This is an excellent, brave thing to write and I originally had a long comment highlighting a bunch of particularly poignant paragraphs that I deleted because really you should just read the entire thing. Neither I nor the vast majority of the people I know have ever been subject to online harassment and it makes me thankful that there are incredible people like Kathy out there. Lord knows I wouldn't have the courage for something like this.
In interest of actually fostering a discussion: I think there's a lot of merit in bringing back moderation, as suggested in the article, as sort of an internet cultural norm. Maybe it's confirmation bias: the highest-quality communities I've ever spent time in, MetaFilter and Something Awful [^1], both use incredibly stringent moderation -- but I feel HN has had a huge uptick in overall quality since the comments and content moderation has stepped up over the past months.
I think that Twitter and Reddit have sort of made their bones on the idea that as long as you aren't doing anything that threatens the company in any way then you're given carte blanche. Twitter's ineffectiveness with dealing with harassment et al requests is notorious; and Reddit, as much as I love it at times, is a cesspool by default. [^2]
At what point does the value proposition flip the other way?
[^1]: I know, I peaked in like 2004.
[^2]: I know this is not a popular opinion, but is growing increasingly painful to visit a site that willingly allows to exist subreddits devoted towards domestic abuse and snuff .
I agree completely and yet ... I feel a bit responsible too.
In my mind, Kathy has credibility because she built it the old fashioned way - being worthy of trust. Being a Java developer, I watched JavaRanch grow and I especially loved watching her presentations (the BoS talks are amazing).
And yet I under-appreciated what these attacks were doing to her as well as how severe they'd become. No having celebrity of my own, perhaps I can't understand it fully but what I could have done is at least speak against the growing hatred.
I'm going to start refuting trolls (when I can) and I'm going to try to be that person who's dependable under fire - Kathy, I've got your back ... and I'm sorry for my quiet complicity with your past attackers.
“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”
The key thing is to break down the vague word "trolling" into specific bad actions. Threats. Verbal abuse. Inciting harm. Doxxing. It's fairly easy to get people to agree that these are bad and use the existing antispam machinery to get rid of them. You don't refute death threats, you delete them, ban the user, and if they're persistent enough report them to the police.
The older sense of troll (posting controversial opinions and false statements in hope of getting furious disagreement) does respond to "feeding", but is not so directly harmful.
Then you have to make a judgement call as to whether some opinions which aren't specifically violent or threatening should be banned anyway (e.g. "women do not belong in IT"). Allowing those opinions drives people (e.g. women) away, often quietly and without fuss, but creates a subtly oppressive environment. This is not easy to do and will itself attract controversy and trolling.
> You don't refute death threats, you delete them, ban the user, and if they're persistent enough report them to the police.
This is the same as ignoring them, unfortunately, and the article goes on at great length at how that's not sufficient. A blocked user makes another account, and can still goad others into joining them. Meanwhile the police do nothing in nearly all cases. From the article:
> You’re probably more likely to win the lottery than to get any law enforcement agency in the United States to take action when you are harassed online, no matter how viscously and explicitly. Local agencies lack the resources, federal agencies won’t bother.
I would say be careful to not be directed by the trolls. Real trolls are good at directing all of us to attack the innocent. Thus while you may feel like you are "stopping" someone, you may in fact be attacking the wrong target. Look at what happened with Reddit and the Boston Marathon Bomber.
Some trolls love to create these vortexes ... it was the end-game for them all along. So ... if the person being attacked is a public person, I would say tread lightly. If both are anonymous ... perhaps simply getting into thread "thought defense" is not wise and should be avoided?
There are trolls on HN that have very high karma and yet are anonymous accounts. We (in the technical community) need to pause when we allow for that type of power that can be used against others.
In any bullying, there are three players: the bully, the bullied and the witnesses.
People who are bullied will often internalize that they are worthless (and that's why they are bullied). That can be one of the hardest parts of being bullied.
This happens especially if people who witness the bullying stay silent. Than the bullied will feel even more alone (and will feel awful about how bad they feel).
But if witnesses stand up and say- "hey, bully: you're being an asshole", then that is a service to the bullied. The bullied will at least not feel so alone.
In what way does the parent comment indicate the author did not read the article? The article discusses options as a target of trolling, the parent seems directed at bystanders.
The article specifically calls out the "ignore the trolling" tactic is specifically a losing one, as the trolls will simply turn up the volume / severity of abuse. Nearly the entire article elaborates on this theme -- that it's not something that can be ignored, nor fought easily, and that telling someone to "just ignore it" is not going to solve it.
Like I said, though, that is directed at troll targets, not bystanders. Further, "just ignore it" is an incorrect summary of what Joe suggested, which was "ignore it but support the victim". I don't know that this is the correct approach, but I know it's not what the article spoke to.
I didn't read it as being directed only as targets.
There's been a general push, among communities suffering harassment, against the notion that vocally calling out malicious actors is 'feeding the trolls' in the traditional exacerbating sense. i.e. standing aside allows further victimization.
It may deserve to be directed more broadly; reading the article, it was not my impression that it was being so directed - and skimming again seems to support my initial reading ("ignore" is mentioned thrice, and every time in the context of talking to someone who was a target of trolls).
I would note that this discussion lends significant strength to my initial complaint here - which is that a bare RTFA is poor form and one should point to why and how the source disagrees with the comment. People are quite capable of reading the same material and coming away with different things (without anyone being an idiot).
The article also mentions that there becomes a competition among the bullies to see who can find the most effective tactic. ("The more dangerous social-web-fueled gamification of trolling is the unofficial troll/hate leader-board. ....")
