I'm going to disagree. I've been in IRC, Forums, Newsgroups, lurked 4Chan, Reddit, and Slashdot for years. It has actually been evolving to a point, especially among the younger crowd to get bent out of shape about essentially nothing. Maybe that is because more of our lives are online than before, but if you were to go through Twitter and Tumblr and just browse around it is a huge mess of people constantly being offended and wanting an apology. I'm not defending the Redditors that legitimately harassed Ellen Pao.
However, modern media (like Gawker, Vox, Salon, Slate, etc) can somehow turn 3 tweets from anonymous people with no followers into a national shit storm. These media outlets feed the trolls, because it gets them clicks. So, it is of my opinion that the "trolls" aren't "winning" the battle, they just haven't left, and never will. The news outlets are click junkies and know they can foment faux rage by enticing people who otherwise we would have just ignored 10+ years ago. Of course they look large in numbers if you're putting them under the microscope. The thing people who have little online experience miss is that they are making things worse by giving people attention and trying to "silence" them.
This is exactly right. Reasoning ends when the feelings start. I am not even sure if I understand -btw. usually attributed to religious people- the concept of getting offended. If somebody says something you don't like and you don't want to hear just walk away, close the tab, delete the email.
You can work. You can learn. You can wonder. You can teach. You can discover. And you don't need to be immersed in feelings or controlled by them in order to achieve that.
Feeling is not the end of all and it's not superior to everything else, it's just another side of being human.
Could I or could anybody? Funny you mention ad hominem and targeting the question to me, implying that I use slurs and ad hominems. :)
I seriously don't care if somebody is smart and I have something to learn I will regardless of her style, slurs or whatever. I learned that in primary school where I was exposed to underpaid teachers who hated everybody who was smart. :)
Does "Just don't feed the trolls" continue to work in a world where trolls know that SWATting someone is as easy as picking up a phone, and doxxing someone can have significant long-term consequences?
Unfortunately most humans -- and this includes the humans posting on this thread, including me -- suffer from tribalism, and "it's okay when my side does it" overrides all the other rules.
Fixing this is really hard and requires constant application of lots of energy.
Should we repeal the first amendment because people sometimes used racial or ethnic slurs? Or they deny the moon landing? Or say things that your preferred political party happens to disagree with? Or maybe only things that YOU disagree with?
Nobody is recommending a repeal of the First Amendment. At best, the conversation is about whether orgs like Reddit have any obligation (moral, business, or otherwise) to allow people screaming racial or ethnic slurs to stand on (metaphorically speaking) their property and use their megaphones.
Usenet still exists, and nobody is stopping people from using it. It's just not where trolls go to be heard anymore, because nobody is there to hear them. ;)
"Nobody wants to take away your right to free speech, we're just trying to create social norms that discourage, or hinder, the freedom to express views we don't like. Ignore the fact that social norms inevitably become codified in law."
That's a non-sequitur to the claim that social norms (of the variety that Reddit is attempting to establish) tend to become codified into law, for better or worse.
Of course, that's a non-sequitur to the claim that Reddit is an entity that has no obligation to be a platform for entirely-uncensored expression, though even that is a cop-out argument against those who cite Reddit as having a reputation of free expression.
Or does it? Now, no company would owe you freedom of speech just for existing, but in the previous promises Reddit made, it did promise to be a bastion of free speech. It wasn't an explicit contract that they can be taken to court over, but do we really want to say that, unless there is an explicit contract, there cannot be any agreements?
Can you change your mind on a verbal agreement? That a court is likely to not find sufficient evidence to enforce it doesn't make changing you mind about it right/ethical once you've gained benefit from the agreement.
If I get the community to help me build a orphanage, it is wrong for me to decide I rather do something else with the building once built.
I believe you're conflating laws which are objective and shared with morals/ethics which are subjective and personal. Something legal to you and me can be unethical to you while being ethical to me. Something illegal to you and me can be unethical to you while being ethical to me.
I believe you are confused about the law. Laws are not objective. There are many, many cases brought before the courts where the facts are not in dispute.
All of the parts are unclear. I'm confused because the objectivity of a law depends on the facts in court cases being in dispute?
When I use the word subjective, it means that an individual personally gets to decide the truth of something. You can't make something illegal just by changing your mind, but you can make it immoral. We probably have different understandings of subjectivity and objectivity.
Inconveniently, juries (and judges in non-criminal cases) do, in fact, make something legal or illegal by changing their minds. It is the function of a jury to decide questions of fact, because determining absolute objective truth in a courtroom scenario (from a scientific sense of the word) is often functionally impossible. So you're left with the situation where the plaintiff and defendant provide evidence that their respective versions of the truth are the objective reality, and the jury's subjective opinion of their case determines what the law agrees upon as objective.
This interface between objective and subjective is the "magic" of the legal system. If you can argue in a court of law, successfully enough to convince a jury (or judge, depending on the criminal / civil nature of the case), that, say for instance, a corporation is a person in the same sense as an individual human being, then as far as the law is concerned it is now an objective truth that corporations are people.
I'm not even talking about deciding questions of fact. If you take a set of facts as a given, it's still often not clear if something is legal or not. Legislation is often written in broad strokes and it is up to the courts to fill in the details. There are always new cases coming up that don't fit the same fact pattern as existing cases and hence no one is quite sure what the law says on such matter.
Given a set of facts, it isn't always clear if something is legal or not. Hence, case law, and appeals and so on. Was obamacare illegal? It wasn't clear. A judgement has been made at this point, but to suggest it was an "objective" decision wouldn't be accurate. The supreme court judges could have just "decided" it was illegal if that was their opinion. Several did. The very existence of the supreme courts highlights the fact that the law is a subjective thing, there isn't some nice big leather bound book which you can just consult for every single situation and go "yep, ok, that's legal".
I see what you're saying, somebody has to decide what the law actually is. They do it in collaboration with a huge system of legal training, case law, appointment, election, and the opinions of other judges, but that a single person's opinion counts for so much does introduce subjectivity. Obama makes decisions, but half of us (or whatever) agreed that it was good for him to do so. We place a similar confidence in scientists.
I generally think of a continuum where 100% subjective means only you agree and 100% objective means everybody on the planet agrees. Questions of legality tend towards the objective side of the continuum, and questions of morality tend towards the subjective side. Very little is at either end of it. (Maybe ice cream is 98% objectively delicious or something.) It would have helped if I clarified this before just spitting out that laws != morals because objective != subjective.
No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying that right now, this very second, there are many things which may or may not be legal, it's uncertain. There are circumstances where (usually) companies will get legal advice from a top-tier firm, and that advice will be "we are not certain if this is legal or not", because there are no cases where this has been tested. This is more common than you might realize. It comes up often where new legislation is passed. Dodd-Frank introduced legislation and none of it had been tested in court and many banks didn't know if X was legal or not, because the legislation didn't explicitly say anything about X, but X might be covered under Y which is explicitly said to be legal or not. There are companies doing things right now and they aren't certain if what they are doing is legal.
Your personal opinion about whether a piece of untested legislation is good or bad according to your own morals/values/ethics is more subjective than a judge's legal opinion about what that legislation means in terms of regulating behavior in accordance with everything else in the legal system.
Okay, so compare and contrast with science. Is it fair to say that murder is to Dodd-Frank what classical mechanics is to string theory? By the way, thanks for the discussion so far.
I don't know. Classical mechanics is useful but has proven to be wrong in various places, I don't know how useful string theory is but, at least to my knowledge, it has never been proven wrong. Whether a set of facts adds up to "murder" is debatable and what is and is not legal under Dodd-Frank is also debatable.
Technically Reddit doesn't owe anyone anything. However, if an outlet is significant enough, their private right to censor becomes, for all practical purposes, political censorship of public space. If you have no practical means of exercising your right to free speech, it might as well not exist, because it is then just a dead letter on a piece of paper. (Whether Reddit is actually significant to such an extent is debatable.)
When the value of that property is determined entierly by the size and engagement of the community using it (a community that gathered largely around the ethos of Free Speech), it's not necessarily a smart thing to attack them.
It's quite trendy now to push the meaning of censorship all the way back to a legal definition around the first amendment and say things like private companies can't censor people. That's simply not true. Removing information is censorship.
Reddit was born on the spirit of freedom of speech and repealing it, while fully with their rights, will be the death of Reddit.
