Trolls were always winning the internet. From "RTFM" attitudes to anonymous user accounts. It's a troll playground. Don't get me wrong the internet was built to be/can be an incredible tool, but let's not misconstrue this is a new trend.
EDIT:
I find the issue with the candor on the internet is lack of context 90% of the time.
Trolls, in a broad sense, win life in the same way. "This is why we can't have nice things," is a practically universal sentiment, and much of our human endeavor is geared to managing the activities of its edge cases. Technology only empowers people, it doesn't make them better people... so this is the result.
The response will be a combination of social quarantine, and an upgraded intellectual immune system on the part of netizens. I think Trump's election and the damage his presidency is likely to inflict will be a bit of a turning point in the collective attitude to trolls in general.
I agree. It seems to me that the biggest difference is the extent to which the average internet user gets his content from other internet users (reddit, facebook, twitter, etc) instead of designated content creators with reputations to uphold.
Isn't this the applied form of the Global Village nonsense from back in the '90s? I'm sure I've seen positively-spun descriptions of the process you describe.
>It seems to me that the biggest difference is the extent to which the average internet user gets his content from other internet users (reddit, facebook, twitter, etc) instead of designated content creators with reputations to uphold.
This is as old as humanity, and has always been the case for the majority. See the chapter "Social Proof" in the book "Influence":
While agree some internet users are a bit too gung-ho with RTFM, I think it's unfair to lump them with trolls. While veterans can be harsh and unfriendly, the RTFM response is often warranted (though, again, it could be phrased more nicely -- and the default assumption should be that the person seeking help is well-intentioned). Otherwise, many online communities would be completely overrun by people demanding help with minimum effort on their part.
"RTFM" is not trollish behavior, because trolls have a different goal: to disrupt communities, start flamewars and generally annoy the hell out of people. It's not merely being "unfriendly"; in fact some trolls fake cluelesness instead of anger.
I disagree. I think that hand-holding beginners can be one of the best services a community can provide, and it can go a long way to growing the community.
That doesn't mean everybody needs to be teacher/mentor/educator. But the people who don't want to be can also just keep out of the conversation, instead of rudely pointing to some 300 page manual and telling someone with passion and interest to screw off.
Hmm, RTFM is not aimed at beginners (and note: I do agree with the sibling comment that the aggressiveness of the response leaves a bad taste. I do agree pointing to a 300 page manual, without any guidance at all, is unhelpful).
RTFM is aimed at help vampires (recommended reading: http://www.skidmore.edu/~pdwyer/e/eoc/help_vampire.htm). Help vampires do not grow a community; they destroy it. These are people you do not want in your community anyway. Unlike actual beginners, who learn and then proceed to become valuable contributors (unless of course they are treated harshly by veterans, in which case they simply leave), help vampires are never helpful. They ask the same question again and again, don't pay attention to any cues, don't read anything, and seldom provide context or follow-ups to their problem. And when you've wasted time with one (more often than not fruitlessly), the next one comes in. And they are legion. The end result, like the first article I mentioned claims, is that your community of well-intentioned volunteers is destroyed. So a polite RTFM is often the best response: if the person was an actual beginner, they'll read TFM -- and follow-up questions are often welcome, since they show the asker has actually made an effort. If not, they'll leave and you haven't wasted any valuable time.
In fact, help vampires are often indistinguishable from trolls, in that they have the same community-disrupting effect.
Sure, I could see that being a problem, but if the question that the "help vampire" is asking is a valid one, then you have to remember that all online conversations have an audience, and that your response is as much to the audience as it is to the person you're directly responding to.
Even just politely linking a similar question and response is better than responding with RTFM.
> RTFM has always been part of the hacker culture
That doesn't necessarily make it a good thing, or anything worth keeping.
Help vampires do not ask valid questions very often. It's very unlikely a community will have RTFM as a standard response to valid questions (i.e. those that provide context and show effort on the part of the asker), with one exception: when the question has been asked countless times already, and the asker could have seen it if they had made the minimum effort of reading the community's FAQ. In which case, RTFM -- or rather, a link to the FAQ -- is the best response.
> That doesn't necessarily make it a good thing, or anything worth keeping.
But it does make it not trollish behavior, which we were discussing. Hacker culture was not trollish, this was always part of hacker culture, therefore it's neither new nor trollish behavior.
I think a variation of RTFM, let's call it GentleRTFM, is both worth keeping and necessary.
>...one exception: when the question has been asked countless times already, and the asker could have seen it if they had made the minimum effort of reading the community's FAQ. In which case, RTFM -- or rather, a link to the FAQ -- is the best response.
This is actually the RTFM-ish situations I hate the most; specifically as someone searching a forum and finding a thread or threads close to my own question, only to find the only responses are rudely unhelpful.
I get not answering an insipid post, or a mod locking/deleting one but replying to a question you find dumb or repetitive is a waste of time to everyone involved.
Just like "Don't feed the Trolls," I feel one shouldn't raise the post count of a time sink.
I suppose not answering at all is an acceptable solution; a RTFM response does imply a certain irritation directed at the asker (for not doing their homework). In the case of help vampires it does nothing more than signalling irritation to other community regulars, since the clueless undead -- by definition -- won't RTFM or even know what that means.
Answering with a link to the canonical question doesn't seem rude to me, however.
Agreed. I guess I'm not saying RTFM isn't needed (I rtfm all the time). However it's the bad taste that's left behind and the potential miscommunication from the simple action of telling someone to read the fucking manual. There are better ways to get the original message across.
RTFM are usually jerks acting like jerk and it has nothing to do with seniority or skill. Half of those "harsh" people don't know all that much.
Overworked seniors simply don't respond on forums due to lack of time. Seniors with time and willingness to answer answer how they know. RTFM are doing what they are doing just to stroke their own ego.
Being jerk does not imply skill nor lack of it. It just being jerk.
I disagree that RTFM'ers are jerks, for reasons I've already explained in other posts (though, again, there are ways and ways of telling someone to RTFM, some nicer than others).
Other than that, I agree they are not necessarily more senior or experienced. That's why I used the term "veterans": they are old timers in the community in question, have seen countless newbies come and go, and must suffer the onslaught of help vampires with needy requests and an ungrateful, instant-gratification attitude every day. They may not necessarily be seniors, but they are the people who actually form the community, because help vampires ask their poorly-formulated questions and go away forever, only to be replaced by newer ones. They do not tend to "grow" the community, only destroy it by attrition. How would you deal with them?
Again, "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way" ( http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html ) should be mandatory reading for online participation in online communities. Some of it is even common sense. And if you don't have the time to read it or TFM or the FAQ, why should volunteers take the time to help you, anyway?
To answer your question, I eit her ignore asks for help I don't want to answer or say that this section of forum is not intended for beginners questions if that is the case.
Overwhelming majority of RTFM ate not trying to manage community. That involves more then just putting in RTFM with some insults every time you feel like.
I agree that some of rtfm consider themselves community and are trying to put off newcomers - and keep their own social status within forum high. That is just closed circle jerk, exactly like any other. Most of these communities have many other members who form them equally or even more and don't behave this way.
Elaborate faq on how to ask question is great and I would treat it seriosly, assuming the rest of discussion has similarly high standards. Except that rest of discussion is neither precise, nor well pharsed, nothing like that. So yeah, where it is consistent with general quality of discussion, cool. Where it represents double standard, meh.
What I see is some people dont like foolish words on a screen so they want to clamp down on open discourse to control dialogue because in their opinion its fruitless or mean or whatever they feel.
Some silly troll spamming idiotic statements is not nearly the threat that controlling dialogue on the net and deciding what is trolling and what isnt.
Socrates would be labeled a troll these days if he was on social media.
My screen is of a fixed size; my days are of a fixed length. If you want to put foolish words on your screen more power to you, but if they're on my screen or taking my time, that impedes me doing whatever I want to do with my screen or my time.
That is, the more dialogue that I'm uninterested in that I lack tools to filter, the more my dialogue is being controlled by DoS. That is the fundamental paradox of open discourse; I don't know what the right answer is, but naive open discourse isn't it.
So your solution is to be given tools to enforce your cognitive bias reinforcing filter bubble? That's not a solution, that's a technology provided lobotomy.
A dialogue takes two - if you don't like the dialogue taking place, instead of attempting to quiet the other voices, perhaps just remove yourself from the dialogue.
As a counterpoint, the biggest gripe of "trolling" that I have is that it prevents dialogue rather than adding to it. It's one thing to argue for say Nazi ideology in a relevant conversation with the purpose of expressing a genuine point (this would be a rare event indeed), but that is not what trolls are doing. Instead, they are invading a conversation with ad hominem attacks as well as distracting and attention-seeking behaviors.
Preventing trolling does not inherently involve silencing points of view. All it should be doing is removing unhelpful, unsolicited, and off topic nonsense. Even the most evil views that I can think of should not be censored, under the condition that they are actually being discussed with the interest of discourse, for that truly is what "dialogue" is. But again, in that event it isn't really "trolling".
The conflation of "Obama is a monkey" type comments with people who legitimately dislike the man's policies is not a good faith definition of trolling.
But I'm getting really, really, really tired of people conflating the "other side" stuff with the trolling stuff. Look at all the stuff sent to Leslie Jones last summer. Do you honestly think that was meant to be a dialog? Of course not. That was trolling. That was harassment. And that is what people are trying to filter out.
I would agree with you there. I think the problem is we are talking about 2 separate issues, but due to intentional conflation of the two by ideologically motivated factions, we're crossing the streams by using the, now overloaded, term "troll".
If i say "leslie jones sucks" am I trolling or do I think she actually sucks at her job.
If a million people one after another go on leslie jones profile and say "leslie is a horrible actress" is that trolling ? harrassment ?
If someone says "Trump sucks" should they be filtered out ?
Do I think its a dialogue, heck no. Do I think it should be filtered, double heck no.
If you send her dick pics, dead animals pics or photos of apes with "this is how you look like" under it, all that from hundreds of different accounts so that she can not effectively filter it, then yeah, you are trolling and harassing.
Likewise, if you flood someone employer customers with the above material to get him or her fired, you are harassing.
Let's not pretend this was just about "slightly impolite words". Or misunderstood dialog.
You are conflating. I simply asked a question. I did not say that is what happened to Leslie. I do notice you avoid the question like the other who responded. That to me is very telling.
It looks like your account is teetering on the edge of using HN primarily to argue about politics and ideology. That's not what this site is for, and we ban accounts that use it this way—we have to, in order to preserve the intended use of the site, which is stories and conversation that gratify intellectual curiosity.
Hmm this kind of surprises me, but do what you feel is best. I am not attached to ideology or politics.
The post you responded to was me wanting to find out where respondees would want to draw the line on what is harrassment and what is open discourse online. I think this is extremely on topic, relevent and devoid of ideology.
As far as arguing I dont see it in my posts. I usually make one comment then read responses. I will take your warning to heart but I dont really see my post style changing.
When I look at your account history, it's mostly civil, but it does look like you're (bordering on) commenting primarily on political issues. The key word here is 'primarily': that's our present criterion for whether the site is being abused or used as intended. I realize the reason for that takes some explaining, so let me try again.
HN is for stories and conversations that gratify intellectual curiosity (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). That implies a wide range of things that are interesting just because they're interesting. We want people to comment here because their "oh!" circuitry gets activated—not their "burning issue" circuitry. (I'm using that word metaphorically.) It's not primarily a question of the topics since these things overlap, but of the spirit of the discussion.
I think there are two fundamentally different kinds of dialogue on the internet.
1. Dialogue in communities directed towards a purpose.
2. Dialogue in public forums.
In my mind, the only place where filtering should take place is in #1. If you want to see information about specific kinds of basket-weaving, then the communities directed towards basket-weaving should give you the tools you need to see that information, and should police their communities such that there isn't too much non-basket-weaving content. But in public forums, I think that people should actively resist filters. I see filters as a case of trying to make something straight out of the crooked timber of humanity. Not only is it a goal that may be fundamentally impossible, it has negative impacts on the people who use the filters. To the well-filtered person, the general public may look more civilized and reasonable than they actually are. This can manifest itself, for example, as the well filtered people being baffled by the success of populists candidates because "everyone I talked to online could see right through them!"
I think online communities would be better off ahead of time if they made an explicit choice about which type of dialogue they were hosting, and communicated that choice to all visitors.
I think the apparent "rise" of trolls is mostly borne from sites with a disconnect between their stated goals and their actual rules. News organizations are likely to say they want free-speech forum in their comment section, but people mostly expect conversation directed towards the topics being reported on. Reddit was formerly a free-speech platform, but subreddits started behaving more like directed-communities, and the admins encouraged this site-wide. Hacker News is clearly a directed community, and so has fewer trolls, while 4chan is clearly a free-speech community and therefore ALSO has fewer trolls (i.e. most people on 4chan conform to 4chan norms, even if that would be considered trolling elsewhere.)
This seems to be borrowing from the 'your right to swing your fist ends at my nose' cliche. So, let's put it in those terms. 'Your right to post a comment on an open internet forum ends when it meets my right to only have things I value on my screen.' Surely most folks can see why that doesn't work at all. Moderation is already ubiquitous, and that is not the same thing at all. That's the forum's owner exercising their right to boot your account and delete your comment. I'd be interested to hear any sensible proposals for dealing with trolls that we don't already have everywhere, i.e. moderation and user-centric filtering tools.
Very much this, and the realisation that attention is finite and very highly rivalrous is one that needs a great deal of amplification.
I'm finding Herbert Simon and Alvin Toffler's Future Shock to be pretty fascinating reading in this context, both from the early 1970s. Toffler cites significant earlier work.
I'm also starting to wonder what the long-term effects of high-level information overload are. Toffler's giving me considerable pause on that account.
If you're using Twitter to communicate with some people, and you're getting a hundred stomach-turning tweets in your feed every day, then you can't communicate with those people any more. Abuse isn't about discourse.
Sigh The Trolls have been with the internet from the start. I would say that actually they are mostly contained (why? because its really fucking difficult to be anonymous. Plus you are more than likely to be prosecuted for whatever you've done)
So whats changed? more people are on platforms like twitter, and seem to think that fake internet points are real.
The vast majority of "trolling" is pretty low grade "die", "sexual slur", "lol rape", "exploitation of personal detail that you've shared" Thats not trolling, thats people just being arseholes.
They are anonymous people, they have no impact on your life, ignore them.
edit I should point out that yes swatting and doxxing still happens, and the impact is massive. but it is still rare.
The advantage of a twitter profile is you can delete it, and start again. I wish I could have done that in real life. It would have helped me escape the daily torment of my bullies at high school.
I'd say it has a pretty profound impact on your life: share personal information online, get 'trolled', and then watch that encounter become permanently associated with your name.
I hate this attitude of "blame everything on the trolls". You can't use your real name on the internet because using your real name on the internet is basically asking for trouble. You have to defend yourself in the same way you have to look at ads and read media critically and don't believe everything someone says on the phone or in the mail. It's really nothing new, it's just on the internet this time. Scamming and spectacle has always been a good play.
People are simply not trustworthy, especially in large numbers, the internet just provides more exposure, so "don't be dumb" applies even more. Defending yourself is simply part of living in society.
In my experience the vast majority of people are trustworthy. The problem is that the tiny minority of people who are not trustworthy are winning the internet because they have time, and shout loudly. More, some of them do obnoxious and potentially dangerous things.
That's why people get upset - because it is a tiny minority that spoil the whole thing. If only we could stop that tiny minority ...
> In my experience the vast majority of people are trustworthy.
Sure, but in quantity there will always be some people - even some of those normal, trustworthy people who feel particularly strongly about something and decide to go on the offensive.
There's nothing you can do about that, that "tiny minority" of abusers will always exist in any given situation involving enough people. Ignoring this effect is stupid. Trying to counter it is a waste of time and potentially harmful to speech. Defending yourself is the cheapest option, just do it. Tell other people how to do it.
Maybe I'm just a cynic, but I'm beginning to feel like the trolls are smarter than the people who whine about trolling in this day and age - they're able to defend themselves better at least.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but citing your experience with people is equivalent to trolling. Your anecdotal evidence doesn't agree with what's been studied in Behavioral Economics.
The problem is not that a tiny minority are untrustworthy; the problem is that a large majority lie (a little bit) often and by nature.