This adds a lot to the severity. Ignoring it is not enough.
Note that I'm not saying ignoring it is the best approach. I just don't like seeing a bare "RTFA" when the issue raised was not specifically addressed in the article. (Even if it can be arguably inferred from the article, some pointers at the steps of inference are worthwhile - things are not equally obvious to everyone).
I felt that the aside about social gamification was important conceptually.
As technologists, sometimes we build something and then like to step aside and talk about it like it's inevitable. But how it was made and how it works factors in to how it is used. So it is our responsibility.
Right, thanks, way beyond normal sane responses required I see from the article. Well, maybe there's not been anything invented yet that will solve this problem.
If I will go through this forum and add reply to every post in an attempt to get random people angry, I am a troll. If I personally target you, publish your ssn and spread lies about you, then I am harassing you.
The solution to trolling is not feeding them in majority of cases, but it will not solve harassment problem.
I think what Kathy Sierra described was people following charismatic "trolls" without thinking ... if those of us capable of rational thought actually speak out, I'm assuming we'd be the majority. Trolls and their followers are that same radical 10% of the population that bombs abortion clinics (or WTCs).
i: a small short website that can serve as a point of accurate information
ii: support for the person under attack. Whether privately by email (or similar) or a short single "please don't let the attacks get to you".
iii: disengaging from the trolls, and building a culture where responding to trolling is avoided.
The UK had some high profile arrests, trials, and imprisonments recently. I'm not sure if it made much difference in the frequency or severity of trolling.
Did you actually read the article? That's not feeding the trolls. That's, after six years of ignoring the trolls, deciding that it's gotten toxic enough that she needs to make a public refutation of weev's reality distortion field.
Aren't trolls getting lulz off of this? If so, they've been fed, regardless of whatever reasons it's so. Nobody feeds trolls to keep them fat and happy; people feed trolls because they are against trolling, so we have to remind them to stop because it's counterproductive.
I do think it's going to prove counterproductive for internet discourse as a whole.
At this point though, the "con" of feeding trolls is outweighed by the "pro" of increasing public awareness. Plus, the "trolls" involved here are so severe that they no longer require a response to continue. The core of the "don't feed the trolls" argument seems to be that they will eventually give up, but that only works with the mildest of offenders.
It could however be argued that by pulling away from the public eye she actually was feeding them, and that the best course of action would be to act like they don't exist. I still find it doubtfull that it would have stopped it though, as in the minds of the most obsessed trolls the very act of ignoring them tells them their tactics are working.
Will writing this make things worse for her? Probably, but saying it's her fault makes as much sense blaming sexual assault victims for wearing anything even remotely revealing.
-sent from phone, so please forgive spelling/grammar
I wholeheartedly agree that strong moderation does a LOT to foster strong communities, and frankly very positive ones.
Both of my favorite subreddits do this very well, as does my favorite forum, and though you get the jokes about 'fascist mods' and the genuine complainers who would rather be able to troll to their hearts content (and who inevitably flame out in a couple months time), they are very enjoyable to be a part of. Rather than having inane comments, stupid back and forths, and, in the case of one more factually based subreddit, misleading comments, you get what the majority of well-intentioned people actually come for.
From what I've seen, incredibly stringent moderation creates the illusion of a high-quality community more than anything else. For example, a while ago Something Awful forum member's boyfriend posted something claiming that she'd been raped by another forum member, and the admin at the time decided to handle it by permanently banning everyone involved including the alleged victim. You wouldn't have seen any criticism of this on the forums at the time because doing so was a bannable offence; I'm not sure most people who used the forums even knew it happened. There were rumours that some of the moderators were blackmailing women on the forums for nude pics earlier on, but again they didn't make it onto the forums themselves.
There was a moderator who turned out to be a convicted child molester (Aatrek), and it seems they knew prior, but didn't actually take action to remove him until it became general knowledge among forum members.
Now that you mention Reddit, I've abandoned it because that cesspool is overflowing. It's no longer just the obscure subs, misogynist thrash from mainstream subs is hitting the front page on a daily basis.
Me too. You end up feeling ambushed, because you'll be reading a bunch of witty, smart, and/or playful comments on some Reddit post, thinking "I don't know these people but they're fun", and then you randomly encounter some unchallenged misogyny or racism in the midst of it with plenty of upvotes. Can these people really exist? Do I want to even be reading something that people who repulse me are also reading?
If you stick to subreddits thing are much better. For example, I lurk on r/rust a lot, and like other high-quality subreddits they have a stickied code of conduct to establish the ground rules. And the community there is extremely friendly and encouraging.
Personally I find the predominant brand of humor at Reddit to be annoying too. An interesting conversation devolves into five trailing one-liners circling around a pop culture reference ... ugh.
I wouldn't call MetaFilter a particularly high quality community. Discussions there can have just as many trite and trollish comments as your average subreddit.
How MetaFilter differs is in that it features a rigid, hierarchical moderation structure, with gatekeepers who ensure posted content meets the stringent politically-correct tastes of its leadership. As a result I have seen legitimately interesting, good-faith discussion censored there, for no other reason than that it offended the sensibilities of some moderator. (This article was removed by a moderator, for example: http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/girls-and-software)
It is a huge mistake to confuse enforced, intellectually sterile homogeneity for quality.
Respectful and polite debate can be truly amazing but it doesn't happen often enough and, when it does, it's really easy for bystanders to shout down one of the debaters. Political correctness in only one tool people use to make sure their side wins ... let's hear the debate instead and decide rationally.
