Trouble at the Koolaid Point
seriouspony.com
seriouspony.com
In interest of actually fostering a discussion: I think there's a lot of merit in bringing back moderation, as suggested in the article, as sort of an internet cultural norm. Maybe it's confirmation bias: the highest-quality communities I've ever spent time in, MetaFilter and Something Awful [^1], both use incredibly stringent moderation -- but I feel HN has had a huge uptick in overall quality since the comments and content moderation has stepped up over the past months.
I think that Twitter and Reddit have sort of made their bones on the idea that as long as you aren't doing anything that threatens the company in any way then you're given carte blanche. Twitter's ineffectiveness with dealing with harassment et al requests is notorious; and Reddit, as much as I love it at times, is a cesspool by default. [^2]
At what point does the value proposition flip the other way?
[^1]: I know, I peaked in like 2004.
[^2]: I know this is not a popular opinion, but is growing increasingly painful to visit a site that willingly allows to exist subreddits devoted towards domestic abuse and snuff .
Serious question: why does this even bother you?
More broadly speaking, I would be very willing to bet that an internet community that places harsher standards on acceptable content would result in a better environment for those involved -- but Reddit's stance during the celebrity photo stuff reinforced their position of 'Reddit as a platform', and I don't see that going away.
That's the start of most 'war-on-obscenity' arguments, and usually leads to no constructive ideas. I hate the topic (abusive pornography/snuff) as much as you, but that rational is inappropriate given the peoples' wide variety of tastes in this world, if the material is indeed legal for your region of the world.
>> More broadly speaking, I would be very willing to bet that an internet community that places harsher standards on acceptable content would result in a better environment for those involved
historically that has only served to push users to other services. the success of the regionalization of 2channel into what 4chan is now is a good example. 4chan's success is widely attributed to the pseudo-anonymity that it's users enjoy, and the founder of the site spoke at TED a few years back on what exactly the benefits of such a relationship with their userbase is.
http://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_m00t_poole_the_case_for...
But this is exactly what you want - get rid of the low-quality users and offload them somewhere else. reddit has gotten itself quite a questionable image tolerating pornographic jailbait, necrophiliac porn, stolen nudes and domestic abusers on its platform for very long.
Signal to people who care.
"They shouldn't be posting X because I don't like X" sounds extremely entitled to me.
"They are damaging the brand value of the site" which has nothing to do with you. When I criticise Apple (and you use Apple products), there is no need to take it personally.
And of course, junk traffic breeds more junk traffic. Even if the first generation of a shady subreddit might make this up with quality in other parts of your site, it will invariably attract generation 2 and later which will create a mini-eternal September.
>And of course, junk traffic breeds more junk traffic. Even if the first generation of a shady subreddit might make this up with quality in other parts of your site, it will invariably attract generation 2 and later which will create a mini-eternal September.
You can argue both ways, the quality increase will attract more quality users.
* the single /r/whatever namespace, which was meant to be used as the marker for the canonical or default reddit on a particular topic (and is still used by users for that purpose, whatever disclaimers Reddit may want to hide behind now)
* the partly-shared moderation across subreddits
* talk about "the Reddit community" and "Redditors" (wait, it's not a community but rather "a community of communities"? http://www.redditblog.com/2014/09/every-man-is-responsible-f... ? Excuse me while I pick myself up off the floor), the Snoo branding and individual subreddits' customisation thereof, the promotion of shared Reddit meetups http://www.redditblog.com/2014/05/global-reddit-meetup-day-i... , and in general the consistent effort to promote a common identity for "Reddit" and "Redditors"
* other technical features like Reddit gold which likewise encourage the perception of Reddit as a single platform
The just-a-platform argument is hard one for any message board or single-host/owner, single-login cluster of message-boards to sustain. Reddit's even more poorly placed to sustain it than others. Twitter, for example, is much better placed to do so, even though it's a single-owner/host, single-login publishing system.
It bothers me for the same reason it bothers me that those things exist. They are terrible, and should not be given a platform. I don't feel that we, as a society, should tolerate terrible things in general, much less let them prosper.
Who decides?
There is a wide gap between being hesitant and serious about prohibiting things and accepting everything for fear of overreach, in my opinion. We need to work towards a middle-ground.
Not entirely true - the reaction in the UK to this whole incident has been quite negative from what I've seen. Then again, we're not overly happy with our press at the best of times...
People are not happy with the press hounding people to suicide. The Daily Mail has a nasty track record of outing LGBTQ people, for example.
If misogynists and abusers want to go and construct their own forums, nobody can legally stop them (as long as their discussion stops short of the various sorts of criminal speech, like conspiracy to commit). But nobody is legally obligated to support them, either.
Reddit tomorrow could say, "Welp, we're not going to host people who cause harm in way X". And that's perfectly American because they'd be exercising their own rights. That they choose to support abusers is legal, but it is well within everybody else's rights to point that out, with volume and at length.
Reddit could censor all instances of discussion featuring the phrase "hackers news" tomorrow, and it's not as if they would be brought up on freedom-of-speech charges.
You mean premarital sex, homosexuality, genital mutilation and women showing their faces? Hint: two of those things are still considered normal in much of the world.
We choose between letting everyone go free and dealing with the consequences, or restricting people and living with the consequences. There is no right answer.
There is no right answer, but restricting information is the wrong answer, primarily because it doesn't work. The leaked nudes are still available, even if not on reddit. You can still download pirated movies, even if it's not as simple as it used to be. Eventually, we'll have to figure out ways of preventing/minimizing the consequences, without restricting information.
That's the point - I can dump uuencoded blobs of text in HN that are stolen nudes. I'd be downvoted to hellban if I tried.
Online communities create their own standards. Reddit's standards exclude some groups of people. That's a weird choice to make - in the name of freedom of expression we're going to create an environment that is ridiculously hostile to large numbers of people to make sure they can't express their opinions.
So you're suggestion that instead, in the name of safety, we should create an environment that is ridiculously hostile to large numbers of people (banning them) to make sure they can't express their opinions?
If their opinion is "You should die you stupid fucking cunt" or "I'm going to find you and rape you and then kill you" then yes, ban those people.
"I'd do a lot worse than rape you. I've just got out of prison and would happily do more time to see you berried [sic]. #10feetunder."
"I will find you, and you don't want to know what I will do when I do. You're pathetic. Kill yourself. Before I do. #Godie."
I find it fucking baffling that you chose to defend those people, the people saying stuff like that, at the cost of their victims.
Caroline Criado Perez was not complaining about one or two people sending a few dozens of messages that were a bit mean. She was inundated with thousands of messages, from many people, threatening sexual violence and death. One man was sending 50 messages per hour, over about 12 hours. Another woman sent hundreds of messages. Perez's "crime"? She campaigned to have a woman on British banknotes after the Bank of England phased out Elizabeth Fry on the £5 - leaving no women on the banknotes.
I would be proud to ban those people from any service I ran.
Oh well, I find it weird that you're twisting my words so much, but I won't insult your intelligence because of it.
Anyways, I don't defend those people - I think they're morons, I would shame them, etc. (I would defend them in court, though, unless they actually (physically) harm anyone - because freedom of speech).
The problem is (1) banning/censorship is a slippery slope, and will inevitably results in censoring some inconvenient truth, and (2) it doesn't work, because the trolls can just make a new account. IMO, personal filters that each user can activate and tune to their desire (akin email spam filters) would work much better.
Yeah she was:
https://twitter.com/CCriadoPerez/statuses/375689920742182912
If you dig, you find that she's an aggressive jerk, and that's why she's a hate magnet. In a different political context, she'd be the "troll." Same for the person she's arguing with. I don't lump Kathy Sierra in this category, but there's a reason some people always find themselves in the middle of a shitstorm.
>I find it fucking baffling that you chose to defend those people, the people saying stuff like that, at the cost of their victims.
See, this is the thing. You see very, very few people defending that. But everybody who doesn't agree with banning vehement disagreement gets attributed that opinion. Every time. The same thing is happening with the so-called gamergate.
Who's being excluded by reddit's standards? Aside from egregious racists who become nuisances to others, and/or child porn distributors (both good exclusions, IMO), it seems like a free-for-all. You want to create a subreddit reflecting your odd interests, go ahead!
Not the person you aimed the question at, but…
I worked as a volunteer counsellor for a few years in my twenties. Some of the stuff I encountered during those years was folk who were going through horrific, long-term abuse.
One of the patterns that you notice is that abusers go to a lot of effort at times to show that their behaviour as normal. Both as a tool to justify it to themselves (this is normal — everybody does it — I'm not a bad person or doing anything bad), and as a tool to further control the abused (this is normal — this is what you should expect — you won't get any better elsewhere).