I had to take down the website for my business and can only accept brick & mortar transactions because of trolls... but sure I guess you can win at your commenting game by claiming everything is shit.
I've been running a business with multiple locations for 10 years and I've never had a problem more serious than trolls on the internet doxxing me.
See, this is the problem. Don't blame it on "trolls", analyze where you screwed up and how you could have defended yourself better so you know what to do next time. Then open up shop under a different alias.
If you're not vigilant about your own security and safety, no one else will do it for you. Take responsibility for your own actions.
Why was that information available on the internet?
That's the kind of risk you take if you make that kind of information available on the internet. Think of all the possible things someone could do with your address and assume those will be done. That's the type of precaution you should be taking.
Doxxing a business owner is generally very straightforward even if they take careful steps to hide their identity - there's a huge paper trail behind any real business.
If you think you can't be doxxed, you're probably just lucky.
Why were you selected over any other business owner? Just seems odd you would be selected at random and then two different people would make an effort to drive out to your house "for the lols".
Sorry, if I go into details it'll be pretty obvious who I am. My entire point is that internet trolls aren't just some sort of harmless fun for a lot of people.
You're as much a victim here as someone who downloads a tiny executable off a filesharing network and thinks it's the latest movie or game. Or falls for a Nigerian scam. These are accepted facts of the internet. We defend against them. Just as much as publishing your address or information which can be associated to it should be.
Precautions are important. You can never rid the world of evil, but you can protect yourself from it, especially trivially in this case.
We made Nigerian scams illegal. We defend against them partly by prosecuting them. We work hard to reduce the frequency and the impact of them. But you're not saying that we should do any of that for trolls. I don't accept that trolling is just something that necessarily happens and that we need to accept. We can hold trolls accountable and work to reduce trolling overall.
> We made Nigerian scams illegal. We defend against them partly by prosecuting them. We work hard to reduce the frequency and the impact of them.
And guess what? They still happen. We already have the laws to attack the kind of "troll" that shows up at your door in many cases - but guess what? It still happens. Ultimately the law only gets you so far. So we must defend against them in more effective ways - like individual knowledge.
It's a lot easier and more effective to guarantee safety with online matters when you behave safely online than when you start taking risks and expect the law, the website or whatever else to deal with the consequences. That's just wishfully naive thinking.
Yes, in an absolute sense, all harm should be blamed on the abuser, I don't mean to suggest otherwise. But the prevention potential is so much higher if you can attack it at it's destination than at its source - like using a firewall on your server instead of just saying "hacking is illegal, therefore no one will hack me".
I tell my kid not to run in the street for a reason. On the Internet, you can run in the street all day, and if someone hits you, it's not your fault because "victim blaming is wrong".
Yeah, its one thing to say victim blaming about something that's difficult or expensive (monetarily, freedom or time) - it's quite another to use it to discourage individual defense.
There are people who simply cannot effectively defend themselves.
They don't have the knowledge. They're visually disabled. They've got cognitive decline, for whatever reasons.
And the scams and attacks keep coming.
Generally not trolls, so much, though that can be a thing as well.
I'm not completely against there being some wild corners of the Internet (though you might want to take a look at some of danah boyd's recent writing on 4chan and /b/, and what grew from them, and why, and how), but there's a rather large part of it that really has no business being like that.
People get hurt. Money and life savings are lost.
Not everyone's a street-wise, healthy and hale 24 year old.
Eternal September ? As access got more and more widespread, the average savviness of new entrants lowered and they became more and more susceptible to the permanent trolling ? In turn, the new entrants have a bigger voice outside of the internet, and their parole is taken with more value than those who roamed it from the beginning, unmoved by the usual trolling ?
I'm not talking about a bullying campaign that's branched out into the digital world, that is what I would class as actual trolling.
I run a blog that talks about the specifics of labour law. A number of posts resonated with a profession that was going through a tough time. As time drew on, what was professional unity devolved into infighting along two lines: accept a new contract, or not and carry on industrial action.
I advocated the new contract. It was the best offer(in my opinion), went from salary with a paycut and increased hours, to effectively an hourly rate with punitive overtime pay(for the employer)
Now, This is where I supposedly got trolled. I was innundated with comments saying that I had "betrayed an entire profession", "I couldn't add up", "I'd never worked as X what the fuck did I know"
In my posts I swear a lot. Instantly I went from an amusing post with some political points that "really hit the man" to "a dirty troll who's foul language betrays a profession"
I just expressed an opinion.
People engaged with me, and I them on twitter. When I didn't change my opinion, I was a troll. When I used high quality sources, I was a shill.
Unless someone doxxes you, (either in public press, or 4chan) you can just turn it off. Twitter/facebook/email can all be erased.
You do not have to respond. They want a response, to re-enforce their own opinion.
That can mean professional or social isolation for quite a lot of people - or at least disadvantage. The moment your blog, github account, facebook account or twitters matters for employers, peers, business, conferences you would like talk at or negotiations is the moment when walking away affects you.
That's a little exaggerated I think. I don't have a blog, an active GitHub account, and don't use Facebook or Twitter at all. Yet, by some miracle, I have a robust social life and am gainfully employed. I think people overstate the importance of these services (most of which, by the way, did not even exist 15 years ago). I choose to post here but could stop tomorrow and it would have zero effect on my personal or professional life.
B-b-but how will I growth hack my way to a 4-hour-workweek selling ebooks about how to growth hack, without constant, obnoxious self promotion under my real name on all corners of the Web?! God's sake, I can't possibly be a thought leader anonymously! You savage.
What you just describes is normal capitalist economy. People selling and promoting stuff. If that person is able to make a living with just 4 hours a week work like that, they are pretty skilled. Are you saying it is ok to harass them out of that business just because you are jealous?
It is nice example of someone who would be really harmed by leaving.
No, I'm saying there's an inherent conflict between those for whom the "No One Can Tell You're a Dog" Internet is and should be how things work, and those for whom making money under their real name by polluting it with garbage is part of how they do business or build their ridiculous "personal brand" or whatever. For the former, the latter complaining that they're being harassed because they plastered their real world details on every virtual surface they could find comes off as 1) n00btastic and/or 2) entitled whining, and the continued pushes for increased real-name use and harsh moderation from that corner (and the continued intrusion of commercial activity, especially ads and the OMG-we-actually-live-in-a-sci-fi-dystopia spy economy but also marketing trash masquerading as content) represent attacks on the quality and freedom of the Internet.
Just because people get to run around filling the real world with junk to make a buck doesn't mean they're entitled to feel welcome everywhere they might want to do that, or that they can expect to be given a pass on common sense or the norms of the media they seek to degrade. They can console themselves with the fact that they're almost certainly going to win in the long run, I guess, since money always does.
That said: yeah, prosecute actual harassment when possible. "NEVER POST YOUR REAL WOLD DETAILS PUBLICLY ON THE INTERNET" remains and should (but won't) remain excellent advice, however, and I wish more people would follow it, and if they've chosen to ignore it to make money I wish they'd quit trying to make everything worse rather than saying "oh, gee, I ignored that and bad things happened, I guess I should stop ignoring that" (but they won't, because money).
Congrats. And everyone else is expected to be exactly like you and have nice real world community and job that does not involve real identity on the Internet. Gotcha.
The trick is a scalable means to do identity verification on the internet...basically a way to do it that preserves user privacy and security and it is dirt cheap so everyone can leverage it.
I'm curious about something... I've seen reports that when places started using Facebook comments, they found that the lack of anonymity didn't prevent trolling, in fact, it made everyday people more hostile.
Is it just about identity? Would that do anything more than just removing the occasional death threat, instead of actually addressing the more pervasive trolling?
Given that identity is the basis for most trolling, I'd say identity is a poor proxy for trust. Despite what Facebook and the CIA / NSA may want us to believe, there's no evidence that a lack of anonymity/privacy leads to greater accountability.
Identity can prevent abuse if it can be used as an effective way to keep the trolls out. In the real world if you know behaving badly can get you permanently banned from a place you'd like to have access to, that keeps you in check.
Similarly if it was possible for service providers to effectively penalize (from suspension to permanent banning) abusers in a way that they can't easily circumvent (ie create a new account), that'll be effective.
I'd argue that it's reputation, the prevalance of impunity with present systems, and the problem of introducing consequence for misbehaviour, which is the core.
These can be changed without requiring full identification and disclosure. And there's a very long history of principled (and some unprincipled) pseudonymous discussion.
There are going to be people who are terrible and will continue misbehaving without concern for others....the basic problem with the internet as it currently exists is that it has almost entirely modeled our physical world's societal processes but unfortunately lacks a way to easily hold people accountable online for their behavior. Most of the stuff people feel free to do online that is detrimental to others, they would never do in the physical world. Distance obviously does give safety to bad behavior, I can sit in NYC and insult you in SF without worrying about physical altercation.
One way to address this problem is to give service providers an easy way to enforce their terms of services. This would have the effect of also making those service providers honest, in other words if you claim to want to create a welcoming space for all your users but you refuse to take effective actions against those who violate your terms then your hypocrisy is laid bare...Today twitter can claim they can't verify everyone's account, but if that was not an excuse anymore, then they'll have to effectively deal with those who violate their policies even if it means losing certain users.
I might disagree wildly with you in a number of cases but I try to be reasonable in how I argue my points.
I stay away from pages that use Facebook comments because I don't want to be part of the problem with fake profiles and I don't want everyone to be able to trace everything I ever said back to me.
Not because I intend to say something unreasonable. Not because I fear law enforcement but because I will apply for jobs in the future. And I might want to visit arab countries in the future. Or Israel, who knows?
I think this is a reasonable position. I expect and respect if you do the same - even if I disagree wildly with your opinions I don't want you to get in trouble for them bext time you fly into a country were your ideas aren't so correct.
Or next time a president goes rogue like Erdogan.
I think full name policies scare away lots of reasonable people.
The ones who stay either don't think that far, or don't care or use a fake Facebook profile. I guess none of these attributes correlate well with insightful and polite.
I have found the opposite to be the case. A newspaper I read had a problem with their comments. The comment section on every story was pretty active but almost always quickly devolved into partisan trolling and bickering and name-calling. They switched to Facebook comments to show real names and there was a dramatic change. Now, most stories get no comments. The few that do are civil.
The real problem is that bytes are effectively free. Here I am, using up your bytes right now. Using up the bytes on Hacker news. The only limit is my own time, effort, and energy.
You think this means that we're all equal; we all have equal access to sharing bytes. But the problem is that trolls have infinite time and energy to post bytes. They have significantly more power and influence than you do because of that simple fact. Trolls could, if they wanted, completely bring down hacker news with just endless content and it would be near impossible to stop.
I've had to deal with real determined trolls on some of my own sites that simply have infinite time to post, to write code to post, to obfuscate themselves -- a single troll can shout out dozens to hundreds of other people. This is why the trolls are winning.
Anil Dash actually wrote a great article about this. The short summary is you need real humans doing the moderating. All the tooling you create should be about enhancing those humans.
I banned an entire country once -- not the best way to go but after all other mitigations failed it was the last choice available. And it wasn't China or Russia.
It's almost impossible to give everyone the same number of bytes of work with -- if you can solve that problem you've solved it all.
It is an irrational belief that trolls have infinite time and energy. This is, in fact, the very idea of irrationality, who's concept indicates additional work must be done to determine outcome of choice, either by individual or by group. Note that I did not disagree with your assertions here, but simply seek to restate them in slightly different terms so they may be visualized by others more effectively.
Trolls may encapsulate irrational ideas, which may be visualized as memes, inside multiple illogical statements which may be designed to directly conflict with each other's truths. Evaluating one of these statements as a "truth" may cause the other statement to evaluate to false. Trolls may utilize statements in which evaluation of truth is not desirable to the entity visualizing the truth. Any attempt by the recipient to evaluate truth or non-truth of these statements may lead to additional work being conducted to achieve a desirable outcome, such as "winning an argument".
Additionally, these "double bind" memes, or internal visualizations, may effectively spread the irrationality to other actors if they are constructed correctly. These viral memes take root and spread when the new irrational actor posts more irrationality in the form of similar or modified logic patterns.
Trolls remove choice from individuals and groups by causing the individual and groups to work against each other. The only way to prevent this is to educate people on the concept of double bind statements, their use in removing choice for others, and the possibility that these concepts may spread virally, on their own accord, in a population which may or may not be conscious.
My primary suggestion for combat trolls in a quick and easy way is to simply not visualize removal of choice for another in your own internal frame. In other words, visualize choice for yourself in the future if you must, but avoid visualizing the actions of others! Stating your refusal to be illogical, or irrational, is usually enough to send the trolls scurrying away.
Note: A double bind and a double BLIND are two different concepts. Double binding someone has been likened to "crazy making" due to its effect of blocking decision making processes from occurring in a given entity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_bind
Be spontaneous, is the quick and dirty example. ;) It's hard to have intent to be spontaneous, given it's the inverse of intent.
Other examples of internally held double-binds would be jobs, or relationships. Holding a job you do not like in order to live in a place which makes you happy is a double bind. Quitting the job can be imagined to increase happiness, but cause loss of place to live, which itself makes you happy. Loss of happiness is not desired, so quitting is not an option given moving may result in loss of happiness.
Let's look at a troll's use of a double bind, with intent to spread the double bind:
> Only by enlisting the full potential of women in our society will we be truly able to #MakeAmericaGreatAgain - @potus
This is a recent tweet by the President of the United States, Donald Trump. Trump presents two concepts, which are both shown to be irrational: 1. "We" do not enlist the full potential of women in society, and 2. "Our" society, America, is not currently great. Linking them together is achieved by saying "only", which implies that #1 must evaluate to truth in order for #2 to evaluate to truth. i.e. If women, as a group, do not attain their "full potential", and do so by choice for all of us, America will not be great again.
"Enlisting" is considered engaging someone in their support of a cause, by either willing or unwilling removal of choice. This statement is, technically, unwilling removal of choice from the group women AND unwilling removal of choice of an individual woman, given she is a member of group women. In this case, the removal of choice is actually done via the hypothesized, and forced, attainment of "full potential" of a woman and women, by "us" (which is really Trump speaking for all of us at this point). This is an impressive play on Trump's part, given this statement, in and of itself, is a double bind. Women, or any other entity or group for that matter, may only achieve their full potential by having internal choice for themselves. No other entity may speak for the potential in another without applying judgment, or removal of choice, from that individual AND be capable of staying rational while doing so.
By tacking on the idea of "making America great", any dismissal of the first concept, which again is itself a double bind, enables the use of blame for not wanting to make America great again. As with potential, America is only "great" if people think it's great. If it is to be made "great again", that implies it is not currently great, which itself is an irrational statement.
Look how much more you expended than the person trolling you though. If you are willing to be manipulative, you can hassle people into wasting their time with pretty short comments.
Not the "if you are willing to be manipulative" statement. That is what defines a troll. A "troll" is simply an entity (of race human) who is willing to remove choice from others by tricking them into removing choice for themselves.
So, what is choice? I hypothesize it is work. Work done and saved on one hand. Work to be done on the other. Some of our choices are based on what has come before regarding the choice we must make. I like German beer, so I drink one each day. Some comes from other humans, however, who choose to remove our choice for us. Advertising does this, for example. Sometimes choice is removed from use of logic, or rationality.
It is my belief that our choices are, in part, governed by our visualization systems. I'm talking about that thing in your head that allows us to visualize images similar to what we see while using compute devices, such as this monitor, graphics card, computer I am typing on now.
If someone else, besides you, can get you to visualize something, I'm asserting that this is actually a choice of removal of choice by yourself.
> It is an irrational belief that trolls have infinite time and energy.
Unless they are well paid state-sponsored trolls. They still don't have infinite time or energy, but neither we do.
> The only way to prevent this is to educate people on the concept of double bind statements, their use in removing choice for others, and the possibility that these concepts may spread virally, on their own accord, in a population which may or may not be conscious.
Education is the solution. And I hope that we chose it.
> It is an irrational belief that trolls have infinite time and energy.
Infinite is certainly a hyperbole; but trolls typically have more time and energy to devote to destruction than you do. I have experienced it. Some trolls are mentally ill -- I have had to deal with that as well.
I honestly don't know what else you're trying to say here but you did use a lot of bytes to do it.