Can we please keep this us vs them bullshit off HN?
The linked blog, whether you agree with it or not, keeps a reasonably neutral tone throughout (even if the author's frustration is obvious).
Agreeing with it does not automatically make someone a misogynist, and criticizing a moderator does not automatically make someone an awful person.
Are you joking? The article is classic "fuck-you-I-got-mine" woman-to-woman sexism that completely ignores, as a trivial example, the comparable ratios of women to men in education and training that falls off in the workplace.
This is literally tech sexism 101, and the fact that you're willing to wade into the discussion blathering about logical fallacies and neutral tone without bothering to educate yourself in the basics is the actual problem.
It's not no much about tone as it is about making a genuine, intellectually honest argument without resorting to ad hominem insults.
Hell, one of the reasons I like coming to HN is precisely because the general consensus here is in many ways contrary to my political worldview.
But I digress. You've made it clear that you regard homogeneity of opinions (and possibly outright censorship) as a good thing, and I doubt I can change your mind. There is little reason for me to continue this conversation (besides maybe grinding for karma).
Yeah, creating a safe environment for discourse is super-awesome. Those environments are the best thing ever, compared to the oppressive atmosphere of places like HN and reddit.
The thing is, arguments on HN about this topic are not intellectually honest. Far from it. They are awful, excruciating, painful, blood-pressure spiking. Filled with dishonesty, zero empathy and zero good faith. It’s an awful, awful place.
> Yeah, creating a safe environment for discourse is super-awesome.
You have a strange definition of discourse if all that's required to create a non-"safe environment" is to present a dissenting opinion. (Did you mean: echo chamber?)
> Filled with dishonesty, zero empathy and zero good faith.
That's a rich complaint coming from someone who called me a misogynist and awful person for the crime of mentioning an article by an actual woman in technology, with her own unconventional opinion on how to ultimately make things better for other women in technology. (Maybe she's right, maybe she's wrong, I sure as hell don't know and that's not the point—the article was censored by a mod just after I and a few other people started discussing it, so that conversation never even got to happen.)
I have every reason to believe that Susan Sons wrote her article in good faith. I sure as heck wanted to discuss it in good faith. So seriously, you should be ashamed of yourself for calling me a misogynist for caring about women in technology. People who derail respectful dialogue by going nonlinear with appeals to emotion and unfounded name-calling, like you have here, are the reason important topics like this one rarely see the light of open civil discourse.
Please carefully examine your reaction on this thread and reconsider how you have chosen to conduct yourself.
You joke (I think) but it's more like it went through a years-long period where it was really, really terrible. It's gotten better lately as far as I can tell. I'm posting there again after giving up on it years ago.
But, they don't really have stringent moderation, I don't think. It's more that when they do moderate, it means something, because you can't just register another account and back to business as usual. Being an asshole costs money there, and most assholes are apparently not willing to pay the price.
I don't know how to duplicate it without getting the critical mass first. It would be interesting if reddit suddenly switched to a paid model, but I really doubt that will ever happen.
Yeah, I was surprised to see Something Awful listed as an example of a place that does well. Back in the day (early 2000s) it was, like you said, really really terrible. When I think of "for the lulz" I think of SA. Reddit seems to be at the same stage now that SA was back then. There's a lot of good, but there's also a lot of bad and the admins don't seem to care to get rid of the bad.
Of course, that was a decade ago. Maybe I should revisit it and see if my account's still there...
Also, complaining about how they moderate - including the lack of moderation - is against the rules over there, and they do enforce that rule. "If you do not like the mods or the moderation, feel free to not post here." So if anyone is unhappy about how Something Awful is moderated they can't really complain about it or tell if anyone else feels the same way. It seems to be a very effective tactic for them.
Meatball wiki has a lot of great information. The trolling stuff, and makin things unfun and uninteresting are useful. The stuff about vested contributors and concern trolls are pretty good too.
Yes, I also worked in fields where this was a hot topic. The discussion techniques are very similiar. I can recommend reading up in those fields.
The problem is that online moderation has lots of particularities, especially the lack of face to face interaction. Not a lot of them are covered in published works.
> I know this is not a popular opinion, but is growing increasingly painful to visit a site that willingly allows to exist subreddits devoted towards domestic abuse and snuff.
How do you feel about visiting a country that allows freedom of speech and association? I don't like many of the worst of the subreddits either, but allowing them is probably much better than forbidding them for the same reason that we allow such things within the US.
I agree that the American government shouldn't regulate speech. I don't trust the government and I can't easily replace it, so it's worth the legality of NAMBLA that the activist groups I belonged to could exist.
But being legal and being able to exist are totally different things. If you're a business owner, you can disrupt white supremacists by denying them the use of your business. Hotels do this all the time, to the point where it's difficult for militant white supremacists groups (that aren't, say, the police) to find places to meet (maybe the police will get theirs eventually).
I'm okay with this because there are a lot more hotels than governments, and they're a lot easier to replace. If a hotel I wanted to go to started prohibiting communists from using it, I'd just use a different hotel. Or AirBNB. It's a great world we live in.
To put it in a word, the government and private entities are different, so they should obey different rules. This is not a hard concept to grasp, but very frequently people literally do not think about these things, they pattern-match on the first argument that leads to what they want. Which in this case is the ability to objectify, harass, and sexually assault women.
There is no inherent good in providing space for all opinions. Free speech is not an end in itself, but rather a means. You are confusing the two.