Anecdotally the ones who can find or create an active "community" of abusers — where two best friends both hit their partners and acknowledge it to each other, where everybody in an extended family beats on their kids, etc. — the abuse is worse because there is little or no sense of shame in what's done.
It's normal.
Now this was the 90s. Before subreddits were around. But this is why it bothers me. Yes, it's just words. But those words are probably making the lives of other people worse.
Without rehashing the obvious problems of giving a platform to harassment, child porn, spam, etc, just read about how Reddit supported and profited off bros like Violentacrez. Just a little research shows these corporations intervene heavily — but in peculiar ways. http://gawker.com/5950981/unmasking-reddits-violentacrez-the...
It is better they are out in the open, that they are confronted publicly. Those standing to be counted are not the dangerous ones.... it is the 10 more who agree silently.
If it is driven to silence it does not disappear but is spoken in whispers. It is better that they are challenged in the open.
Whatever solution will be found will be a social one, that's the only way to actually change what people feel and think and believe. And if they feel and think and believe it, they'll act on it in one way or another, no matter how you try to prevent it.
Trolls will always act, but that doesn't mean we have to put up with letting them use the some of the most powerful communications mediums of all time to do so.
Twitter has a massive pulpit to make statements that influence social change. Deleting the weev account won't stop him, but would make a very powerful pronouncement about what the company views as unacceptable behaviour, would diminish his "credibility" and change the narrative.
There are dollars in spectacle but in the end twitter, fb, reddit or HN are inferior tools because of this.
What’s with all this binary thinking? It’s completely non-sensical and irrelevant. Twitter is an important tool for communication for many people, so if harassing people gets harder there it makes it easier for those people, even if the harassers move elsewhere. In other places they do get less direct access, so their impact is diminished, even if they put in just as much work.
But what the article is talking about is also doxxing, sending things to physical addresses, etc, which are by far the more distressing elements of harassing.
Kicking people off Twitter does nothing to stop or even slow those things down.
It's not "binary thinking", so please don't try to dismiss it as such. It's acknowledging that the simple answers don't solve the worst aspects of the problem.
Obviously, for this there is no technical solution. But Twitter (and reddit) currently do a really, really shitty job and they have to do so, so much better. They make it worse.
The lasting solution is for everyone to shun harassers (if anyone you know does it, approach them, tell them to stop in no uncertain terms, always) and to shun enablers (those who downplay or minimise the effects). That’s really obvious, too, but obviously also a hard problem to solve.
Every bit of harm makes things worse. Ergo, every time we eliminate some bit of harm, we make things better.
The Twitter harassment is obviously material, because a) many accounts of harassment mention it clearly, and b) the harassers do it because it works.
Further, the harassment shows obvious patterns of escalation. It is entirely reasonable to believe that if the harassers get no oxygen on Twitter, there will be less escalation.
I'm not claiming these are the numbers, just pointing out that there are numbers, and I'm wondering where you would draw the line, if you would draw it at all. That is, giving these people a forum where they can freely associate, normalize their behavior, and find sympathetic friends, might make them a greater threat that if we just did everything we could to marginalize these assholes and atomize their communities/roach dens wherever and whenever we found them.
I really do emphasize the might here - I don't have an answer. But, I do think it's something that needs to be given serious thought, rather than reverting the default 'freedom of speech must be preserved' position so tempting to the typical liberal.
Freedom ain't free. It calls for noble labour.
My gut feeling is that most of the '50% busy' people I reference above do not identity strongly with the assholes in their community, but neither are they going to go out of their way to do much about it, and that includes listening to anything the other side has to say. They're going to usually conclude the truth lies somewhere in the middle and then move on to the other shit that occupies their time. It seems to me that, over time, a totally unmoderated and free community devolves into chaos and bigotry - look to television or talk radio after the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine for a solid example.
Organisation of campaigns of threat, harrasment and violence is on the boundary, and needs careful consideration. But the worst case is very bad; a sufficiently powerful hate campaign can provoke genocide. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_T%C3%A9l%C3%A9vision_Libr...
It calls for noble labour.
By labour, I mean grab a pen and paper and devise a method to fix the problem. If it is broke devise a method to fix it.
Noble labour takes resolve.
I will note that much of HN doesn't seem to believe this - when the Brendan Eich thing happened, and people were choosing to boycott Mozilla for his views (thus using their freedom of association and freedom of speech to call for him to be removed from that post), many seemed to believe that Brendan Eich's rights to freedom of speech and political freedom were being attacked by anybody who chose not to associate with him because of his views.
The fact is, any individual or entity can, and should, choose not to associate with those who they see as causing harm to others. That's an individual choice. Free speech and free thought should not mean that anybody give anybody else a free pass to cause harm or spread ideas that are likely to cause harm - and we should use every right we have to ensure this, so long as it doesn't end up with people losing their rights to food, water, shelter, and (a duty of the Government and the people) protection from direct abuse.
Your right to freedom of speech do not mean that I have to listen to you, interact with you, or provide a platform for you, no matter whether I'm one person or a multinational. You can be angry that I won't - I'm angry that the mainstream media won't give my minority a platform - but I don't have to. The only entity which has to be fair is the Government.
But then you don't have free speech or thought anymore. You only have the freedom to express ideas that are deemed to be acceptable by whoever holds the most sociopolitical power at any one time. And there's never a guarantee that the progressive side will hold that power forever.
And the Mozilla boycotters weren't just "choosing not to associate with him". They were calling for him to be fired for participating in a political campaign they disagreed with. This is exactly what McCarthyism was about. It's amazing how progressives have forgotten the danger of this now that they control the social narrative.
If there's any reasonable amount of support for your ideas, any at all, you really should have no problem finding work, friends, and wealth. We're not exactly at a point where LGBT rights, feminism, and similar subjects have anywhere close to unanimous support. You only have to look across this discussion board and in most newspapers to see that.
> They were calling for him to be fired for participating in a political campaign they disagreed with.
Yes, that's part of a decent protest - telling the company what they can do to get you back as a customer - and Mozilla could've chosen to ignore them and potentially lose them as customers and community members. That's fine. That would be their choice. Many companies have done so and succeeded - Chick-fil-a, as one example.
You really think that when it comes back round again, if we're nice and don't try to cause any real societal change, the (little-c) conservatives won't try to cause any real change in the opposite direction? That the Government and the media are never going to pick another scapegoat minority for society to go after when the majority is fed up again? That they'll always tell both sides of the story from a fair and neutral perspective? That's never been my experience, and history tells us the complete opposite.
The majority is always going to have immense amounts of power, and they're always going to wield it. We might as well try and push in our direction while we have any power at all (and seriously, we have far less than you think).
Here's a question: We have the right to freedom of association. Is that somehow a lesser right than freedom of speech? Or must we be forced to associate with those whose speech we find bigoted and harmful?
Chick fil A pulled back on most of its homophobic donations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick-fil-A_same-sex_marriage_c...
I still don't eat there, but only because Bojangles is closer and better.
You joke (I think) but it's more like it went through a years-long period where it was really, really terrible. It's gotten better lately as far as I can tell. I'm posting there again after giving up on it years ago.
But, they don't really have stringent moderation, I don't think. It's more that when they do moderate, it means something, because you can't just register another account and back to business as usual. Being an asshole costs money there, and most assholes are apparently not willing to pay the price.
I don't know how to duplicate it without getting the critical mass first. It would be interesting if reddit suddenly switched to a paid model, but I really doubt that will ever happen.
Of course, that was a decade ago. Maybe I should revisit it and see if my account's still there...
If you stick to subreddits thing are much better. For example, I lurk on r/rust a lot, and like other high-quality subreddits they have a stickied code of conduct to establish the ground rules. And the community there is extremely friendly and encouraging.
Both of my favorite subreddits do this very well, as does my favorite forum, and though you get the jokes about 'fascist mods' and the genuine complainers who would rather be able to troll to their hearts content (and who inevitably flame out in a couple months time), they are very enjoyable to be a part of. Rather than having inane comments, stupid back and forths, and, in the case of one more factually based subreddit, misleading comments, you get what the majority of well-intentioned people actually come for.
How MetaFilter differs is in that it features a rigid, hierarchical moderation structure, with gatekeepers who ensure posted content meets the stringent politically-correct tastes of its leadership. As a result I have seen legitimately interesting, good-faith discussion censored there, for no other reason than that it offended the sensibilities of some moderator. (This article was removed by a moderator, for example: http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/girls-and-software)
It is a huge mistake to confuse enforced, intellectually sterile homogeneity for quality.