I think the counterpoint here is that it's much easier to make a script to automate the process of spreading misery than it is to make quality contributions to an online community.
Is this really a problem of technology though? Seems more the artifact of a modern culture so predicated on con-artistry and spectacle, that abuse and manipulation have become the dominant form of expression.
Technology makes this easier for sure. But I think it's the futureless world of hucksterism being articulated to everyone that makes behaving this way attractive to so many people.
Yeah, it pretty much is. If you're going to credit the development of the web and related technologies with the economic benefits it has delivered, we need to take it on the chin for the damage it has caused to our society.
Every time we disrupt an industry, especially media, we are by definition shaping society. It's about time we as technologists started being honest about that.
If we define "troll" as anyone who posts inflammatory, bad faith, needlessly aggressive, insulting, false, or otherwise unproductive content, then the entire class of authors of the genre of news article decrying trolling and harassment are themselves trolls.
>Of course, this is already happening, just out of sight of most of us
Why would they consider that to be such a big problem, if it's not bothering those who are wont to be bothered? The true motivation for these comments is clear, but remains unsaid: what "trolls" are posting is outside the control of these would-be authorities.
The technology community must pick between enabling universal surveillance and censorship, or protecting the privacy of the vulnerable, including those who hold minority opinions and express themselves in ways that could be deemed "unpleasant".
If we define "troll" as anyone who posts inflammatory, bad faith, needlessly aggressive, insulting, false, or otherwise unproductive content, then the entire class of authors of the genre of news article decrying trolling and harassment are themselves trolls.
Isn't that a bit of a tautology? "If I expand the definition of the word 'troll' to include 'authors decrying trolling' then authors who decry trolling become 'trolls' themselves."
It's not an exceedingly convincing statement to me personally.
Though you've used one of the adjectives I think best describes the nature of 'trolling' and that's "bad faith". Personally, I feel the most useful definition of 'troll' is someone who argues/antagonizes/insults others not because they are trying to make a point or start a conversation, but merely to provoke a negative response.
>Isn't that a bit of a tautology? "If I expand the definition of the word 'troll' to include 'authors decrying trolling' then authors who decry trolling become 'trolls' themselves."
No, it's not tautological.
The parent doesn't propose to "expand the definition of the word 'troll' to include 'authors decrying trolling'". He proposes defining trolls as "as anyone who posts inflammatory, bad faith, needlessly aggressive, insulting, false, or otherwise unproductive content".
Which is as (or close) to how it has always been defined, and how the authors of TFA use it.
So what the parent suggests is not some "expansion of the definition of trolling", much less one to include "those who complain about trolling", and in no sense a tautology.
The parent doesn't propose to "expand the definition of the word 'troll' to include 'authors decrying trolling'". He proposes defining trolls as "as anyone who posts inflammatory, bad faith, needlessly aggressive, insulting, false, or otherwise unproductive content".
If you assume that the word troll does not mean "anyone who posts inflammatory, bad faith, needlessly aggressive, insulting, false, or otherwise unproductive content" then someone claiming it does is pretty clearly expanding the definition of the word.
Which is as (or close) to how it has always been defined, and how the authors of TFA use it.
I actually disagree with both of these assertions. Sometimes people expand the word troll to encompass too large a group, but that doesn't necessarily change the definition and I definitely don't see how the article uses it in that manner.
Though, I can definitely understand the desire to expand the definition of the word 'troll' into usefulness. It does make it easier to dismiss other's complaints.
> If you assume that the word troll does not mean "anyone who posts inflammatory, bad faith, needlessly aggressive, insulting, false, or otherwise unproductive content" then someone claiming it does is pretty clearly expanding the definition of the word.
I don't think the OP is advocating for any particular definition, but pointing out that the authors of these articles seem to be using a definition of "troll" (whether or not it's expanded is irrelevant) which would encompass said authors.
In the trolling game, there's the concept of triggering the "inner troll" of one's opponent. So they start trolling too, rather like a puppet. Puppet count is part of scoring.
It would be possible for "authors decrying trolling" to do so in a way that isn't "inflammatory, bad faith, needlessly aggressive, insulting, false, or otherwise unproductive". So it's not a tautology unless you insert an empirical assertion that every single one of the "authors decrying trolling" is exhibiting one or more of the abovementioned qualities. And that assertion sounds like a substantial point, not logically empty at all.
I think it's more of a signal to noise problem. We've had that issue before in society (e.g. the Middle Ages), when information flow was not constructive, and therefore not _additive_. The net result was that society moved sideways, not forward.
Contrast that with Victorian England, where large parts of society had "manners", which allowed for information to be constructive, and society (technology, etc) could evolve.
When the signal-to-noise ratio gets low enough, people leave groups, and progress cannot occur at any reasonable rate.
Regarding manners, it really depends on what those manners are.
Chinese medieval society was very orderly and mannered; there were clear standards of behavior (at least for the elites). But the manners in question were conservative and did not encourage innovation, so they did not advance rapidly and ended up far behind Europe despite having a head start. The enforced homogeneity of thought and thus destroyed opportunities to advance or get past their own biases. Read about the Imperial exam system for some reference on how this was achieved, and note that Chinese geography has the most fertile regions highly centralized.
In the west we developed this system of manners based on freedom, where we let people do things we think are wrong, as long as they're not hurting us. This permits intellectual diversity, which means that when the mainstream experts have it wrong, at least someone else can come and knock them over with reality. Rationalism, not authority. Objective evidence, not subjective feelings.
My main worry is that the modern mainstream morality seems to be all about intensive efforts to homogenize thought, opinion, and policy as widely as possible, to exalt collective justice over individual rights, and to privilege subjective "lived experience" over objective evidence. Freedom of conscience and freedom of speech seem to be "out" these days and it's gonna create some real unpleasant results. It already is.
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(Slightly off topic as well:
It's kind of a myth that society didn't move forward through the Middle Ages. While western medieval society remained in the Malthusian trap up until the 1800's, in other ways it did advance continuously over that time.
For example, studies of documents signed reveal that literacy increased continuously from the 1200s all the way until it hit nearly 99% in ~1900.
Similarly, studies of recorded ages reveal that most people didn't know their age in 1200, but more and more people knew it up until the present day. (You can tell this because people who don't know their age tend to round it to end in a 0 or 5, so you can count the over-representation of this in the data, or even by just looking at tombstones).
Something was changing through the whole medieval era.
And there are other markers (e.g. interest rates went down continuously, rationalism advanced, etc etc).)
"In the west we developed this system of manners based on freedom, where we let people do things we think are wrong, as long as they're not hurting us."
I agree that west is more free then anything else. However that freedom in general sense or relatively new thing for large parts of population. And for that matter, marihuanna is still illegal and harms no one.
I think that west ultimately created system where groups were able to succesfully win fight for their right to not harm others. But it took fight and abuses happened every single time.
I'm assuming by "manners" you are talking about societal norms and regulations. And you're correct in your diagnosis that China has the most fertile regions in the world. However, these manners didn't really affect Chinese "development" as much as you imply.
The imperial exam is good example of just how advanced the Chinese nation was for most of history. China as a country remained politically united for most of known history, quite a remarkable feat if you think about it. One of the enablers was a professional bureaucracy that allowed the state to remain strong without being challenged by regional usurpers.
This is a huge topic of course but one of the reasons why China fell behind is because certain isolationist policies took hold just when the modern era dawned, pushing China farther and farther behind simply due to the backbreaking speed of modern development.
Another reason why I don't think "manners" matter is Japan; isolationist until the Meiji Restoration, rapidly modernized after despite the "manners" remaining intact.
> Another reason why I don't think "manners" matter is Japan; isolationist until the Meiji Restoration, rapidly modernized after despite the "manners" remaining intact.
Japan abolished social classes (or pretended to) and nobody gets killed for insulting a samurai these days. The voluntary-then-forced Westernization was a pretty major changes.
Lived experience is all any of us has got, in terms of experimental data. If someone thinks they are having a bad time, it's difficult and dangerous to discount that: right now there is no way to assess the validity of someone else's subjective judgement. To rule it out completely is going to far, almost denying the reality (pleasant or unpleasant) of one's own life...
Well a large part of our daily communication is still how's weather like, gossip and what's for dinner.
Internet may look like it's all lolcats and trolls if you look hard enough, but that's like dropping into a teenage group and complain all they talk all day is tits and soccer*
At any time one can still go on a gated, moderated community and obtain meaningful noise free communication with little interference from trolls and attention seekers.
This whole piece reads like "the problem of wetness in swimming" - a non problem that has been created by putting oneself into that condition in the first place.
I wish people understood this. Its so incredibly frutrating to deal with (controlling?) people trying to control the way communities that they have just joined operate. Here's an alternative to joining a community you don't like: don't join the community!
People will act like they understand this, but if they did, they simply wouldn't have a problem. Theres really no issue here if you actually understand this advice.
Right, Mirimir likes moderated communities. So HN, Wilders and some subreddits. Never Twitter. People have tried to get me on it, but I find it maddening.
While I agree absolutely with this, the problem is that there is a growing base.. What almost feels like it's becoming a mainstream majority, that feel a better solution is to have someone, the government, LE, some invisible hand, take control and deem what is and isn't acceptable thought and speech.
You can see it even on here. Instead of a thicker skin, or not using something like Twitter, people espouse ideas such as enforcing non 'harassing' language. But in my mind there is a clear difference in the 'harassment' online, and real harassment, e.g. you're swatted at 4am, they poison your pets, they stalk you, not just once but could continue for weeks or months or years on end.
At the risk of sounding like an old curmudgeon, I do understand that now more than ever, we have an entire generation that has never been taught anything except their online persona is as important, if not more important than who they are in meatspace. It's easy to understand, they have really become a brand, their own brand, which is both good and unfortunate. The reality is that life will continue on regardless of data pipes working or not.
The growing outcry for safety and homogeneous thought is larger than ever, in almost every aspect. But with regard to the internet, the issue is that as this group becomes the majority, their calls carry more and more weight for moving the internet into the same world as many US universities.. Every campus now has a Free Speech zone, an XX meter square that you can freely speak your mind, and even hand out constitution pamphlets. Step outside that, speak your mind and you are charged with 'harassment'.
I'm not that hopeful though. As we move more into the world of where the government continues to take a larger role in making the internet fair, we relinquish certain other things. Of course, it starts benign, but it ends up quite different.
One of the norms of Victorian society was that once you acquired wealth, you were meant to behave in a way that was befitting of that status - including in terms of morality. And indeed middle class and wealthy Victorians poured money into / agnonized over the condition of the working class.
What I believe you are seeing now is the entrenchment a significant minority of people who not only feel they have not 'won', but that the rich and well connected have broken that social contract. They, unsurprisingly, don't feel like playing the 'manners' game if they feel the system is abusing them.
I disagree with your list. You put "bad faith" posts as one of the things a troll might do, but I think trolling must always be bad faith. I post aggressively, insulting, inflammatory content with some regularity (not proud of it), but it's never bad faith. I'm never doing it "for the lulz". I don't necessarily think I'm any better than a troll in those moments, but it's not trolling.
It's only trolling if you think what you're posting is funny.
>The technology community must pick between enabling universal surveillance and censorship, or protecting the privacy of the vulnerable, including those who hold minority opinions and express themselves in ways that could be deemed "unpleasant".
They chose a long time ago. A lot of the issues that are slowly coming to the surface for most people (police/surveillance state, endless war driven by military-industrial complex and politics, climate disaster, etc...) are old issues. They're finally surfacing because most of them are so far beyond criticality that they're actually detonating in our midst.
These choices have been made again and again by the few people who really bother to engage with these issues, and we lost. This is what losing all of these battles over decades looks like when the bill starts coming due.
I don't believe it is a choice made once, but a series of choices. When Drupal threw out one of their leaders, because he was into BDSM, they made exactly the choice you suggest we don't. It was not made by some mysterious “other”, it was not made by “them”, it was a choice made by a few named people.
It's a choice we all make every day, is the sum of those choices that make the world we live in. If you want to change the world we live in, act accordingly and convince others to act accordingly.
Most people simply lack the ability to understand reality to any reasonable approximation, and are too easily led by pathos. For them, it's not what you say, but who you are. People like those on HN are a tiny minority, and that's the reality.
I disagree. CTR was known for promotion, shilling, just as advertisers are, but people in Russian employ were known for disruption. They aren't pushing the merits of Donald Trump, Marine LePen, etc., as much as they're fomenting discord through fake news and aggressive bias.
I guess where we're in disagreement, though, and this is something that was in discussion at the senate hearings in terms of "unwitting agents" or put less delicately, "useful idiots" that will follow along with dangerous patterns that might have their source in extremely negative astroturfing/forum-sliding/shilling, but which take on a life of their own.
We have clear evidence that disinformation campaigns and active measures are being used, but the reason they work isn't because initially a bunch of Russian teenagers are employed to push false and dangerous narratives. They work because they get picked up by totally sincere people who have an emotional reason for perpetuating them, but which reject any kind of rational discussion around them.
As a use case: An army of (shills/trolls) pushes a completely fake story titled, "Police Find 19 White Female Bodies In Freezers With ‘Black Lives Matter’ Carved Into Skin." (this was an actual, viral fake news headline), and times it properly to get it to certain key environments.
Once it's there, it gets perpetuated by people who are sincere, who are continuing the narrative for emotional, irrational reasons ("this fits my world view, it angers me, it makes me feel good to bring it to light"). When people respond that it is a fake story, those people are responded to with hostility, name-calling and anger.
At this point, you have a shift from shilling to trolling, but the original source hits a particular emotional note that posting things like, "Hillary Clinton is the most experienced and qualified candidate for president EVER" or "Hey guys! I just learned about this great new product, totally randomly! Let's talk about it!"
Both are problems. The latter are annoying, and with a little bit of savvy, easily identified and ignored. The former is outright dangerous and attacks one of the foundations of a democratic, free society.
>I guess where we're in disagreement, though, [...] "useful idiots" that will follow along with dangerous patterns that might have their source in extremely negative astroturfing/forum-sliding/shilling, but which take on a life of their own.
I'm not sure where the disagreement is; gaining sincere support is the whole point. Shills spread plenty of false anti-bernie things.
I think you should take a second look at what I said. Yes, there were anti-Bernie things, and I say this as someone whose politics are much closer to Bernie's than they will ever be to Hillary's.
But the nature of what Putin is doing is radically different, for the reasons I outlined. Misrepresenting an essay that Bernie wrote 50 years ago, for instance, is dirty politics for sure, but I don't put it on the same level as spreading a fake story about Muslim immigrants or black people, especially in a country like ours that has a very dangerous history of racial populism.
Add to this that those whipping up these deep social divisions aren't even American, and you have yourself a problem with a much greater significance than playing dirty in a primary battle.
I haven't found sources or people being confirmed as CTR shills after the election was over. If you could provide some I'd appreciate these. I agree shills can be a problem but I haven't found conclusive evidence of their influence.
If you give people a big wall and free spray paint, of course they 'll fill it with dicks. Unlike real life, there is nobody to paint over them. Trolling is a natural part of the internet, its the price for having relative freedom, i dont have a problem with it. If that puts off people who don't have the capacity to tune it out, all the better.
> Unlike real life, there is nobody to paint over them.
In the real world having your tagging painted over is one of the saddest feelings. I wonder if there's a way to digitize that sensation but I think people are desensitized to things being deleted. It would have to be beyond that.
I've seen people respond similarly or analagously to having their posts or comments removed.
Which makes me cautious about invoking that particular remedy in any but particularly eggregious or blatent cases. If I think there's any reasonable option for remediation, I'll try to avoid it.
Sure, but if the big wall is a map, and you're trying to find something on that map, all the dicks make it so much harder to find it that giving up in despair is often the reaction.
It's hard to tune out a cubic mile of dicks when you're looking for a pearl.
Well, in that case the Internet "map"'s problem is less the dicks drawn here and there than its being covered on every square centimeter by ads. Oh wait, I think I see the part of the map I needed... oh, no, just another ad designed to make me think it was part of the map.
That's not true of course. Most graffiti, murals etc are not of dicks. And if you have a community bulletin board that gets spray-painted with dicks, someone is going to possibly get fined or jailed.
