Trent Reznor Quits Web 2.0, Offers Cutting Advice To Haters
forum.nin.com
forum.nin.com
Trent could probably solve some of this with technology and create a self-policing environment, in which a core group of half-sane fans could administrate/police/censor to the betterment of all - There's a reason why Wikipedia's NPOV cabal and anti-vandalism bots make it a better place.
Likewise with keeping the community small (and hopefully self selected to be at least semi-lucid) ala the HN approach is also good.
Big, uncontrolled, and lunatic is a recipe for all sorts of wackiness and cruft.
Seriously, bans work. I know at least one forum which has kept trolls away for years with the mighty ban-hammer, and maintained consistent quality of posts by making chronic idiocy a ban-worthy offense.
Well, having been on the receiving end of something I thought I'd share my experience. There are raving lunatic fans all around the place, regardless of what genre the artists are in.
During the campaign to get Rick Astley voted as Best Act Ever for last years MTV Europe Music Awards, I started receiving large volumes of hate mail from one or two of Astley's fans (I've never seen anything quite like it before or since... and I've seen some pretty angry emails).
I was also getting some quite vitriolic comments posted about me by these same fans on many blogs around the web (Thanks Google Alerts!)... these fans, I found out, just happened to be women in their mid 40's who have a "thing" for Astley.
Having spoken to several people close to Astley (I can't say who) they have mentioned who these people are and that they were "loonies" and could effectively be ignored.
So, I imagine Reznor would get more than his fair share and I feel for him, I really do (I experienced about 3 weeks of it, and that was 3 weeks too much) - raving lunatic fans are everywhere.
Anyway, back to the story at hand, I think Trent talking about verified forum profiles is great, but I think that you could take it one step further.
Some sort of centralised system for verified identities online with a simple API that people could plug into their forums/comment systems on blogs.
Only want verified people to comment on your blog - easy, same with forums? - easy
I think when you start removing the anonymous posting aspect of parts of the web, it becomes civil. That's why I never post anywhere anonymously, I self regulate and I find I don't troll - unfortunately I expect there is a significant contingent online that don't have the same self control and do cause problems for others.
I think right now is that we're seeing a tipping point from when trolling was an accepted fact of the web the experience that new users are experiencing as how to act given it's becoming more widespread, and those people are simply emulating that.
It's a problem that is just snowballing.
</rant>
No, nothing like that.
I did have the intention of writing some essays on the site (I really just registered the domain to have my name as a TLD and for the email) but I've been working on my startup, so really haven't made the time to write essays.
It's not really a priority right now, whereas the startup is.
Nice rant, and that line is particularly striking. You'd think the fans would be favoring such an award for Rick, given they were his fans. They were jealous some new groupies would get to him first, likely. But to be such strong fans for Rick 20 years later: indicates added lunancy. Sheesh, you got Rick Rolled and a half: why would you want Astley to receive such an award? I mean back in the day Rick's music was commercially successful, today it's scene style-wise as a caricature to be mocked. Bizarre to the max.
I'd say so, from the content of some of the emails, they were annoyed because they were his fans first and yet we managed to accomplish something in a short amount of time, 20 years after the fact.
I'm guessing these particular people were getting annoyed because they didn't get any recognition for being his fans. I particularly saw their posts on his official forums after he had won... Trying to take a lot of the credit for what really was achieved by nearly half a million people that we managed to get using the autovoting program during october of last year (that I could measure anyway).
It could be higher for all I know, although that being said, I do have the figures for how many votes he did get from MTV themselves and it was nothing short of substantial.
This would not even be particularly hard; the infrastructure already exists in the form of SSL certificate issuance/verification.
PGP keysigning is supposed to accomplish the same thing but has never seemed to work as well in my experience. It's a lot easier to just pay $20 to Thawte or Verisign and send them copies of some identity documents than to chase down volunteers and get them to verify you. (Not because there's anything wrong with the volunteers, but I always feel like I'm imposing, in a way that I don't with Verisign.)
And if the cost component to SSL/X.509 is problematic, there's always CACert -- they have a fairly rigorous system for identity verification (at least on par with the commercial issuers), using either trusted third parties or a web-of-trust -- and they don't charge for it.
I think there are JS libraries around already for doing S/MIME signing in-browser; you could build that in to a comment form and just reject anything that wasn't signed with a trustworthy certificate bearing a real name (not "Thawte Freemail Member" or something similarly generic).
Of course you'd lose 99.9% of prospective contributors, but that's the case with any barrier to entry that removes anonymity. People aren't going to join something like that unless the content is really good.
From the post:
In a closed environment like nin.com a lot of this can be moderated away, or code can be implemented to make it more difficult for troublemakers to persist. It's tedious and feels like wasted energy doing that shit, but some people exist to ruin it for others - and they are the ones who have nothing better to do with their time.
They've done the tech thing, but it's an arms race. I think the point of the "experiment" comment in the third to last paragraph is that the problem doesn't want to be fixed. The coping effort is doing more harm than good, idiots rule.