> There is no inherent good in providing space for all opinions. Free speech is not an end in itself, but rather a means. You are confusing the two.
No, I'm pretty sure that free speech is an end in itself. It's how we as humans maintain our integrity in a social context. That's why it's seen as a basic right.
In any case, I have no problem with the fact that you disagree with me on that and I have enough basic respect for you as a human (and even for racists) to be willing to let everyone talk have it all sort out (or not). Marginalizing people only makes them more bitter. It doesn't solve problems.
Actually, white nationalists and other racist groups depend on liberals like you allowing them a platform to appear like a legitimate alternative in the political system. They use that legitimacy to attract new members, and there's a bright line from that to violence to Kristallnacht.
Europeans understand this, which is why they've outlawed Nazism. It's to express as a society that such a thing is not acceptable.
By expressing that it is acceptable, you are participating tacitly.
In contrast, expressing at every point, in every interaction, that white supremacy in all its forms (radical white supremacy, institutionalized white supremacy, cultural appropriation, colonialism, imperialism) is fucked up and fucking wrong and disgusting, you are chipping away at the fascists' resolve. People have a tendency to conform; it is physically difficult not to. In experimental settings, people who have to act nonconformingly feel physically uncomfortable and experience a fight-or-flight response. After experiencing this enough, people will stop being fascists.
In contrast, it's been demonstrated time and again that "rational" argument does nothing but solidify people's pre-existing ideas. So if you want to increase the chance a Nazi stays a Nazi, continue to debate with them. But remember that unlike your high school debate club, the Nazi will, empowered by his strengthened beliefs, go out and kill people. And their blood will be on your hands, because you had a chance to weaken his beliefs instead of making them stronger and you made them stronger.
I think humans maintain their integrity by rejecting all forms of oppression, from patriarchy to white supremacy to homophobia to capitalism, and I think that you sell your integrity away by capitalizing on your privilege and oppressing people, either actively and directly, by being a nazi; actively and indirectly, by arguing for a liberal concept of free speech; passively and directly, by ignoring opportunities to fight when you could; or passively and indirectly, by remaining silent and therefore complicit.
You are wrong, empirically, on every claim you have made, and you are wrong morally, because you have been given a chance to eliminate injustice and have chosen to back the side of oppression.
History is a tidal wave; you can either ride it or be crushed by it. The choice is yours.
> Europeans understand this, which is why they've outlawed Nazism. It's to express as a society that such a thing is not acceptable. By expressing that it is acceptable, you are participating tacitly.
If you live in the US you're clearly in the wrong country.
> I think that you sell your integrity away by capitalizing on your privilege and oppressing people, either actively and directly, by being a nazi; actively and indirectly
Zero to Godwin's Law in, what? Two posts. Goodbye.
It's a little absurd to ragequit a discussion about free speech for racist extremists when someone mentions... racist extremists.
I think I'm in the right country, because as an aware, conscious person, I can act against oppression in a place where it needs to be struggled against. One day, the United States will also outlaw Nazism, and that will be a great victory for humanity.
The US never will because of the 1st Amendment. All I can say is that your understanding of human nature and agency needs some work. You turn people by interacting with them not shaming them. Basic lesson about human nature. We're lucky some people understood that 200+ years ago. It's carried us further than many of us appreciate.
Where are the violent neo-Nazis? Where are the Baptists going out gaybashing after Sunday service? I don't see it. You said a lot of airy, high-minded things without actually supporting your position.
And in America, dressed as police, shooting any black man they care to.
This isn't the greatest part of white supremacy or homophobia but it does exist and to claim it doesn't is either ignorance or (now that you don't have that excuse) willful complicity.
> This isn't the greatest part of white supremacy or homophobia but it does exist and to claim it doesn't is either ignorance or (now that you don't have that excuse) willful complicity.
Wait, back up. Who said they don't exist? Your claim was that letting people be bigoted makes it worse, not that it creates the problem in the first place.
No, I said I don't see it. I asked you to show me. You still haven't made the connection between the links you offered and free speech.
I definitely deal with less homophobia now than I did five or ten years ago, and most of it came from engaging with homophobes and changing their minds. Racism is still almost as bad as ever, but it seems like that's mostly because the instigators (racists) never interact with their targets (people visually and culturally dissimilar from them).
The only difference I see is that one improved more than the other because people engaged with bigots and changed their minds. Which goes against your (as of yet unproven) assertion that engagement makes it worse.
This country is pretty bad about race. It's a struggle getting the average person to even acknowledge that racism is still a thing. But I don't agree with tedks that banning racism (or other bigotries) is going to solve anything. People are still going to be bigots. They'll just hide it better.
Making them hide their bigotry will seem like a solution in the short term, but it never ends well. And on a personal level, I would rather the bigots be open about it so I can avoid them. As long as they're not voting away my rights or being violent, the psychological harm is manageable.
Because real-life harassment isn't protected by first amendment.
A large part of the problem is people, like you, who view all of this as someone just expressing their opinion equally with others. That has nothing to do with targeted harassment and death threats to one's family.
In real life, people get prosecuted for this stuff. Unfortunately there's so many obstacles and hurdles to prosecuting Internet harassment that it only happens if the harassee is someone famous.
I'm not sure what you think I was saying. What I was saying was that I'm okay with Reddit not shutting down subreddits. What happened to Kathy was horrible and I don't condone it. But, while whack-a-mole-ing on the internet may make people feel better it doesn't fix the problem. Shutting down forums is a copout.
That is not in fact what liberal democracy is about.