I don't like the loose language used in this article and others that uses "trolling" as a catch-all for online harassment, violence, privacy violations, and more. It's misleading and gets people riled up as they talk past each other. Conflating 'baiting someone into looking stupid online' with 'sending threats to their family members' muddles the conversation. Worse, it erodes the meaning of the term. I'd call it cultural appropriation but that'd be too obvious.
Unfortunately (because I agree with you), that's the common meaning of the word nowadays. I guess we have to deal with it, and speak of oldschool troll for the original meaning from now on.
I stopped reading after the third paragraph when I realized the entire basis for this article is a survey given to 1500 "technologists" with a loaded question that basically equates to "is trolling getting better or worse?". First of all, not everyone who could be described as a "technologist" is qualified to answer that question, and people are naturally biased to say things are getting worse. I have seen non-opinionated ways to research trolling, e.g. at a hackathon I saw a couple high schoolers use IBM Watson's sentiment analysis API with Twitter feeds.
In a sense this article is just a more educated form of trolling - someone with an opinion grasps at fallacies and bad statistics to back it up, and uses the Internet to disseminate it.
I think online journalism as a whole has turned into a form of trolling.
Or maybe we are in a post Journalist world now.
The value of a story is based on how many clicks it gets. Thats what makes these sites money. It does not matter if you click because the story makes you angry or you think its insulting just so long as you click and you get the advertising. And as far as standards go there are none. Just make up some stuff that riles people and come up with a click bait headline and on to the next story.
I think that depends on your sources. TheIntercept doesn't fit into that bracket to me. Bias? Maybe, but bias isn't a problem if you read a diverse set of sources. Bias isn't a problem, opinion isn't a problem; reading one source and complaining its 'fake news' because it's bias isn't the same as yours is.
I agree that there is still a spectrum of quality. And certain Journalists and publications can still establish a reputation for reliability and quality.
But the problem is the business model. No one has been able to come up with a solution to make money on quality. Its all volume advertising. NYT is competing with BuzzFeed for eyeballs. Its a competition to come up with the most clever hook and target peoples emotions to drive traffic.
In the print days there was a small number of publications and it was very expensive to start one. The more serious publications published monthly. Its totally different now.
Think about that up until just a few years ago serious Journalists had to produce about one piece a month and they had supporting staff and a budget.
There is very little now that comes close to the quality and analysis that there use to be.
I read the FT weekend, private eye, and sometimes monocle as my fill of physical periodicals but I think throwing all journalism into the same box as your avg daily mail/buzz feed AP copy/paster isn't really accurate. These aren't journalists they are 'content curators' or whatever the term is these days.
I'll use some of those sites to see what's happening quickly -- the bullshit around a story isn't too important when I'm just looking for headlines. things like 'terrorist attack in paris' are statements everywhere which is about all can expect from such places; more in depth stuff I go longform and sometime even podcasts or books written later.
Instead of raging war on stuff that's been going on for years in the press why don't we just balance out input ourselves instead of playing into this drive to delegitimise the press, which only seems to benefit the government. We need a press to hold things accountable since the judiciary and senate have already been steamrolled.
I think it's the opposite: I hardly see any truly malicious trolling these days, especially since 2013. What the author attributes to trolling may just be someone expressing a view that goes against the grain, but is not deliberately intended to provoke a negative reaction and or in 'bad faith', which is a closer definition of what trolling is. The reason why there is less trolling is because many forum communities and social networks have filters and much stricter moderation and much less tolerance for trolls, than a decade or longer ago. From anecdotal experience, in 2004, trolling was much more prevalent on forums, but now admins and users have much less tolerance for it.
I'll agree the tolerance for extreme trolling is down, but I envy you your shelter: From trash talk to insults to casual "I'll drop this outrageous-but-believable statement and quietly leave", I see non-extreme trolling as mainstream anymore.
And I define "trolling" as "taking actions or communication with the sole goal of gaining pleasure from someone's misery and/or outrage"
It think the problem is now too many people are on the internet.
Back in the 90's, it was a great place to hang out. In the 2000's, you had fun sites with great user commentary like Fark, Digg, Slashdot, and Reddit.
Now everybody and their kid has a cellphone with internet access. Your average person is an asshole, so that's reflected online because of how saturated it all is now.
The internet can still be a great place to hang out. It's just a matter of finding a community, rather than on of the big sites. https://lobste.rs is one example that I've found (mostly, anyway), I'm sure there are various fora as well.
Any community that comes in contact with a larger community that does not respect their customs has problems, but it Usenet, email conventions, Burning Man, victims of imperialism, or a local book club.
We have lots of evidence of this. The unfortunate thing is that I can't come up with examples of anything positive coming about as a result: The smaller community is either destroyed or weakened, and the larger community rarely replicates the strengths of the smaller ones.
We can talk about the strength of diversity, and I'm all for it! But this isn't a melding to create something new, this is tearing apart the "other" and continuing on barely altered.
Humans are poorly built to handle large communities, and we've not really come up with an artificial means to deal with such situations.
That was a very interesting read, thanks! It's more focused on a "scene" and monetizing than I was thinking of, so it gives a different take on the same basic problem.
My general thought was influenced by various communities (RPGs, IF, Usenet, coding, etc) I've been part of or witnessed, and how they were unable to survive the swarm of slightly-interested. A few interested are good and healthy: You need the fresh blood to both replace those that leave and keep old-timers engaged. Too many and your norms and conventions are crushed and at a minimum you lose the sense of community, most often you lose the ability to communicate effectively.
There are plenty of historical parallels as well, or at least they seem to be - history is not my strong suit, so while I'll suspect the parallels line up, I won't go asserting it too far and will stick with the communities.
Usenet in the face of AOL is one example (I was there, it was tragic, and though we live in a wonderful age with a lot more information available, I think it's harder to FIND an in-depth discussion). Another example is, say, Slashdot. Originally it was the haven for techies, which made it popular, which made it NOT the haven for techies. After /., I moved through a few attempts communities and currently HN is one of my sources for discussion. While every community has it's nostaglics, I definitely feel like the last 2-3 years have had an increase in people talking about the decrease in quality comments. At this point, I've come to expect that eventually HN will fall prey to popularity and I'll have to find somewhere else to go.
In light of the article you linked, I'm not really sure how it links up. I guess too many "mops" are attracted, and even if you don't get any "sociopaths", just throwing the ratio of people that want it close-to-the-way-it-was to people who this-is-nice-on-my-terms off too much can drown the community in noise.
The disturbing thing is that I feel like the tail of the "mops" there. I'm not the creators, I'm usually not a fanatic. For example, while I'm _willing_, I've never gone through the trouble of contributing to any open source project beyond the most thin of bug reporting or the rare cash contribution. OTOH, I don't think I qualify as entitled, and I try to learn and abide by the norms of each community, so maybe this is a variation of Imposter Syndrome, maybe I just know my limitations, or maybe I'm a mooch.
I will ponder this. It dovetails in disturbing ways with some thoughts I've had about societal futures in a Fifth Wave sort of way. Thanks for the link, I'll have to look into "The Gervais Principle" he mentioned as well.
Usenet was tiny. Probably ~50k users, maybe 500k, back in the late 1980s / early 1990s. (Email discussion with Gene "Spaff" Spafford, one of the Usenet Cabal (TINC) members.)
I remember Slashdot ... before there were userIDs. I ... had a pretty low-digit-count ID, and remember when the site hit 100k and 1 million users.
Today, an online service with 5 million to 10 million active users is ... considered a failure. (I was ... kind of responsible for giving a good count of Google+ public user activity.) Facebook is over 2 billion users, and something like 500m regular users.
Those are big networks. And scale matters.
This isn't just a matter of the Eternal September, though acculturation is certainly a big part. I don't think Usenet could have sustained a network of this size, even with four weeks of mandatory on-boarding every September. The scale is simply too large.
One of my hobbies has been to look at how dynamics within various groups change with group size. That matters much more than the group composition (though that also matters). No matter what, a group of 5 people, or 20, or 100, or 1,000, or 10,000, has a fairly distinct feel.
Even before I'd estimated G+'s size, I had a fairly decent intuitive sense (generous, as it turned out), for the userbase size (I'd thought perhaps 20-50 million).
Reddit's various subs also give good examples of how community varies from sizes of ~1 to about 15 million (the largest subs).
My suspicion is that ~50 - 500 users is probably a relatively good sweet point, though I'm not sure how that an be utilised to make scalable discussions possible -- collecting the best from many groups, but keeping the discussions generally smaller.
"One of my hobbies has been to look at how dynamics within various groups change with group size"
Do you have a link? I went to your ello page, and now I have 7 tabs open, lol. I saw "Conversation doesn't scale very well", but that was only a tiny conversation; unless I missed something.
"My suspicion is that ~50 - 500 users is probably a relatively good sweet point, though I'm not sure how that an be utilised to make scalable discussions possible"
Just a thought after reading a couple of your ello posts. I wonder is the sweet point is related to "The basis of trust should be local reputation by peers who actually know who you are and that you play fair." [1]. Meaning it might be beneficial to limit discussions to those that are considered experts by their peers? Yet, sometimes outside perspective can be beneficial. As mentioned in [2]. I guess what I'm saying is, are scalable discussions possible? They seem to branch off into many tangents. Just brainstorming here :)
A lot of this is still ideas floating around my skull and various notes (electronic or paper), not fully organised.
Ello is, as I've just noted in a post there, very search-resistant, which is becoming a major pain-point. My post index (see my profile page there) is very sadly out of date, though it has a few items on it.
Somewhere amongst my writing is a suggestion for a tiered set of vaguely Dunbar's Number sized network clusters. Say, 50-150 people per group, themselves organised into clusters of perhaps 50 groups themselves. A small level of tiers gets you to current global population size (5-7 levels as I recall). If each group surfaces, say, 10 - 100 items per day of choice public content, and the filtering is applied upwards, then ... maybe there's a way to have both local and global discussion.
Topical interests might be overlays on that, based on net interest. A topic with a 1:50 interest level would draw from all 50 neighbouring clusters for its own base level. A topic with a 1:2500 interest would scale to two levels up -- this retains some level of "locality" whilst also allowing for broader discussion.
And branching out between clusters would be possible, but effectively with some additional cost -- UI/UX-imposed or other. Not large, but present.
There's an existing (or was) network that was organised somewhat on these terms, though I believe it's not done much. Building initial interest is difficult.
If I understand correctly what has happened recently, state-sponsored media disruption is the problem.
While the Internet was a place for nerds, it was uninteresting for mainstream powers. Nowadays is a good target for states wanting to influence elections, for companies that want to sell their products and for organized religion. Old tricks in a "new" medium.
If a power can mobilize millions of troops, or expend millions on discrediting climate change. Why should they respect the Internet?
It's the paradox of epistemic systems: as they become larger (or the audience more attractive), they attrack those who would use them for manipulation.
I don't understand this article at all. I participate in two large professional forums (one for poker, one for development). The professionals are winning the internet there. There are dedicated subforums for trolls and random bs, which are pretty funny sometimes, but serve as an outlet for the garbage.
I browse hacker news... It is what it is, I'm happy with it as a content sharing platform. My biggest gripe is the obvious advertorial/astroturfing that I think is probably something hn offers as a service, but I'm not stupid, so I ignore it.
I get news through economist.com and npr.org and scattered other sources. I don't feel overwhelmed by trolls, except when I read yet another fucking headline about gluten.
My social media is so boring and predictable I'll probably delete it all shortly. I've never had a problem there, but I respect that some people do.
I shop on the internet frequently. I get trolled by counterfeit goods sometimes! Also by fake reviews, but that's what professional forums are for in the post cluetrain world.
I get scholarly articles on the internet every other day as part of a professional masters program. Sometimes open comments on academic articles read like troll fests, but not really.
I participate in open source on github, that's not being trolled to death (Although big os project maintainers may disagree).
And on and on... The internet (as I know it) isn't being won by trolls at all. So what is the article actually about? Twitter? Comments on news sites (lol)? The pessimistic attitudes of "technologists"?
Vote with your feet/filter/time. Don't go to to /r/the_donald.
I just use HN and twitter mainly. I keep Facebook because many friends can only be kept in touch with (out of the blue) via facebook. Otherwise, just block a lot of it.
Nobody is forced to go to "the_donald". What would "the_donald" without trolling supposedly be? I dont know "the_donald", but doesn't the name itself already say "this is for trolling"?
if the internet is supposed to be a truly public platform, that is to say a space where different opinions can collide productively then the internet at the moment is clearly losing.
It's not that the trolls occupy the corners, it's that they occupy the big, visible public spaces of the internet, while everybody else is driven into digital sanctuaries. That clearly is a failure if the stated goal is to genuinely democratise knowledge and discourse.
I'd even go further than the author and say that we're way past a 'potemkin internet with a nice facade'. The facade is pretty darn ugly as well. The kind of stuff people are willing to post under their actual name is pretty scary.
sure, those are affected to. The comment sections originally intended for discussion on most big media sites are toxic even with moderation or have become so bad that some news sites have ended the experiment altogether.
That's a pretty sad result given that the whole idea was to break down the barrier between journalists and readers.
>Go spend some "quality time" on /r/the_donald for a more typical experience.
/the_donald has almost 400k subscribers. It is what it is. Do you assume these people are stupid, or do their beliefs and interests (and sense of humour) differ from yours?
Just checked it out. I see a meme with the text: "[..] There is no bigotry here. We do not look down on snowflakes, cucks, neckbeards or landwhales. Here, you are all equally worthless".
> Do you assume these people are stupid
probably, although it's their morality that's more of a problem than their IQ.
> do their beliefs and interests (and sense of humour) differ from yours?
I dunno... every time Trump fucks up in a big way, the_donald folks genuinely think he is playing "five-dimensional chess" and that he fucked up on purpose as a way to outmaneuver his opponents without them realizing it.
So yes, they are absolutely, definitively stupid. I mean how else do you explain the attribution of superhuman intelligence to someone who is an incredible cretin?
The exact same thing could be said about the people celebrating the DNC and Hillary's race to the White house on reddit. An obviously flawed actor with few redeeming qualities, yet still held in high regard in the minds of people on r/politics. The only difference I see on the left side of the divide is lack of humour (which tends to invite trolling).
I don't want to get into a political argument, especially with someone who thinks Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are even remotely comparable. And I say that as someone with a deep dislike of Hillary.
Interesting that you think the left side lacks humor. Last time I checked, all parody shows on TV were liberal. What is the right-wing equivalent of SNL?
Bullied off the air long ago. Remember people tried to get people like Thiel fired from FB for daring to donate campaign funds to a mainstream candidate.
I agree that /r/the_donald is a poor quality experience, but it's analogous and in response to the poor quality experience of the /r/politics. They're both "circlejerks" that don't allow competing views to be posted. So while you may need to take the_donald with a huge grain of salt, if you're only get your news from left wing site like /r/politics, npr, huff po, new york times, and even hacker news for the most part, you could do worse than checking it out. (Though I would recommended Daily Wire, Daily Caller, and Reason as a counter points.)
>I agree that /r/the_donald is a poor quality experience, but it's analogous and in response to the poor quality experience of the /r/politics. They're both "circlejerks" that don't allow competing views to be posted.
But years ago, /r/politics was not that way. The fact that it is is being used as a sign by many that the "trolls have won".
TD isn't meant to be a bastion of free speech. It's candidate support website. They say it in the sidebar: "This is a forum for supporters of Trump ONLY". They obviously won't allow anything which does NOT support Trump. /r/politics is supposed to be a neural subreddit, is not even close to it.
It's a forum dedicated to a certain political candidate and their views. By definition, such a place will be an echo chamber with a (usually) low regard for neutrality.
It's no different from a hobby forum simply not tolerating people who don't like that hobby. You don't go to say, a Microsoft specific forum and expect to hear why Apple or Linux operating systems are better. And if you did keep saying that, you'd probably be chucked out or flamed to a crisp.
I don't feel any need to do that on any kind of regular basis, any more than I feel the need to browse pro-anorexia or pro-suicide forums. I certainly take the view that one should keep one's eyes open, but the presence of human garbage (which is a cultural constant) has never bogged down the internet for me. (The worst of the internet - snuff porn, child porn, violent hate groups, people selling people, or murder, or weapons, or whatever - is as old as the internet. /r/the_donald is just like, I don't know... whatever).
Like, why wouldn't I think that the contents of the internet would be a reflection of the contents of our society?