So, while I agree wth you that moderated spaces are better than unmoderated we need to rememberthat it's not a panacea.
(I've been moderating bulletin boards for 15 years)
The problem is that online moderation has lots of particularities, especially the lack of face to face interaction. Not a lot of them are covered in published works.
In my mind, Kathy has credibility because she built it the old fashioned way - being worthy of trust. Being a Java developer, I watched JavaRanch grow and I especially loved watching her presentations (the BoS talks are amazing).
And yet I under-appreciated what these attacks were doing to her as well as how severe they'd become. No having celebrity of my own, perhaps I can't understand it fully but what I could have done is at least speak against the growing hatred.
I'm going to start refuting trolls (when I can) and I'm going to try to be that person who's dependable under fire - Kathy, I've got your back ... and I'm sorry for my quiet complicity with your past attackers.
“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”
― Edmund Burke
I do think it's going to prove counterproductive for internet discourse as a whole.
It could however be argued that by pulling away from the public eye she actually was feeding them, and that the best course of action would be to act like they don't exist. I still find it doubtfull that it would have stopped it though, as in the minds of the most obsessed trolls the very act of ignoring them tells them their tactics are working.
Will writing this make things worse for her? Probably, but saying it's her fault makes as much sense blaming sexual assault victims for wearing anything even remotely revealing.
-sent from phone, so please forgive spelling/grammar
People who are bullied will often internalize that they are worthless (and that's why they are bullied). That can be one of the hardest parts of being bullied.
This happens especially if people who witness the bullying stay silent. Than the bullied will feel even more alone (and will feel awful about how bad they feel).
But if witnesses stand up and say- "hey, bully: you're being an asshole", then that is a service to the bullied. The bullied will at least not feel so alone.
Hope that makes sense.
There's been a general push, among communities suffering harassment, against the notion that vocally calling out malicious actors is 'feeding the trolls' in the traditional exacerbating sense. i.e. standing aside allows further victimization.
I would note that this discussion lends significant strength to my initial complaint here - which is that a bare RTFA is poor form and one should point to why and how the source disagrees with the comment. People are quite capable of reading the same material and coming away with different things (without anyone being an idiot).
This adds a lot to the severity. Ignoring it is not enough.
As technologists, sometimes we build something and then like to step aside and talk about it like it's inevitable. But how it was made and how it works factors in to how it is used. So it is our responsibility.
Some trolls love to create these vortexes ... it was the end-game for them all along. So ... if the person being attacked is a public person, I would say tread lightly. If both are anonymous ... perhaps simply getting into thread "thought defense" is not wise and should be avoided?
There are trolls on HN that have very high karma and yet are anonymous accounts. We (in the technical community) need to pause when we allow for that type of power that can be used against others.
If I will go through this forum and add reply to every post in an attempt to get random people angry, I am a troll. If I personally target you, publish your ssn and spread lies about you, then I am harassing you.
The solution to trolling is not feeding them in majority of cases, but it will not solve harassment problem.
The older sense of troll (posting controversial opinions and false statements in hope of getting furious disagreement) does respond to "feeding", but is not so directly harmful.
Then you have to make a judgement call as to whether some opinions which aren't specifically violent or threatening should be banned anyway (e.g. "women do not belong in IT"). Allowing those opinions drives people (e.g. women) away, often quietly and without fuss, but creates a subtly oppressive environment. This is not easy to do and will itself attract controversy and trolling.
This is the same as ignoring them, unfortunately, and the article goes on at great length at how that's not sufficient. A blocked user makes another account, and can still goad others into joining them. Meanwhile the police do nothing in nearly all cases. From the article:
> You’re probably more likely to win the lottery than to get any law enforcement agency in the United States to take action when you are harassed online, no matter how viscously and explicitly. Local agencies lack the resources, federal agencies won’t bother.
I suggest
i: a small short website that can serve as a point of accurate information
ii: support for the person under attack. Whether privately by email (or similar) or a short single "please don't let the attacks get to you".
iii: disengaging from the trolls, and building a culture where responding to trolling is avoided.
The UK had some high profile arrests, trials, and imprisonments recently. I'm not sure if it made much difference in the frequency or severity of trolling.
This report from 2013 says that 2,000 reports are made to police in London each year. I don't know how many of those are the severe end. http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-24160004
This report says that 1,700 reports of online abuse reached courts http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23502291
How do you feel about visiting a country that allows freedom of speech and association? I don't like many of the worst of the subreddits either, but allowing them is probably much better than forbidding them for the same reason that we allow such things within the US.
Reddit gets to choose whether it will be one of those platforms and it looks like they have.
You can boycott Reddit for that choice but why not boycott the US for permitting speech you disagree with too?
But being legal and being able to exist are totally different things. If you're a business owner, you can disrupt white supremacists by denying them the use of your business. Hotels do this all the time, to the point where it's difficult for militant white supremacists groups (that aren't, say, the police) to find places to meet (maybe the police will get theirs eventually).
I'm okay with this because there are a lot more hotels than governments, and they're a lot easier to replace. If a hotel I wanted to go to started prohibiting communists from using it, I'd just use a different hotel. Or AirBNB. It's a great world we live in.
To put it in a word, the government and private entities are different, so they should obey different rules. This is not a hard concept to grasp, but very frequently people literally do not think about these things, they pattern-match on the first argument that leads to what they want. Which in this case is the ability to objectify, harass, and sexually assault women.
There is no inherent good in providing space for all opinions. Free speech is not an end in itself, but rather a means. You are confusing the two.
No, I'm pretty sure that free speech is an end in itself. It's how we as humans maintain our integrity in a social context. That's why it's seen as a basic right.
In any case, I have no problem with the fact that you disagree with me on that and I have enough basic respect for you as a human (and even for racists) to be willing to let everyone talk have it all sort out (or not). Marginalizing people only makes them more bitter. It doesn't solve problems.
Europeans understand this, which is why they've outlawed Nazism. It's to express as a society that such a thing is not acceptable.
By expressing that it is acceptable, you are participating tacitly.
In contrast, expressing at every point, in every interaction, that white supremacy in all its forms (radical white supremacy, institutionalized white supremacy, cultural appropriation, colonialism, imperialism) is fucked up and fucking wrong and disgusting, you are chipping away at the fascists' resolve. People have a tendency to conform; it is physically difficult not to. In experimental settings, people who have to act nonconformingly feel physically uncomfortable and experience a fight-or-flight response. After experiencing this enough, people will stop being fascists.
In contrast, it's been demonstrated time and again that "rational" argument does nothing but solidify people's pre-existing ideas. So if you want to increase the chance a Nazi stays a Nazi, continue to debate with them. But remember that unlike your high school debate club, the Nazi will, empowered by his strengthened beliefs, go out and kill people. And their blood will be on your hands, because you had a chance to weaken his beliefs instead of making them stronger and you made them stronger.
I think humans maintain their integrity by rejecting all forms of oppression, from patriarchy to white supremacy to homophobia to capitalism, and I think that you sell your integrity away by capitalizing on your privilege and oppressing people, either actively and directly, by being a nazi; actively and indirectly, by arguing for a liberal concept of free speech; passively and directly, by ignoring opportunities to fight when you could; or passively and indirectly, by remaining silent and therefore complicit.
You are wrong, empirically, on every claim you have made, and you are wrong morally, because you have been given a chance to eliminate injustice and have chosen to back the side of oppression.
History is a tidal wave; you can either ride it or be crushed by it. The choice is yours.
On the Mexican-American border with assault weapons, picking off migrant workers trying to find work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minuteman_Civil_Defense_Corps
In Greece, leading a prominent political party: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dawn_%28political_party...
And in America, dressed as police, shooting any black man they care to.
This isn't the greatest part of white supremacy or homophobia but it does exist and to claim it doesn't is either ignorance or (now that you don't have that excuse) willful complicity.
False equivalence is a wonderful thing, isn't it?
Making them hide their bigotry will seem like a solution in the short term, but it never ends well. And on a personal level, I would rather the bigots be open about it so I can avoid them. As long as they're not voting away my rights or being violent, the psychological harm is manageable.
Wait, back up. Who said they don't exist? Your claim was that letting people be bigoted makes it worse, not that it creates the problem in the first place.
>>Where are the violent neo-Nazis? I don't see it.
I definitely deal with less homophobia now than I did five or ten years ago, and most of it came from engaging with homophobes and changing their minds. Racism is still almost as bad as ever, but it seems like that's mostly because the instigators (racists) never interact with their targets (people visually and culturally dissimilar from them).