Democracy requires us not to use the apparatus of the state to suppress opinions by force. But that's it.
It certainly doesn't require us to provide material support for all opinions, no matter how toxic. Neither does it require tolerance of speech that goes beyond opinion. Incitement to riot, for example, is a crime. So is making threats, or conspiring to commit other crimes.
We can also criticize Reddit for that choice. Freedom of speech, and all. It sounds like you're upset that we choose to criticize Reddit for this.
The difference between what a business allows and what a state allows are so different as to not really be illuminative here.
I could decide that no one watches animated cartoons in my house, and no one is really harmed by that in any significant way. A state that declares that no one shall watch animated cartoons, however, is quite a different thing.
> Serious question: why does this even bother you?
Not the person you aimed the question at, but…
I worked as a volunteer counsellor for a few years in my twenties. Some of the stuff I encountered during those years was folk who were going through horrific, long-term abuse.
One of the patterns that you notice is that abusers go to a lot of effort at times to show that their behaviour as normal. Both as a tool to justify it to themselves (this is normal — everybody does it — I'm not a bad person or doing anything bad), and as a tool to further control the abused (this is normal — this is what you should expect — you won't get any better elsewhere).
Anecdotally the ones who can find or create an active "community" of abusers — where two best friends both hit their partners and acknowledge it to each other, where everybody in an extended family beats on their kids, etc. — the abuse is worse because there is little or no sense of shame in what's done.
It's normal.
Now this was the 90s. Before subreddits were around. But this is why it bothers me. Yes, it's just words. But those words are probably making the lives of other people worse.
It bothers me for the same reason it bothers me that those things exist. They are terrible, and should not be given a platform. I don't feel that we, as a society, should tolerate terrible things in general, much less let them prosper.
May I ask where you are from? Free speech - bigoted, hateful, maybe untrue, or otherwise, is perhaps the one enduring (sacred) tenet of American society.
Harassment isn't. One of the big points of the article is that when law enforcement doesn't act that is justification that the action is legal and thus "free speech". Except that law enforcement almost never acts against online harassment. There are plenty of laws restricting free speech when it harms others, and I'd hope you agree that some of the examples in the article crosses the boundary into things that should be criminal.
The boundaries of harassment are very blurry and tend to favour the powerful. For example, some of the campaigns against online harassers look even more like harassment than the actions they're going after people for: http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/online-trolls-w... Except that because it's the press harassing people to the point of suicide, we don't see anything wrong with it.
Not entirely true - the reaction in the UK to this whole incident has been quite negative from what I've seen. Then again, we're not overly happy with our press at the best of times...
The parent wasn't a comment about the article directly, but on a thread that was discussing acceptance or rejection of subreddits for "domestic abuse and snuff". I don't know that these constitute "online harassment".
Free speech, sure. But freedom of association, too. And accepting the consequences of one's actions.
If misogynists and abusers want to go and construct their own forums, nobody can legally stop them (as long as their discussion stops short of the various sorts of criminal speech, like conspiracy to commit). But nobody is legally obligated to support them, either.
Reddit tomorrow could say, "Welp, we're not going to host people who cause harm in way X". And that's perfectly American because they'd be exercising their own rights. That they choose to support abusers is legal, but it is well within everybody else's rights to point that out, with volume and at length.
Reddit could censor all instances of discussion featuring the phrase "hackers news" tomorrow, and it's not as if they would be brought up on freedom-of-speech charges.
Society decides. And sometimes it comes up with the wrong answers. But I don't think that pure freedom comes up with the right answers, either. There are consequences to both sides, and the consequences of no action can be just as bad as the consequences of too much action.
There is a wide gap between being hesitant and serious about prohibiting things and accepting everything for fear of overreach, in my opinion. We need to work towards a middle-ground.
> I don't feel that we, as a society, should tolerate terrible things in general, much less let them prosper.
You mean premarital sex, homosexuality, genital mutilation and women showing their faces? Hint: two of those things are still considered normal in much of the world.
I understand the difficulties. However, just as I would not support a lawless society, I do not support the laissez-faire attitude of the reddit admins. And the reasons are much the same.
We choose between letting everyone go free and dealing with the consequences, or restricting people and living with the consequences. There is no right answer.
> We choose between letting everyone go free and dealing with the consequences, or restricting people and living with the consequences. There is no right answer.
There is no right answer, but restricting information is the wrong answer, primarily because it doesn't work. The leaked nudes are still available, even if not on reddit. You can still download pirated movies, even if it's not as simple as it used to be. Eventually, we'll have to figure out ways of preventing/minimizing the consequences, without restricting information.
> The leaked nudes are still available, even if not on reddit.
That's the point - I can dump uuencoded blobs of text in HN that are stolen nudes. I'd be downvoted to hellban if I tried.
Online communities create their own standards. Reddit's standards exclude some groups of people. That's a weird choice to make - in the name of freedom of expression we're going to create an environment that is ridiculously hostile to large numbers of people to make sure they can't express their opinions.
> That's a weird choice to make - in the name of freedom of expression we're going to create an environment that is ridiculously hostile to large numbers of people to make sure they can't express their opinions.
So you're suggestion that instead, in the name of safety, we should create an environment that is ridiculously hostile to large numbers of people (banning them) to make sure they can't express their opinions?
> So you're suggestion that instead, in the name of safety, we should create an environment that is ridiculously hostile to large numbers of people (banning them) to make sure they can't express their opinions?
If their opinion is "You should die you stupid fucking cunt" or "I'm going to find you and rape you and then kill you" then yes, ban those people.
