I look around at every. single. internet community on the planet and I struggle to find a single one that isn't full of assholes. Including the very space I am on right now.
And yet - when I step outside and go talk to people and hang out with my friends they suddenly recede into the shadows. Sure, here and there somebody will be an asshole but for the most part everyone is nice, helpful, and (especially in my friends group), welcoming.
This includes people I disagree with politically. I think we should able to turn the internet off for everyone for arbitrary amounts of time. Don't really know how to reconcile this for those who need it like the disabled, medical, etc...
My point is, I fundamentally disagree with this article.
It’s the distillation - you don’t know me at all, and even if you do it’s only though some vague recollections of previous posts.
Friends are people who do and say things - and if they say something assholic once in awhile, it’s just something they said/did - but one asshole comment makes the poster an asshole forever, and people start treating them as such, which encourages it.
Non-online communications have way more venues to interact with others.
I don’t really understand the link between your post and the article, but I might have a context free theory:
In the real world annoying people can only annoy so many people at once. On the internet everyone has to read when an annoying person is posting constantly into the group chat. Annoying people simply can take up more oxygen.
Now for the contextful thing: there are loads of communities that aren’t filled with assholes! Check out subreddits for some of your hobbies, maybe a discord/irc channel for something you like, a relatively small community… there are nice places on the web!
Google's Real Names experiment helped simplify this equation. They proved that people don't even need anonymity to be fuckwads; all they need is an audience. I remember a lot of low-level bemusement and high-level consternation when the quality of discussion in YouTube comments didn't get any better after they tied everything to an identity.
> welcoming. This includes people I disagree with politically.
I disagree on this one vehemently. This is spoken like someone from a privileged position of the majority or in a relatively cosmopolitan area.
Be an atheist or agnostic in the Bible belt. You will find yourself either in conflict or holding your tongue A LOT.
Be a nurse in the Bible belt. You will get attacked by your family for promoting "vax conspiracies".
Normally, I would just hold my tongue in these situations, but I've stopped doing that. I'm quite a bit more outspoken lately and becoming moreso. Why?
Because I have had people breathe sighs of relief when I tell them up front that I am pro-vax and pro-science and pro-medicine and if they don't like it they can shut up. Because I've had multiple people crying with gratefulness because I stood up and forced some asshole yelling at them to back down. Whole swathes of US society are taking advantage of the fact that decent people normally avoid conflict.
That is unacceptable. And it stops with me. I refuse to allow this to continue quietly.
I won't seek conflict, but if you want to avoid conflict it's time for YOU to hold your own damn tongue, thanks.
> Like being pro gun in most democrat strongholds.
A very poor choice of example demonstrating a lack of actual experience with those people and groups.
A LOT of hunters are from Democratic strongholds--Pennsylvania and New York, for example. So many people hunt in Pennsylvania (including Pittsburgh and Philadelphia) that the first day of hunting season is a state holiday.
And the "gun control" rhetoric in California originated with "Saint Reagan" (Republican, please note) when minorities started to arm themselves.
There are spaces on the internet where people are nice to each other, it's just they're usually heavily moderated or invite-only where there's a consequence to being an asshole. People don't act nice on the public internet because there's nothing disincentivizing being mean.
It's more easy than the article makes it out to be:
You delete everything you don't instantly agree with.
Don't get emotional about it, just sit there like a robot and delete everything. It's okay to be amused when people enrage to levels they themselves didn't think possible when you delete their comments then delete what she wrote again. No need to ban anyone.
Each comment should be valuable to read and provide further insight into the mission. What does bigfoot eat? What is the best time to spot nessie? When was Dr Fritz channeled for last time? When will bitcoin finally die? etc etc No space for detailed explanations why the very essence of the platform is nonsense.
Ideally written things served to other people are written by yourself but comments can be as good and sometimes even better. Nearly all of it doesn't make the cut. However polite the compliment to the author of the article, it is wasting other peoples time. It needs to be a homogeneous mass of remote viewers, color forth programmers or vic 20 evangelists aimed like lasers at a goal. Simply buying a Tucker Torpedo doesn't make you worth listening to.