> Reddit was born on the spirit of freedom of speech
Was it though?
"back when I was running things, if there was anything racist, sexist, or homophobic I'd ban it right away. I don't think there's a place for such things on reddit. Of course, now that reddit is much bigger, I understand if maybe things are different."
http://www.vox.com/2015/7/15/8967721/reddit-yishan-wong-elle...
Better example would be anti-vaxxers. You can point to actual cases of dead children and say this is the penalty of free speech.
Speaking of which, why is anti-vaxxer rhetoric protected even though it contributes to the harm of children. I can think of illegal speech that was banned because of it being harmful to children (and which is likely less lethal than anti-vaxxer rhetoric).
Images/videos are considered speech. There was actually a few different First Amendment cases concerning different images/videos being made illegal, but of those only one ban clearly stuck (a second ban was struck down but reinstated with slightly different laws and is still waiting a second SCOTUS ruling on it).
(As a side note to any lawyers, is text protected speech when it originates as a description of an actual harmful act of which video/images would not be legal speech? I don't think it was made illegal, but I wonder if it could be (at least if it were at some level of detail).)
If the autoimmune disease of our society is so fucked up that SWATing is a viable tactic, things need to be fixed. If these media outlets spent half as much effort addressing that sort of shortcoming, maybe things would be better.
Instead, they use their power for clickbait, and that means that the few times they do cover it they're dismissed as just another one of those "This unemployed veteran consumed bath salts--you'll never guess what happened next" or "1 easy tip for getting out of criminal charges--the ACLU hates this (white) guy".
SWATing is bad, but rare, and imo it speak more volumes for the really low threshold police have for using a SWAT team for things. That can be addressed in other ways. SWAT teams raid the wrong houses all the time. If someone SWATs someone they should be thrown in jail, imo, but it also, again speak volumes to the mentality of modern police departments who will SWAT someone based on nothing but a phone call.
I would argue the easily-exploitable 911 infrastructure is the larger problem. Concerns about police militarization aside, I don't fault their low threshold for response. If I report a violent crime in progress I don't want the 911 operator saying "That's a pretty bold claim, sir. Is there anyone else I could speak to?".
In that case, it can be said that the difference now is that the news media have joined the trolls.
And they do it because it benefits them. Feeding the troll in this case gives the trolls paychecks and influence, making the future even more trollish.
Does anybody remember when trolling was a term used to describe an activity in which users wielding enough understanding of other's perspectives would attempt to give other's cognitive dissonance?
It seems that one of the most powerful online political classes have lumped hatred and abuse in with disagreement, mockery and satire.
I don't think it's good for the conversation between the group of user's that dislike where Reddit and other big social media sites are headed and the people that are taking them there.
It is really easy to define the meaning of terms if you are the easy-to-agree-with side of a conflict. And now you cannot even mention the elephant in the room anymore without being immediately flagged, banned or at least called a women hating privileged white boy.
I miss those days when I was proud to be a troll, when it meant tricking people into thinking in ways that they normally wouldn't. People used to love trolls! Of course, it didn't just mean that. There were also troll raids when friends would get together and make silly comments on every thread they could find, crashing the party but having fun with it. The incendiary ones used to be called flamers, but I think that term is too trollish to use against trolls these days.
I was never the type to participate in the troll raid style, just the kind to nudge a conversation in a certain direction, more like taking a position in a debate that I didn't necessarily agree with to make it more interesting. I'm thinking of threads on forums where people would actually vote for their favorite trolls. But you would have had to be there to know what I mean.
I think I remember the term flamers being retired as people began to misinterpret it as a negative term for homosexual individuals (based off of flamboyant). This would've been around a decade ago, maybe a bit more, so it could just be a false memory.
Yes, I think that's definitely it. That's what I meant by being too trollish. It's too much like something a troll would say. But I never even realized the anti-gay term was based on flamboyant, although it makes perfect sense. Thanks for pointing that out.
Bingo, the whole thing has taken on the contours of a psyops with the goal of silencing the opposition under the guise of "trolling".
More and more political debates have turned to a battle of "framing" rather than actually debating the positive and negative sides of some action (or inaction).
EDIT: Removed overreaction to grammatical pet peeve that distracts from the main point.
> It seems that one of the most powerful online political classes have lumped hatred and abuse in with disagreement and mockery.
Its pretty common, online and off, for people of all classes to ascribe disagreement with their preferred position with "hatred and abuse". Mistaking this common error for a feature of a particular "powerful online class" is, AFAICT, the same kind of misperception of persecution as the error itself.
Like holding a straight face and carefully putting forwards an extreme position which you do not hold while making use of the correct memes and language so that it appears congruent to outsiders.
A humorous effect is created because a line can be drawn between those of the audience that know what you're doing and those that do not. A selection of the audience watches on as people that are not in the know either get angry with you or agree with your bizarre statements.
It's effectively hidden satire and that's why it was so fun and so potent.
I use to love to do this while at college. Homosexuality was still controversial enough you would get people debating it. Of course someone would eventually compare it to something most everyone agreed was wrong. Immediately the other side would try to say why that other thing was wrong, at which point I would jump in to defend it. I became so good at it that people would approach me after class to clarify if I was being serious or not. I even wrote a paper for a class that was titled something along the lines of 'A Defense of Consensual Relationships Between Genetically Similar Adults'. I ended up Poe's Lawing myself with that paper.
Sadly corporate environment isn't anywhere near as tolerant of this.
From what i've seen on reddit, twitter, and sometimes even on hn, some are quick to label people whose opinion differs from theirs as trolls. It doesn't matter if it is a polite or well-though out comment, they are quick to shout the word harassment or whatever -ist allows them to hold some moral high ground.
Christie Blatchford's skew is quite heavy in this reporting. I've seen the other side of the argument with some of the behaviours and tweets in question, and it's not so clear cut. I would definitely feel harassed by this individual, and in Canada, we do not claim to have the free speech as defined in America. Hate speech is not tolerated here, and most Canadians are in agreement with this. You can have a difference of opinion, but if you attack someone with words, there are legal consequences.
'hate speech' has a very high bar and from the court details there is zero evidence that the defendant engaged in anything remotely approaching harrassment, never mind hate speech.
by their own admission and by the evidence, the plaintiffs however did engage in a pattern of behavior and organized others into the same pattern which resulted in a person not only being harassed but also losing their job.
it is not enough to say, 'I feel harrassed' or 'I feel hurt' - that does not meet the legal test. You have no right not to be offended.
by the token of 'feelings', I could say that your response is 'hate speech' towards me and that I 'felt' harrassed and I 'felt' that my personal safety was in jeopardy.
If I were to claim that, I should rightfully be pointed in the direction of a mental health professional, not a court of law.
Words may hurt. No one denied this. Saying words killed because of the actions a person took after being hurt is incredibly disingenuous. Only the person who took the action is responsible.
>Hate speech is not tolerated here, and most Canadians are in agreement with this.
Please don't speak for the majority of Canadians. I am not in agreement with this and I speculate that many people living in Canada would object to it as well.
I love that quote, especially since some claim vulgarity is harassment, abuse and bigotry.
You're just going to alienate people with that kind of thinking.
How do you define hate, abuse and trolls?
In certain countries atheists are considered terrorists. Those who blog about atheism are haters and a bigot.
It's justified to hack them to death, imprison them or whip them.
In other countries female drivers are abusing the sensibilities of men.
Who is to say which ones are doing the censorship right, lol.
Is /r/Stuff, /r/iAMA_troll_AmA, /r/PaoMustResign, or /r/EllenPao_IsA_Cunt even default subreddits? I didn't see any of those on the front page that day. If they aren't default, then does it really matter? If trolls want to troll away in their own little troll cave, so be it?
Why? It's no one's default unless you manually subscribe to all subreddits, and you don't get "/r/all" unless type it in or click on "ᴀʟʟ" to get to it.
They were hit back by karma. Reddit has never hesitated to take advantage of the word "democracy" to refer to how their site works. It's a word that sounds very well. So there they have it: that screenshot is what democracy looks like.
The submitted article is about the state of trolling in general. It uses Pao's own experience as one particular example.
When he says that the "troll" label is overly used, that does not mean he is claiming it was inappropriate in any particular case, such as when applied to what was directed at Pao.
