site ComicsAlliance posed the question: "Which one of these statements makes more sense to say: 'These people need to find more ways to stop people from harming them.' OR: 'These people should stop causing harm.' If you ever find yourself saying the former instead of the latter, take a moment and ask yourself why."[3]
>In a 2014 post on the anti-rape blog Yes Means Yes,[4] lawyer Thomas MacAulay Millar wrote that the missing stair analogy was consistent with his understanding of rapists' motivations and behaviors, based on research carried out by clinical psychologists David Lisak and Paul M. Miller, and by Stephanie K. McWhorter, a researcher with the U.S. Naval Health Research Center. Millar wrote that while a small number of rapists are "one-timers" who may be making a mistake or are confused about consent, the majority are repeat offenders, averaging six rapes each.[5] "We need to spot the rapists," Millar wrote, "and we need to shut down the social structures that give them a license to operate. They don't accidentally end up in a room with a woman too drunk or high to consent or resist; they plan on getting there and that's where they end up."[6]
One other terrible thing about mental illness like that (as if there needed to be another) is that it's really, really hard for people with mental illness to navigate the healthcare system to get proper treatment. Even I've experienced this, with ADHD. I joke that I take medication to remember to take my medication, and that's sometimes kinda true. I can only imagine what it would be like with delusions of persecution and voices in my head telling me to do stuff.
Another thing is that in the US, it's incredibly hard to get someone like Terry on medication if they don't want to be, even if it's in their own best interests. Most of the time, I'm generally in favor of this stance, as I don't think that anyone else, particularly the government, should be able to force medicate people against their wills. (NB: I'm not talking about vaccines here.)
The unfortunate result of these things is that people with really severe mental issues can easily end up homeless, or, at the very least, on disability and unable to work, and there's nothing anybody else can do about it.
Schizophrenia in particular is a real bastard of a disease, as you noted. Apparently, symptoms only go away in 70% of people who get treatment, and 15% of people with schizophrenia end up institutionalized.[0] The symptoms apparently also trend less severe over time, but there can be sudden and severe regressions.
Terry got dealt a bad hand, it's true. But, I don't think it's fair to say that getting banned from a website led to his death. If that was all it took, then just about anything could have caused him to go over the edge.
---
[0]: https://www.webmd.com/schizophrenia/schizophrenia-outlook#1
> According to this rule, one third of patients will have just a single psychotic episode during their lifetime; another third will experience different psychotic episodes that will recede without causing much deterioration and they will preserve psychosocial functioning; and the final third will present psychotic symptoms continually, as well as suffering notable deterioration and functional incapacity.
[From this source I just found now: https://www.clinicbarcelona.org/en/assistance/diseases/schiz... ]
"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me"
Puritanical grown adults on the post-2008 Internet acting like scared children afraid of tokens of text are the root of the problem.
HN banning him was not the cause of this, it was a symptom.
I think of Terry often, and he most certainly deserved better.
weird. they seem to like him
4chan "likes" vulnerable people in much the way that psychopaths "like" small animals.
Hacker News had a weird fetishistic fascination with him too.
Unfortunately, that can be blamed on "lack of great hackers to observe".