Check a Usenet archive and see what the alt.* groups looked like in 1997. Lunatics and assholes have always been present on the internet; the difference is that in 1997, we saw the necessity of creating private spaces that excluded undesirable people.
Facebook and Twitter are virtually unmoderated. As long as your comment is legal and non-pornographic, it's probably staying up. The "communities" used by the majority of people the majority of the time are less well moderated than a lot of 4chan boards.
Of course the debate on Facebook is uncivil. Expecting otherwise is a peculiar kind of madness.
And if you have civil debates on Facebook, your social circle is extraordinarily strange.
Also, Facebook is moderated by the person whose wall you are posting on. I've seen effective moderation in this way. If you have friends that value good discourse norms, and you shitpost in the discussion around their posts, they can and will delete your shit and tell you to knock it off.
Oh man, have you ever tried to have a political discussion on Facebook? Even citing sources, trying to be diligent... And then, the only response you get is... "that's not right!". And that response is somehow given equal weighting?
I actually wish Facebook, the place where a majority of Internet discussion probably occurs, WOULD institute a dislike button and suppress those comments that get down voted too much (like Hackers News or Reddit).
Right now, it's either a "thumbs up" or a neutral stance, and that's just not enough to accurately describe the level of discourse occurring.
I mean, I can hop on the gripe-train about Facebook, but the only way I've found to have meaningful political conversations is over a very narrow topic with the expectation that parties come well-researched and willing to continue researching. Politics is excruciatingly complicated, trying to have a cogent conversation about it on Facebook is like trying to have a deep talk about religion while riding bumper cars.
The problem with downvotes is they are susceptible to brigading and in political discussions, there are essentially 2 hivemind brigades. In the end, any point that doesn't agree with the majority hivemind on the platform gets buried. /r/politics is a case study in this.
The problem with services like Facebook is they give everyone equal footing on any topic no matter the person's expertise on the subject, their relationship to the matter at hand, or their overall attitude towards discussions in general.
This means a black person who's been repeatedly victimized by police has no more credibility than some white dude who thinks everyone's making it up and it's a bunch of cry-babies going on about nothing.
It means a cryptography expert can get shouted down by some idiot that's just parroting something they read on CNN that's dangerously misinformed.
There's a lot of factors in play here but the "like" button skews the conversations towards things that earn votes which are not necessarily things that are true, accurate, or meaningful.
Sometimes the truth is ugly and painful and that's hard to like.
Political discussions with general public have always been like that, in every country and every age. It's not Facebook's problem, that's just how people are.
Any topic that indiscriminately concerns almost any person (e.g. politics, religion, weight loss and bodybuilding, how to parent and educate children, cooking, healing common pains/sicknesses), when discussed with random people, is automatically doomed to turn into a mess of uninformed opinions, misinformation, trivial logical slips and ordinary quarrel.
Tech/science discussions are usually constructive because they imply harsh entrance filter on education and intelligence, because most of those who upvote "that is not right!" can not join a public discussion of pharmacokinetics of a certain organic molecule no matter how welcome they are. When filters are absent, you get what you have described.
The real problem is that over 95% of people do not even value being constructive, checking facts, citing sources, etc. That is not a technical problem, you can't solve it by tweaking voting buttons.
I'm merely pointing out that "just say no" isn't a real solution to the fact that a large swath of the population falls for propaganda cancer (which is hell of a lot bigger than which sites you go to on the internet).
So should model the internet after a victorian society where proeminent women jorunalists could drink tea, play the piano and have a meaningful conversations about marriage?
sure, but here her voice is at the top of a widely read internet forum, and there's a polite conversation going on about it. This seems like a win for the internet. I can't stress enough that I respect the pain of public personalities in the age of the internet, to the extent that they suffer harassing emails, fake police calls, stalking, and lord only knows what else. That's not what the conversation is about though (those aren't examples of 'trolling on the internet' those are examples of illegal harassment).
The internet is and continues to grow as a powerful tool for people who want to learn, converse, share ideas, entertain themselves, build things, etc. The idea that 'the trolls have won' seems misplaced and strange.
> My biggest gripe is the obvious advertorial/astroturfing that I think is probably something hn offers as a service, but I'm not stupid, so I ignore it.
I've been warned that I would be banned for implying that astroturfing was happening on this site without proof.
> I participate in two large professional forums (one for poker, one for development)
"Large" is subjective, and I'm inclined to argue that anywhere "non-trolls are winning" simply doesn't have the size that forums which fight against 'actual' trolling at its scale do.
A simple BBS system or IRC channel can "let the professionals win" simply by being so niche that the professional : troll ratio is well within the manageable bounds for a handful of mods to be able to casually moderate every so often. Hell, this pattern is visibly demonstrable with smaller 'niche' subreddits and subcommunities. It's the whole "there goes the neighborhood" pattern in its digital form.
"By obscurity" doesn't isn't really an anti-troll 'win', it's just escaping trolls' attention. It only works so long as trolls don't hear about or aren't interested in the forum.
This was exactly the point of the article. You seem to have built your perfect Elysium, and you surrounded yourself with likeminded enlightened users. This is not representative of the state of the Web, tho.
Plus: forums are still great because they're one of those places where you can still have a full anonymity while discussing something you care about.
Look bruh, when we got on this internet, we could be whoever we wanted. It didn't matter what flesh machine was punching on the keyboard, if I said I was a white Nigerian female quantum physicist, it's on you to either accept my identity or challenge it. That's how it was for decades.
Then social media came and incentivized personal identifiers like photos and videos and audio. Once personal identifiers became cheap to transmit, then old world political conflict, racial conflict, gender conflict, and the rest of the identity politics shit show quickly followed in its wake. People refused to challenge self-identification for the sake of being polite and "revolutionary" (Yeah, okay). In fact, they were attacked if they DIDN'T accept a self-identification.
So, here we are, hacking your stupid addiction to identity politics because the reason we ended up on the internet to begin with WAS to get away from that insanity as it chased us across real-life institutions, cultures, and social programs.
Maybe I want to be more than the person I was genetically and socioeconomically destined to be. Maybe I want off of this postmodern circle-jerk where humans are supposed to be ambivalent balls of energy that can be shaped however the powerful desire. The internet was essential in exploring those potentials. You call it trolling, I call it liberation.
I used to laugh reading about politics in Abraham Lincoln's time: distribution of news was, at best, iffy and journalists made up stories to suit their political/social viewpoint. Remarkably like today. The Internet is indeed wondrous. Thanks to the trolls, we're back to where we were in 1860 again.
"Fake news isn’t a recent problem in the US — it almost destroyed Abraham Lincoln":
I think the scope of this trolling concern needs to be expanded to include the latest science on confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance.
The fake news of Hillary running a child prostitution ring out of a pizza parlor is an example of where people are creating protected spaces for confirmation bias online. Such a story is ludicrous. After Trump won the alt-right created a coded language where common words are substituted for slurs. It is human nature for birds of a feather to flock together and part of this includes creating a negative environment to weed out all but the most dedicated. This human behavior can be found at executive levels at Fortune 500 companies where cussing and swearing not allowed at the employee level represent barriers for people, most notably women, who don't appreciate the troll, obnoxious behavior. It is well known that climbing the corporate ladder requires an ever increasing capacity to put up with caustic trolling behavior.
I don't think we can cut off trolls because of free speech. Its not even a good idea as some trolls aren't even trolls, they are just loud. Instead, if personal filters were controlled via browser settings or something independent of the actual provider, you could maintain privacy yet have nice content as well. An AI filter would be a good candidate for that.
Wrong. Most internet forums are privately owned, and thus the concept doesn't apply. Plus, trolling and harassment isn't free speech. Conflating the two is insulting to those who are fighting for actual free speech, in places where they will be arrested for advocating that.
I have a hard time knowing who is a troll as there are times when people become one but not in their normal behavior. I remember recently there was a study on that listed here which was interesting. Also, your negative tone for example could be interpreted as trolling if you put lots of those types of responses, not saying you are of course, but some AI might give you a false positive on extreme opinions.
What I meant was not the person trolling but the person viewing content, just being able to have their own filter, where the filter is not controlled by some 3rd party but under your own so let's say the 3rd party couldn't suddenly remove the option. More about control than privacy in that case.
What if most of them aren't "trolls" at all, but rather people who have something to say that is important to them and they choose a method to say it that upsets some people?
The base assumption is that many of them are old-school variety: they seek disruption for its own sake. Suppose for a moment that this base assumption should not be taken as axiomatic. What else might motivate such a person? Some of you are quick to jump to the conclusion that money is the only other motivation. But money isn't what motivates everyone. Lots of people create art, for example, and receive little to no money for what they do.
What if some people are trying to motivate others to think about the things they believe, say, and do? Their medium need not be literature, paintings, music, sculpture, and so forth. A sarcastic tongue can teach too. It can spread ideas and challenge assumptions. Writing a lengthy essay that nobody will read may be a counterproductive use of time.
People roll their eyes if one brings up philosophy in a casual setting. I see a lot of things people call "trolling" as small performances of philosophy. Not all of them are effective, virtuous, or well-informed. But some are. The ones that really get under our skin are the ones who actually understand us the best, they know our weaknesses and exploit them. There is too much focus on who they are and whether or not they're getting paid (because they probably aren't) and not enough on what is being said. In a lot of cases, what isn't said is just as important. If the "troll" wants you to think about your own positions, he may just omit several critical details on purpose and let you fill in the blanks.
Diogenes didn't make people happy when he walked about in broad daylight with a lantern looking for "an honest man", he made some of them laugh, and made others angry. Socrates made enemies by arguing with people and showing them that they didn't really know why they believed as they did. I've had more productive conversations with people in my life when I took an adversarial position to them under the veil of anonymity, even though I agreed with their position. If I can argue a position I don't agree with and hold my own, the other guy comes out of it with new ammunition to defeat it too (or more ambition to find some), and they often teach me a few tricks along the way.
It is entirely too easy to dismiss a person if all you think they want is to make you mad with what they've said.
"What if most of them aren't "trolls" at all, but rather people who have something to say that is important to them and they choose a method to say it that upsets some people?"
If the only way you can express your dislike of a black actress is to compare her to an ape, maybe just shut the fuck up.
"It is entirely too easy to dismiss a person if all you think they want is to make you mad with what they've said."
And it's entirely too easy to ignore the problem of real trolling and harassment if you think it's just people with "differing opinions".
>If the only way you can express your dislike of a black actress is to compare her to an ape, maybe just shut the fuck up.
??? You got me, yes, this is exactly what I do. There's a secret Nazi hiding in every bush and behind every corner ready to pounce and I'm part of the great Internet conspiracy of secret Nazis.
>And it's entirely too easy to ignore the problem of real trolling and harassment if you think it's just people with "differing opinions".
Harassment is totally the same thing. And if a hundred people show up to make fun of the dumb thing you said, it was an organized conspiracy to hurt your feelings and not myopia about potentially millions of people who normally see stuff and don't interact with it until it's too dumb to ignore.
If you've got people sending you death threats or violating TOS of sites, obviously report them. If they say rude things that have absolutely no value at all, ignore them. But if they're actually trying to pick an argument with you in good faith, they may not be a "troll" after all. There's FAR too much where people have slid into thinking that anyone who has a different opinion and expresses it in an unpleasant way is out to "troll" or "harass" them.
I mean, look, you just attacked me, a complete stranger, who has never done any of the things you brought up because I dare suggest that some belief you hold is wrong. How's that for proving a point?
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 311 ms ] threadEDIT: I find the issue with the candor on the internet is lack of context 90% of the time.
The response will be a combination of social quarantine, and an upgraded intellectual immune system on the part of netizens. I think Trump's election and the damage his presidency is likely to inflict will be a bit of a turning point in the collective attitude to trolls in general.
This is as old as humanity, and has always been the case for the majority. See the chapter "Social Proof" in the book "Influence":
https://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Rober...
While agree some internet users are a bit too gung-ho with RTFM, I think it's unfair to lump them with trolls. While veterans can be harsh and unfriendly, the RTFM response is often warranted (though, again, it could be phrased more nicely -- and the default assumption should be that the person seeking help is well-intentioned). Otherwise, many online communities would be completely overrun by people demanding help with minimum effort on their part.
"RTFM" is not trollish behavior, because trolls have a different goal: to disrupt communities, start flamewars and generally annoy the hell out of people. It's not merely being "unfriendly"; in fact some trolls fake cluelesness instead of anger.
That doesn't mean everybody needs to be teacher/mentor/educator. But the people who don't want to be can also just keep out of the conversation, instead of rudely pointing to some 300 page manual and telling someone with passion and interest to screw off.
RTFM is aimed at help vampires (recommended reading: http://www.skidmore.edu/~pdwyer/e/eoc/help_vampire.htm). Help vampires do not grow a community; they destroy it. These are people you do not want in your community anyway. Unlike actual beginners, who learn and then proceed to become valuable contributors (unless of course they are treated harshly by veterans, in which case they simply leave), help vampires are never helpful. They ask the same question again and again, don't pay attention to any cues, don't read anything, and seldom provide context or follow-ups to their problem. And when you've wasted time with one (more often than not fruitlessly), the next one comes in. And they are legion. The end result, like the first article I mentioned claims, is that your community of well-intentioned volunteers is destroyed. So a polite RTFM is often the best response: if the person was an actual beginner, they'll read TFM -- and follow-up questions are often welcome, since they show the asker has actually made an effort. If not, they'll leave and you haven't wasted any valuable time.
In fact, help vampires are often indistinguishable from trolls, in that they have the same community-disrupting effect.
RTFM has always been part of the hacker culture (also see: How To Ask Questions The Smart Way, http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html). It has nothing to do with trolls.
Even just politely linking a similar question and response is better than responding with RTFM.
> RTFM has always been part of the hacker culture
That doesn't necessarily make it a good thing, or anything worth keeping.
> That doesn't necessarily make it a good thing, or anything worth keeping.
But it does make it not trollish behavior, which we were discussing. Hacker culture was not trollish, this was always part of hacker culture, therefore it's neither new nor trollish behavior.
I think a variation of RTFM, let's call it GentleRTFM, is both worth keeping and necessary.
I'm in agreement on that. Although I also think Socratic method should also be employed in those cases.
This is actually the RTFM-ish situations I hate the most; specifically as someone searching a forum and finding a thread or threads close to my own question, only to find the only responses are rudely unhelpful.
I get not answering an insipid post, or a mod locking/deleting one but replying to a question you find dumb or repetitive is a waste of time to everyone involved.
Just like "Don't feed the Trolls," I feel one shouldn't raise the post count of a time sink.
Answering with a link to the canonical question doesn't seem rude to me, however.
Overworked seniors simply don't respond on forums due to lack of time. Seniors with time and willingness to answer answer how they know. RTFM are doing what they are doing just to stroke their own ego.
Being jerk does not imply skill nor lack of it. It just being jerk.
Other than that, I agree they are not necessarily more senior or experienced. That's why I used the term "veterans": they are old timers in the community in question, have seen countless newbies come and go, and must suffer the onslaught of help vampires with needy requests and an ungrateful, instant-gratification attitude every day. They may not necessarily be seniors, but they are the people who actually form the community, because help vampires ask their poorly-formulated questions and go away forever, only to be replaced by newer ones. They do not tend to "grow" the community, only destroy it by attrition. How would you deal with them?
Again, "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way" ( http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html ) should be mandatory reading for online participation in online communities. Some of it is even common sense. And if you don't have the time to read it or TFM or the FAQ, why should volunteers take the time to help you, anyway?
Overwhelming majority of RTFM ate not trying to manage community. That involves more then just putting in RTFM with some insults every time you feel like.
I agree that some of rtfm consider themselves community and are trying to put off newcomers - and keep their own social status within forum high. That is just closed circle jerk, exactly like any other. Most of these communities have many other members who form them equally or even more and don't behave this way.
Elaborate faq on how to ask question is great and I would treat it seriosly, assuming the rest of discussion has similarly high standards. Except that rest of discussion is neither precise, nor well pharsed, nothing like that. So yeah, where it is consistent with general quality of discussion, cool. Where it represents double standard, meh.
Some silly troll spamming idiotic statements is not nearly the threat that controlling dialogue on the net and deciding what is trolling and what isnt.