It's just as disingenuous to post a screenshot of submissions from /r/PaoMustResign, /r/IAmA_troll_AmA, and /r/EllenPao_IsA_C* and claim that they're representative of the attitude of Reddit as a whole.
I'd be much more interested in seeing what the front page of /r/all was for that same period of time.
I believe that screenshot is of /r/all, actually though I pulled the screenshot from a news story on daily dot as I don't have my own screenshot from that day.
I agree that's in bad taste. It gives credence to Pao saying trolls won.
But it's more complicated than it looks. Pao and stuff are giving 0 cares about political correctness being a cancer far more evil than fat hate.
We don't need owners at reddit to act like priest or therapist spreading their "morality". It doesn't work.
Why are jerks like Trump surging? People have had it with the hypocriscy and suppression of truth.
You can't speak simple truths without staking your career on it. Armies on twitter claim to be harassment victims while themselves being criminally harassers [1][2]
It's not just about mislabeling, or false accusations. There is a certain element of hypocrisy, too.
A demonstration of this is in the article:
"In May, the company banned harassment of individuals from the site. Last month, we took down sections of the site that drew repeat harassers. Then, after making these policy changes to prevent and ban harassment, I, along with several colleagues, was targeted with harassing messages, attempts to post my private information online and death threats. These were attempts to demean, shame and scare us into silence."
On one hand, these people affiliated with reddit did not appreciate these alleged "attempts to demean, shame and scare us into silence" when they were the recipients.
Yet these same people were perfectly willing, and perhaps even proud, to silence other reddit users, whether at an individual level or by eliminating entire subreddits.
In fact, the article in this case could very well be seen as an attempt to "demean, shame and scare" the alleged "trolls" into silence. It engages in the sort of behavior that it is deeming as unacceptable!
I mean, it's a comment on a thread in a sub called "punchable faces", the thread links to an Imgur image of Pao labled "ching chong ding dong", has 2,400 upvotes.
Can you point one which wasn't downvoted to oblivion? This one is pretty bad example to give, when you're trying to convince people that "thousands" were of this opinion. I really recommend reading comments in that thread.
"Pao had thousands of people calling her a ching-chong cunt."
Is this a known/established fact? I see in the article a paragraph about how she received thousands of positive notes/emails but nothing about the # or volume of hate. It may not be documented here, but I'm curious if it was actually as widespread as implied.
The front page of Reddit was littered with derogatory Pao posts for days on end following the shutdown of /r/fph and firing of Victoria. I'm sure she also received a large amount of private hate messages too.
I saw the front page, and many (most?) were not of the "ching-chong cunt" variety. I witnessed a lot of misplaced hate (we now know is "misplaced" after the fact) but there's a difference between "flaming" someone and using racist/bigoted language.
I've read through many of the top threads on Pao over the past few weeks, and from my experience about 30% of all posts publicly used the word "cunt" to describe Pao.
Hundreds of people on ten accounts each having the capacity to look like thousands of people is part of the problem Ellen Pao's essay is trying to highlight.
We're still human beings, and even though we all abstractly know that throwaway accounts exist, when you're getting 10,000 PMs that say you suck, it matters. Besides, evidence from Twitter suggests that it's demonstrably more often an easily-led mob than hundreds of sock-puppets these days.
Really? So you are going to count the number of "accounts" now?
She was bullied and forced to resign. This is the standard operating procedure of many here on HN and on the Internet (Mozilla CEO anyone?): Someone just can't have a differing opinion. They need to be bullied, tormented, silenced, fired, and marginalized until they admit that their opinion is wrong.
It was all based on mis-information (many still don't know why the AmA employee was fired) and mob mentality.
Just remember this conversation when you get fired because someone does research on your your Internet comments and decides that one of your opinions is deemed "offensive". It will most likely happen someday.
I also find it a little funny that when someone in a git repository doesn't use specific gender pronouns, they are called out as biased (and bullied). But when hundreds and thousands of people call a woman racial slurs (so much worse), it's defended.
This is my point exactly: Most people talking about 'equality' are lying. They want equality when someone is against their own personal beliefs, but are just fine spewing the same hate and bigotry when the roles are reversed.
This modern trend of trying to fire people whose speech we don't like is nuts.
I suspect, possibly incorrectly, that it's being done heavily by people who have never tried to support a family and don't realize the extreme damage their "hobby" has on the world.
Right, but those are elected officials. Appeasing the public is their job. That's not the case for, say, some graphic designer somewhere, and said graphic designer being fired over some remark on the Internet is absurd.
Did you read those words I wrote? Yes or no? Feel free to yell at someone, but it shouldn't be me.
I want accurate reporting, don't demonize me for that, okay. Units matter. If OP has proof that it was "thousands of people calling her a ching-chong cunt," then I'd like to see it. If instead, OP has proof that 2,400 accounts upvoted an image labeling her "ching chong ding dong," then report that.
Thousands of people? Where did you get that number from? Also, there were (misguided) reasons for people to be upset, which does not justify the racism, but hey, extreme insults are normal if you are very angry (no, not just on the Internet but also outside tech filter bubbles).
I'd much rather eradicate murder. Murder sucks. It needs to stop being a normal day-to-day occurrence in our lives. Someone, somewhere will be murdered today. How can you continue with your life knowing that will happen? Worse - it will be more than one person! Multiple people will be murdered today, tomorrow, and every day in the future too! Most of them are total strangers, but maybe one day it will be someone you know. I don't want to live in a world like that. In fact, I don't think anyone wants to live in a world with murder.
We have laws against it, we punish murderers, but murder still happens! All of our attempts over thousands of years have failed to eradicate murder! There has to be more we can do! Do you have suggestions?
------
In case my point isn't made clear: there are some things that are simply facts of life. You will not be able to solve them. People are emotional and will react on those emotions. Sometimes people will do terrible things while acting on these emotions. Sometimes we will fight with one another, sometimes we will throw fists at one another, sometimes we will call each other names. We'll bury each other 6' under ground. These are things that happen. We know they happen. We expect them to happen. While none of us wishes these things happen, we recognize that they will happen. That recognition of things that will happen is what makes those things normal. Normal things do not get our attention. We haven't been trained to care about expected, normal things.
I recognize that tomorrow morning, the sun will rise. It's a very special event. It means the sun is still burning and providing light and life to the planet. It's a normal occurrence though. The sun will rise the day after tomorrow. In fact, the sun will likely rise every day for the rest of my life. It's an expected occurrence. It's a normal one. I don't celebrate it. I don't pay attention to it, most of the time. Some days I might appreciate the sunrise and the beauty of it. Most days it gets ignored.
Some days I notice some terrible occurrence happening in the world. Those terrible things happen every day. They're normal. So most days. They get ignored.
With respect (because I share the feeling), that's an attitude that helps one sleep at night in a broken world, but it's inherently defeatist and decreases the likelihood of positive change. Because things can be changed. Over the work of several decades, the murder rate (along with the violent crime rate) has gone down. Why should we just assume that the same can't be said for bullying and abuse?
There's plenty of question of how much we're willing to spend to solve the problem, of course (to give a terrible ad absurdium example, it's trivial to stop Internet bullying by shutting off the internet). But when we just hand-wave and say "Can't be fixed," we aren't helping.
When people stop posting PII online their abuse rates will go down. That's my conjecture.
In fact, personal abuse online has risen online and I blame people being so open with their personally identifying information. I made a related post on this issue here [0]. The solution is not one that people want to subscribe to. They'd rather share their lives on FB and Twitter for the world to see. "The world" includes nasty people and bullies. If people don't want nasty people and bullies to have access to this information, people need to stop sharing it with the world.
It is much easier to harass someone in a credible manner when you have information about them. No information? Nothing to attack. But so many people want to shove their name, gender, sexuality, religion, age, beliefs, and who-knows-what-else in front of everyones' eyes to see. So people who dislike _____ now have something to attack. People who dislike ____ will always and forever exist. Always. Until we remove the right for individuals to hold their own beliefs or have freedom.
Social norms change. Samurai used to ride around and slice people in half just because they could. Public hangings and lynchings used to happen all the time. Most places in the world have eradicated that sort of murder out in the open, and the ones that haven't are making concerted efforts to stop it.
There's nothing about human culture that's consistent except its inconsistency and adaptability. It might not be obvious within a few decades, but big changes do happen.
I totally support that, but the Internet is probably the worst and hardest place to try initiate that change.