Maybe it was self protection against edits or deletion for the original post.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this thread is too small to contain...but I am making notes to write it up in some useful form.
This isn't going to be like Fermat's theorem all over again is it?
Seriously though I agree that you need a system that copes with the fact that different people have different tastes. Not a generic 'good' vs 'bad/spam'.
(BTW, this is not meant to be flamebait either way about Zed Shaw. I thought it was an interesting project and it came to mind reading this.)
So early on it wasn't a problem, my guess is that trolls probably didn't really appear until AOL.
Found... don't know if it counts as a troll, tough: Google for "The Strange Case of the Electronic Lover"
The real Internet is not HN, it's not Facebook or Livejournal. It's 4chan and the comments on Youtube. That's what we built, that's the glorious future, the pinnacle of high tech, the global collective consciousness. How proud should we be?
What's really depressing to me is going to visit the San Francisco Chronicle website, CNN or wherever, and seeing the comment space overrun by arrogant idiots who think they're superior to 4chan, or would if they knew about it. I would far rather be trapped in a lift with a bunch of /b/tards than the over-earnest moralists (of all political stripes) that attach themselves like limpets to the mainstream news and political sites.
You can't compare that to YouTube comments at all. 4chan's about lulz, not pure unadulterated stupidity. They're not the same at all.
And anyway - not all "trolling" is created equal, IMO. Smart, organised, (dare I say) funny trolling beats random hate and idiocy anyday. I haven't noticed 4chan moving with any particular malicious intent; they just try to amuse themselves, and the causes are as often defensible (Scientology, Sarah Palin mails) as not.
We're always going to have trolls. If 4chan sets the standard for trolling I think we've done pretty well actually. At least they're intelligent.
The real internet isn't HN, but it's also not 4chan or Youtube. The real internet is the internet -- the whole internet. Tautological but true. As long as there's always some readily-accessible part of the internet without troll problems, then I'd say we're doing okay.
The real progress, though, would be figuring out how those civilized parts of the internet can stay civilized. Some forums have a small population. Some forums have a strong sense of community and ban-happy moderators. Some forums have downvoting, although that doesn't seem to stop persistent trolls. If you've got a better way, discussing it would be fun.
That said, the caliber of trolling may have been slightly higher. :)
I'm old enough to remember that there were trolls on Usenet before AOL built its gateway to Usenet.
I'm pretty sure that verifying the earliest use of "troll" in the sense of this thread and comparing that with the date of AOL's gateway opening would confirm this.
For me version one would have been usenet, FidoNet and BBS chat circa late 80s or early 90s. I knew then what Trent has finally figured out. Sounds like he really is "living next" to us.
(Not being snide - wherever you look, politicians seem to unfailingly be raping and making a mockery of the democratic system. I may be slightly more cynical than usual as we discussed Berlusconi at lunch today, though).
Does anyone have good real-world examples of the the kind of communities we would like to see online? I'd like to hope that degeneration into idiocracy as communities grow is not some kind of natural law.
Well, I'll give a fairly decent example.
I occasionally played tabletop wargames in the past locally and we have a statewide forum dedicated to it.
I've seen disagreements before on the forum, but have never seen anything that would constitute trolling or abusive behaviour. I think this stems from the fact that everyone pretty much knows everyone outside of the forums and so idiotic behaviour can have real-world consequences (eg, not being able to set up games with others)
There is little to no anonymity on those forums and so everyone is quite civil. I suspect that if you make people responsible for their actions that they end up being quite responsible on the forums.
That's not to say there hasn't been the occasional piece of drama, it's just normally localised and doesn't make its way to the forums for everyone to read.
So there's no way to infer from their presence whether they're a representative sample. I mean, people troll and spew racial slurs on -home improvement sites-. I don't think that means Whirlpool and Bob Villa themselves attract the dregs.
web two point oh
black as your soul
he'd rather die than give trolls control
> Anyway, we're in a world where the mainstream social networks want any and all people to boost user numbers for the big selloff and are not concerned with the quality of experience.
It stops being fun for them and it comes down to business. If they are not getting enough out of it to put up with the crap, they will stop or pawn it off on PR people to do it for them.
Same reason Obama and the likes don't watch cable news.
http://twitter.com/trent_reznor/status/2049368290 probably sums up Trent's feelings in a tweet.
That's a dead end.
Instead, I suggest that at least on a personal level, we should let go and try to realize that nothing* really matters online.
As you begin to welcome anonymity, a certain type of apathy appears. You may even surprise yourself that you don't actually care that some troll just told you to "an hero" or whatever else it is they're bringing.
Although we're not funded yet, my startup is working on bringing the ideas of anonymity (along with privacy/security) to the mainstream.
We believe, that for many, many use cases, identity simply doesn't matter.
*mostly ;)
http://iranianminorityshumanright.blogspot.com/2009/03/repor...
In other words, not caring what trolls say is necessary but not sufficient.