The only difference I see is that one improved more than the other because people engaged with bigots and changed their minds. Which goes against your (as of yet unproven) assertion that engagement makes it worse.
If you live in the US you're clearly in the wrong country.
> I think that you sell your integrity away by capitalizing on your privilege and oppressing people, either actively and directly, by being a nazi; actively and indirectly
Zero to Godwin's Law in, what? Two posts. Goodbye.
I think I'm in the right country, because as an aware, conscious person, I can act against oppression in a place where it needs to be struggled against. One day, the United States will also outlaw Nazism, and that will be a great victory for humanity.
Democracy requires us not to use the apparatus of the state to suppress opinions by force. But that's it.
It certainly doesn't require us to provide material support for all opinions, no matter how toxic. Neither does it require tolerance of speech that goes beyond opinion. Incitement to riot, for example, is a crime. So is making threats, or conspiring to commit other crimes.
A large part of the problem is people, like you, who view all of this as someone just expressing their opinion equally with others. That has nothing to do with targeted harassment and death threats to one's family.
In real life, people get prosecuted for this stuff. Unfortunately there's so many obstacles and hurdles to prosecuting Internet harassment that it only happens if the harassee is someone famous.
The difference between what a business allows and what a state allows are so different as to not really be illuminative here.
I could decide that no one watches animated cartoons in my house, and no one is really harmed by that in any significant way. A state that declares that no one shall watch animated cartoons, however, is quite a different thing.
However, mailing lists seem to be going extinct. Even back then it had a quaint, ancient feel to it.
I suspect that one outcome of the wave of vicious trolling that has been building the last few years will be stronger laws against online stalking and harassment, possibly even a national quick response network to ensure that the Department of Homeland Security can protect American citizens from these "lawless online thugs".
I don't have an answer for you; but I know that I am saddened that some of the smartest and most technically adept people I know are viciously harassed for their public participation in the technical community. If you think being a woman in public justifies rape threats or death threats; I have no respect for you. If you think that sort of thing is just a game, you need to grow up. And if you think the current situation can go on indefinitely without winding up in one of a number of drastic failure modes; you're fooling yourself.
However, even though it's "more manipulable" it's still not _easy_. "Social" in its surface forms - the forum, the comments section, the chat room, etc. - has persisted in a churn cycle where the form changes somewhat between iterations, but the characters, goals, and tactics are age-old. All the stuff about "us" versus "them" manifests itself in every permutation of every medium, whether it's "women" or "those bastards over the next hill" that are deemed the enemy.
Troll tactics ultimately come down to the old "signal to noise" problem. Forum admins know pretty well - if you trace the "noise" in a discussion backwards to the source bad actors, and then quietly remove those actors so that innocent people aren't dragged in, the conversation changes dramatically for the better. There is no magic algorithm needed, or even privacy invasion: just sharp eyes that can spot and predict the reactions to a problematic train of thought, and prune it out before there's a flame war. But we persistently end up in spaces where high volume is encouraged, anonymity is encouraged, and moderation is hands off, hands tied, or willfully blind. We are allowing Sybil attacks to take place on our networks all the time, every time.
Security aspects play a role in this, but they would be more of a long-term "how do we rebuild the internet" question; multiplayer games of a certain stripe(usually twitchy FPS games) have had to work around an inherent lack of security and the resulting cheating for a long time, and the best guarantees they've come up with are social in nature - as long as you can create identity persistence, the rest of the social profile can be built up.
Advogato put a ton of thought into technical aspects of identity and trust metrics; I think many of its results remain applicable to a new network. Blockchains also enable distributed persistent identity, but not unique identity. Perhaps we could incorporate market forces and allow identities or their postings to exist as cryptoassets - creating a universe where "valuable comments" translate to wealth. Or perhaps that would be our undoing, allowing trolls to profiteer off their own cultivated following. Perhaps we could force more accountability into the system by explicitly defining top-down fiefdoms and have individuals act to "represent" those fiefdoms, therefore motivating the leaders to moderate them into the best possible light.
As I see it, it's a big open field for protocol designers to come up with the right balance of incentives, privileges, and accessibility.
The logical requirements for reciprocal altruism are: 1. Others are recognizable 2. You can remember their past behavior 3. There is a reasonable chance of interacting with them again. It is this simple game-theory situation that we have to reckon with and the Internet gives us much more elegant and humane tools than Hammurabi had. Remember when comments were ordered by submission date? The difference between that pointless cesspool of idiocy (FRIST!) and the acceptable level of comments ordered by upvotes is striking. If such a simple change in UI can cause a significant increase in the quality of community discussion, there must be many other techniques to make online communication more civilized yet to be discovered. Unfortunately, they are not easily tested because it requires a large, active community and time.
I am doubtful that more moderation is the answer. If the problem is people behaving poorly, giving some people more power does not sound like a solution - just a different problem.
Millions (or billions?) of racist, sexist, cruel and sadistic people exist. This is not a problem with the Internet. It is a problem with the world. If there are not laws enforced by traditional justice systems against stalking, harassment and threats, there probably should be. It shouldn't matter if it is done verbally, over the phone, through the mail, or online.
tl;dr The Internet did not create jerks, but it may have tools to handle them better.
I would be good to know if this person: 1. Adds to the discussion 2. Has skin in the game
Systems like karma/points/votes kind of address these, but they aren't perfect.
The general phenomenon of misogynist trolling, and in particular the wave of misogyny masquerading as #gamergate has been astonishing to read about. There's something deeply, deeply disturbing and raw going on here and it is hard to see the contours of it.
It's a pity that a 12-hour old HN submission [1] of Anita Sarkeesian's moving talk at XOXO [2] didn't get much traction (indeed a sock-puppet immediately emerged to denounce the submission as 'trash').
I response to your implied question why this is perceived as much more interesting than an older submission of a talk by Anita Sarkeesian (which I didn't watch, I'm just extrapolating here), it's because it separates out the ideology part from the description of the trolling phenomenon. You don't need to drink SeriousPony's koolaid to hear her argument about trolling in general and this troll in particular.
You can't expose trolls by preaching to the choir, you have to talk everybody's language to subvert trolls' efforts to create a polarized discussion.
Note how OP's post was met with weird complaints that she "thought prostitution and being a victim of domestic violence were somehow 'shameful.'" - this is again trying to use ideology to polarize a discussion that should be troll-targeted and not ideology-targeted.
Note: I'm not claiming that we shouldn't try to discuss ideologies, just that it's something that trolls will try to exploit. And that the difficulty of moderating such discussions is why Hackernews doesn't even try to be welcoming to discussions that are or look ideological. Let's put it this way: the moderators here have a good track record for creating a pleasant, constructive discussion around technical stuff (including Windows and Linux and upstart and systemd and a host of contentious issues) and around business/startup stuff. As we find out how to have a constructive, non-polarizing, non-troll-prone discussion about other issues (global economy, misogyny/misandry, whatever), these things will be received more positively on Hackernews. (Or maybe: as much as they are somewhat related to YCombinator's business with startups).
Ideology starts when you automatically view an instance of a decision on a particular topic as a person's disposition towards that topic, and automatically view a person's disposition towards one topic as a reason to put a label on them and ascribe to them dispositions towards totally unrelated topics.
A non-ideological stance can consist in noting that, while many occasions have shown a co-occurrence of sexism-related idiocy and trolling, they are not the same thing (see Lennart Poettering being harassed for non-sexist reasons), and hence we have multiple angles of attack: combating the trolls through effective lawful action (which is a bit tedious, but still what OP thinks should be done when the guy in person has a well-known track record of harassing people in ways that frequently go beyond what's funny or harmless), combating people's willingness to act on behalf of trolls (e.g. reddit and 4chan's ban on personal-army type posts), as well as acting on the polarizing issues that make people more prone to get drawn into these astroturfing-initiated conflicts (which is a hard thing to do).
Do we have a moral common ground to do any of this? Absolutely. Even if we suspend contentious arguments and ideological blame-shifting.
I don't know any of the backstory to this, so I'm taking the blog at face value. Even if only 1% of what she say is accurate (and I'm inclined to lean the opposite way), it's absolutely horrendous.
How is it possible that people behave this way? I don't understand what the line of justification can be. It's just cold-hearted, mean and vicious behaviour. I can't understand what benefit is drawn from treating someone like this.
Is there by chance a theory of sociopathy that covers this kind of behaviour?
I hope I never, ever make the terrible mistake of even unknowingly treating someone in this manner.
It happens that this is an extreme example of this common phenomenon. Some men find successful women extremely threatening.
When I first started blogging, about 10 years ago, I would also post on slashdot.
I started getting a lot of traffic. Along with that, I started getting harassed.