Opposed to the real world, wannabe bullies have zero chance of seeing a reaction from their victims if those do not react. Online bullies like there DO lose their interest. Just look at past outrages on reddit to see. People need to despise that these short-term hype shitstorms are not worth reacting to'. Maybe ask PR campaigners how they handle it, there should be decades of research.
I am obviously excluding actual stalkers, sociopaths etc. Those are hard problems but not one you can as easily treat and not a widespread problem.
I definitely think the solution has to be deeper than banning people from forums. People exhibiting sociopathic tendencies have needs that aren't being met in their real lives. They most likely need therapy, counseling, or community support. They might have abusive home lives. The online harrassment issue is a big warning sign that there are deep social issues all over the world that aren't being addressed, but everyone knew that already. What this really calls for is expanded mental health care, but I don't know if anyone is going to respond that way, since it's expensive and requires a lot of people doing hard work.
Parent comment says that people call mild, polite, disagreement trolling. This thread is about Pao calling out trolls. It's pretty fucking important to make people realise that this is not polite disagreement about some obscure topic, but that it is very many people leaving posts that are little more than "Pao is a cunt" or using racial slurs.
It's weird that you object to the racial slur but ignore the sexual slur.
Hundreds of thousands strongly disagreement with firing Victoria, and the overall deterioration of the admin relationship. But let's focus on the brats instead.
Real trolls exist, but other than that, I must admit I was also thinking that a rallying cry against trolling is usually just a cry to shut down people somebody disagrees with. Actual trolling without content is usually well covered by user agreements and general law.
How many thousands of people weren't? Was it statistically significant? Or is this another case of focusing on the insignificant <1%, many of which are trolls, and pretending it's somehow a majority or significant amount of people with sincere feelings[0]?
It's actually kind of amazing, the modern day media has lifted shamelessly the exact attitude of intolerance and hostility that used to be targeted strictly at people of color in the 60s, and now are targeting people of opinions today. Armed with their vocabulary of loaded words like "troll", "racist", "sexist", and "shitlord", they just as readily label, harass, and even destroy people (i.e. wreck their careers, get them fired, etc.) as those crazy mobs half a century ago in the south. There's no consideration for context, individuality, intention, or circumstance; you recognize a woman is different from a man = you're a sexist. You question diversity = you're a troll. You bring up crime statistics = you're a racist.
And the hilarious thing is, the "trolls" didn't even "win". Reddit's new CEO is implementing even stricter censorship measures, all of it most likely in the hopes of making reddit more appealing for advertisers. If you stand back and look at this whole fiasco from a distance, Reddit higher-ups want to make more money, and in order to do so, they decide they need to curb their more "unsightly" elements. But attacking free speech is a dicey proposition, so what do they do? They hire a woman and make her do it. If redditors are dumb sheep and take it quietly, great. If not, wrap the whole thing around her neck and throw her under the bus (reminds you of the Bourne Trilogy deson't it), then come riding in on a white horse to "save" reddit from "chairman Pao".
And so far, it's working perfectly. The "trolls" celebrate their victory by having the sensationalist media blast them on their sexism, Pao's reputation is utterly destroyed and she's essentially too toxic to employ anywhere, and Reddit still gets to wipe the floor with free speech.
also, I might be wrong, but, if you comment about an idea that doesn't conform to a sub-reddit's ideology, you can get down-voted to oblivion for no obvious reason... I used to not like Facebook's idea of not providing a dislike button, but I am not so sure anymore
It's too bad that this type of comment and the one above it are going to kill any meaningful discussion about this interesting and important topic. To quote Sam Altman[1]:
> Most smart people I know have decided to just not discuss anything sensitive because of the internet lynchmob looking for any slight mistake
> This seems unlikely to be a good development. At some point the conversations will only have the extremists left.
We need to talk about this, but without heavy moderation which will introduce a different set of problems, I don't see how.
Well, in Sam's case, he has a tendency to talk about many things which he has no expertise. I'd guess he and his friends sit around talking about things which they don't really understand and think they have "insight". So do my friends and I. This is fine to the extent one is chatting with friends. It's the silicon valley thing to do, think we know waaaay more than we do.
However I don't think it's a great idea to put forth one's amateurish "insight" as discussion worthy in a public forum. It promotes the idea that any position is "valid" when many simply aren't. Having a "discussion", which everyone seems to think is oh so important, is absolutely useless if it's between people who don't have any clue about the topic they are discussing. So, if the "internet lynchmob" has stopped people speaking publicly about things which they have no business doing, I can't say I feel sad about it.
As someone with sympathy for many causes that are attacked as "SJW," I agree. I never thought the term was reasonable. It's as embarrassingly hokey and strident as Christian evangelists self-describing as "spiritual warriors." It would be just as annoying to have all Christians dismissively labeled as "spiritual warriors" for their belief.
Framing advocacy as warfare is inaccurate and unwise. Appealing to people with your arguments and example and negotiating points of agreement are huge parts of effective advocacy.
Defining people as opponents to kill, disable or dominate isn't effective advocacy - and recent wars might even indicate that they aren't focuses for effective warfare, either. Furthermore, it tells your "opponents" that the only way to deal with you is to suppress you by force. When people get locked obsessively into these conflicts beyond reconciliation, it's sick and self-perpetuating rather than cathartic and it doesn't help anybody.
The thing is, there is no big yellow line between aggressive politics and warfare. If someone gets me fired from my job, that is actually worse for me than if I get punched in the face. And while many SJW's don't engage in violence themselves, they do play the role of trumpeter, and the trumpeter should be considered a type of warrior - http://www.bartleby.com/17/1/79.html And there are plenty examples of the left either using the state to engage in violence to further left-wing causes, or in tying the hands of the state to allow left-aligned mobs to engage in violence.
The defining trait of SJW is not that they are activists for a cause. If they were just trying to win hearts and minds so they could win at the ballot box, that would be one thing. The defining trait is that they use any means at their disposable to defeat their enemies: naming and shaming, purging, getting people fired, getting people banned from communities, lawsuits, criminal complaints, etc. That is the mentality of warfare, and deserves to be called as such.
At this point, the term "SJW" is so overused as a content-free pejorative that I don't think it is even possible to rehabilitate it for any kind of constructive communication. I see people's use of this term as a signal that they have accepted the framing of warfare, because by use it appears to mean "my enemies who are so wrong and unjustly aggressive that I have the right to fight them tooth and nail."
Unfortunately, the people "on the other side" will tend to see things the same way. And our tendency is to define the enemy group vaguely, over-generalizing by including lots of people who are not really malicious or even wrong. Maybe our anger makes us hungry for targets. Or maybe we are just so upset about the disagreement itself that we are happy to have a list of bad things the other side does as a way of trying to discredit people who are not involved in those bad things, but disagree with us. Not everyone is honest about why they want to hurt the people they publicly declare as enemies. Sometimes it is just intolerance of disagreement, or simple sadism.
Even if the damage among the "combatants" didn't matter, it is often the "civilian bystanders" who are hurt. This is totally nuts. Even if these issues are worth being passionate about, they are not rationally comparable to warfare, they don't rationally justify war tactics. This isn't the Thunderdome, it's the civil society we all have to live in. And we don't have a real choice about whether that society includes people we disagree with, so it's better if we come to terms with that and find ways either to fence off or compromise in the common space, to mutual advantage.
For example, I think you're stacking the deck with your talk about "left-aligned mobs" and that you are intentionally eliding the history of right-wing fascism to make "your side" look better than "the other side." I'm a realist, I don't think people will usually be civil without special effort. So for all I know based on your rhetoric, you'd identify me as an enemy and a threat based on my views, and even kill me if you had the chance; I will defensively avoid testing that. But that's as far as I should rationally go. The important part is that whatever our disagreements, and they may be very deep, I don't need to assume that we are at war, that I am a warrior and you are my enemy, and focus on somehow figuratively "killing" you. In my view, that would actually be very silly and self-destructive. I don't actually benefit from trying to damage you, it's pointless, it doesn't help my causes and it pollutes the civil society I have to live in. (Of course it is another issue if you decide to literally threaten me and my lawful interests, but then it is a purely defensive and practical issue; I don't need to respond to that by declaring war on your "tribe" and I certainly can't pre-empt that by turning every disagreement into an intractable "war.")