If the author just like you thinks the rapture is happening, then we have a keeper!
Our friends and even acquaintances and people who live near us are a more selective group than we often think. I'm not sure it's the internet specifically. If you go to a school board meeting in a big city, or a Walmart or some place with lots of random people you will deal with some absolutely awful encounters in the real world as well.
I personally love the neovim community. The subreddit is full of helpful people and the core developers / contributors are absolutely wonderful people. Everytime neovim has a major release, there is a presentation and plenty of interviews with said wonderful people.
HN: one of the last remaining Great Good Places of the Internet, a lone tavern in an iconic gateway town to the now not-so-wild west.
Beyond the western borders of this little town, the tech gold rush has both expanded to epic proportions, affecting all the economies in the world, and also gone through enough booms and busts that the phrase "gold rush" seems somehow off.
As more and more young'uns join and jaded veterans return to throng the tavern alike, it often seems to be on the brink of either exploding with the largest gun fight in history, or jumping the shark.
The secret is the man at the corner of the bar @dang, always around with a friendly smile and a towel on his shoulder. The only sheriff in the west who still doubles as the friendly bartender: always polite, always willing to break up a fight with kind words and clean up messes himself.
Yes a cold-hard look from him is all it takes to get most outlaws to back down, yes, his Colt-45 "moderator" edition is feared by all men, but the real secret to his success: his earnest passion (some call it an obsession) for the seemingly sisyphean task of sustaining good conflict - letting it simmer but keeping it all times below the boiling point based on "the code":
"Conflict is essential to human life, whether between different aspects of oneself, between oneself and the environment, between different individuals or between different groups. It follows that the aim of healthy living is not the direct elimination of conflict, which is possible only by forcible suppression of one or other of its antagonistic components, but the toleration of it—the capacity to bear the tensions of doubt and of unsatisfied need and the willingness to hold judgement in suspense until finer and finer solutions can be discovered which integrate more and more the claims of both sides. It is the psychologist's job to make possible the acceptance of such an idea so that the richness of the varieties of experience, whether within the unit of the single personality or in the wider unit of the group, can come to expression."
May the last great tavern in the West and it's friendly bartender-sheriff live long and prosper.
This seems like an overly idyllic reading of this site. There's a lot of good things about this site but there are very silly cultural quirks, such as the ways people structure their posts/arguments, what people tend to value, and maybe more importantly that amidst the very high quality comments there are a lot of confidently false/incorrect ones that rise to the top
(of course, that also means you shouldn't take this post as the truth either).
I appreciate that this community prioritizes logical reasoning, but often the "rationalist" mentality just turns into searching for ways to rationalize an existing viewpoint. It reminds me of Less Wrong, though at least here there's less of a cult-like worshipping of the "core literature" and its authors, so maybe that's the silver lining.
Real humans viewing comments is probably one of the most important things. HN has good moderation when things get personal. (I am admittedly the recipient of one of these moderations) HN tends to keep things professional - but can dip into the "you have no idea what you're talking about" territory at times. The problem is, we're all know-it-alls on the internet. We have a wealth of information at our fingertips. We often pretend like we were on the teams that made some sort of scientific discovery.
What I see happening in other communities (I'll take Reddit and Townhall.com as examples) is that people get into like-minded echo chambers where they feel comfortable. Anyone appealing to reason in either of those communities is downvoted if they make a suggestion, ask a question, or simply refuse to tow the "party line". (I say that without politics in mind, but politics DEFINITELY factor into it) People as a general species, WANT to be liked. Because of this desire, we'll often adopt the viewpoints of our surrounding community. We'll pick on those who are different because we perceive that they're "morons" for not agreeing with the "party line". It's very hard for any sort of algorithm to solve that problem. The best we can hope for, is an even-handed moderator to say, "this person may not agree with my own personal feelings on a matter, but their voice is just as valuable to the conversation".