It was some of the vilest stuff I've ever read in an online forum -- attacking me, my family, my personality, and so on. I found it quite disturbing, as if one of my friends was secretly insane.
I finally had to institute blocks. After about 100 blocks, I was able to bring the blog back under control.
At that point, I stopped promoting my blog so much. I was happier just to write for myself.
They say there's always 2% of folks that you're not going to get along with. There's also probably 0.2% of folks who actively wish you harm. On the internet with 2B folks? Those percentages add up big time.
My point is that gender is important here, but I'm not sure it's anywhere near being the entire story.
It's really crazy that we give adolescents all this latitude growing up -- they can't be tried as adults, their medical care is the responsibility of others, they are provided free food and medical care if needed, etc. -- and then we expect these same folks to go online and somehow behave like miniature adults. At any one time there's probably a thousand 12-year-olds living in crack houses that are online. And we expect them to behave the same way as a 30-year-old.
By no means am I condoning this kind of trash. But we can explain things without condoning them.
The internet is nice because nobody can tell anything about you, but when talking about things like this, that's not a good thing. There's a vast difference between being harassed by, say, people who are mentally barely able to care for themselves and being harassed by the guy who lives next door.
Obsession and outrage comes from all types.
Perhaps in terms of how that harassment should be dealt with, but not really in terms of how it affects the harassed.
It's so strange that he did this before the iPad incident, and it's not mentioned at all. Did no one Google him?
That is how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Also, since you mention gamergate, have one adult link on the matter: http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2014/09/04/gamergate-a-...
Of course the request itself looks incredibly fake (not even bothering to capitalize her name), so who the hell knows where it came from?
In any case, the controversy isn't really about Zoe any more. We don't know how much truth there is to the accusations, and even if they are true, she's really not that important to the big picture.
(I know, I know, he's a guy and it's A-OK. Bleh.)
Pro-Zoey - You really don't wanna bring up any legitimate criticism of her when you could be playing up the victim narrative.
Anti-Zoey (AKA mysoginists) - The man is obviously a hero for giving that bitch what-for.
Pro-Journalistic-Integrity - Who the fuck is Zoey Quinn, and why can't people shut up about her?
So while he may be a classless dickhead, he's not high on anyone's agenda. Nobody in the trenches cares about Gavrilo Princip.
The original article is about trolls making up lies and victims having little recourse.
The lie in this case is "Zoe traded sex for press coverage". Kain explains how there is no basis for this claim whatsoever ("the initial concerns were quickly proven to be all smoke and no fire") and then goes on to explain how, despite being based on nothing, this managed to blow up anyhow by everyone making allegations that are nearly impossible to make fact, yet are taken as fact by many others.
This kind of thing is exactly what the original article is talking about, only that in the GamerGate case it's happening in both directions.
As for the DMCA thing: The video was down. While i haven't even watched it, as it's probably full of bullshit, you can go to the video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5CXOafuTXM ), click "... More > Statistics > Daily" and see the view count drop to zero in august for a few days. This outage may have had several reasons, but due to the original uploader linking to what seems to be a DMCA takedown notice on his tumblr ( http://archive.today/UqAwg ) it appears that she did send that. And that is all Kain said.
Given these two facts, and how they do belong into the greater discussion, i am curious how you'd expect him to express that differently.
For the DMCA: "unverifiable" is probably a better description than "unsourced", but the part I wanted to highlight was how this whole thing followed the exact playbook described in Kathy Sierra's essay.
Second, while Kain is trying to take a balanced approach, he unfortunately only looks at the surface of the issues, reporting the accusations in great detail. This is a dynamic that's also pointed out in the original article: uncritically accepting a new martyr while glossing over the original harassment. Lots about "gamers are over" and TFYC, virtually nothing about the mob harassment for anyone other than Phil Fish. And absolutely nothing about the organized astroturfing in the IRC channels, which has been documented extensively.
The accusations are repeated without much introspection, in a way that it can be used as an apologetic hammer against either side. It may not be actively harmful in itself, but it doesn't do much to actually inform the reader of all of the issues.
For an even-handed look at the topic, I'd rather suggest, say, a scholarly look at the issues that acknowledges some of the problems: http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/we-will-force-gaming-to-be... or at least an article by someone who is less personally involved than Kain is: http://www.vox.com/2014/9/6/6111065/gamergate-explained-ever...
You believe that an article that describes both sides' claims without judging either is "harassment" and that instead of something that "can be used [...] against either side" we should be looking at articles and authors that are directly and openly associated with Kotaku/Gawker or Polygon/Vox for a more "even-handed" look?
Is that correct?
I just grabbed to Vox link because it was one of the more even-handed summaries from the more general news sites, regardless of association. Read both and come to your own conclusion if that makes you feel better.
I suppose I can dig up something by someone with absolutely no association with any of this, but those people generally aren't writing about this at all. That's part of the problem with that particular mess: everyone who can talk about it already knows each other and have probably already been attacked by one side or the other.
http://www.dailystormer.com/what-i-learned-from-my-time-in-p...
clearly a posterboy for neckbeards around the globe.
if you download an mp3 you go to jail, you harass another human being nothing happens.
Nobody goes around in public threatening to rape or murder strangers. This might seem naive, but honestly, why is this tolerable by so many people if the words are said on the internet rather than on the streets?
It's not pretend. These are REAL people that are being subjected to threats that at least aren't innocent and at worst are also real. People's intuition of "free speech" seems to be warped here. Should it be okay to type these things to someone? Would it be okay if you called them and said it over the phone? What if you said it to their face? Mailed it to them in a letter? Does the medium change the message?
I'm just tired of the "nut up or shut up" attitude that a lot of the internet seems to overflow with.
saying this is so unnecessary. The harassment Kathy has received is widely documented, for years. Do a little googling up front instead of unnecessarily dishing out assorted seeds of doubt.
I did google both of them, and read some of her other blog posts. I'm not going to proclaim though that I really understand what's happening after 25 minutes on google. It's irrelevant to her deeper point.
I think it makes more sense to know who whom this is coming from, what she has suffered rather than someone who was never a victim writing about it.
It isn't tolerated, but there is no recourse for response. Words said on the streets can be met with physical response, meaning directly removing the offending individual by force, or even physically harming them for their behavior.
Words said online can only be met by moderator response, which is always delayed, easily shrugged off and rarely an actual punishment.
I'm not sure laws will be able to stop all this single handedly. What we really need is something like shaming. We need to show no tolerance to those who take part in harassment, and even supporters, maybe. We kind of have this for racism and it works more or less. It's amazing we're still going through it when it comes to sexism.
There seems to be no real constructive, intellectual or positive way to deal with this problem. Sociopaths aren't technically sane so how do you deal with an insane person? Expose them as having a mental illness and getting them locked away for treatment does seem like one avenue. Like reverse-swatting, you inform mental institutions of would-be patients but everyone is a tad bit insane so there's a lot of room for abuse.
This is not an easy problem to solve, verging on unsolvable from an individual perspective. How does one change culture to make this unacceptable? Because in the 10 years since this started, I don't see any positive momentum. Not really. Sure, I do see well more exposure because it's become extremely prolific but it really feels like nothing is being done about it, just talked about ad nauseum. That just really reinforces that it is a tough problem to solve.
1. I know of weev from hacker circles. He really is this douchetastic. But what's really insane to me is that there's a bunch of women in the hacker scene who adore him. I couldn't quite understand it, until I saw them also adore Adrian Lamo, and so my theory is very close to Kathy's here: hero worship distorts reality. In order to stop people from enabling abusive trolls like this, someone has to debunk the hero status. Which is a lot more difficult than it sounds.
2. Being a troll is about one thing, and one thing only: power. The power to abuse someone and laugh and get away with it. The essential requirement of trolling is that you make someone upset. So there's a very real requirement that you do not respond in the way the troll wants in order for them to put their attention on something else. But trolls are varied, and sometimes they'll just keep plugging away at you. In cases like these you have to change tactics, though there's no guarantee anything will definitely put them off.
3. In general, trolls have goals. Usually it's to harass you until you literally disappear into the ether. Once they can't find any trace of you anymore, they have nothing left to do, and so they find another target. In this sense it's sometimes necessary to literally leave the [online or physical] community you face harassment in, or find a way to force the troll out of it. In either case it's basically a war, and you have to decide to either abandon the area or fight it out to the death.
4. I believe I understand why she was targeted. She has opinions that some people hate. Why, I have no frigging idea; ask a shrink. The point is, when people hate something, they lash out. And the internet is basically a hate delivery mechanism. And here's my opinion that will probably get me downvoted into hell: there is no way to stop this, other than leaving the internet.