I don't like how politics becomes warfare, but the phenomena exists, and we need a name for the people who engage in this kind of activism. I don't think that all leftist activists are social justice warriors, but there are very clearly activists who believe in shaming and purging, and there needs to be a name distinguishing those aggressive activists versus activists who just want to convince people. The war tactics exist, refusing to label them as such does make them go away.
For example, I think you're stacking the deck with your talk about "left-aligned mobs" and that you are intentionally eliding the history of right-wing fascism to make "your side" look better than "the other side."
I mention that because we were talking about social justice warriors, who are on the left. If there was a term "Right-wing Warriors" or such to describe right-wing people who wanted to dox, shame, purge, ban, and use any tactic necessary to fire leftists, then that would make sense. It would be completely appropriate to label such people as "warriors", if they are engaging as politics as warfare rather than as a way to convince people.
What word would you use for a left-wing activist who aggressively wants to name and shame, or purge, or get fired, or get banned, any person on the right who crosses a certain line? These types of people exist, is is a real phenomena, so it needs a name.
If being a warrier of social justice is a slur then bring them on. Could the people who are against speaking out for women and other minorities have picked a more ridiculous phrase to try and make an insult?
Overuse and broad use have made the term useless anyway.
Aside from that, I do have an objection to the term: real advocates for social justice are doing something constructive. Literal warriors make war, which is destructive. That may have grim uses, but it isn't preferable to make our civil society as hostile as a war zone. Why do we need to appropriate the trappings of literal warriors, and why can't we embrace constructiveness instead of associating advocacy with destruction?
tldr; heavy moderation actually causes trolling on sites like Reddit.
>taking extreme action against small infractions can exacerbate antisocial behavior (e.g., unfairness can cause users to write worse). Though average classifier precision is relatively high (0.80), one in five users identified as antisocial are nonetheless misclassified. Whereas trading off overall performance for higher precision and have a human moder- ator approve any bans is one way to avoid incorrectly blocking innocent users, a better response may instead involve giving antisocial users a chance to redeem themselves.
The whole thing with Pao got out of control because somebody was routinely deleting comments and shadowbanning people who mentioned the trouble her husband was in. Whether it was her, another admin or a moderator doing the banning that was what fueled the fire.
Moderation on Reddit is insane, a single basement dweller with sociopathic tendencies (99% of forum moderators everywhere) can control the conversation totally, they constantly ban discussion that they don't agree with and there is absolutely no transparency. It happens to be a wonderful way of incubating hate groups by eliminating cross pollination of ideas, but it also tends to piss people off.
The trolls won the war for usenet too. It didn't destroy the internet. Just because trolls are making reddit unpleasant doesn't mean that they will destroy the internet. reddit isn't the whole internet, not even close!
Furthermore, supposing that reddit users revolting against the clamping-down of reddit management constitutes the "biggest trolling attacks in history" is a little disingenuous. What about all the people who got internet famous for dumb stuff like the mustard guy or folks that got pranked by Sacha Baron Cohen or the jackass guys? Those were arguably trolling, and they got made into major motion pictures that got commercials and put into theaters!
Reddit trolls just post nasty comments on reddit, a place that probably half of America barely knows about and definitely doesn't care about.
I'm not saying that the nasty stuff that happened to her didn't happen, or that it's somehow not a big deal. It obviously is a big deal to her, and a great many other people as well.
But that doesn't make it the "largest trolling attack in history"
> The trolls won the war for usenet too. It didn't destroy the internet.
It sure as hell destroyed Usenet, though. I remember, because I was there when it happened.
At least when we lost Usenet there was somewhere else for all those discussions to migrate to: the Web. If they destroy the Web, where are the discussions supposed to go then?
Please remember that just because someone says a thing, that does not make it true.
Reddit is not the WHOLE internet. Just because trolls are causing havoc at reddit doesn't mean that they're winning everywhere.
Further any one website isn't the whole internet. Usenet was a unified system, the myraid websites that people troll on right now are not. Facebook is different from Reddit which is different from slashdot which is different from HN which is different from etc.
> The Trolls Are Winning the Battle for the Internet
Does anyone honestly believe this? Even Ellen in the op-ed says
> As the trolls on Reddit grew louder and more harassing in recent weeks, another group of users became more vocal. First a few sent positive messages. Then a few more. Soon, I was receiving hundreds of messages a day, and at one point thousands. These messages were thoughtful, well-written and heartfelt, in stark contrast to the trolling messages, which were usually made up of little more than four-letter words. Many shared their own stories of harassment and thanked us for our stance.
I think most people see trolls as just trolls. People are going to be jerks sometimes - whether under their real name (facebook / youtube) or anonymously.
The major issue is the notion that "jerks sometimes" is evolving into "jerks all the time."
Not yet sure how much of this notion stems from the focus on the problem and how much is actual increase, but it's a problem nonetheless. Why do we tolerate as much trolling as we do? Why do we continue to see trolls as just trolls when we have evidence of people being bullied to suicide via the signal-magnification effect of online interaction?
> The major issue is the notion that "jerks sometimes" is evolving into "jerks all the time."
I would doubt that. I think it's an outgrowth of more information created (so the trolls, if you're looking for them, will have more trolling as well).
It's just like how the news is claiming things are always getting worse. They're not. Things are better than ever, we're just getting much better at hearing about the outlier cases of when bad things do happen.
I just posted this in the earlier submission[1], but I'll put it here too:
I really worry that if we don't find a way to fix the abuse problem, pseudonymity online will be looked back on by future generations as our time's Klan hood.
Abuse stories like these make me embarrassed to support any form of privacy online.
Platforms need to take a stand and find a way reduce hate and abuse, or public opinion (and my own) will turn against support of privacy. If it turns out pseudonymity is fundamentally incompatible with safety of the abused online then I'll take the latter, but I'd rather search for a way to have both.
Platforms banning abusive subcommunities seems like a good start.
I'm not so sure. Looking at the history of the Internet, the communications technology seems to have grown from a system of necessary pseudonymity to increasinglhy-non-pseudonymous interactions (social networks with real names, merchant systems with credit cards, and increasingly initiatives to use one authoritative account system to authenticate with multiple services).
A social shift to consider people who don't use their real names online as "creepy" or "with something to hide" may not be as impossible as you want it to be.
Quite to the contrary, in fact. One of the big learnings from the Google real names policy was that people are JUST as willing to be terrible under their real names.
What I think it is, if I may hypothesize, is merely that there is fundamentally no incentive to NOT be however you want on the internet. 9 times out of 10 nothing you say will be traced back to you, or will reflect on any aspect of your day to day life. I consider the internet a window into the uninhibited mindset of the average person, and that although we may find it distasteful, to censor it would be paramount to burying our heads in the sand about our own nature.
What's worrying is that rather than find avenues to deal with it in reasonable or moderated fashion, the narratives often seem to shift to the most extreme and often dogmatic-seeming angles, more as talking points than measured response.
These points are all well-taken. Real names don't magically make people good to one another. I don't think the problem will go away with the removal of pseudonymity.
Of course that case is controversial, but social consequences are one thing that can help protect against this sort of behaviour (note that this is not really a free speech issue in that he was not put in jail).
So what are social consequences we can levy online, if we want to support psudonymity and stay disconnected from our meatspace identities? One such consequence is having your hateful platform (the FPH subreddit in the Reddit case) closed. I am fine with this approach.
But this is the fundamental extreme response to which I was referring. It doesn't address the problem in any way other than "remove that which is offensive to me". This tends to trend exponentially towards groupthink, I've found, as the dominating group proceeds to wall themselves off. (Walling _themselves_ off would even be preferable, the current mindset is far more obliterating the opposition than isolating oneself from it, although I don't think either is necessarily "effective" int he long term)
It is a slippery slope when one starts enacting vengeance as a response to speech actions deemed unacceptable, the canonical questions being "who draws the line" and "what happens when the line moves under coercion from malicious entities". I aspire towards, as I said, a more measured approach.
Let me make my view perfectly clear; there is a level of harassment that becomes _material_ and is no longer simply a speech issue, but given your citing of FPH, I don't believe that's what is necessarily being discussed. (I also think that's a difficult instance to discuss, due to the frank level of "politicking" that's been involved in that whole situation, although that (the building of a self serving movement either for or against a social justice issue) is another potentially worrying bit of fallout from a "warlike" mindset and response (for lack of a better word). Aggressive action only polarizes further; and while I agree with your core point that social pressure is key, I think it must be well crafted.)
