Are Trolls Ruining Social Media?
readwriteweb.com
readwriteweb.com
What, you mean when services expected your machine to be running identd? When finger worked? When your IP uniquely identified you? When sysadmins knew your phone number?
If anything, the internet has trended towards anonymity as it's aged -- the more people are online, the harder it is to track someone down.
But then the Endless September came, and most end users by this point weren't versed in "netiquette" or the whole RFC tradition to know how to use such tools and protocols, so anonymity crept in as an accidental default state. (As the drift towards the modern connotation of "peer-to-peer" demonstrates.) I personally got online about year or so before this, spent time lurking and learning the ways of the old Internet, only to watch in horror as my peers didn't give a s--t and ruined it for the rest of us.
I disagree. I thought about this when we were starting HN, and I deliberately opted for anonymity, though with profiles if people wanted to post stuff in them. When all people know about you is what you say, they judge you based on what you say, instead of who you are.
But there is no such anonymity for the user known here as "pg."
I used to frequent a forum for tabletop wargaming here in Western Australia that was used for discussing the hobby, setting up games etc. Anonymity really isn't an issue there because everyone knows pretty much everyone else.
While it's not quite on the scale of HN, in the 4 or 5 years that it's been running with over a thousand users, it hasn't had a single trolling incident (except bots).... simply because of the lack of anonymity.
I personally agree with one of the comments in the article which suggests a hybrid system
seems like a quick feature-add could fix this: blog comments should just have a tick box that either displays or hides anonymous commentors. some people care what the trolls say, most people don't. so it should be optional.
What a great idea, optional verification and for those people that want to disable non-verified comments, it can remove the incidents of trolling.
This sounds a bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There's a lot of talk of "the problems it would solve", but what would the costs be?
Think about it, sites like 4chan have issues with getting advertisers BECAUSE of the extreme anonymity.
Let's be real, the government has a thing for overstepping its right to follow you around. Why turn every action on the net into a key, value pair that clearly identifies you, just to stop a few teenagers from crapping on a writer of novels for young people and a rock star?
Control? You have control over what you put into the world and you have control over what you pay attention to. You do not have control over what people think or say. At best you have influence.
I believe that most social features are really just mechanical coping mechanisms. Generally to deal with traffic, but some for spam, trolling, etc. We need to come up with some better coping mechanisms. (And news.yc has been inspiringly innovative in this regard.)
People of fame need to accept the trade-offs, particularly people who strive to become famous. So they may not be able to use Twitter like the rest of us. Although I think most people of reasonable fame are using it just fine.
We're talking about about Trent Reznor here, not everyone encourages and profits from typically very young people by writing consistently dark, sex-infused and anti-authoritarian lyrics. He's gonna have to take his lumps.
Plus, like the article says, there are places he can go, like Facebook, where he can deal with a more well identified group. This article is just pushing an agenda that's removed from the real nature of Trent Reznor's online experience and options.
I wish that people who write these calls for removing anonymity would get a more mature world-view.
Big names (Like Reznor) have fans who follow them to whatever online neighborhood they may move into. Reznors' experience may say more about the type of people his music attracts than it does about the internet at large. There are plenty of well-know people who are able to use the internet as a way to engage a readership in meaningful ways, and a lot of it has to do with the audience they attract. If Reznor was a classically trained Violinist, for instance, I'm willing to bet his foray into social media would have had a different result.
Are there really places on the internet you can "go to have health, civil debates" that are a) troll-free, and b) unmoderated? The world has neighborhoods, each one tnds to have its own police force.
You might cut down on the trolling, but merely, say, cutting it in half isn't going to change anything.
The trolls would not go away, but no one would ever see them and this would have the same effect.
If you look at wifi maps of any major metropolitan area, they're almost all completely covered with signal these days. A mesh system could be brought up very quickly, with some point-to-point communication to get beyond metro areas. Once that happens I'm sure there will have to be some people who will end up having to tunnel to a "Free-speech zone", but many Chinese citizens are already doing that today to circumvent the Great Firewall. The infrastructure is already in place to escape any attempts at censorship or forced identification now.
Of course, what I'm suggesting is ridiculous... but not quite as ridiculous as recommending we all get on board and verify who we are for every site we visit and every comment we leave.
Are you saying that we haven't seen that already?