Socrates would be labeled a troll these days if he was on social media.
That is, the more dialogue that I'm uninterested in that I lack tools to filter, the more my dialogue is being controlled by DoS. That is the fundamental paradox of open discourse; I don't know what the right answer is, but naive open discourse isn't it.
A dialogue takes two - if you don't like the dialogue taking place, instead of attempting to quiet the other voices, perhaps just remove yourself from the dialogue.
Preventing trolling does not inherently involve silencing points of view. All it should be doing is removing unhelpful, unsolicited, and off topic nonsense. Even the most evil views that I can think of should not be censored, under the condition that they are actually being discussed with the interest of discourse, for that truly is what "dialogue" is. But again, in that event it isn't really "trolling".
But I'm getting really, really, really tired of people conflating the "other side" stuff with the trolling stuff. Look at all the stuff sent to Leslie Jones last summer. Do you honestly think that was meant to be a dialog? Of course not. That was trolling. That was harassment. And that is what people are trying to filter out.
If someone says "Trump sucks" should they be filtered out ?
Do I think its a dialogue, heck no. Do I think it should be filtered, double heck no.
Likewise, if you flood someone employer customers with the above material to get him or her fired, you are harassing.
Let's not pretend this was just about "slightly impolite words". Or misunderstood dialog.
The post you responded to was me wanting to find out where respondees would want to draw the line on what is harrassment and what is open discourse online. I think this is extremely on topic, relevent and devoid of ideology.
As far as arguing I dont see it in my posts. I usually make one comment then read responses. I will take your warning to heart but I dont really see my post style changing.
HN is for stories and conversations that gratify intellectual curiosity (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). That implies a wide range of things that are interesting just because they're interesting. We want people to comment here because their "oh!" circuitry gets activated—not their "burning issue" circuitry. (I'm using that word metaphorically.) It's not primarily a question of the topics since these things overlap, but of the spirit of the discussion.
Like I would hope people now recognize that stoking a culture war to market a shitty movie is a bad idea.
1. Dialogue in communities directed towards a purpose. 2. Dialogue in public forums.
In my mind, the only place where filtering should take place is in #1. If you want to see information about specific kinds of basket-weaving, then the communities directed towards basket-weaving should give you the tools you need to see that information, and should police their communities such that there isn't too much non-basket-weaving content. But in public forums, I think that people should actively resist filters. I see filters as a case of trying to make something straight out of the crooked timber of humanity. Not only is it a goal that may be fundamentally impossible, it has negative impacts on the people who use the filters. To the well-filtered person, the general public may look more civilized and reasonable than they actually are. This can manifest itself, for example, as the well filtered people being baffled by the success of populists candidates because "everyone I talked to online could see right through them!"
I think online communities would be better off ahead of time if they made an explicit choice about which type of dialogue they were hosting, and communicated that choice to all visitors.
I think the apparent "rise" of trolls is mostly borne from sites with a disconnect between their stated goals and their actual rules. News organizations are likely to say they want free-speech forum in their comment section, but people mostly expect conversation directed towards the topics being reported on. Reddit was formerly a free-speech platform, but subreddits started behaving more like directed-communities, and the admins encouraged this site-wide. Hacker News is clearly a directed community, and so has fewer trolls, while 4chan is clearly a free-speech community and therefore ALSO has fewer trolls (i.e. most people on 4chan conform to 4chan norms, even if that would be considered trolling elsewhere.)
I'm finding Herbert Simon and Alvin Toffler's Future Shock to be pretty fascinating reading in this context, both from the early 1970s. Toffler cites significant earlier work.
I'm also starting to wonder what the long-term effects of high-level information overload are. Toffler's giving me considerable pause on that account.
So whats changed? more people are on platforms like twitter, and seem to think that fake internet points are real.
The vast majority of "trolling" is pretty low grade "die", "sexual slur", "lol rape", "exploitation of personal detail that you've shared" Thats not trolling, thats people just being arseholes.
They are anonymous people, they have no impact on your life, ignore them.
edit I should point out that yes swatting and doxxing still happens, and the impact is massive. but it is still rare.
The advantage of a twitter profile is you can delete it, and start again. I wish I could have done that in real life. It would have helped me escape the daily torment of my bullies at high school.
Apparently posting a link in reply to someone is now "trolling"
They've spammed business, social media accounts, email...
For some people the impact on their life is very real.
I can't use my name publicly on the internet because of trolls. This impacts my life in a huge way.
you were trolled, and it is clearly devastating. What most people think of trolling is just someone shouting WANKER at the screen.
People are simply not trustworthy, especially in large numbers, the internet just provides more exposure, so "don't be dumb" applies even more. Defending yourself is simply part of living in society.
> People are simply not trustworthy, ...
In my experience the vast majority of people are trustworthy. The problem is that the tiny minority of people who are not trustworthy are winning the internet because they have time, and shout loudly. More, some of them do obnoxious and potentially dangerous things.
That's why people get upset - because it is a tiny minority that spoil the whole thing. If only we could stop that tiny minority ...
Sure, but in quantity there will always be some people - even some of those normal, trustworthy people who feel particularly strongly about something and decide to go on the offensive.
There's nothing you can do about that, that "tiny minority" of abusers will always exist in any given situation involving enough people. Ignoring this effect is stupid. Trying to counter it is a waste of time and potentially harmful to speech. Defending yourself is the cheapest option, just do it. Tell other people how to do it.
Maybe I'm just a cynic, but I'm beginning to feel like the trolls are smarter than the people who whine about trolling in this day and age - they're able to defend themselves better at least.
The problem is not that a tiny minority are untrustworthy; the problem is that a large majority lie (a little bit) often and by nature.
Many individuals stretching the truth for their side just a little bit adds up to a warped picture in total and gets blamed as if it's a goal.
That's an interesting point of view - thank you for sharing it. I will think hard on what you say.
I've been running a business with multiple locations for 10 years and I've never had a problem more serious than trolls on the internet doxxing me.
If you're not vigilant about your own security and safety, no one else will do it for you. Take responsibility for your own actions.
That's the kind of risk you take if you make that kind of information available on the internet. Think of all the possible things someone could do with your address and assume those will be done. That's the type of precaution you should be taking.
Get a PO box or pay a corporate privacy company to forward your mail.
Depends how you operate though I suppose. Unless you're running a physical business from your house you probably don't need to disclose.
If you think you can't be doxxed, you're probably just lucky.
Why are you so set on blaming me for this? Do you want copies of restraining orders I had to file on the two people who came to my house?
When do you think someone should start being responsible for behaving dangerously?
People tend not to just browse city property listings for fun.
So why were they able to get to that stage - did they have your name? Why? What did you do to piss them off? Could you have done it anonymously?
Precautions are important. You can never rid the world of evil, but you can protect yourself from it, especially trivially in this case.
And guess what? They still happen. We already have the laws to attack the kind of "troll" that shows up at your door in many cases - but guess what? It still happens. Ultimately the law only gets you so far. So we must defend against them in more effective ways - like individual knowledge.
It's a lot easier and more effective to guarantee safety with online matters when you behave safely online than when you start taking risks and expect the law, the website or whatever else to deal with the consequences. That's just wishfully naive thinking.
Yes, in an absolute sense, all harm should be blamed on the abuser, I don't mean to suggest otherwise. But the prevention potential is so much higher if you can attack it at it's destination than at its source - like using a firewall on your server instead of just saying "hacking is illegal, therefore no one will hack me".
They don't have the knowledge. They're visually disabled. They've got cognitive decline, for whatever reasons.
And the scams and attacks keep coming.
Generally not trolls, so much, though that can be a thing as well.
I'm not completely against there being some wild corners of the Internet (though you might want to take a look at some of danah boyd's recent writing on 4chan and /b/, and what grew from them, and why, and how), but there's a rather large part of it that really has no business being like that.
People get hurt. Money and life savings are lost.
Not everyone's a street-wise, healthy and hale 24 year old.
But damn, if you could later change permissions, and then they would forget, that would reduce your risk. It could get confusing, however.
Eternal September ? As access got more and more widespread, the average savviness of new entrants lowered and they became more and more susceptible to the permanent trolling ? In turn, the new entrants have a bigger voice outside of the internet, and their parole is taken with more value than those who roamed it from the beginning, unmoved by the usual trolling ?
That is like saying "just igore bullies" to bullied kid. It does not work.
I'm not talking about a bullying campaign that's branched out into the digital world, that is what I would class as actual trolling.
I run a blog that talks about the specifics of labour law. A number of posts resonated with a profession that was going through a tough time. As time drew on, what was professional unity devolved into infighting along two lines: accept a new contract, or not and carry on industrial action.
I advocated the new contract. It was the best offer(in my opinion), went from salary with a paycut and increased hours, to effectively an hourly rate with punitive overtime pay(for the employer)
Now, This is where I supposedly got trolled. I was innundated with comments saying that I had "betrayed an entire profession", "I couldn't add up", "I'd never worked as X what the fuck did I know"
In my posts I swear a lot. Instantly I went from an amusing post with some political points that "really hit the man" to "a dirty troll who's foul language betrays a profession"
I just expressed an opinion.
People engaged with me, and I them on twitter. When I didn't change my opinion, I was a troll. When I used high quality sources, I was a shill.
Unless someone doxxes you, (either in public press, or 4chan) you can just turn it off. Twitter/facebook/email can all be erased.
You do not have to respond. They want a response, to re-enforce their own opinion.
That can mean professional or social isolation for quite a lot of people - or at least disadvantage. The moment your blog, github account, facebook account or twitters matters for employers, peers, business, conferences you would like talk at or negotiations is the moment when walking away affects you.
It is nice example of someone who would be really harmed by leaving.
Just because people get to run around filling the real world with junk to make a buck doesn't mean they're entitled to feel welcome everywhere they might want to do that, or that they can expect to be given a pass on common sense or the norms of the media they seek to degrade. They can console themselves with the fact that they're almost certainly going to win in the long run, I guess, since money always does.
That said: yeah, prosecute actual harassment when possible. "NEVER POST YOUR REAL WOLD DETAILS PUBLICLY ON THE INTERNET" remains and should (but won't) remain excellent advice, however, and I wish more people would follow it, and if they've chosen to ignore it to make money I wish they'd quit trying to make everything worse rather than saying "oh, gee, I ignored that and bad things happened, I guess I should stop ignoring that" (but they won't, because money).
People said the same thing about spam. And it's largely been defeated (or institutionalized, whichever way you want to look at).
We're all still figuring out the dynamics of the attention economy... and I imagine that as we do, we'll find ways to minimize the impact of trolling.
I'd venture to say that that's the big lesson we have to learn from the current presidential cycle (aka troll-in-chief).
The trick is a scalable means to do identity verification on the internet...basically a way to do it that preserves user privacy and security and it is dirt cheap so everyone can leverage it.
Is it just about identity? Would that do anything more than just removing the occasional death threat, instead of actually addressing the more pervasive trolling?
Similarly if it was possible for service providers to effectively penalize (from suspension to permanent banning) abusers in a way that they can't easily circumvent (ie create a new account), that'll be effective.
Honest people get shut up - or outed.
These can be changed without requiring full identification and disclosure. And there's a very long history of principled (and some unprincipled) pseudonymous discussion.
https://www.cipheredtrust.com/doc/#anonymized-identities
It is the perfect balance between privacy and accountability.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/500ysb/the_imz...
One way to address this problem is to give service providers an easy way to enforce their terms of services. This would have the effect of also making those service providers honest, in other words if you claim to want to create a welcoming space for all your users but you refuse to take effective actions against those who violate your terms then your hypocrisy is laid bare...Today twitter can claim they can't verify everyone's account, but if that was not an excuse anymore, then they'll have to effectively deal with those who violate their policies even if it means losing certain users.
I might disagree wildly with you in a number of cases but I try to be reasonable in how I argue my points.
I stay away from pages that use Facebook comments because I don't want to be part of the problem with fake profiles and I don't want everyone to be able to trace everything I ever said back to me.
Not because I intend to say something unreasonable. Not because I fear law enforcement but because I will apply for jobs in the future. And I might want to visit arab countries in the future. Or Israel, who knows?
I think this is a reasonable position. I expect and respect if you do the same - even if I disagree wildly with your opinions I don't want you to get in trouble for them bext time you fly into a country were your ideas aren't so correct.
Or next time a president goes rogue like Erdogan.
I think full name policies scare away lots of reasonable people.
The ones who stay either don't think that far, or don't care or use a fake Facebook profile. I guess none of these attributes correlate well with insightful and polite.
You think this means that we're all equal; we all have equal access to sharing bytes. But the problem is that trolls have infinite time and energy to post bytes. They have significantly more power and influence than you do because of that simple fact. Trolls could, if they wanted, completely bring down hacker news with just endless content and it would be near impossible to stop.
I've had to deal with real determined trolls on some of my own sites that simply have infinite time to post, to write code to post, to obfuscate themselves -- a single troll can shout out dozens to hundreds of other people. This is why the trolls are winning.
Moderation, flagging, downvoting, IP address rate limits, keyword blacklisting, are these effective?
http://anildash.com/2011/07/if-your-websites-full-of-asshole...
It's almost impossible to give everyone the same number of bytes of work with -- if you can solve that problem you've solved it all.
Trolls may encapsulate irrational ideas, which may be visualized as memes, inside multiple illogical statements which may be designed to directly conflict with each other's truths. Evaluating one of these statements as a "truth" may cause the other statement to evaluate to false. Trolls may utilize statements in which evaluation of truth is not desirable to the entity visualizing the truth. Any attempt by the recipient to evaluate truth or non-truth of these statements may lead to additional work being conducted to achieve a desirable outcome, such as "winning an argument".
Additionally, these "double bind" memes, or internal visualizations, may effectively spread the irrationality to other actors if they are constructed correctly. These viral memes take root and spread when the new irrational actor posts more irrationality in the form of similar or modified logic patterns.
This process, manifests as a viral meme (or what I hypothesize as an entity): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
Trolls remove choice from individuals and groups by causing the individual and groups to work against each other. The only way to prevent this is to educate people on the concept of double bind statements, their use in removing choice for others, and the possibility that these concepts may spread virally, on their own accord, in a population which may or may not be conscious.
My primary suggestion for combat trolls in a quick and easy way is to simply not visualize removal of choice for another in your own internal frame. In other words, visualize choice for yourself in the future if you must, but avoid visualizing the actions of others! Stating your refusal to be illogical, or irrational, is usually enough to send the trolls scurrying away.
Note: A double bind and a double BLIND are two different concepts. Double binding someone has been likened to "crazy making" due to its effect of blocking decision making processes from occurring in a given entity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_bind
Other examples of internally held double-binds would be jobs, or relationships. Holding a job you do not like in order to live in a place which makes you happy is a double bind. Quitting the job can be imagined to increase happiness, but cause loss of place to live, which itself makes you happy. Loss of happiness is not desired, so quitting is not an option given moving may result in loss of happiness.
Let's look at a troll's use of a double bind, with intent to spread the double bind:
> Only by enlisting the full potential of women in our society will we be truly able to #MakeAmericaGreatAgain - @potus
This is a recent tweet by the President of the United States, Donald Trump. Trump presents two concepts, which are both shown to be irrational: 1. "We" do not enlist the full potential of women in society, and 2. "Our" society, America, is not currently great. Linking them together is achieved by saying "only", which implies that #1 must evaluate to truth in order for #2 to evaluate to truth. i.e. If women, as a group, do not attain their "full potential", and do so by choice for all of us, America will not be great again.
"Enlisting" is considered engaging someone in their support of a cause, by either willing or unwilling removal of choice. This statement is, technically, unwilling removal of choice from the group women AND unwilling removal of choice of an individual woman, given she is a member of group women. In this case, the removal of choice is actually done via the hypothesized, and forced, attainment of "full potential" of a woman and women, by "us" (which is really Trump speaking for all of us at this point). This is an impressive play on Trump's part, given this statement, in and of itself, is a double bind. Women, or any other entity or group for that matter, may only achieve their full potential by having internal choice for themselves. No other entity may speak for the potential in another without applying judgment, or removal of choice, from that individual AND be capable of staying rational while doing so.
By tacking on the idea of "making America great", any dismissal of the first concept, which again is itself a double bind, enables the use of blame for not wanting to make America great again. As with potential, America is only "great" if people think it's great. If it is to be made "great again", that implies it is not currently great, which itself is an irrational statement.
