
Play nice - How the internet is trying to design out toxic behaviour - r721
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/22/play-nice-how-the-internet-is-trying-to-design-out-toxic-behaviour
======
FilterSweep
I had considered a much longer criticism of this article, but I soon realized
that there was no sense in complaining about a service which is no longer "
_ours_." The internet of today (Internet 2.x), is little more than an
_advertising space_ , a vehicle through which users mistakenly approach as an
encyclopedia housing the world's information, while in actuality, the user is
product.

So I'll just touch on one point instead: _Humor_

> "But Mrgan insists it hasn’t led to sterile, sanitised comments. “People are
> still making jokes, being a little bit snarky, getting really opinionated,”
> she says. “The personal attacks, name-calling and abuse have gone, but the
> same feel has really stayed.”"

Has Mrgan ever been to Reddit, the site so bold as to deem itself "The Front
Page of the Internet" before? I absolutely disagree with her insistence. While
the information is often great in some specialty areas, the humor is
completely dry, _overly snarky_ , and most users appear (caveat: _IMO_ ) to be
treading on eggshells in avoidance of "Being downvoted" and having their
comment hidden from the world.

If you were to go to a standup comedy show, you would see a _plethora_ of
philosophically different types of humor. Deprecating humor, Self-deprecating
humor, sarcasm, parody, allegorical comedy, etc. etc.

The "new internet" is in the process of filtering out most of this. To repeat
my caveat, this is all my opinion, but a sterile Internet very quickly only
reduces itself to plain sarcasm and snark, and honestly, sarcasm is the lowest
form of wit.

Back in the "good old days" During the 90's and the 00's, the _onus was on the
user_ his-or-herself to ignore and filter out toxic behavior. And it's a shame
I'm saying this in my 20s.

~~~
thex10
Why are we jumping to the conclusion that the whole internet would follow the
same rules though? I imagine some sites would want to cultivate certain kinds
of humor (it might allow abuse, but at least not everyone's walking on
eggshells), and others don't (and would rather enforce some rules in the hopes
of cultivating an abuse-minimized environment).

Why wouldn't each individual service be able to make its own tradeoffs? Then
users would vote with their feet and hangout in the places they like best
anyway..

> Back in the "good old days" During the 90's and the 00's, the onus was on
> the user his-or-herself to ignore and filter out toxic behavior. And it's a
> shame I'm saying this in my 20s.

Back in the day they had to close their eyes and ignore. Now in the day they
craft software that ignores and filters out toxic behavior before it even gets
to their eyes. ;) You think we're regressing?

~~~
FilterSweep
>Back in the day they had to close their eyes and ignore. Now in the day they
craft software that ignores and filters out toxic behavior before it even gets
to their eyes. ;) You think we're regressing?

Yes, I do.

Software could have been, and always can be, improved at the "regex level"
(finding bad worse, slanderous words, etc.) but the money is now in catering
an experience to where things one _simply disagrees with_ can create a false
positive as "toxic behavior." And it often does.

The dialogue has completely regressed, and will continue to do so as long as
catering to as wide an audience as possible is the Modus Operandi of Internet
2.x