Editorial rant (sorry about the length):
Being abused was not Kathy's fault. Unfortunately, you don't have to do anything at all to be abused on the internet. Just your picture, or a handle, or anything can be fodder for trolls. You can do absolutely nothing but exist and people will still try to abuse you.
In my opinion, from what I know of the internet, there is virtually no way to stop someone that hates you from abusing you here. There are no closed systems on the internet. E-mail is public, Twitter is intended to be public, but even if you make it private there's still a picture and a handle to start with (AND you can still direct tweets at private accounts), with Facebook you can avoid non-friends but not on comment sections, and on top of it all these accounts can be hacked. Private information like address, SS#, phone, etc can all be gotten incredibly, stupidly easily, without you ever going online. The internet is the easiest attack platform there is.
If you are visible in any way, you are a potential target for trolls, period. And I don't see any simple solution to any of this. We could re-design our internet services to protect people's privacy and anonymity better from abuse, but this wouldn't protect people who want to publish works like Kathy has. We could try to develop better tools to combat trolling, but that might become an arms race, who knows. Maybe we need to require a ss# and a picture ID for people to make accounts on social media. But regular accounts might just get hacked to be used as sock puppets.
So perhaps there is no technical solution. Perhaps we just need to change the way our entire society treats itself, both online and off. Peacefully boycott sources of abuse, negativity, ridicule and scorn online (i'm looking at you, every-forum-on-the-internet). Combat the causes of insecurity and fear and hate. Provide more social services to support the emotional welfare of all people. Something other than band-aids and coalitions. Maybe it'll never happen in our lifetimes, but at some point we've got to sit down and figure out a way to encourage people to be compassionate, or we're all doomed in the much larger picture of world-wide human affairs.
What about ending anonymity? Much as I like the idea of remaining annoymous online (not that I am here), there are legal means to deal with the extreme end of the trolling spectrum so long as you can identify them.
The next issue that pops up of course is privacy. We need to end anonymity while making privacy the default. But that allows criminals to communicate privately - they can now, but it takes effort and many don't know how.
If you have a room full of people and someone is saying something bigoted, a couple things happen. One, if others agree with the person, they will clump together and gain strength. Two, if they are shunned, they simply go to a corner of the room where nobody minds them and they're allowed to continue. The bigger the room, the more people there are, thus both of these factors simply amplify the behavior. And the internet is the biggest room in the world.
It's quite easy for this stuff to propagate, anonymous or not. Even if public shaming worked they'd just go underground. Most people who have shitty opinions actually believe in them and will defend them if challenged. So whether you 'expose' someone or not won't typically change their thoughts, and thus not their behavior either.
Second, do you remember the old Smurf attack? You sent pings to a bunch of networks' broadcast address, with a forged address. So the machines on the networks replied to the pings. For one packet sent out, you could get a hundred aimed at the victim's machine. You can wind up with something like that here: If you end anonymity, then someone can forge something horrible as coming from you, and all the honest, morally upright people online will come down on you in outrage. (In her article, Kathy mentions trolls/harassers already using tactics like this.)
Facebook and Youtube now have open racists who push their malignant opinion upon everyone now, and are proud enough to sign their name next to it.
The KKK wore hoods for a reason. Sure, there were plenty of racists willing to be open about their views. But letting people be anonymous assholes greatly increases the awfulness.
Even gamers know it: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19
Weev's public identity is known. That didn't stop him from trolling or harassing the subject of the article.
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EDIT: also, the Penny Arcade comic you linked was from 2004, literally 2 or 3 years before the invention of youtube and long before Twitter and Facebook existed.
The opinion contained in the said comic does not, and cannot apply to the modern internet, where Anonymity is beginning to be stripped away and yet the trolling / harassing problems are clearly remaining.
Indeed, it has only gotten easier to get doxxed online and humiliated by the trolls, now that we communicate through Facebook and our names are attached to us in Google / Youtube / everything.
As I already said, some people will be assholes under their own names, because they're just that awful. But that proves nothing about how many people would be assholes when they can evade accountability.
I'm more worried about the people who shy away from online conversations when anonymity is stripped away. Anonymity is my _only_ protection from harassing trolls like Weev.
If I didn't feel secure in my thoughts, I wouldn't be able to talk frankly to you, and I'd leave.
Congratulations, now you've opened up a lot of trans, gay, and other minority-status people to endless physical harassment every time they use the Internet in their preferred personae.
> We need to end anonymity while making privacy the default.
The only way I can understand this is if it's like the postal service without postcards: Senders and recipients are known, but message contents aren't. This... works, I suppose, but it removes nearly all the benefits the Internet provides.
>You’re probably more likely to win the lottery than to get any law enforcement agency in the United States to take action when you are harassed online, no matter how viscously and explicitly.......There IS no “the authorities” that will help us.
I find this part of the article most disturbing. I can't imagine how law enforcement doesn't take online threats as seriously as "real" threats. Kids are thrown in jail for posting about bombing a school on Facebook, but if I directly say I'm going to rape or kill someone on Twitter or Facebook nothing happens?
How do we get the authorities to start making examples of these people and handing down serious jail time for online threats?
http://peopleinfofind.com/find-social-security-number/
(and I'm sure others, that's just the first I quickly found)
I have no idea how reasonable their verification of purchasers is.
That's karma for ya.
Unfortunately it's not. Weev went to jail for reasons that had nothing to do with the bad things he did. And I think this is worth pointing out, because unjust laws are not selective like karma; if we tolerate them when they target assholes, it's not long before they start targeting innocent people.
Maybe that's not a good thing, but it sure worked in this case.
Putting people to jail for things they ARE guilty of is fine even if that is not the worst thing they did.
The world is full of all types of people who get their kicks in all types of ways. Unless you propose monitoring everybody so that any offensive speech can be punished, there is always going to be a contingent that will capitalize on any chink in psychological armor just to get someone's ire up. When someone's image primarily consists of being a victim, it's not terribly surprising that they're going to serve as a lightning rod for all sorts of harassment - it's known to work after all!
Frankly, what's sickening is seeing otherwise reasonable people proposing that the solution might be taking away anonymity, perhaps even at the protocol level! If you'd like to be so mollycoddled, then stick to your "web 2.0" VC-gardens. Please leave the Internet alone with your misguided surveillance wet dream "solutions."
And finally, if this article itself is about harassment and speaking truth to power, then why do I feel compelled to use a throwaway account to post this comment?
~8 year HN member.
Because you show all of the sympathy and concern of an albino crocodile? Because you indulge in blatant victim-blaming? Because after (maybe) reading about the horrific campaign of calculated abuse, all you can care about is yourself?
And, of course, because you recognize that other people will (correctly) think less of you. So rather than owning up to your opinions, you are only brave enough to mewl from the shadows.
You're right that other people would think less of me, for the same reason I could never hope to refute your attacks - the narrative for this topic has left the domain of logic, and is based solely on hysterical feelings.
Now that nerds have achieved societal glamor through VC money and social acceptance from selling their mothers and friends to Apple and Google, they've eagerly formed the same oppressive mob as everyone else.
At least the jocks ran on a shallow strategy that was easy to understand and avoid. This new set of bullies exerts endless brainpower fooling everyone (most importantly themselves) that they're "making a better world." Alas, we all know how that turns out - same shit, different day.
Given the content of both your comments here, this response is ludicrous.
Without engaging with any of the content of the article you say the author's behavior of objecting to harassment was itself a necessary cause for that harassment, you attack those calling for less anonymity without actually arguing why that would be a bad thing, you appeal to your own standing in the HN community as if that number means something without being willing to back that up, you claim to be unable to refute any attacks because those attacks are only based on hysterical feelings, and then you name the nerds "selling their mothers and friends" as the new bullies because a single person rightly pointed out why your original comment was shit.
I'd say take your own advice: drop the hysteria and try to make an actual argument next time.
Funnily, I agree with you that nerds are behaving badly now that they have power. [1] But I disagree with your conclusion. What happened to Sierra is a great example of nerds misusing their sudden social power. Now we need to start taking responsibility for the broader effects of our works and our previously insular culture.
[1] For others, this is a good analysis: http://petewarden.com/2014/10/05/why-nerd-culture-must-die/
Weev posted a response that contained specific assertions. If he is lying then rebutting them should be quite easy, yet the only responses are ad hominem dismissals.
> feelings like empathy and concern have no place in a discussion about how humans should treat other humans
The topic starts with that, but takes on a much larger scope. Empathy and concern don't scale, as illustrated by main stream media's pathologies.