"I'd do a lot worse than rape you. I've just got out of prison and would happily do more time to see you berried [sic]. #10feetunder."
"I will find you, and you don't want to know what I will do when I do. You're pathetic. Kill yourself. Before I do. #Godie."
I find it fucking baffling that you chose to defend those people, the people saying stuff like that, at the cost of their victims.
Caroline Criado Perez was not complaining about one or two people sending a few dozens of messages that were a bit mean. She was inundated with thousands of messages, from many people, threatening sexual violence and death. One man was sending 50 messages per hour, over about 12 hours. Another woman sent hundreds of messages. Perez's "crime"? She campaigned to have a woman on British banknotes after the Bank of England phased out Elizabeth Fry on the £5 - leaving no women on the banknotes.
I would be proud to ban those people from any service I ran.
> I find it fucking baffling that you chose to defend those people, the people saying stuff like that, at the cost of their victims.
Oh well, I find it weird that you're twisting my words so much, but I won't insult your intelligence because of it.
Anyways, I don't defend those people - I think they're morons, I would shame them, etc. (I would defend them in court, though, unless they actually (physically) harm anyone - because freedom of speech).
The problem is (1) banning/censorship is a slippery slope, and will inevitably results in censoring some inconvenient truth, and (2) it doesn't work, because the trolls can just make a new account. IMO, personal filters that each user can activate and tune to their desire (akin email spam filters) would work much better.
If you dig, you find that she's an aggressive jerk, and that's why she's a hate magnet. In a different political context, she'd be the "troll." Same for the person she's arguing with. I don't lump Kathy Sierra in this category, but there's a reason some people always find themselves in the middle of a shitstorm.
>I find it fucking baffling that you chose to defend those people, the people saying stuff like that, at the cost of their victims.
See, this is the thing. You see very, very few people defending that. But everybody who doesn't agree with banning vehement disagreement gets attributed that opinion. Every time. The same thing is happening with the so-called gamergate.
> Online communities create their own standards. Reddit's standards exclude some groups of people. That's a weird choice to make - in the name of freedom of expression we're going to create an environment that is ridiculously hostile to large numbers of people to make sure they can't express their opinions.
Who's being excluded by reddit's standards? Aside from egregious racists who become nuisances to others, and/or child porn distributors (both good exclusions, IMO), it seems like a free-for-all. You want to create a subreddit reflecting your odd interests, go ahead!
Such questions are favored by Reddit trolls, because they take virtually no time to formulate, require no effort in self-education, and eat up other people's time.
Without rehashing the obvious problems of giving a platform to harassment, child porn, spam, etc, just read about how Reddit supported and profited off bros like Violentacrez. Just a little research shows these corporations intervene heavily — but in peculiar ways. http://gawker.com/5950981/unmasking-reddits-violentacrez-the...
Reddit isn't the government; they're not under any obligation to permit all-speech-no-matter-how-odious. The site chooses who to provide with a platform - why shouldn't the poster you quoted judge them based on that choice?
That's a completely valid question, and the answer isn't something concrete. I think on one hand it's just overall indicative of the site's priorities (and again, I completely acknowledge that it's those same priorities which also helped foster the subreddits that I love) -- on the other hand, I think it's just the sense of heebie-jeebies, like being a pro bono lawyer for the mob or something -- as though my presence there is somehow contributing to something that I desparately don't want to exist.
More broadly speaking, I would be very willing to bet that an internet community that places harsher standards on acceptable content would result in a better environment for those involved -- but Reddit's stance during the celebrity photo stuff reinforced their position of 'Reddit as a platform', and I don't see that going away.
That's the start of most 'war-on-obscenity' arguments, and usually leads to no constructive ideas. I hate the topic (abusive pornography/snuff) as much as you, but that rational is inappropriate given the peoples' wide variety of tastes in this world, if the material is indeed legal for your region of the world.
>> More broadly speaking, I would be very willing to bet that an internet community that places harsher standards on acceptable content would result in a better environment for those involved
historically that has only served to push users to other services. the success of the regionalization of 2channel into what 4chan is now is a good example. 4chan's success is widely attributed to the pseudo-anonymity that it's users enjoy, and the founder of the site spoke at TED a few years back on what exactly the benefits of such a relationship with their userbase is.
>historically that has only served to push users to other services.
But this is exactly what you want - get rid of the low-quality users and offload them somewhere else. reddit has gotten itself quite a questionable image tolerating pornographic jailbait, necrophiliac porn, stolen nudes and domestic abusers on its platform for very long.
And who is to say these users are inherently low quality? Enjoying any anything socially unacceptable doesn't preclude them from creating content you may enjoy in another subreddit.
I'd argue that personality traits cluster, so that someone who frequents a fappenings-subreddit is way more likely to doxx your users, troll or cause other disturbances than people who don't.
And of course, junk traffic breeds more junk traffic. Even if the first generation of a shady subreddit might make this up with quality in other parts of your site, it will invariably attract generation 2 and later which will create a mini-eternal September.
>And of course, junk traffic breeds more junk traffic. Even if the first generation of a shady subreddit might make this up with quality in other parts of your site, it will invariably attract generation 2 and later which will create a mini-eternal September.
You can argue both ways, the quality increase will attract more quality users.
While those users are creating and posting dog porn they are of low value to me. They're creating noise not signal; consuming resources; and creating negative brand associations. By asking them to take their dog porn elsewhere I risk losing them altogether (which currently isn't much loss) or they start posting other content.