And it's quite simplistic to write off the past as "closing ones eyes and
ignoring." At the very least, IRC channels had moderators.

~~~
douche
I sort of miss the old days of the "clbuttic" obscenity filters you found on
so many message boards...

------
boona
Ugh, that's what I get for reading a Guardian article, little substance, an
insult to liberals (or North-American libertarians), and finally a safe space
for third-wave feminists, never mind that they have now become the dominant
group in the media and are constantly shutting down anyone with a different of
opinion.

Shame on me for clicking that link.

------
rustynails
I'm curious. Do others see this (among other faults) as a criticism and attack
on everything masculine? It's pretty thinly veiled to pretend to be
egalitarian.

Unicorns and rainbows, every reference is to a woman, how girls are
suppressed, bad behaviour is like "football" fans. They even slipped in a
misogyny! Feminist bingo!

It fascinates me. We condemn the KKK for treating groups of people
differently. Yet, when feminism (referred in the article) makes sexist and
false statements, it's lorded by the media. For example, in Australia,
domestic violence was a "man" thing. When a mother killed her daughter/son is
was never domestic violence. "Men" need to be educated. However, when you have
a group (feminism, KKK) that prioritise one group over another, you get these
propaganda campaigns that tend to spread worldwide. They encourage intolerance
and demonise others.

Now, a fundamental problem with this article's proposal Is that you can be as
intolerant as you like as long as you don't say curse words (unicorns and
rainbows) and threaten to hit/kill someone. The truth is that far more damage
has been done by far more subtle propaganda campaigns, especially in the last
5 years. Not one of them would be stopped by this proposal.

------
Animats
First problem: anonymity + some assholes = mess (the Penny Arcade version:[1])

Facebook dealt with this by requiring "real names". Except from some whining
from drag queens, this has worked well.

Wikipedia has an ongoing struggle with this, but because everything on
Wikipedia can be undone, users have reputations, and the asshole fraction
isn't that large, Wikipedia continues to work.

Any system where fake identities can be created in bulk at low cost suffers
badly from this problem. Email, especially. Interestingly, if you have
conversations, and not much happens based on single messages, it's less of a
problem. Twitter and IRC are examples.

Second problem: once the bulk junk identity problem is under control, how do
you get people to behave reasonably well? Wikipedia does this surprisingly
well, with a complex set of rules and an explicit requirement of civility.
(Many new editors complain that it's hard to edit Wikipedia, but that's
because they treat it like a blog. Think of it more like checking out
something from Github and submitting a pull request.)

Newspaper comment sections do this badly. Karma-based systems such as the one
here and on Slashdot do it reasonably well. Fancier karma systems are
possible; Civil Comments seems to be using something like the ELO algorithm.
It takes a lot of user time to crowdsource such rankings, and that's a scarce
resource. Not many people want to do Mechanical Turk work for free.

[1] [https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19](https://www.penny-
arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19)

~~~
mseidl
Wasn't there something in the last few years in S. Korea where in order to
curb online harassment/stupid people so they made everybody use their real
name and it only dropped by like 0.02 percent. It was really negligible.

------
unics
Censoring the internet, what could go wrong?

~~~
benten10
>>You f\ _king w\_ \ _re, I 'm going to ra\_e you, and kill your family and
pet, and tort\\* you till you beg for mercy, and I'm going to feed your pieces
to your dogs, if you dare talk anything on this issue again.

As you see, this works both ways.

Above, it should have been clear I was _clearly_ using threatening language
for elucidation process. And yet, something _must_ have 'jumped' in you. Even
if a little bit. Even after ' _' out the important words. Even after I toned
down what I'd originally planned to write. Now imagine, I didn't make it as
obvious it was for education purposes, but it was reasonably clear to guess I
meant it that way. And then imagine there was no commentary. Now consider the
possibility I am a random stranger who might actually have meant it. Women and
minorities _do* go through it every day. Every damn day. Now, you can call it
free speech, and banning anything similar censoring. In which case, I will
have to work on a few sockpuppet bots to prove my point more clearly ;). My
point is, you are being reductive in looking the world as 'censorship', and
'free speech'. This argument has happened for thousands of years, and it
speeds up if all caught up on the definitions of 'reasonable threats', 'hate
speech' etcetera, and the historical contexts surrounding such issues.

~~~
FilterSweep
I've heard worse from a pull request on an open source project.

~~~
pjc50
That's not great though, is it? Do you think this might discourage people who
don't like death threats from getting involved in open source?

~~~
adiabatty
That's the risk of putting yourself out there on the Internet — someone might
threaten to kill you/rape you/make you unemployable.

I tend to keep a low profile for this reason.

That said, what's p(murdered and/or raped by someone who sent you a murder
and/or rape threat|got sent a murder and/or rape threat while contributing to
an open source project)? How does it compare to p(raped and/or murdered)?

My hunch is that people who get sent these things don't get any physical harm
from the people who send them. Psychological harm is another matter, but if
people can recognize bluster for what it is, we'd all be better off,
especially the death-threat recipients.

(In case you're wondering, I already have persistent stalkers with
subordinates. Mine are the reason why I never had a public Twitter account
back when I used the service. I also take other measures to minimize my
exposure to both rage-filled randos and the long-term creeps.)

