huge fan of Amy Zhang's work on digital civics/harassment/governance/justice. She's one of the folks who worked on SquadBox[1], which is a similar sort of protection system, except it's run by your peers me/friends. Lets them filter & deal with troubling encounters, be a first line of defense.
her other projects are similarly on the leadingest of edges, dealing with digital juries, construction kits for digital policy, information truthfulness collaboration tools, many more.
so far almost all digital systems are authoritarian "we say so" little fiefs & moderations is warnings or bans, & that's it. it's remarkably savage & opaque & often imo cruel. glad to see some attempts to bring real governance & process & human sociological cooperativity into the wild wild net. thanks all you trying to advance our resocialization.
I just took a look at her AMA and I think some of her complaints about reddit are mistaken. Of course the complaint that some people were being nasty and reddit would benefit from a reduction of such behavior is valid.
She complains about insufficient positive engagement, but she erred in using a different account to reply to questions than the toplevel post. This makes an AMA post harder to navigate because comments from the OP are highlighted in most ways people view reddit, and many clients have an AMA mode with additional UI based around the assumption that the post and answers will use the same account.
She complains that her comments were downvoted into oblivion. I don't know if many of them had negative scores briefly, but the only ones that do now are complaints about downvotes and a comment containing a personal attack. The currently-downvoted comments are not a positive contribution to the discussion.
Finally, she didn't respond to what is now the highest-scoring question regarding her product collecting and storing data it doesn't obviously need, such as user location. If I was considering using this product, I'd like to know why it collects and stores my location.
> using a different account to reply to questions than the toplevel post
> her comments were downvoted into oblivion
Haven't investigated this specific AMA, but in general, any reply to a AMA, by a account other than the one that posted the AMA, pretending to be the account that posted the AMA, should in fact be downvoted into oblivion.
The toplevel post was edited to make it clear what account would be replying, but it still breaks the UI. I have the impression a third-party tool was involved in scheduling the post.
> it effectively became an advert for her own app.
It does not read that way to me. Take a look at that thread -- if you were someone who asked a question in good faith only to get a flippant response by someone who doesn't respect the rules of the space, what do you think it tells you about that person? I can't imagine that earned her any political capital.
> that it effectively became an advert for her own app.
From the title of the AMA, it was intended as an advert from the start.
> I made Silicon Valley publish its diversity data (which sucked, obviously), got micro-famous for it, then got so much online harassment that I started a whole company to try to fix it. I'm Tracy Chou, founder and CEO of Block Party. AMA
>women and people of color are particularly targeted for online abuse
I think you have to be careful with the vocabulary here. If a white man is being abused online, and he complains about it, his complaint may be rendered illegitimate on the basis of being "tone policing". He may be told that "freedom of speech does not mean freedom from its consequences". He may be told that the people abusing him are under no obligation to educate him and are doing "unpaid emotional labor".
"I call out bad behavior, they are trolling, you engage in targeted online harassment."
If anything, I've noticed that women and minorities seem to have more of a blank check to get really crass and say things like "go fuck yourself", etc. I see people being mocked on the basis of being "mediocre white men" far more often on Twitter than I see them mocked on the basis of being "mediocre women of color". Gendered/racialized equivalents of "toxic masculinity" and "whiteness" aren't as widely employed.
(Agreed that social media can be terrible; I hope this initiative makes it better.)
I would take "go fuck yourself" to be a clear request for personal disengagement and, if that is as far as it goes, is crass/profane but not abusive (in the sense intended here).
True, but it is mostly white men who engage in sexist and racist behavior online, at least in the predominantly US English parts of the internet. Perhaps related to the internet's heritage as a white man's space.
Therefore it's mostly women and colored people who get targeted for this sort of abuse, being not men and not white.
(I'm not calling you wrong here.. I'm just pointing out that it's very hard to correlate a user with a real identity.. there are a lot of people out there)
Go play any online game and have a gay sounding voice. All of the sudden that great white male privilege women like this think we have also disappears.
Yup, I agree women and minority groups are often targeted with online harassment. That also doesn't mean a white gay male doesn't benefit from inherent biases elsewhere in society.
If you were an alien visiting our planet and getting a snapshot of our culture, I can totally understand your take. It's very real and mirrors my experience also.
However, you aren't. There's a history here that you seem to be ignoring.
> I see people being mocked on the basis of being "mediocre white men" far more often on Twitter than I see them mocked on the basis of being "mediocre women of color"
Wowza.
Has it occurred to you that centuries of colonization and slavery have rendered marginalized groups in such a way as to be viewed with mediocrity as a default? And territorial, warmongering, profiteering people (among whom, white men have become most wealthy and "successful") are rendered as great?
It seems the core issue of your anecdotal case is that the people you see as being victims here are seen as harassers / antagonists by others. So the direction then goes from "don't harass" to "don't engage with people targeting you".
I'm disappointed but unsurprised that this becomes the focus of the conversation rather than the core purpose, which is to prevent harassment generally. Unless you're coming with stats (not anecdotes that are potentially actually about harassers) that show that the claims in the article about who is most targeted for abuse, you're both creating division and distracting from those who are in need of more help, for what?
My great-grandparent harmed your great-grandparent, and now I am convicted in response?
At the very least this sentence would appear to violate statute of limitations :-) But the bigger problem is that the punishment has no deterrent value--there is no way for me to change my great-grandparent's behavior. And it is straightforwardly unjust to convict me for a crime I didn't commit.
I think this is actually a pretty racist idea--that because you share genes with someone, you are partially responsible for crimes they've committed. It would be like if someone in a small town committed a crime, and the town responded by having the police begin always harassing every member of the criminal's race.