"They shouldn't be posting X because I don't like X" sounds extremely entitled to me.
"They are damaging the brand value of the site" which has nothing to do with you. When I criticise Apple (and you use Apple products), there is no need to take it personally.
A company is free to care about users who want dog porn. That company should not be surprised when other users, or advertisers, steer clear of that company or its brand.
An important part of the question here is are the subquestions of what should be regarded as a "common carrier"-like thing (a category which probably includes email traffic and public Internet traffic at the TCP/UDP level), and what should be tolerated on those services, and what should be regarded as not similar to a "common carrier" (which clearly includes, say, the official Wikipedia version of a Wikipedia page or the non-advertising content of an issue of the New York Times), and what should be tolerated in those venues. Part of the problem of Reddit is that it blurs the lines between the two categories and sends vague or contradictory messages about which side of the line it's on. Things that make Reddit look more like a single publisher or "community" include:
* the single /r/whatever namespace, which was meant to be used as the marker for the canonical or default reddit on a particular topic (and is still used by users for that purpose, whatever disclaimers Reddit may want to hide behind now)
* other technical features like Reddit gold which likewise encourage the perception of Reddit as a single platform
The just-a-platform argument is hard one for any message board or single-host/owner, single-login cluster of message-boards to sustain. Reddit's even more poorly placed to sustain it than others. Twitter, for example, is much better placed to do so, even though it's a single-owner/host, single-login publishing system.
Freedom of speech. The one jerk of a teacher I had, made me realize this.
It is better they are out in the open, that they are confronted publicly. Those standing to be counted are not the dangerous ones.... it is the 10 more who agree silently.
If it is driven to silence it does not disappear but is spoken in whispers. It is better that they are challenged in the open.
And I think that's at the heart of why there isn't a technical or legal solution to these issues.
Whatever solution will be found will be a social one, that's the only way to actually change what people feel and think and believe. And if they feel and think and believe it, they'll act on it in one way or another, no matter how you try to prevent it.
There is a commercial one. Twitter doesn't have to allow them to carry on in this fashion, and it is a massive enabler of trolls. It's attitude towards online abuse is shockingly neglectful.
Trolls will always act, but that doesn't mean we have to put up with letting them use the some of the most powerful communications mediums of all time to do so.
Twitter has a massive pulpit to make statements that influence social change. Deleting the weev account won't stop him, but would make a very powerful pronouncement about what the company views as unacceptable behaviour, would diminish his "credibility" and change the narrative.
If by not solve the problem you mean not completely eliminate, then yeah. Of course. Obviously.
What’s with all this binary thinking? It’s completely non-sensical and irrelevant. Twitter is an important tool for communication for many people, so if harassing people gets harder there it makes it easier for those people, even if the harassers move elsewhere. In other places they do get less direct access, so their impact is diminished, even if they put in just as much work.
Sure, of course the harassers can't attack people directly on Twitter if they're banned from Twitter.
But what the article is talking about is also doxxing, sending things to physical addresses, etc, which are by far the more distressing elements of harassing.
Kicking people off Twitter does nothing to stop or even slow those things down.
It's not "binary thinking", so please don't try to dismiss it as such. It's acknowledging that the simple answers don't solve the worst aspects of the problem.
It is binary thinking, though. A is not completely effective, so it’s completely worthless. That’s bullshit.
Obviously, for this there is no technical solution. But Twitter (and reddit) currently do a really, really shitty job and they have to do so, so much better. They make it worse.
The lasting solution is for everyone to shun harassers (if anyone you know does it, approach them, tell them to stop in no uncertain terms, always) and to shun enablers (those who downplay or minimise the effects). That’s really obvious, too, but obviously also a hard problem to solve.
Banning those people from Twitter would do plenty.
Every bit of harm makes things worse. Ergo, every time we eliminate some bit of harm, we make things better.
The Twitter harassment is obviously material, because a) many accounts of harassment mention it clearly, and b) the harassers do it because it works.
Further, the harassment shows obvious patterns of escalation. It is entirely reasonable to believe that if the harassers get no oxygen on Twitter, there will be less escalation.
It's much harder to use Reddit to issue a death threat to someone when they don't use Reddit. Twitter especially is a tool for magnifying hate in a way that other venues just aren't.
The article specifically mentions instances of weev's tweets appearing in her timeline due to retweets, Twitter suggesting she follow him.
What if I told you that around 35% of the population is just terrible, and another 50% is too busy to do anything about it? Would that change your mind?
I'm not claiming these are the numbers, just pointing out that there are numbers, and I'm wondering where you would draw the line, if you would draw it at all. That is, giving these people a forum where they can freely associate, normalize their behavior, and find sympathetic friends, might make them a greater threat that if we just did everything we could to marginalize these assholes and atomize their communities/roach dens wherever and whenever we found them.
I really do emphasize the might here - I don't have an answer. But, I do think it's something that needs to be given serious thought, rather than reverting the default 'freedom of speech must be preserved' position so tempting to the typical liberal.
> Freedom of speech mean that these ideas can be challenged in the public sphere.
I will note that much of HN doesn't seem to believe this - when the Brendan Eich thing happened, and people were choosing to boycott Mozilla for his views (thus using their freedom of association and freedom of speech to call for him to be removed from that post), many seemed to believe that Brendan Eich's rights to freedom of speech and political freedom were being attacked by anybody who chose not to associate with him because of his views.