I would hypothesize that the correlation is that a pseudonym increases your sense of invincibility.
If you already think there will be no ramifications of friends/people knowing your opinion, then a pseudonym doesn't give you much incremental benefit.
If, however, the potential ramifications are great, a pseudonym does a lot to distance the ramifications from you individually.
Facebook's userbase is so large, many users are functionally anonymous.
Before online communities, most people interacted in social circles small enough that their identity actually meant something to the other participants.
But on widely circulated/public posts on facebook, the audience is so large, that "John Doe from Indiana" might as well be anonymous.
Confirmation bias and all, but: I had a friend in high school who was really cool. But he was a complete ass to everyone, even his friends, on the internet. It's not like he was anonymous to us or anything. We saw him in person every day of the week.
> pseudonymity online will be looked back on by future generations as our time's Klan hood
That's an extremely bad analogy. It's reasonable to expect that anyone wearing a Klan hood has inflicted some kind of harm or pain onto others, but it's not at all reasonable to expect that the typical user of a pseudonymous forum has participated in abuse.
You are saying we need censorship. Growing up in a country that had very strict censorship rules I can tell you two things:
- it never works because people just simply fool the censors with twisting words the right way so the censors don't understand it but the smarter readers do. Entire genre was created for this sort of stuff in my country.
- just by trying to censor people you are pushing many different groups to the same platform and they gonna overthrow the ruling class anyways because together they are stronger and they are going to get rid of censorship. Look at the history for some countries with censorship.
On the top of that, how will define what safe means? This is really a double edge sword.
Please watch this video, this sums up pretty nicely my opinion:
Guys who disagree: I do not care about karma loss because representing a non-popular view on things, but if you take the effort to downvote please have the courage to put a comment in as well.
>In my opinion, people support trolls as long as they align with their ideas
Exactly. These communities form because there are people that share the beliefs, for better or worse. And it any online community, a "troll" is someone who goes against the norms.
Censorship is a slippery slope. The fact that you have people, like the OP, stating that if bullying doesn't stop he'll turn "against support of privacy" is downright scary.
That's exactly it. "It's trolling when they do it, it's arguments on their level when we do it".
What bothers me is that members of the general population have little self-respect and ridiculously low standards of discussions and reasoning. And sadly, this is as much a problem off-line as it is on-line.
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
People have lost the fear of being ostracized by their antisocial acts because communities that thrive on such behavior are becoming increasingly easy to find.
So what's your definition of abusive? Who's definition do we pick? Can we vote on it? What happens when a vocal minority disagrees with a consensus? What happens if that consensus harms a non-vocal minority? What happens when no matter your decision, someone will be affected adversely? Which side do you choose?
No doubt it will be a constant complicated debate, as social norms tend to be. But we don't throw up our hands and say "we can't have social norms! Who picks them? How do we vote?!"
Unfortunately I don't think we'll come up with a simple set of universally applicable rules and move on.
I do know that my abuse-free internet experience is very much a bubble, and every time I have been given the opportunity to see the experience of a "woman with an opinion" online I get to realize this. So let's as a society say "this isn't acceptable" and then deal with the much more difficult question of "what to do about it".
In any other commercial venue if a patron started shouting racist and sexist epithets, we would be ok with the owner throwing them out. We don't get caught up in slippery slope fallacies.
I can't scientifically prove that Fat-people Hate was objectively abusive but that's the beauty of social norms, I can say "I think it's abusive" and put pressure on businesses to remove its platform. Which is what I'm doing :)
Except that an enforcement of a real-name policy will make it even easier to abuse online users, since now a harasser (or "troll", if you will) has that much more information to go on when doxxing or otherwise imposing offline consequences for online activities.
In other words, pseudonymity is, if anything, the one safeguard we have left against the sort of cyberbullying that happens with disturbing regularity. Advocating for its removal for the sake of "online safety" is the textbook definition of "backfire" (and, I'd imagine, would count as tragic irony).
>Abuse stories like these make me embarrassed to support any form of privacy online
I don't feel embarrassed to support free speech when I see it abused.
Your line of thought would have us all registered with the state before we could use the internet - a tragic outcome that some on this planet are already subjected to.
Misquoting Bart Simpson "If you never experience the abuse, you'll never get desensitized to it", and with that in mind, and talking here only about written abuse, these are my favorite three outcomes for, let's say, my daughter:
1) No one abuses her online
2) People abuse her, she dismisses it as noise
3) People abuse her, and she reacts and attempts to control it
I think I get your point, that it is healthy to be able to deal with the world as it is, but that doesn't mean that we have to accept or embrace it as it is.
What her daughter may perceive as "abuse" can be very subjective. That's why censorship in general is never a good idea. Learning to "dismiss" it as noise is a more scalable and elegant approach, and doesn't limit anyone's freedoms in a subjective way.
I'm not advocating for censorship when I say that we should be aiming to not have people abusing each other. We should be aiming for a society where no one wants to abuse other people.
Maybe that's dreamy-eyed nonsense, but I think when you talk about aims you have to let ideals in, not just stick to what is practical tomorrow.
Why do you believe it's better for your daughter to receive abuse and dismiss it than not to receive it in the first place? If we're aiming for ideals, let's go for the ideal of a world in which people aren't subjected to so much abuse that they just filter it out as background noise, because that sounds like a shit future.
It can't be a great idea to aim for the "ideal" situation if it's impossible to do. So much wasted time. Surely it's a better idea to aim for something that one can control, and is obtainable, even if not easy.
While I generally agree that it's mostly (and likely even entirely) noise, I also can't ignore that there were many instances of abuse in this particular issue that would be outright criminal in most jurisdictions (death threats) if those same people said the same things in person in a public forum. The fact that its done under a practically anonymous pseudonym by a large number of people doesn't change the criminality, it just makes it impractical to enforce the law against those offender. I don't think we want people desensitized to threats on their life, even if from a source that's typically just noise.
If you want to spout hate and slurs over the internet, go right ahead, I think people do need to develop thick skin to idiots, but I wouldn't be sad if a few of the small number of people making threats of harm were tracked down and charged appropriately.
Agreed, you are smart. Many people won't agree, but if you can even just have your own daughter think that way, you've probably done all that really matters.
The situation at reddit is appalling and the death threats and egregious harassment against Pao were wrong, and likely illegal in some cases.
That said, my opinion of her is that she is far from the champion that this battle needs. I believe that the most common view of Pao is not too savory, between her husbands ponzi scheme, the details that came out of the KPCB trial and the plethora of other poor decision taken by her, she has made it easy to find faults with her character.
Trolls used to mean (and I think still does mean) a person who attempts to voice an opinion they don't hold with the intent of invoking a negative reaction out of someone else. Most of the folks spewing bile at Ellen Pao probably don't actually hate her, but can't help seeing their actions have an effect.
Trolls don't win if you ignore them -- the shitshow that's been Reddit this past month is almost entirely because Ellen and co. can't/won't stop reacting to short-sighted outcries from Reddit's userbase.
Yishan, Ellen, Alexis, Steve, even Sam, and everyone else involved needs to shut the fuck up (publicly) about Reddit for a few weeks. This whole "airing of grievances" is actually what's killing Reddit, not the trolls.
What I want to see is legal action taken against Yishan for fueling this well beyond its natural life. He had to violate an NDA of some kind with all the extra fuel he's been throwing onto this...
i just think its dumb how people want to "change" the internet, or anything for that matter. its not a tamable creature, its anarchy and chaos and humanity in all of its glory, good or bad.
it bothers me when people say we need to take something off the internet... no really, we dont, it was put there for a reason, no matter how misguided that reason may be. hate speech, no matter how distasteful is still free speech. dont want to see it on reddit, dont look for it! i mean quite frankly, if you are fat and self conscious, going to a "fat haters" forum is probably going to end poorly for you.
as for her statistic about 40% of internet users saying they have been bullied... welcome to the real world lady! run that same quiz in a random highschool and i'd bet its double that percentage... people are mean. why should the internet not reflect real life? art imitates life.
it also bothers me these people saying we need to change hiring practices and other such nonsense. many things self regulate, leave them alone.
"I have just endured one of the largest trolling attacks in history"
I don't know enough about what Ellen went through to comment on it, but I find this comment very funny, and it made it hard to take the rest of the article seriously.