So, what is choice? I hypothesize it is work. Work done and saved on one hand. Work to be done on the other. Some of our choices are based on what has come before regarding the choice we must make. I like German beer, so I drink one each day. Some comes from other humans, however, who choose to remove our choice for us. Advertising does this, for example. Sometimes choice is removed from use of logic, or rationality.
It is my belief that our choices are, in part, governed by our visualization systems. I'm talking about that thing in your head that allows us to visualize images similar to what we see while using compute devices, such as this monitor, graphics card, computer I am typing on now.
If someone else, besides you, can get you to visualize something, I'm asserting that this is actually a choice of removal of choice by yourself.
Unless they are well paid state-sponsored trolls. They still don't have infinite time or energy, but neither we do.
> The only way to prevent this is to educate people on the concept of double bind statements, their use in removing choice for others, and the possibility that these concepts may spread virally, on their own accord, in a population which may or may not be conscious.
Education is the solution. And I hope that we chose it.
Infinite is certainly a hyperbole; but trolls typically have more time and energy to devote to destruction than you do. I have experienced it. Some trolls are mentally ill -- I have had to deal with that as well.
I honestly don't know what else you're trying to say here but you did use a lot of bytes to do it.
See https://xkcd.com/810/
Technology makes this easier for sure. But I think it's the futureless world of hucksterism being articulated to everyone that makes behaving this way attractive to so many people.
Every time we disrupt an industry, especially media, we are by definition shaping society. It's about time we as technologists started being honest about that.
>Of course, this is already happening, just out of sight of most of us
Why would they consider that to be such a big problem, if it's not bothering those who are wont to be bothered? The true motivation for these comments is clear, but remains unsaid: what "trolls" are posting is outside the control of these would-be authorities.
The technology community must pick between enabling universal surveillance and censorship, or protecting the privacy of the vulnerable, including those who hold minority opinions and express themselves in ways that could be deemed "unpleasant".
Isn't that a bit of a tautology? "If I expand the definition of the word 'troll' to include 'authors decrying trolling' then authors who decry trolling become 'trolls' themselves."
It's not an exceedingly convincing statement to me personally.
Though you've used one of the adjectives I think best describes the nature of 'trolling' and that's "bad faith". Personally, I feel the most useful definition of 'troll' is someone who argues/antagonizes/insults others not because they are trying to make a point or start a conversation, but merely to provoke a negative response.
No, it's not tautological.
The parent doesn't propose to "expand the definition of the word 'troll' to include 'authors decrying trolling'". He proposes defining trolls as "as anyone who posts inflammatory, bad faith, needlessly aggressive, insulting, false, or otherwise unproductive content".
Which is as (or close) to how it has always been defined, and how the authors of TFA use it.
So what the parent suggests is not some "expansion of the definition of trolling", much less one to include "those who complain about trolling", and in no sense a tautology.
If you assume that the word troll does not mean "anyone who posts inflammatory, bad faith, needlessly aggressive, insulting, false, or otherwise unproductive content" then someone claiming it does is pretty clearly expanding the definition of the word.
Which is as (or close) to how it has always been defined, and how the authors of TFA use it.
I actually disagree with both of these assertions. Sometimes people expand the word troll to encompass too large a group, but that doesn't necessarily change the definition and I definitely don't see how the article uses it in that manner.
Though, I can definitely understand the desire to expand the definition of the word 'troll' into usefulness. It does make it easier to dismiss other's complaints.
I don't think the OP is advocating for any particular definition, but pointing out that the authors of these articles seem to be using a definition of "troll" (whether or not it's expanded is irrelevant) which would encompass said authors.
Astro-turfers, shills and disingenious actors are an entirely separate class. And, they are winning.
Contrast that with Victorian England, where large parts of society had "manners", which allowed for information to be constructive, and society (technology, etc) could evolve.
When the signal-to-noise ratio gets low enough, people leave groups, and progress cannot occur at any reasonable rate.
Chinese medieval society was very orderly and mannered; there were clear standards of behavior (at least for the elites). But the manners in question were conservative and did not encourage innovation, so they did not advance rapidly and ended up far behind Europe despite having a head start. The enforced homogeneity of thought and thus destroyed opportunities to advance or get past their own biases. Read about the Imperial exam system for some reference on how this was achieved, and note that Chinese geography has the most fertile regions highly centralized.
In the west we developed this system of manners based on freedom, where we let people do things we think are wrong, as long as they're not hurting us. This permits intellectual diversity, which means that when the mainstream experts have it wrong, at least someone else can come and knock them over with reality. Rationalism, not authority. Objective evidence, not subjective feelings.
My main worry is that the modern mainstream morality seems to be all about intensive efforts to homogenize thought, opinion, and policy as widely as possible, to exalt collective justice over individual rights, and to privilege subjective "lived experience" over objective evidence. Freedom of conscience and freedom of speech seem to be "out" these days and it's gonna create some real unpleasant results. It already is.
---
(Slightly off topic as well:
It's kind of a myth that society didn't move forward through the Middle Ages. While western medieval society remained in the Malthusian trap up until the 1800's, in other ways it did advance continuously over that time.
For example, studies of documents signed reveal that literacy increased continuously from the 1200s all the way until it hit nearly 99% in ~1900.
Similarly, studies of recorded ages reveal that most people didn't know their age in 1200, but more and more people knew it up until the present day. (You can tell this because people who don't know their age tend to round it to end in a 0 or 5, so you can count the over-representation of this in the data, or even by just looking at tombstones).
Something was changing through the whole medieval era.
And there are other markers (e.g. interest rates went down continuously, rationalism advanced, etc etc).)
I agree that west is more free then anything else. However that freedom in general sense or relatively new thing for large parts of population. And for that matter, marihuanna is still illegal and harms no one.
I think that west ultimately created system where groups were able to succesfully win fight for their right to not harm others. But it took fight and abuses happened every single time.
The imperial exam is good example of just how advanced the Chinese nation was for most of history. China as a country remained politically united for most of known history, quite a remarkable feat if you think about it. One of the enablers was a professional bureaucracy that allowed the state to remain strong without being challenged by regional usurpers.
This is a huge topic of course but one of the reasons why China fell behind is because certain isolationist policies took hold just when the modern era dawned, pushing China farther and farther behind simply due to the backbreaking speed of modern development.
Another reason why I don't think "manners" matter is Japan; isolationist until the Meiji Restoration, rapidly modernized after despite the "manners" remaining intact.
Japan abolished social classes (or pretended to) and nobody gets killed for insulting a samurai these days. The voluntary-then-forced Westernization was a pretty major changes.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/03/how-t...
I think some of this may play into it as well. If everything is written to be inflammatory, it becomes an echo chamber of sorts.
Internet may look like it's all lolcats and trolls if you look hard enough, but that's like dropping into a teenage group and complain all they talk all day is tits and soccer*
At any time one can still go on a gated, moderated community and obtain meaningful noise free communication with little interference from trolls and attention seekers.
This whole piece reads like "the problem of wetness in swimming" - a non problem that has been created by putting oneself into that condition in the first place.
*actual sport may vary geographically
People will act like they understand this, but if they did, they simply wouldn't have a problem. Theres really no issue here if you actually understand this advice.
You can see it even on here. Instead of a thicker skin, or not using something like Twitter, people espouse ideas such as enforcing non 'harassing' language. But in my mind there is a clear difference in the 'harassment' online, and real harassment, e.g. you're swatted at 4am, they poison your pets, they stalk you, not just once but could continue for weeks or months or years on end.
At the risk of sounding like an old curmudgeon, I do understand that now more than ever, we have an entire generation that has never been taught anything except their online persona is as important, if not more important than who they are in meatspace. It's easy to understand, they have really become a brand, their own brand, which is both good and unfortunate. The reality is that life will continue on regardless of data pipes working or not.
The growing outcry for safety and homogeneous thought is larger than ever, in almost every aspect. But with regard to the internet, the issue is that as this group becomes the majority, their calls carry more and more weight for moving the internet into the same world as many US universities.. Every campus now has a Free Speech zone, an XX meter square that you can freely speak your mind, and even hand out constitution pamphlets. Step outside that, speak your mind and you are charged with 'harassment'.
I'm not that hopeful though. As we move more into the world of where the government continues to take a larger role in making the internet fair, we relinquish certain other things. Of course, it starts benign, but it ends up quite different.
What I believe you are seeing now is the entrenchment a significant minority of people who not only feel they have not 'won', but that the rich and well connected have broken that social contract. They, unsurprisingly, don't feel like playing the 'manners' game if they feel the system is abusing them.
It's only trolling if you think what you're posting is funny.
They chose a long time ago. A lot of the issues that are slowly coming to the surface for most people (police/surveillance state, endless war driven by military-industrial complex and politics, climate disaster, etc...) are old issues. They're finally surfacing because most of them are so far beyond criticality that they're actually detonating in our midst.
These choices have been made again and again by the few people who really bother to engage with these issues, and we lost. This is what losing all of these battles over decades looks like when the bill starts coming due.
It's a choice we all make every day, is the sum of those choices that make the world we live in. If you want to change the world we live in, act accordingly and convince others to act accordingly.
> …young, understimulated men whose main goal is to be the chaos they wish to see in the world.
[1]: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/03/trolls-protest-...
If someone wants to be an ass whatever, but CTR and similar seems like a much more serious problem to me.
It doesn't even have to be political, I'm sure we've all seen the forced corporate memes that totally aren't an advertisement.
I disagree. CTR was known for promotion, shilling, just as advertisers are, but people in Russian employ were known for disruption. They aren't pushing the merits of Donald Trump, Marine LePen, etc., as much as they're fomenting discord through fake news and aggressive bias.
The article doesn't outright define trolling, but gets pretty close with:
>humans like trolling. It’s easy for people to stay anonymous while they harass, pester, and bully other people online
All I'm getting at is, people being assholes on the internet isn't a real problem compared to the astroturfing and forum sliding that goes on.
We have clear evidence that disinformation campaigns and active measures are being used, but the reason they work isn't because initially a bunch of Russian teenagers are employed to push false and dangerous narratives. They work because they get picked up by totally sincere people who have an emotional reason for perpetuating them, but which reject any kind of rational discussion around them.
As a use case: An army of (shills/trolls) pushes a completely fake story titled, "Police Find 19 White Female Bodies In Freezers With ‘Black Lives Matter’ Carved Into Skin." (this was an actual, viral fake news headline), and times it properly to get it to certain key environments.
Once it's there, it gets perpetuated by people who are sincere, who are continuing the narrative for emotional, irrational reasons ("this fits my world view, it angers me, it makes me feel good to bring it to light"). When people respond that it is a fake story, those people are responded to with hostility, name-calling and anger.
At this point, you have a shift from shilling to trolling, but the original source hits a particular emotional note that posting things like, "Hillary Clinton is the most experienced and qualified candidate for president EVER" or "Hey guys! I just learned about this great new product, totally randomly! Let's talk about it!"
Both are problems. The latter are annoying, and with a little bit of savvy, easily identified and ignored. The former is outright dangerous and attacks one of the foundations of a democratic, free society.
I'm not sure where the disagreement is; gaining sincere support is the whole point. Shills spread plenty of false anti-bernie things.
But the nature of what Putin is doing is radically different, for the reasons I outlined. Misrepresenting an essay that Bernie wrote 50 years ago, for instance, is dirty politics for sure, but I don't put it on the same level as spreading a fake story about Muslim immigrants or black people, especially in a country like ours that has a very dangerous history of racial populism.
Add to this that those whipping up these deep social divisions aren't even American, and you have yourself a problem with a much greater significance than playing dirty in a primary battle.
https://np.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/56u8vz/new_evide...
In the real world having your tagging painted over is one of the saddest feelings. I wonder if there's a way to digitize that sensation but I think people are desensitized to things being deleted. It would have to be beyond that.
Which makes me cautious about invoking that particular remedy in any but particularly eggregious or blatent cases. If I think there's any reasonable option for remediation, I'll try to avoid it.
Spam and blatent trollery, not so much.
It's hard to tune out a cubic mile of dicks when you're looking for a pearl.
In a sense this article is just a more educated form of trolling - someone with an opinion grasps at fallacies and bad statistics to back it up, and uses the Internet to disseminate it.
Or maybe we are in a post Journalist world now.
The value of a story is based on how many clicks it gets. Thats what makes these sites money. It does not matter if you click because the story makes you angry or you think its insulting just so long as you click and you get the advertising. And as far as standards go there are none. Just make up some stuff that riles people and come up with a click bait headline and on to the next story.
But the problem is the business model. No one has been able to come up with a solution to make money on quality. Its all volume advertising. NYT is competing with BuzzFeed for eyeballs. Its a competition to come up with the most clever hook and target peoples emotions to drive traffic.
In the print days there was a small number of publications and it was very expensive to start one. The more serious publications published monthly. Its totally different now.
Think about that up until just a few years ago serious Journalists had to produce about one piece a month and they had supporting staff and a budget.
There is very little now that comes close to the quality and analysis that there use to be.
I read the FT weekend, private eye, and sometimes monocle as my fill of physical periodicals but I think throwing all journalism into the same box as your avg daily mail/buzz feed AP copy/paster isn't really accurate. These aren't journalists they are 'content curators' or whatever the term is these days.
I'll use some of those sites to see what's happening quickly -- the bullshit around a story isn't too important when I'm just looking for headlines. things like 'terrorist attack in paris' are statements everywhere which is about all can expect from such places; more in depth stuff I go longform and sometime even podcasts or books written later.
Instead of raging war on stuff that's been going on for years in the press why don't we just balance out input ourselves instead of playing into this drive to delegitimise the press, which only seems to benefit the government. We need a press to hold things accountable since the judiciary and senate have already been steamrolled.
And I define "trolling" as "taking actions or communication with the sole goal of gaining pleasure from someone's misery and/or outrage"
Back in the 90's, it was a great place to hang out. In the 2000's, you had fun sites with great user commentary like Fark, Digg, Slashdot, and Reddit.
Now everybody and their kid has a cellphone with internet access. Your average person is an asshole, so that's reflected online because of how saturated it all is now.
You know Sturgeon's Law? Something along the lines of "90% of science fiction is crap, because 90% of everything is crap?"
Well, if you more or less agree with that, there is just so much more of everything that there is so much more crap.
Another commenter expressed this as a signal-to-noise ratio problem. It is that, but it is also that O(N) is bad news for very large values of N.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1yzvh3/refutat...
Any community that comes in contact with a larger community that does not respect their customs has problems, but it Usenet, email conventions, Burning Man, victims of imperialism, or a local book club.
We have lots of evidence of this. The unfortunate thing is that I can't come up with examples of anything positive coming about as a result: The smaller community is either destroyed or weakened, and the larger community rarely replicates the strengths of the smaller ones.
We can talk about the strength of diversity, and I'm all for it! But this isn't a melding to create something new, this is tearing apart the "other" and continuing on barely altered.
Humans are poorly built to handle large communities, and we've not really come up with an artificial means to deal with such situations.
this is a great article on the stages of this phenomenon: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
My general thought was influenced by various communities (RPGs, IF, Usenet, coding, etc) I've been part of or witnessed, and how they were unable to survive the swarm of slightly-interested. A few interested are good and healthy: You need the fresh blood to both replace those that leave and keep old-timers engaged. Too many and your norms and conventions are crushed and at a minimum you lose the sense of community, most often you lose the ability to communicate effectively.
There are plenty of historical parallels as well, or at least they seem to be - history is not my strong suit, so while I'll suspect the parallels line up, I won't go asserting it too far and will stick with the communities.
Usenet in the face of AOL is one example (I was there, it was tragic, and though we live in a wonderful age with a lot more information available, I think it's harder to FIND an in-depth discussion). Another example is, say, Slashdot. Originally it was the haven for techies, which made it popular, which made it NOT the haven for techies. After /., I moved through a few attempts communities and currently HN is one of my sources for discussion. While every community has it's nostaglics, I definitely feel like the last 2-3 years have had an increase in people talking about the decrease in quality comments. At this point, I've come to expect that eventually HN will fall prey to popularity and I'll have to find somewhere else to go.