It's easy to shut off assholes if you are an even bigger asshole yourself. I shall not point fingers but the the demise of online forums and the meteoric rise of Facebook is a proof. There were certain values that websites in 00-ies had and that were eroded by the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn and yes, even Reddit.
I am still operating an old-style online forum that shrank from tens of thousands of users to a dozen occasional visitors, and I attribute its decline to its core values: anonymity, absence of monetization, minimal moderation.
I always thought that Something Awful’s $10 paywall was pretty effective. If you’re an asshole and break the the rules, you’re out $10 and have to pay again. If you’re a big enough asshole, then you get permabanned.
You’ll hear a lot of people complain about it and never register over the $10. I paid my $10 once almost 20 years ago and never got banned. That was the best $10 I have ever spent.
You're deeply confused if you think SA is/was not essentially defined by some of the most capriciously cruel people online. The founder just shot himself after leaving behind a wrecked family with multiple ex-wives, abandoned children, and DV convictions. FYAD, Helldump, etc. really define the spirit of SA, and it's also a precise counterexample to your argument about paywalls being a good thing.
Is "absence of monetization" a value? Do we expect this with any other business other than the ones on the internet - news papers, magazines, local community events etc.
Absence of monetization, to me means its a hobby project funded by you and not a business, that also perhaps means it has not kept up with the competition - think servers, performance, websites, mobile apps etc. Maybe avoiding ad based monetization could be what you are talking about but then you still got to pay the bills some how, so unless you monetize, I don't know how a business would survive. Considering this, I don't think its a surprise that your users are on the decline. Besides, doesn't everyone like to complain about ads online but very few really want to pay for alternative paid services anyway e.g. email, navigation, private messaging etc
It is a value. It means that the incentives of the user and the producer are aligned: to enjoy the time in a community, rather than have one try to extract money.
Aside from that, not everything needs to be a business, and even then, not everything needs to be profitable.
By that logic lets stop paying street sweepers and sanitation workers. See, their incenitives are mutually aligned with the interests of those who walk the streets, so there is no reason to "extract money".
Sure thing, but the article in question EXPLICITLY mentions "You should make a budget that supports having a good community, or you should find another line of work.", which means that one way or another funding is needed, unless you're comfortable with making someone read through kilobytes of drivel and spam in their free (or perhaps not so free) time.
I'm sure if you stopped paying the street sweepers, you'd find out that a lot of them don't care about sanitation, and the rest can't pick up the burden. That's why they get paid.
Even then, I'd rather have one of those motivated by cleanliness service my area. Just the same way, I'll choose a forum that's not monetized.
I don't see how that sentence means that funding is needed. Plenty of forums exist with community moderation. Whether the person doing the work is compensated in respect and social connections, or money, doesn't really make a difference to me.
Exactly. And what do people do when there are tasks that: a) most people don't care about and b) are fundamental to the well being of the community? They offer a reward for accomplishing those tasks.
Why would they service your area at all? Are you sure that your area has people that would go around keeping the streets clean 8 hours a day for nothing in return? Not choosing a forum just because it's monetized is an odd choice to be fair, considering that this conversation takes place on a website that's, well... monetized.
Read the article again and see the context that the sentence was used in. Yes, plenty of forums exist with community moderation, but if the goal is to make a forum a place that is not going to become a disaster, a motivated and well compensated employee is the only solution. Otherwise you're relying on someones occasional contribution to the well being of the community rather than have things go smoothly at all times.
If capitalism is a value, then anti-capitalism is also a value. A lot of people believe the presence of capitalism on the web is fundamentally antithetical to what they see as its fundamentally anarchist/anti-establishment ethos.
Besides, the cost per month of running a small forum nowadays is less than what many people here spend on a single lunch. Not everyone is running a business or a startup.
Ah, the fundamentally anarchist/anti-establishment ethos of millions of computers connected to each other (making a coordinated and organized establishment of their own with hierarchical substructures).
The core values would be the entire benefit to the form of communication. The massive decline in classic forums has been a net negative for the Internet. The 2000s forum culture was a lot different from the current state of things, and better in many ways. You didn't have the level of de facto censorship that you see now with the massive centralized communication platforms.