I don't think it's right to harass people, but I think it's inevitable that some people will be harassed on a global communications network. Even if you change the culture (all cultures), outliers will always remain. Castigating "the culture" for the doings of the outliers effectively creates a new Original Sin.
I could expound on the necessity of anonymity and lack of centralized control, but it would fall on deaf ears here. The same argument would be well-received in a Snowden thread.
Suuuuuure. Please link to your many other posts (on a wide variety of topics) complaining about groupthink, especially ones where you don't open by complaining about how much you have to hear about these darned women and their abuse. And then follow up with a defense of how you totally deserve to be free to be an anonymous dick without consequences, no matter what cost there is to others.
> Weev posted a response that contained specific assertions. If he is lying then rebutting them should be quite easy, yet the only responses are ad hominem dismissals.
Weev is a famous troll, willing to say literally anything for entertainment and/or his own convenience. There is no point in refuting him. If you do, he will ignore you or come up with another set of lies. It's like trying to engage with a tobacco company PR rep. Reasoned dialog is a privilege earned through demonstration of responsible use of dialog.
> I could expound on the necessity of anonymity and lack of centralized control, but it would fall on deaf ears here. The same argument would be well-received in a Snowden thread.
Which is odd given that Snowden didn't actually make use of anonymity. He used the traditional method, which was journalist-mediated anonymity.
Look, your precious anonymity is safe. Nobody will end that. It's not even possible. For at least our lifetimes, literally anybody will be able to rent a server and open a website. What people want is to prevent anonymity from being used as a platform for abuse, harassment, and threats.
If you want to preserve the socially valuable sorts of anonymity, the best thing you can do is to condemn the abuse and work toward limiting it, while providing those who need anonymity with hard-to-abuse flavors of it. That will work a lot better than coming here and being anonymously shitty while demonstrating zero empathy for victims of abuse.
Plenty of people hate brands. Microsoft, Ford, Chevy, Walmart, Green Bay Packers. You try to turn yourself into a brand, you're going to pick up hate because you're a brand not because you're a person and hating brands is culturally seen as a great idea that should be emulated as much as possible. So trying to fix hatred toward humans is pretty much a waste of time when the root problem is hatred directed at brands. Even if they are "personal" brands. Or rephrased whatever is done to fix this (if anything) the blowback will eliminate brand hatred (umm, good luck with that BTW). No more hating some random female programmer or journalist means no more hating walmart or ISIS or the Jews or Obama (oh wait Obama is a dude not a brand, well, he is both, whatever).
The other aspect is anonymity mismatch where semi-anonymous people are attacking very non-anonymous victims. The solution proposed over and over is less anonymity for attackers. Removal of identity from the victims would work just as well. This merges in with "personal brands" paragraph above. If supposedly you truly want to promote a message and not a brand, that brand being yourself of course, you'd do it for the cause and not the fame. Unless you really are promoting yourself as a brand using a message as a tool to gain fame, and unfortunately gains attacks.
Combine the two concepts and a "famous" non-anonymous brand, which happens to be an individual, will get a heaping dose of trolling for deep seated cultural reasons related to what it means to be a brand and what it means to be famous (and not famous). Good luck fixing that by getting distracted by "brands are people too" and "be nice to people", its the wrong tactic to fix it. You're trying to install deck screws with a hammer.
An internet where all online identities are decoupled from offline identities seems possible, at least in theory. The idea that using your real name online makes you act more responsibly doesn't seem to work anyway.
But wait. That would only solve part of the problem - trolls targeting women, minorities etc. Even if you have a fictional online identity, once you have visibility and say something a troll doesn't agree with, they'll still come after you.
Its always the people who insist on making themselves the brands, that self-promote themselves as a brand, that attract the death threats and nut cases, just like any other "brand".
If you can separate the brand and the person in a way even the trolls can understand, let them hate the anonymous brand all they want, what does it matter?
Maybe a sports analogy helps? Everyone in the state of Wisconsin viciously hates the brand of the Chicago Bears and the journalists encourage it as much as possible. But no one sends death threats to Mr. XYZ who is a ticket collector at gate 3. One is a brand and hating brands is seen as a universal good (other than on social media, whoops). The other is just some dude making his way thru life, no problem.
(edited to give you another example. Look how /b/ on 4chan behaves toward women on /b/. Not women in abstract or women in journalism, I'm talking about humans with two x chromosomes talking on /b/ itself which is about 99% male trolls (and lots of lurkers). Frankly, /b/ behaves pretty nicely and civil almost gentlemanly toward women actually on /b/ AS LONG AS she doesn't go all self promotional "gimmie attention look here I am a girlie on /b/ everyone look at me because you're mostly guys and I are a girl so you must worship me its all about me me me me" and then they turn on her like starving wolves beginning with "show us (you can guess) or GTFO" and it generally kinda devolves from there, in fact it gets quite a bit worse, and very quickly. They now hate her because she is now a brand and not a person. Find me a trollier place on the internet than /b/ (good luck) and I bet they behave the same way, people treat people like people, and some people treat some brands like dirt, worse than dirt, worse than you can imagine dirt being treated, and if the brand happens to be an intensely self promotional person instead of an abstract entity or corporation or idea or whatever then things are really going to suck for that brand-which-happens-to-be-a-real-woman. Or TLDR if you want to be treated like a person on 4chan on /b/, its really easy no matter who or what you are, just behave like a person, not a brand or a PR rep or marketdroid. The internet is very nice to people, and occasionally utterly shockingly brutal to brands. Go choose your destiny...)
> No matter how many people hate General Motors, the spokesmodel of the latest TV commercial is not likely getting death threats.
The spokesmodel probably doesn't get death threats, but what about the president or the CEO of GM?
> Everyone in the state of Wisconsin viciously hates the brand of the Chicago Bears and the journalists encourage it as much as possible. But no one sends death threats to Mr. XYZ who is a ticket collector at gate 3.
Of course not, but are you sure nobody sends death threats to the manager of the team or the coach?
> One is a brand and hating brands is seen as a universal good
That's a bit hiperbolic. I don't consider Google bashing or Apple bashing, for example, to be a net good. IMO, it's just a tribal instinct that we haven't managed to get rid of yet.
Some of those self promotional brands are multinational megacorps and when you divide the internet hate machine between prez, CEO as you list, plus board members, major shareholder investors, 10 thousand dealership owners, 10 thousand service dept managers, probably 100 thousand salespeople, the average "GM dude" gets a middle finger from the internet hate machine about once every decade and just kinda brushes it off. When the self promotional brand is one woman as the face of social justice warriors (generally speaking, not the specific lady from the article, although we know who I'm talking about), she's going to take the full impact square on full force no protection. Its going to hurt. GM can take a GM sized punch and laugh it off. One nice normal lady cannot take a GM sized punch. She, as a basically nice person, doesn't deserve it at all, but brands will be brands and culturally we think its OK to hit a brand that hard. And she wants to be a brand, so the painful result is not exactly surprising when it happens...
You wanna be as big as GM you better be able to take a GM sized punch. Nobody in the general public understands the difference between her financial statements and GMs statements, they just know her and GM are both on twitter, and we all know what twitter is for, so the guy who was screaming at GM for taking .gov bailout tax money last night is going to be on her case tonight, with 10 million of his "friends" and she's not going to like it.
"I don't consider ... bashing ... a net good"
Any mistake in my summarization of your position is my own. Given that disclaimer, the sound you just heard was every clickbait journalist and sports writer and PR dude in the world just disagreeing with you.
Members of the general public making an emotional connection with a brand is idealized because optimistic people assume it'll be like a laughter filled life long infatuation of a love affair right out of a sappy hollywood romantic comedy movie, forgetting that too many intense human emotional relationships end in hatred, murder, insanity, beatings. Not that many, thankfully, but enough to be a problem when you scale it to a 7 billion person marriage. If you use techniques that give people an emotional response to a brand, you might not like that response... And if you're GM sized you don't care, but if you're one human female sized that punch is going to sting a bit.
(Edited to add, think of social media as a multiplier. You can have the force of a billion dollar brand, if you're lucky and play it well. The bad news is if you don't play it well, you WILL have to be able to take a punch like a billion dollar brand. And that'll hurt if it all lands on just you. And the Billion Dollar Brands like it that way, who needs competition from the little people?)
I also wonder why you are so certain that you understand the typical circumstances where people get harassed (you must be pretty sure to construct such an elaborate theory).
That is obviously not true. Racism, homophobia, bigotry are every-day examples of undeserved hate.
Regarding the rest of your hypothesis - that when the brand is represented by a single person, the hate gets concentrated on that single person - it seems plausible.