The fact is, any individual or entity can, and should, choose not to associate with those who they see as causing harm to others. That's an individual choice. Free speech and free thought should not mean that anybody give anybody else a free pass to cause harm or spread ideas that are likely to cause harm - and we should use every right we have to ensure this, so long as it doesn't end up with people losing their rights to food, water, shelter, and (a duty of the Government and the people) protection from direct abuse.
Your right to freedom of speech do not mean that I have to listen to you, interact with you, or provide a platform for you, no matter whether I'm one person or a multinational. You can be angry that I won't - I'm angry that the mainstream media won't give my minority a platform - but I don't have to. The only entity which has to be fair is the Government.
> Free speech and free thought should not mean that anybody give anybody else a free pass to cause harm or spread ideas that are likely to cause harm
But then you don't have free speech or thought anymore. You only have the freedom to express ideas that are deemed to be acceptable by whoever holds the most sociopolitical power at any one time. And there's never a guarantee that the progressive side will hold that power forever.
And the Mozilla boycotters weren't just "choosing not to associate with him". They were calling for him to be fired for participating in a political campaign they disagreed with. This is exactly what McCarthyism was about. It's amazing how progressives have forgotten the danger of this now that they control the social narrative.
> You only have the freedom to express ideas that are deemed to be acceptable by whoever holds the most sociopolitical power at any one time.
If there's any reasonable amount of support for your ideas, any at all, you really should have no problem finding work, friends, and wealth. We're not exactly at a point where LGBT rights, feminism, and similar subjects have anywhere close to unanimous support. You only have to look across this discussion board and in most newspapers to see that.
> They were calling for him to be fired for participating in a political campaign they disagreed with.
Yes, that's part of a decent protest - telling the company what they can do to get you back as a customer - and Mozilla could've chosen to ignore them and potentially lose them as customers and community members. That's fine. That would be their choice. Many companies have done so and succeeded - Chick-fil-a, as one example.
You really think that when it comes back round again, if we're nice and don't try to cause any real societal change, the (little-c) conservatives won't try to cause any real change in the opposite direction? That the Government and the media are never going to pick another scapegoat minority for society to go after when the majority is fed up again? That they'll always tell both sides of the story from a fair and neutral perspective? That's never been my experience, and history tells us the complete opposite.
The majority is always going to have immense amounts of power, and they're always going to wield it. We might as well try and push in our direction while we have any power at all (and seriously, we have far less than you think).
Here's a question: We have the right to freedom of association. Is that somehow a lesser right than freedom of speech? Or must we be forced to associate with those whose speech we find bigoted and harmful?
> Yes, that's part of a decent protest - telling the company what they can do to get you back as a customer - and Mozilla could've chosen to ignore them and potentially lose them as customers and community members. That's fine. That would be their choice. Many companies have done so and succeeded - Chick-fil-a, as one example.
Yes, for some reason many people think freedom of speech means they--and those they identify with--should be able to speak free of social consequence. I don't really know what leads a person to think that. Maybe they just said stuff for so long without being challenged, that they start to think they are entitled to never being challenged?
The design here is flawed. It is insane to expect anything different then what it is. You can still hack it if you are inclined, but I agree the bias is not prosocial.
By labour, I mean grab a pen and paper and devise a method to fix the problem. If it is broke devise a method to fix it.
Ideas can be discussed and challenged. Threats and harrasment are not ideas and should be dealt with differently.
Organisation of campaigns of threat, harrasment and violence is on the boundary, and needs careful consideration. But the worst case is very bad; a sufficiently powerful hate campaign can provoke genocide.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_T%C3%A9l%C3%A9vision_Libr...
Perhaps. I don't think people are as noble or reasonable or responsible as you obviously do. I'm envious of this somewhat :-)
My gut feeling is that most of the '50% busy' people I reference above do not identity strongly with the assholes in their community, but neither are they going to go out of their way to do much about it, and that includes listening to anything the other side has to say. They're going to usually conclude the truth lies somewhere in the middle and then move on to the other shit that occupies their time. It seems to me that, over time, a totally unmoderated and free community devolves into chaos and bigotry - look to television or talk radio after the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine for a solid example.
What if I told you I'm a fascist dictatorship and I and I alone uphold the moral authority? Maybe we should find these people and exterminate them, for the good of everyone.
Related: Does anyone know of a good-quality place to go for discussion that doesn't center around news and links? Something akin to MetaFilter or HN in terms of standards, but not focused on aggregation. Are mailing lists/Usenet groups good for this?
Mailing lists, in my experience, can feature incredible discussion. I participated on one centered around a somewhat obscure literary topic for some years. You almost develop a sense of kinship.
However, mailing lists seem to be going extinct. Even back then it had a quaint, ancient feel to it.
In interest of actually fostering a discussion: I think there's a lot of merit in bringing back moderation, as suggested in the article, as sort of an internet cultural norm. Maybe it's confirmation bias: the highest-quality communities I've ever spent time in, MetaFilter and Something Awful [^1], both use incredibly stringent moderation -- but I feel HN has had a huge uptick in overall quality since the comments and content moderation has stepped up over the past months.
I think that Twitter and Reddit have sort of made their bones on the idea that as long as you aren't doing anything that threatens the company in any way then you're given carte blanche. Twitter's ineffectiveness with dealing with harassment et al requests is notorious; and Reddit, as much as I love it at times, is a cesspool by default. [^2]
At what point does the value proposition flip the other way?
[^1]: I know, I peaked in like 2004.
[^2]: I know this is not a popular opinion, but is growing increasingly painful to visit a site that willingly allows to exist subreddits devoted towards domestic abuse and snuff .