>You didn't have the level of de facto censorship that you see now with the massive centralized communication platforms.
I disagree. Not every forum was SA or 4chan, plenty were aggressively moderated. The primary difference between then and now that I see is that, back then, moderation wasn't always considered censorship.
Anil dash is one of those tech bros that just says shit to create content and it has no basis in experience or research, just a weak amalgamation of thoughts. This article vaguely describes moderating. Thanks for your wisdom, Anil.
Eh, gratuitously sweary and inflammatory. Sort of a hypocritical take -- I say this as someone prone to f-bombs myself, but this is a situation where modeling appropriate behavior would be an appropriate thing to do.
You will find assholes everywhere. We all have that potential. Good rules etc can craft a reasonably civil environment anyway.
It takes work to foster civility. This is always true. It's just not always obvious.
Moderators who treat their forums as a privilege to be a part of, and who enforce a bar reward their users with that value every day I think.
I've been a member of a variety of communities in my life, and to a single one what made them good was the sense of ownership and stewardship by a core member or senate of members. They were all minor personality cults around BDFLs. Whether it was bands, bars and restaurants, hackers, software projects, companies, sports teams, volunteer projects, or anything else, there was someone who could say, "this is my thing, the bar is here, be welcome or leave," and the main thing they did not tolerate was members usurping that authority with external criteria, criticism, or drama. The difference between an organic community and a "scene," I'd suspect is this ownership piece, where an organic community has a founder steward who is a hub or hierarch, whereas a scene is a kind of dynamic running opporunistic power struggle. While I thought there might be masculine and feminine aspects to that, I've known too many women who had that steward/hierarch role in different places to think it is an artifact of sex. I suspect you could replace most of the rules in the article with one rule, which is "respect the mods," and provided the moderators don't debase themselves or get trolled, that's pretty sustainable. The more rules you have, the more likely someone will leverage any possible inconsistency into creating chaos that puts them at the center of it.
I would be interested in others' thoughts about why irc/silc, usenet, fidonet, early reddit, and even early twitter worked. Did they implement this articles recommendations, and which ones are sufficient or necessary? IRC was pretty anonymous for its time, especially with proxies and shells, and it persists today. IRC helped scale communities pretty fast, but being an entertaining participant vs. running a show are very different skills and desires. In each case, the rule was "respect the mods," and so long as they stayed aloof, appreciated what they had created, and acted minimally and according to principle, their communities sustained and thrived. I don't know whether these additional rules are that necessary if the recipe for a thriving community is just really a good BDFL.
Wild digression: Just reading the title, I thought this was going to be the story about someone who had a huge amount of server traffic for some innocuous image he was hosting. He eventually figured out some Wordpress theme publisher had used a link to it in a theme they wrote and sold. So all these web-sites that were using the theme were loading this image from his server - costing him traffic and money.
So he changed the image to something disgusting along the lines of a goatse image (and this is where my brain went to, "If you website's full of assholes...").
The kicker was the theme writer actually contacted him and asked him to "fix" the image as it was upsetting their customers and effecting their sales. Apparently the theme publisher no longer had access to whoever they originally had write the theme, and lacked sufficient skills to publish an update with a link to a different image themself.
This is easier said than done. The one thing all online communities suffer from is you cannot truly perma-ban people on the internet, making moderation a bottomless pit. Only chance you have is basically charging people to sign up, but then you will also drive away 99,99% of your target audience.
I did get the occasional asshole comment in my Wordpress blog. Much happier since I moved the thing to Hugo and disabled comments - not like I really care much about what others say, and my tiny blog was not a super popular gathering place anyway.
And yet - when I step outside and go talk to people and hang out with my friends they suddenly recede into the shadows. Sure, here and there somebody will be an asshole but for the most part everyone is nice, helpful, and (especially in my friends group), welcoming.
This includes people I disagree with politically. I think we should able to turn the internet off for everyone for arbitrary amounts of time. Don't really know how to reconcile this for those who need it like the disabled, medical, etc...
My point is, I fundamentally disagree with this article.