Rule #1: Never feed the trolls. She has just given them a feast. I miss FidoNet, it used to be so easy to shut down abuse and the conversations were so much more thoughtful. I wonder if we can ever get that back.
Reading all of this has given me the beginnings of an idea. Although I'm not a machine learning/NLP expert the idea is obviously non-trivial to an extreme (maybe impossible, currently): What if there were a forum similar in style to reddit that had a form of auto-moderation that identified logical fallacies and other irrelevant information and then highlighted those within arguments.
For example if there was an ad hominem attack "Fuck you Ellen Pao." The auto moderator would allow the post but would highlight the text red with a small bubble identifying it as ad hominem, users could react appropriately.
Or, maybe you have a long well thought out argument that has a straw man in it. The auto-mod could highlight the straw man to point out that it exists and maybe even format the post to show the point from which the rest of the position is based on that.
Maybe this wouldn't have to be actively presented but just a tool that comments were run through so users could be warned prior to their submissions. Obviously the complications with this would be ridiculous and you could never stop training the algorithm that was processing your text. But the implications of having such a thing seem pretty incredible.
There is a lot of denial about the nature of the intellectual bell curve. The majority of people are not that smart and cannot make thoughtful contributions to most discussions. The majority of people will at least some of the time lose decorum and make vicious personal attacks when they perceive themselves as being threatened or as being wronged. Upvoting and downvoting is an action, and action requires motivation. Thus, unless an audience is especially smart and valuing of rationality, comments are most likely to get upvotes when they provoke an emotional reaction.
To have a high quality discussion board you must have a critical mass of reasonable, smart people. You must avoid letting in the hoi polloi. And you must quickly ban users who make dumb comments or violate decorum.
However, most internet business models are based on advertising. Advertising revenues are based on eyeballs. And a normal stupid person's eyeballs are worth just as much as smart person's eyeballs (perhaps more, the smart person probably has adblock installed).
Thus the central conflict. Business models are based on making it as easy as possible for normal people to get engaged in the platform. But the result of normal people getting engaged will be vicious and unsavory content. Also if it is easy to create account, then it is easy to switch accounts if one account is banned. So it becomes impossible to silence the unsavory users.
I think that ultimately Reddit will end up as sort of the Wikipedia version of a newspaper. All pretense of being free speech or democratic will be dropped in the major subreddits. Rather it will be a media site on a variety of issues that is mostly top-down, and controlled by the actions of entrenched, established users and moderators.
People like to gossip and trashtalk. We can act like it is not human nature and philosophize about ideal conversation, but one look at the afternoon TV programme will quickly convince you otherwise.
Imo the way forward is not demonizing either social group, but to give each their own forum for expression. The word 'troll' is an extremely slippery slope...
She's still a millionaire executive. Obviously nobody deserves the kind of abuse she's gotten, but I think I could put up with a whole lot of nobodies saying mean things about me on the internet in return for being in her position.
Fine, she's technically between positions. You know as well as I do that she will shortly be made an executive or a board member of some other firm(s). She is part of the executive class.
I am afraid that she is right. The few times I have tried dipping my toes into Reddit, I have been attacked by users so filled with bile they seemingly could not communicate without spewing it up.
It left me just flabbergasted by how little provoked them, or how they somehow thought their behavior was appropriate or justified.
These scattered but blessedly brief experiences have been so horrible that I have completely given up on it. I wish it were not the case -- Aaron Swartz is one of my heroes - but I am afraid this particular legacy of his has just spoiled.
I'm not sure that the solution is to completely prevent trolling rather than to inoculate ourselves against it.
Part of 'trolling' (in the sense being talked about here) is knowing what to use against the victim for maximum shock value or impact. I don't think Pao was hated because she was a woman or asian. I think that she was hated, and therefore they found an easy way to disparage her by throwing slurs about her gender and race. It's shocking to see such words and that's precisely why people use them.
I don't think that the world would be a better place if it we cloned it as is and scrubbed all negative references for race/gender/other protected characteristic. I think people will be just as nasty. They'll be nasty using different words to strike at different vulnerabilities. The problem isn't "racism" or "sexism", it's people being plain, old-fashioned mean.
Unfortunately we can't trust the intentions of this piece. She might not actually care about trolls at all, just brushes them off like I do. It's an image piece, designed to fulfill specific purposes, and I doubt the purpose is merely to spread the message of the positive potential of humanity on the Internet.
But that balancing act is getting harder. The trolls are winning.
The success of the original balancing act was that there wasn't one--it was an open platform, it was a loose federation, and it was decentralized. By creating these massive walled gardens and trying to monetize them, companies like Reddit have suddenly had to take a stand.
Short surprise that they're running into problems that didn't exist before they decided to create these massive platforms. If you democratize access to mass point-to-point communications, guess what? By definition, half of your users are of below average empathy and responsibility.
But to attract more mainstream audiences and bring in the big-budget advertisers, you must hide or remove the ugly.
Gentrification of the Internet.
As the threats became really violent, people ended their messages with “stay safe.”
Threats can be graphic, not violent--if they're violent, they're not threats.
Definitely an interesting read. Mostly I am with Pao. But I do feel Reddit has been in the business of supplying a troll friendly environment that is just interesting/safe enough to monetize for quite some time. So, in my opinion, nobody truly "anti-troll" would have stepped into the situation.
Trolling is not a new thing. As long as hateful and/or sociopathic and/or sadistic people exist there will be trolls and trolling. You can only manage trolling, you can't eliminate it. That's the mistake Reddit made, they thought they could eliminate it, or at least hide it, and that isn't something that anyone knows how to do. In their efforts they make some basic mistakes.
They removed areas where the trolls had self segregated (ex. fatshaming) forcing them back into the rest of the community. They failed to properly ignore the trolls and reacted to them up to the extent of claiming that the resignation of a member of their executive had something to do with their actions.
I predict that the Reddit troll problem is going to get much worse before it gets better.
Many of responses I read here are infuriating because many are deliberately ignoring the issue of harassment by claiming it's a free speech issue. In the US you do not have 100% freedom of speech. If you deliberately incite violence against another person through speech, you can be charged with a crime. You can face a lawsuit for assault without touching the victim. You can be charged for, say, harassing others in the workplace. You certainly have the right to speak your mind, but if you think you have the right to deliberately cause severe mental distress, not through mere discussion of your points, but through repetitive and abusive language and getting your cohorts to join you in the assault, you are absolutely mistaken. Even if we were to assume some enshrined right to harass individuals, perhaps it's not the best way to go about a disagreement.
Further, people are choosing to get angry over the false binary of freedom vs harassment, and choosing to ignore the third option of choosing empathy, tact, or clear and fair discussion over slinging barbs at others.
I'm reading comments along the lines of 'well, it couldn't have been that bad' or 'I don't know enough about the extent of the harassment, but I'm going to comment about semantics or the 100 percent accuracy [as opposed to, say, 90 percent] of her claims anyway!' Your comments are pointless and dance around the actual issue of abuse. You fail to feel any sort of empathy because you yourself are not the victim.
I hear people making fun of the concept of 'microaggression' because they fail to adequately understand its meaning. The point is that it's really easy to throw a one-line insult to someone, but in aggregate it can cause great distress, because the throwaway comments of a thousand people can feel like one very persistent stalker. People dismiss this by saying 'oh it's normal' and recommend they just ignore it. Frankly, the point is that it should not be normal, and some people have difficulty ignoring it.
And I know some will deliberately choose to misconstrue what I'm saying here. No, I'm not saying that we should censor the Internet and ban all controversial discussion. I would just hope that more people become aware that it is a real issue that people face, and that commenters should be aware of their own actions and reevaluate how they choose respond to conflicts.
That's an insane thing to say. I know she's the former CEO but anybody saying this is losing perspective. There are countless communities not on Reddit and they can't be represented by Reddit. I know it's probably a conscious exaggeration but it's getting hard to tell, people take this forum shit so seriously.
Given her past, Ellen Pao is not very credible. Her opinion seems part of her self serving rhetoric that is now focused on presenting herself as a martyr.
Incivility has always been a problem in human society--it's magnified by the internet, because of the lack of consequences.
People have been trying to automate moderation and make it perfectly fair for a long time now. It's basically impossible. If you do it at all, you have to use people, which makes it suck.