In light of the article you linked, I'm not really sure how it links up. I guess too many "mops" are attracted, and even if you don't get any "sociopaths", just throwing the ratio of people that want it close-to-the-way-it-was to people who this-is-nice-on-my-terms off too much can drown the community in noise.
The disturbing thing is that I feel like the tail of the "mops" there. I'm not the creators, I'm usually not a fanatic. For example, while I'm _willing_, I've never gone through the trouble of contributing to any open source project beyond the most thin of bug reporting or the rare cash contribution. OTOH, I don't think I qualify as entitled, and I try to learn and abide by the norms of each community, so maybe this is a variation of Imposter Syndrome, maybe I just know my limitations, or maybe I'm a mooch.
I will ponder this. It dovetails in disturbing ways with some thoughts I've had about societal futures in a Fifth Wave sort of way. Thanks for the link, I'll have to look into "The Gervais Principle" he mentioned as well.
Usenet was tiny. Probably ~50k users, maybe 500k, back in the late 1980s / early 1990s. (Email discussion with Gene "Spaff" Spafford, one of the Usenet Cabal (TINC) members.)
I remember Slashdot ... before there were userIDs. I ... had a pretty low-digit-count ID, and remember when the site hit 100k and 1 million users.
Today, an online service with 5 million to 10 million active users is ... considered a failure. (I was ... kind of responsible for giving a good count of Google+ public user activity.) Facebook is over 2 billion users, and something like 500m regular users.
Those are big networks. And scale matters.
This isn't just a matter of the Eternal September, though acculturation is certainly a big part. I don't think Usenet could have sustained a network of this size, even with four weeks of mandatory on-boarding every September. The scale is simply too large.
One of my hobbies has been to look at how dynamics within various groups change with group size. That matters much more than the group composition (though that also matters). No matter what, a group of 5 people, or 20, or 100, or 1,000, or 10,000, has a fairly distinct feel.
Even before I'd estimated G+'s size, I had a fairly decent intuitive sense (generous, as it turned out), for the userbase size (I'd thought perhaps 20-50 million).
Reddit's various subs also give good examples of how community varies from sizes of ~1 to about 15 million (the largest subs).
My suspicion is that ~50 - 500 users is probably a relatively good sweet point, though I'm not sure how that an be utilised to make scalable discussions possible -- collecting the best from many groups, but keeping the discussions generally smaller.
Do you have a link? I went to your ello page, and now I have 7 tabs open, lol. I saw "Conversation doesn't scale very well", but that was only a tiny conversation; unless I missed something.
"My suspicion is that ~50 - 500 users is probably a relatively good sweet point, though I'm not sure how that an be utilised to make scalable discussions possible"
Just a thought after reading a couple of your ello posts. I wonder is the sweet point is related to "The basis of trust should be local reputation by peers who actually know who you are and that you play fair." [1]. Meaning it might be beneficial to limit discussions to those that are considered experts by their peers? Yet, sometimes outside perspective can be beneficial. As mentioned in [2]. I guess what I'm saying is, are scalable discussions possible? They seem to branch off into many tangents. Just brainstorming here :)
1. https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/iex9l-hxfwop9kdyrvugvq
2. https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/lu30wakaoho3guaguxrasw
Ello is, as I've just noted in a post there, very search-resistant, which is becoming a major pain-point. My post index (see my profile page there) is very sadly out of date, though it has a few items on it.
https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/dlz9c2z6x-tvkd7rxtxwpw
I'd put some thoughts together on Reddit and community and what seems to work, or not: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/20yhxc/reddit_...
In the spirit of Thomas Edison, a long list of things that don't work: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1w73g4/on_comm...
You've found two of the better items I'd put together on trust and dialectic discussion at Ello.
Though not directly related to size, I've also suggested standardising topical "channels" of discussion: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/ftpx7lwnfjtopygu5xrkhg
Somewhere amongst my writing is a suggestion for a tiered set of vaguely Dunbar's Number sized network clusters. Say, 50-150 people per group, themselves organised into clusters of perhaps 50 groups themselves. A small level of tiers gets you to current global population size (5-7 levels as I recall). If each group surfaces, say, 10 - 100 items per day of choice public content, and the filtering is applied upwards, then ... maybe there's a way to have both local and global discussion.
Topical interests might be overlays on that, based on net interest. A topic with a 1:50 interest level would draw from all 50 neighbouring clusters for its own base level. A topic with a 1:2500 interest would scale to two levels up -- this retains some level of "locality" whilst also allowing for broader discussion.
And branching out between clusters would be possible, but effectively with some additional cost -- UI/UX-imposed or other. Not large, but present.
There's an existing (or was) network that was organised somewhat on these terms, though I believe it's not done much. Building initial interest is difficult.
[1] https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19
While the Internet was a place for nerds, it was uninteresting for mainstream powers. Nowadays is a good target for states wanting to influence elections, for companies that want to sell their products and for organized religion. Old tricks in a "new" medium.
If a power can mobilize millions of troops, or expend millions on discrediting climate change. Why should they respect the Internet?
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5wg0hp/when_ep...
I browse hacker news... It is what it is, I'm happy with it as a content sharing platform. My biggest gripe is the obvious advertorial/astroturfing that I think is probably something hn offers as a service, but I'm not stupid, so I ignore it.
I get news through economist.com and npr.org and scattered other sources. I don't feel overwhelmed by trolls, except when I read yet another fucking headline about gluten.
My social media is so boring and predictable I'll probably delete it all shortly. I've never had a problem there, but I respect that some people do.
I shop on the internet frequently. I get trolled by counterfeit goods sometimes! Also by fake reviews, but that's what professional forums are for in the post cluetrain world.
I get scholarly articles on the internet every other day as part of a professional masters program. Sometimes open comments on academic articles read like troll fests, but not really.
I participate in open source on github, that's not being trolled to death (Although big os project maintainers may disagree).
And on and on... The internet (as I know it) isn't being won by trolls at all. So what is the article actually about? Twitter? Comments on news sites (lol)? The pessimistic attitudes of "technologists"?
I just use HN and twitter mainly. I keep Facebook because many friends can only be kept in touch with (out of the blue) via facebook. Otherwise, just block a lot of it.
Trolls aren't winning the Internet, for the most part they're loitering in those corners of the web you'd expect to find them.
It's not that the trolls occupy the corners, it's that they occupy the big, visible public spaces of the internet, while everybody else is driven into digital sanctuaries. That clearly is a failure if the stated goal is to genuinely democratise knowledge and discourse.
I'd even go further than the author and say that we're way past a 'potemkin internet with a nice facade'. The facade is pretty darn ugly as well. The kind of stuff people are willing to post under their actual name is pretty scary.
That's a pretty sad result given that the whole idea was to break down the barrier between journalists and readers.
/the_donald has almost 400k subscribers. It is what it is. Do you assume these people are stupid, or do their beliefs and interests (and sense of humour) differ from yours?
> Do you assume these people are stupid
probably, although it's their morality that's more of a problem than their IQ.
> do their beliefs and interests (and sense of humour) differ from yours?
yes.
I dunno... every time Trump fucks up in a big way, the_donald folks genuinely think he is playing "five-dimensional chess" and that he fucked up on purpose as a way to outmaneuver his opponents without them realizing it.
So yes, they are absolutely, definitively stupid. I mean how else do you explain the attribution of superhuman intelligence to someone who is an incredible cretin?
Interesting that you think the left side lacks humor. Last time I checked, all parody shows on TV were liberal. What is the right-wing equivalent of SNL?
Bullied off the air long ago. Remember people tried to get people like Thiel fired from FB for daring to donate campaign funds to a mainstream candidate.
But years ago, /r/politics was not that way. The fact that it is is being used as a sign by many that the "trolls have won".
And if by take it with a grain of salt you mean that nothing in there is actually relevant or related to reality.
It's no different from a hobby forum simply not tolerating people who don't like that hobby. You don't go to say, a Microsoft specific forum and expect to hear why Apple or Linux operating systems are better. And if you did keep saying that, you'd probably be chucked out or flamed to a crisp.
Like, why wouldn't I think that the contents of the internet would be a reflection of the contents of our society?
Facebook and Twitter are virtually unmoderated. As long as your comment is legal and non-pornographic, it's probably staying up. The "communities" used by the majority of people the majority of the time are less well moderated than a lot of 4chan boards.
Of course the debate on Facebook is uncivil. Expecting otherwise is a peculiar kind of madness.
Also, Facebook is moderated by the person whose wall you are posting on. I've seen effective moderation in this way. If you have friends that value good discourse norms, and you shitpost in the discussion around their posts, they can and will delete your shit and tell you to knock it off.
I actually wish Facebook, the place where a majority of Internet discussion probably occurs, WOULD institute a dislike button and suppress those comments that get down voted too much (like Hackers News or Reddit).
Right now, it's either a "thumbs up" or a neutral stance, and that's just not enough to accurately describe the level of discourse occurring.
This means a black person who's been repeatedly victimized by police has no more credibility than some white dude who thinks everyone's making it up and it's a bunch of cry-babies going on about nothing.
It means a cryptography expert can get shouted down by some idiot that's just parroting something they read on CNN that's dangerously misinformed.
There's a lot of factors in play here but the "like" button skews the conversations towards things that earn votes which are not necessarily things that are true, accurate, or meaningful.
Sometimes the truth is ugly and painful and that's hard to like.
I noticed this long before the internet became this popular. Its more about the anti intellectualism than it is technology.
Any topic that indiscriminately concerns almost any person (e.g. politics, religion, weight loss and bodybuilding, how to parent and educate children, cooking, healing common pains/sicknesses), when discussed with random people, is automatically doomed to turn into a mess of uninformed opinions, misinformation, trivial logical slips and ordinary quarrel.
Tech/science discussions are usually constructive because they imply harsh entrance filter on education and intelligence, because most of those who upvote "that is not right!" can not join a public discussion of pharmacokinetics of a certain organic molecule no matter how welcome they are. When filters are absent, you get what you have described.
The real problem is that over 95% of people do not even value being constructive, checking facts, citing sources, etc. That is not a technical problem, you can't solve it by tweaking voting buttons.
The internet is and continues to grow as a powerful tool for people who want to learn, converse, share ideas, entertain themselves, build things, etc. The idea that 'the trolls have won' seems misplaced and strange.
You may not feel overwhelmed by trolls, but if you live in the United States, you have been overwhelmed by trolls.
I've been warned that I would be banned for implying that astroturfing was happening on this site without proof.
"Large" is subjective, and I'm inclined to argue that anywhere "non-trolls are winning" simply doesn't have the size that forums which fight against 'actual' trolling at its scale do.
A simple BBS system or IRC channel can "let the professionals win" simply by being so niche that the professional : troll ratio is well within the manageable bounds for a handful of mods to be able to casually moderate every so often. Hell, this pattern is visibly demonstrable with smaller 'niche' subreddits and subcommunities. It's the whole "there goes the neighborhood" pattern in its digital form.
"By obscurity" doesn't isn't really an anti-troll 'win', it's just escaping trolls' attention. It only works so long as trolls don't hear about or aren't interested in the forum.
http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/09/how-internet-trolls-won-t...
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/memes-4chan-t...
THEY HATIN
AND HOPING THAT THEY GONE CATCH ME RIDING QWERTY
Look bruh, when we got on this internet, we could be whoever we wanted. It didn't matter what flesh machine was punching on the keyboard, if I said I was a white Nigerian female quantum physicist, it's on you to either accept my identity or challenge it. That's how it was for decades.
Then social media came and incentivized personal identifiers like photos and videos and audio. Once personal identifiers became cheap to transmit, then old world political conflict, racial conflict, gender conflict, and the rest of the identity politics shit show quickly followed in its wake. People refused to challenge self-identification for the sake of being polite and "revolutionary" (Yeah, okay). In fact, they were attacked if they DIDN'T accept a self-identification.
So, here we are, hacking your stupid addiction to identity politics because the reason we ended up on the internet to begin with WAS to get away from that insanity as it chased us across real-life institutions, cultures, and social programs.
Maybe I want to be more than the person I was genetically and socioeconomically destined to be. Maybe I want off of this postmodern circle-jerk where humans are supposed to be ambivalent balls of energy that can be shaped however the powerful desire. The internet was essential in exploring those potentials. You call it trolling, I call it liberation.
EDIT: Downvotes only prove my point.
I believe the downfall of the weird wide web has been greatly exaggerated. There are still plenty of interesting corners of the internet.
Don't let Facebook and its kind prevent you from finding the interesting parts of the web.
"Fake news isn’t a recent problem in the US — it almost destroyed Abraham Lincoln":
https://qz.com/842816/fake-news-almost-destroyed-abraham-lin...
The fake news of Hillary running a child prostitution ring out of a pizza parlor is an example of where people are creating protected spaces for confirmation bias online. Such a story is ludicrous. After Trump won the alt-right created a coded language where common words are substituted for slurs. It is human nature for birds of a feather to flock together and part of this includes creating a negative environment to weed out all but the most dedicated. This human behavior can be found at executive levels at Fortune 500 companies where cussing and swearing not allowed at the employee level represent barriers for people, most notably women, who don't appreciate the troll, obnoxious behavior. It is well known that climbing the corporate ladder requires an ever increasing capacity to put up with caustic trolling behavior.
What I meant was not the person trolling but the person viewing content, just being able to have their own filter, where the filter is not controlled by some 3rd party but under your own so let's say the 3rd party couldn't suddenly remove the option. More about control than privacy in that case.
The base assumption is that many of them are old-school variety: they seek disruption for its own sake. Suppose for a moment that this base assumption should not be taken as axiomatic. What else might motivate such a person? Some of you are quick to jump to the conclusion that money is the only other motivation. But money isn't what motivates everyone. Lots of people create art, for example, and receive little to no money for what they do.
What if some people are trying to motivate others to think about the things they believe, say, and do? Their medium need not be literature, paintings, music, sculpture, and so forth. A sarcastic tongue can teach too. It can spread ideas and challenge assumptions. Writing a lengthy essay that nobody will read may be a counterproductive use of time.
People roll their eyes if one brings up philosophy in a casual setting. I see a lot of things people call "trolling" as small performances of philosophy. Not all of them are effective, virtuous, or well-informed. But some are. The ones that really get under our skin are the ones who actually understand us the best, they know our weaknesses and exploit them. There is too much focus on who they are and whether or not they're getting paid (because they probably aren't) and not enough on what is being said. In a lot of cases, what isn't said is just as important. If the "troll" wants you to think about your own positions, he may just omit several critical details on purpose and let you fill in the blanks.
Diogenes didn't make people happy when he walked about in broad daylight with a lantern looking for "an honest man", he made some of them laugh, and made others angry. Socrates made enemies by arguing with people and showing them that they didn't really know why they believed as they did. I've had more productive conversations with people in my life when I took an adversarial position to them under the veil of anonymity, even though I agreed with their position. If I can argue a position I don't agree with and hold my own, the other guy comes out of it with new ammunition to defeat it too (or more ambition to find some), and they often teach me a few tricks along the way.
It is entirely too easy to dismiss a person if all you think they want is to make you mad with what they've said.
If the only way you can express your dislike of a black actress is to compare her to an ape, maybe just shut the fuck up.
"It is entirely too easy to dismiss a person if all you think they want is to make you mad with what they've said."
And it's entirely too easy to ignore the problem of real trolling and harassment if you think it's just people with "differing opinions".
??? You got me, yes, this is exactly what I do. There's a secret Nazi hiding in every bush and behind every corner ready to pounce and I'm part of the great Internet conspiracy of secret Nazis.
>And it's entirely too easy to ignore the problem of real trolling and harassment if you think it's just people with "differing opinions".
Harassment is totally the same thing. And if a hundred people show up to make fun of the dumb thing you said, it was an organized conspiracy to hurt your feelings and not myopia about potentially millions of people who normally see stuff and don't interact with it until it's too dumb to ignore.
If you've got people sending you death threats or violating TOS of sites, obviously report them. If they say rude things that have absolutely no value at all, ignore them. But if they're actually trying to pick an argument with you in good faith, they may not be a "troll" after all. There's FAR too much where people have slid into thinking that anyone who has a different opinion and expresses it in an unpleasant way is out to "troll" or "harass" them.
I mean, look, you just attacked me, a complete stranger, who has never done any of the things you brought up because I dare suggest that some belief you hold is wrong. How's that for proving a point?