Let's all grow up

Antonio,

on HN, you wrote --

"I hate how being harsh has become fashionable. Whatever happened to manners?"

on your blog, you follow up by saying --

"I stand behind those words. Acting bitter on the Internet seems to be increasingly gathering the popularity amongst an audience that’s used to being amused and entertained by cheap attacks."

Two points: the first is that you use the word "bitter" to back up an anecdote of someone using "fucking" as an adjective to describe a poor User Interface experience. I disagree with that assessment, as there's nothing that suggests bitterness by using "fucking." It's merely a more extreme descriptor of the user's anger or exasperation, but it doesn't suggest bitterness, which has a distinctly different flavour (if you will excuse the pun).

Secondly, I don't believe anything "happened" to manners. There have always been people, often a vast majority of a given population, who used much coarser language to describe their everyday life and experience. Often this was a class distinction, thus the reference to "swearing like a sailor" etc. I expect that many people posting here were exposed -- in the context of software engineering or computer science -- to colleagues who were either used to communicating in an academic or professional context. Although coarse language is to be expected to some extent, written communication about features, bugs, etc. in a corporate US context tends to avoid direct expletives for various reasons ("lack of professionalism" etc). This isn't the case in parts of the OSS community or parts of Europe. You may have seen this before -- http://www.vidarholen.net/contents/wordcount/ -- the number of fuck/shit/crap uses in the Linux source code. Do you similarly think that the Linux contributors who provided the patches (or indeed Linus himself) need to "grow up?"

Different contexts, different modes of communication.

But the truth why that dude used "fuck" all over the place? It's a very quick and easy expression of dismay or outrage, and it gets cheap laughs. Whether or not that's an adolescent desire I can't say. Yet some of the most serious commentators on, say, international politics heavily use 'fuck' throughout their own communication. Read some interviews with Pulitzer-winning journalist Seymour Hersh, for instance -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Hersh

"Arrington has every right to write about what he wants, however he wants to - and to do so without being harassed by the community."

The community didn't harass him, a few nutcases did... depending on your threshold for what constitutes harassment.

I think there are two different phenomena going on here. First, you have anonymous jerks making stupid comments and threats all over the web. No surprise there; people are less thoughtful when they don't have to put their identity behind their words. The second phenomena is when someone tries to make a name for themselves by criticizing something or someone popular. Again, no surprise; it's been shown to be an effective way to get attention.

I don't really have a solution for either of these problems, but I think it's important to make the distinction between these two cases.

A trend I think we'll see in the next year: blogs starting to only allow comments that come through Facebook Connect or similar identification services. In my opinion, that would be a change for the better. People actually think about what they say when their name is attached to it.

One million dollars to the first person who can make Internet users nicer.

- No, stabbing doesn't count. DANCE does.

- Tie everything you do to your personal, real-you identity? Too much, privacy concerns.

- Raise awareness about how being good to others is better? Since the dawn of mankind we've been trying.

- Mark it as an unsolvable problem? Nah, not here.

- Have somekind of "boy scouts of the internet"? Give recognition with badges (achievements for you gaming folks)?

- Setup a website (this is an old idea I had) "the-golden-rule.com", where you post what YOU want others to do to you, and users can do these stuff to people they know, and brag on the website how they did it? And earn good-doer points?

- Slashdot moderation applied to random content? Imagine if you could select a DOM node (like Firebug's inspect) and label it "flamebait", "funny", which is sent to a central server, so your blog software can filter your comments not showing some? Or users can assign opacity to "bad" content? (I actually thought of this when I saw Snipd working)

Whatever it is, I think the solution goes around promoting good content, and downplaying bad. Just like in real life... bad people are cast aside, becoming pariahs. Yes, I am fully aware it'll be hard to determine what's good and what's bad. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

But anyway, it would be cool to see some kind of tool along these lines.

Awesome. The question is, how can we encourage good behavior without creating the very animosity we strive to prevent?

I remember a common phrase from my early computing days which I feel applies to all the hubbub over the TC threats, etc:

Don't feed the trolls.

I think part of the problem is that we now spend most of our lives interacting only with people our own age. As a 26-year-old grad student, I spend the vast majority of my social life interacting with people 23-30 years old. We have to find our values anew with each generation, we don't have the presence of older, wiser people to teach us such values as class.

This is at least one area where I think the new secular, educated culture has regressed from the old, traditional one. Interaction between people of different ages is natural, and I think healthy. It may prevent the sort of inbred cultural environment where perspective is lost, such as was demonstrated by the spitter in that assaulted Arrington.

"This spontaneous reaction was in response to a blog that attempted to be humorous by using the word 'fucking' multiple times in reference to Adobe’s UIs which were perceived as lacking a native look and feel."

I assume he means this hilarious Adobe UI gripe blog: http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/

If growing up means not appreciating that blog, then color me prepubescent.

Occasionally bitter and angry is justifiable (don't I know). Assault is not. There's lots of better strategies for revenge.

This reminds me of the spider in Bruce Sterling's novel Distractions which crawled the net for people saying bad things about its owner. When they had crossed its threshold their names got posted on an enemies list website, which was read by nutcase supporters, who then tended to go out and try to assassinate the listees.

Very relevant, I think: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=220878

So true.

Well said, yet completely wrong. People are thinking this stuff, so why should they not say it? The internet is different from real life - everyone with an opinion lands here, and can give their honest opinion. Let them give it, for those of us who grew up in the old polite days, this may be strange, but it's the new world! We are entering a time of REAL freedom of speech, and now that you are confronted with it, do not run away.

Look at YouTube comments, that's how the world really is like. You want to regulate this away? You think you actually can? Welcome to the new world, it's not worse, it's just different. Insulting people is the rock 'n' roll of 2009, if you can't deal with it, well, there's a cable plugged into your wall that you can simply pull out.

Times are changing, folks. Profanity, insults have become way cheaper, because anonymity also has. Arrington may complain, and all the people in this little community of ours make shake their heads and nod sorrowly and agree that something has to be done, but do you realise exactly how small your community is? You are reaching nobody, and nobody can hear your voice.

What we have is a herd of elephants thundering down a slope, heading towards a world of extremely democratic and free speech, and a bunch of rabbits form a council on the side and decide that they choose that the elephants should all start walking the other way.

Pointless, I say! Change sometimes goes your way, but sometimes change goes the way you don't like. This time it is that way, and very frankly, all these beard stroking and discussion about this will have little effect.

So, we can't just all grow up, because the internet is young. It will stay young, so if you want a place where everyone is grown up and civil, build a gate and hide behind the walls.

And don't forget to tap hard on the walls when the rock 'n' roll music of the neighbours gets too loud.