If you don't do any moderation, you get a sewer, and then you get shut down. You can try to exclude only illegal stuff and stand on free speech, but in terms of content you still have a sewer. To be fair, most of the stuff that moves through sewers is not deadly poison, just crap and water. Some people like sewers, so sewer cities continue to be built for people to live in, but most people find them unattractive, so they never take over the world.
To make something more attractive out of all the crap people emit, you need a modicum of moderation, which always comes from other people. Which means it is essentially unfair, capricious, and creates incentives to endless mediocrity and pandering. But even if we accept that rather than going back to the sewers, one man's perfect moderator is the other man's little Hitler. So maybe we should just crowdsource moderation! Brilliant! But "democratic" crowd moderation is essentially a way of diffusing responsibility for censorship. The censorship of whoever happens to brigade your posts (maybe with sockpuppets, or external links) is not any more free, or pleasant, than any other censorship. Meanwhile, upvoting and downvoting takes on a massive life of its own and creates arenas for endless meta-gaming like subcommunities trying to push each other out. This takes over the site. If you manage the site, have fun managing all that effectively, and try not to get sucked in.
If what you want is fairness, all you can do is publish explicit policy (NOT legal ToS) so people know and agree to what they're getting into - then enforce that policy universally to the letter. That will be fair only in the limited sense that everyone agrees to it the same, like the rules of chess.
But human-based moderation will never be fair.
That's not really what I mean. I have no problem with, say, reddit deciding that a "fat people hate" forum is not fit for its site. It's their site, they get to decide that.
Rather, what I am concerned about is the broader conversation which takes place in articles like TFA, by prominent people such as Pao, and by journalists. This broader conversation uses the word "troll" - but who gets to decide which opinions are in that bucket, and therefore not acceptable?
It is easy to say racists are trolls, it's uncontroversial for the most part. But what about, say, gender-critical radical feminists? These are people who challenge certain received beliefs around what gender means, or should mean. They are not hateful, and they are 100% serious about making the world better for women, yet are often accused of transphobia (and worse) for what they believe. They get death threats (from other people who also call themselves feminists) and the rest of it. And it would be so easy to place them in the "troll" category.
USENET, via email, via your own server, via a blog you host on your own server.
But those solutions (a) take effort and (b) implicitly decrease your potential audience because you aren't piggy-backing on some other organization's social networking. So it's understandable why people who get their jollies on upsetting other people would prefer an easier solution for them, like Reddit letting them say whatever they choose to unhindered because "Freedom of speech."
I'm 100% in favor of people who want to talk about topics Reddit has rejected setting up their own competitor. Maybe it will even become as big as Reddit. It's happened before.
> The trolls are winning the battle for the Internet
The trolls aren't "winning" because "the trolls" aren't an organization. They don't have an ideology that they're pushing, or some end-goal that they're hoping to achieve. They're a byproduct of free speech that we all have to deal with.
But most importantly, they're not even able to be categorized uniformly. What is trolling to one person, may be comedy, satire, or even just _disagreement_ to another.
I've been following the Ellen Pao debacle on Reddit, and her misuse of the term "troll" in the article illustrates her ignorance of Internet and Reddit culture that led to her stepping down as CEO.
I'm sure there were many offensive, harassing, and vitriolic comments and directed at her, however they were a result of her incompetent actions and failure to understand the culture that caused the problem, not due to trolls or trolling.
may be, yet it is still doesn't help them win in court ...
Without any reason, just as a fishing expedition for millions of dollars, she basically publicly labeled a bunch of men as sexist pigs. Talking about trolling, ehh..
I wish that there was some sort of Internet-wide 'reputation system' that would accumulate one's reputation across all websites they use - while preserving their pseudonymity on each site.
As an analogy, Steam and Battle.net and other gaming platforms have something going for them, maybe by accident: by using one account across lots of games, the risks incurred by cheating are amplified. If you cheat (or harass) in one game, your account can be banned across all games. This means that if you care about your account on one game still existing, you're disincentivized from cheating in other games, even if you don't care about them.
I play League of Legends regularly, and Riot Games has put in huge amounts of work in figuring out a way to discipline abusive players that will actually induce them to reform. They have shown that most people, when branded as abusive, will often reform their behavior immediately - as if they did not realize (or did not internalize) what kind of person they were being. See, for example, http://www.polygon.com/2015/1/6/7500045/riot-games-league-of... . But it's saddening that all of Riot's work in reforming players or banning them if they can't get along with others cannot be used to weed out these toxic players in other games. I love gaming, but, for me, the absolute worst thing about this hobby is how awful everyone is to each other, and I would love to see a systematic solution.
I wish something like Steam's centralized identity existed across online forums. I wish we used one account everywhere, and the use of a widely-connected account was required to sign up to things - but the details of who you are, and how to associate your identity on one site with your identity on another site, is totally masked to everyone. Site owners and users cannot tell that userA on reddit is also userA on, say, some Disqus blog. But your reputation would still be preserved across sites: if you were reported as a spammer or a bully or a cheater on one site, it would be visible to the other sites you were on. And if those sites wanted to ban you based on your common reputation, they could.
This puts a large burden on the identity management platform. They have to handle everyone's privacy and security, deal with accounts being hacked and used for spam or abuse, provide mechanisms for people to prove their behavior has improved and remove black marks from their records, deal with websites that submit false abuse claims, etc. And (hopefully) they have to be resilient to law enforcement trying to use these records to complete expose users on every website. But at least they could do it in one place, instead of every website having to solve all of these problems independently.
It seems to me that good behavior in 'tribal' human society was enforced by having to, well, remain in one's tribe, and having to convince everyone to put up with you if you want to survive. It also seems that being labeled, with numbers, as a 'bully' or a 'cheater' can have a positive effect in reforming people's behavior. We would need a centralized reputation system like what I've described to do this.
This is on the list of "things I would like to build".
"A lot of times I wish that there was some sort of Internet-wide 'reputation system' that would accumulate one's reputation across all websites they use - while preserving their pseudonymity on each site."
There is. Unfortunately, it's the NSA that operates it.
I'm seeing a lot of this meme that the internet is gentrifying, and I think it's worth discussing. I'm certain the internet isn't getting more gentrified over time.
The internet was extremely gentrified when it was populated only by a relatively tiny elite which tended toward prestigious academic affiliations and higher status. Even the old BBS scene, though a little more populist and accessible to people at home with phone lines and home computers, looks pretty genteel and exclusive by modern standards.
The internet sure felt a lot more democratic when issues like DDOS, doxing, spam, child porn distribution (just to name a few) were not that hard to avoid, so measures against them did not feel that urgent. But that atmosphere is directly related to the selective nature of the audience. Things as small as the introduction of AOL users to USENET caused massive upheavals back in the day. The "barbarians" were at the gates.
It's not coincidental that Facebook built traction against Friendster, etc. largely by restricting to people with academic affiliations, Reddit got its start from a userbase that was more "selective," etc. But then the floodgates are gradually opened to the "barbarians" who were very unlikely ever to have patronized USENET, a BBS, or even an early-2000s phpBB.
In reality, that ratchet only moves forward, and the internet population gets more and more like the general population. Pervasive commercialization is actually part of that trend away from gentrification. It's not gated communities, it's Wal-Mart, payday loan joints, low-end casinos and hawkers in the streets. It's not Singapore, it's a developing country. And for better or worse, nobody can do anything about that.
> I have just endured one of the largest trolling attacks in history.
I feel bad for Ellen and have nothing against her, I don't really go on reddit much. I am aware that she was more or less a scapegoat. But still, for some reason, AND even though the second sentence of the article almost saves face, this statement still bothers me. Sure, she got picked on by reddit quite a bit for lack of transparency, and got thrown under the bus by other high-ranking officials at Reddit.
But to come out and make yourself seem like a champion still illustrates her inflated sense of importance - she's a millionaire exec in an interim position who made mistakes, and got called out in an online forum.
However, modern media (like Gawker, Vox, Salon, Slate, etc) can somehow turn 3 tweets from anonymous people with no followers into a national shit storm. These media outlets feed the trolls, because it gets them clicks. So, it is of my opinion that the "trolls" aren't "winning" the battle, they just haven't left, and never will. The news outlets are click junkies and know they can foment faux rage by enticing people who otherwise we would have just ignored 10+ years ago. Of course they look large in numbers if you're putting them under the microscope. The thing people who have little online experience miss is that they are making things worse by giving people attention and trying to "silence" them.