I was going to make the argument that some types of "personal brands" seem to get more harassment than others, but then I found this piece about Mike Arrington (a white guy): http://www.blogherald.com/2009/01/28/michael-arrington-takes...
Years ago, I found Kathy's posts both very informative and entertaining. She seemed to be very generous with her time and writing. She even took the time to respond to me, personally, once on some question or other.
Something I read at the time about the Weev "data breach" circumstance, that I did not see widely reported. I'm sorry I don't have a reference at hand, so take this as unsupported and from memory: Weev did not immediately reveal the problem. He first took some time (in relative terms; I don't know or recall an absolute quantity) to decide what he was going to do about it and with the data. The reporting implied that perhaps he chose disclosure after realizing there was no other avenue that was personally more advantageous; or perhaps he came to the decision to "do the right thing".
I do NOT support the prosecution of Weev especially under the twisted rationale proffered. The Internet is a public space, and if you are stupid enough, lazy enough, and/or especially simply uncaring and arrogant enough to expose your (and perhaps worse, your customers'/clients') private data there on an unsecured URI/URL, then that is YOUR problem and you DESERVE to be called on it -- all the more so when you do it deliberately as a part of your design.
Nonetheless, I was left with the impression that Weev is not Mr. Goodie-Two-Shoes. (And this was before I knew he was the one who apparently led the bandwagon against Kathy.)
The prosecution shifted attention from the fuck up that is AT&T, onto Weev. Another stupid and probably self-serving prosecution...
And that's the last time I want to use his name. Because, as has become apparent, the loss we are focusing on now has been contributions like those Kathy made to our online world.
So, my two cents. The post implied it is up to us; therefore...
If this was the case, then we can clearly see the problems with Tor Ekeland's statement, "You may think weev is an asshole. But being an asshole is not a crime, and neither is obtaining unsecured information from publicly facing servers." Ekeland thinks that the big problem is that weev's AT&T activities were a crime. Regardless of what you think about that, the bigger problem is that weev's asshole activities are not a crime.
Ekeland consolidates a broad spectrum of harassment into one term "being an asshole", and labels it as not a crime. But that is short-sighted. As Kathy points out, there is a point where the spectrum of digital harassment jumps over into the realm of real-life damage. And that should be a crime that carries stiff penalties and is prosecuted aggressively.
Oh, and one other point. Kathy laments how weev has been glorified in the tech community. My guess is that this is caused by nothing other than ignorance. If all you know about weev is that he seems to fall into the group of people that were at least somewhat unjustly targeted by the government for, scare quotes, "hacking" and received a punishment that seemed too harsh, then you'll probably express support for him (read, that cause). Even if you've heard that he says things on the internet that are trollish asshole material, you, like Ekeland, probably won't change your opinion much. What tips the scale here is the knowledge that his troll speech has had the very real consequence of destroying someone's life. That fact is everything. If you don't know someone is bad, you can't correctly adjust your opinion of them. So props to Kathy for speaking out.
If she could separate one thing from the other, perhaps she would have an easier time online.
Our culture has a very short attention spans and we exalt the wrong people. It creates a weird tension. Being a bad actor is an equal opportunity field and the doubt this creates grows until reasonable people are swallowed.
We have no willingness to forgive and this puritanism has in the end soiled us.
If your ambition is to troll someone, that is your maximum value. I think if you look deeply many will realize that this is not the value they want. I believe that they can dream of something greater then to harass someone online.
If anything it is reminder to avoid being trivial. Ambition leads action. This cycle is who you are. It is beautiful self awareness.
I think it is related to whole 'the meek shall inherent earth' way of thinking. Which is a whole other debate if we get into the gospels of Matthew, Luke and Q issue.
Which if you follow the logic of the statement to Matthew 5:3 it related more to an understanding of poverty and conduct. Ironically very much in line with something Marcus Aurelius would say.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_5:5
So I get the confusion, because I used to make the same error.
I do want to gently call into question the danger of the attack surfaces that you have (I think accurately) spelled out:
1) "Doxxing with calls to action (that — and trust me on this — people DO act on)."
For the most part, high-profile "targets" from the troll's perspective are already known to the public anyway.
Those that aren't, and who want to stay anonymous, have a big job doing so - not just from trolls, but from the NSA and corporate advertising culture.
2) "Swatting (look it up). That nobody has yet been killed in one of these “pranks” is surprising. It’s just a matter of time."
This is purely a political problem. Clearly there's a flaw in the system when police can enter a home by the say-so of someone they haven't verified to be in that home. A sensible solution here is to work to abolish (or nearly abolish) so-called "SWAT" teams. For those that remain, obviously their standard of probable cause needs to change so that the scope no longer includes phenomena that are so easy to defraud.
3) Physical Assualt
In a general sense, this is already illegal under law that is widely supported. It's worth adding sexual assault as well.
The example that you give, which is disgusting of course, seems solvable by some kind of client-side solution that prevents machines from activating photosensitive epilepsy.
At the end of the day, there's not that much that somebody can do from a world away. To the extent that there is, I assert that the solutions are largely political, social, and cultural.
According to Dunbar's number, the average human can maintain meaningful social relations with around 150 people. If you have more than 150 followers on Twitter, you therefore must have followers who are not known to you personally, viz. "the public". That makes most of us "known to the public" in some way.
Calls to action matter. History has plenty of examples of situations in which somebody manages to provoke a group of people into attacking some individual by selectively or misleadingly disclosing information about that person, even if that information is untrue or nonsensical. My favourite example is the case of a mob attacking the home of a British paediatrician after someone confused the word "paediatrician" with "paedophile"[1] (yes, this actually happened).
This could happen to anyone, and the information being released doesn't even need to be true. Are you sure you've never done anything publicly that couldn't be twisted against you by a sufficiently malevolent person? And if you haven't, what would stop them from just making something up?
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/aug/30/childprotection.so...
Literary evidence from Shakespeare, when a mob wishes to avenge Caeser's death, from Julius Caeser, Act 3 Scene 3:
Third Citizen
Your name, sir, truly.
CINNA THE POET
Truly, my name is Cinna.
First Citizen
Tear him to pieces; he's a conspirator.
CINNA THE POET
I am Cinna the poet, I am Cinna the poet.
Fourth Citizen
Tear him for his bad verses, tear him for his bad verses.1. You're pretty much advocating mob rule. Also, are you seriously comparing the threat that internet hate-mongers vs. the NSA poses to the average Joe or Jane with an internet persona? I dislike corporate and government spying as much as the next person, but what immediate threat does the NSA pose to Kathy?
2. It's not hard to dream up a scenario (any immediate severe danger to one or more members of the public?) which, once the police starts believing the "witnesses", would make it irresponsible for them not to act on it. You just need enough "witnesses". From what I gather, the attitudes of some police forces, particularly in the US, could certainly do with adjusting, but that's an entirely separate problem.
3. Yes, as I'm sure you'll remember from the OP, once someone gets beaten up or worse, the authorities will take an interest. Not before that. You can't run around in real life constantly threatening people with violence, what makes it OK to do so via electronic media?
"For the most part, high-profile "targets" from the troll's perspective are already known to the public anyway."
I think the author was simply pointing out that well-known people are well known, so their privacy is, almost by definition, limited anyway.
That people who have some level of public exposure (as you and I do, posting on a public forum) will have some personal information out in the open is obvious. The thread-starter appears to be playing down the damage that doxxing can do "I do want to gently call into question the danger of the attack surfaces". To me, their admittedly unspoken, conclusion from point 1 is therefore "they had it coming".
In this case, the one with which you seem to take issue OP's point #1, which I merely want to point out is a surface that is only available against people who haven't already dox'd themselves. And for those people - people who want to occupy a place on the anonymity spectrum that is far away from a "public figure," the threats to this attack surface are more damning than trolls - they include huge advertising corporations and the NSA.
FWIW, immediately before that sentence, the thread-starter called into question the real danger of doxxing and calls to "action" based on the released information/misinformation.
I did not at all mean that. What I meant was that doxxing is a complex attack surface. If someone is already high-profile and public, they can't really be dox'd. If someone isn't, then staying anonymous is a more harder task than avoiding being dox'd. That's all I was saying.
If anything, I think that people who choose not to be anonymous need more social / political support, not less.
Technology affects culture (and vice-a-versa). Trolling is/was rampant in blogosphere and Twitter, but I have impression that Facebook and Google+, who both enforce much hated real-names policies, have less of a trolling component.
Bulletproof vests aren't a solution to gun violence due to practical reasons (uncomfortable, expensive, only protect your torso, not your head etc.), most of which wouldn't necessarily apply to software.