Alright... so my 3rd cousin twice removed did something to oppress your 4th cousin once removed, and that's your justification for abusing me on the basis of my gender/race?
> I see people being mocked on the basis of being "mediocre white men" far more often on Twitter than I see them mocked on the basis of being "mediocre women of color"
I've been called an "entitled white dude" even on Hacker News (for not wanting my face to be used by Airbnb "anti-racist" algorithms.) The funny thing is, I'm not even white. I just like privacy.
I've been followed around forums by stalkers that were afraid I'd go a day without being called an ape. The fixation of a some members of a particular demographic on minorities and women can be completely overwhelming online.
It's not unique, try being Armenian, Kurdish, or Palestinian on twitter. It's intense, and you're outnumbered.
"I've experienced a pretty wide range of harassment," she said. "Everything from the casual mansplaining-reply guys...
Incredible that the whole article (basically an ad) is full of attacks on people based on their gender and skin color, while singing the buzzwords of diversity snd tolerance. American society truly is bizarre.
I grepped the article and I don't see anything that could be interpreted as such. Here is the single instance of the word "white":
> As she sees it, it's because the predominately white men who start, run and invest in most big tech companies are less likely to personally experience harassment.
And here's the single other instance of the word "men":
> As she sees it, it's because the predominately white men who start, run and invest in most big tech companies are less likely to personally experience harassment.
Basically every other mention of gender or race is some variant of "women and people of color are particularly targeted for online abuse". What are you reading as "attacks on people based on their gender and skin color"?
So does anyone want to you know, respond to a question that literally just is declaring facts about words used in the article, or just silently downvote it because they don't like the "side" the point is coming from?
Agree 100% that it is a trendy buzzword with an instilled connotation.
But, it is also a real thing. It’s all too common to see people say online “the statistics say you’re wrong, so it must’ve not happened”.
One’s life isn’t a collection of statistics, but of anecdotes.
With that being said, I enjoy using this phrase as a buzzword with my wife when she tries to tell me I’m wrong about an opinion I hold based off my lived experience. She finds it infuriating ;).
When people point to statistics in response to "lived experiences" they're not denying that it ever happened. They're refuting the claim (implicit or explicit) that this experience is representative of some broader whole. The plural of anecdote is not "data".
For instance if someone says they experienced X event, but statistics say that X only happens to 1% of people it's entirely fair to bring up the fact that empirical evidence suggests it's a rare occurrence.
Sometimes, usually so on HN. Sometimes I’ve seen “well, the statistics say that this only happens 1% of the time so you’re probably lying”. That’s usually on Reddit.
Anecdotes is definitely a buzzword used to belittle personal stories and to claim credibility with a thin veneer of academic/legalistic language overtones.
Most Americans agree that viewing everything from an identity lens is wrong -- but powerful corporations and the media control what is said and heard -- and they universally support this.
It's spread far and wide. Coca-cola, for example, was just in the news for telling its workers to be less white.
To what extent the powerful people promoting critical race theory believe it -- as opposed to feeling compelled to promote it or be called racist and "canceled" -- is hard to determine.
> Most Americans agree that viewing everything from an identity lens is wrong
Interestingly, it seems especially clear that Black and Indingeous leaders are especially skeptical of identity politics.
(at least this is my experience; I'm white.)
Get involved in mutual aid or mobilization for your local BLM / defund the police actions. I'll be surprised if this doesn't comport with your experience.
it seems the definition for "reply-guy" is quite broad and could include anything from an "unwanted opinion" by a person with the "wrong" ideology in their own profile, to ad-hominem attacks.
the right part of the quote of what she dealt with is IMO relevant and should be quoted in full to keep the message intact (for anyone who hasn't read the actual article):
> "Everything from the casual mansplaining-reply guys to really targeted, persistent harassment and stalking and explicit threats that have led me to have to go to the police and file reports."
reply-guy is IMO (in its weakest form) a product of the twitter algorithm that divides and makes people try to interact in hope of getting seen. But it's the whole range she talks about.
If the founder created the product based on their own online experiences and they happen to be an Asian woman it makes complete sense she would talk about the product from that perspective...
Do you really find it surprising a lot of online harassment is targeted towards women and minorities? And is it abrasive to point that out?
Without really answering your question, I think any pejorative that is based around generalizing an entire behavior as the result of biology/gender/sex is pretty offensive.
In other words, phrases like 'mansplaining' are just as offensive as phrases like 'man-up' or 'stop being such a girl' when being said with a serious or negative tone; and I think the use of such language exacerbates the problem rather than simply pointing it out.
Yes, I think that language is abrasive and contrary to the goal of unification. No, I don't find it surprising that the internet can be a horrible place.
Yes, in a vacuum maybe, but given the context of the world and history, I personally do not find it offensive for a woman to complain about men in a generalized way, given... you know all of human history...
These filters tend to be used less to block harassment, in the sense of targeted vitriol towards you or your group, and more to block any and all people who disagree with you, including the polite ones.
I'm not sure how I feel about that. Certainly, individuals have the right to wall themselves off from counter-arguments, but polite public discourse between ideological opposites is a precious thing, as is the ability to sit down after a hard day at work and not read 10 spelling mistakes squeezed into a 280 character death threat.
Where is "polite public discourse between ideological opposites" happening in practice, though?
If it's not happening on a particular platform, then preventing the possibility of it happening isn't going to outweigh even modest benefits.
The need for productive conversation between people of differing opinions will still exist and it is still critically important that it be solved, but if you're looking for diamonds, don't start digging in a dung heap.
It's happening all the time all over every social media platform, concurrently with the harassment, and largely ignored. Check out any controversial twitter post and you'll see genuine replies as well as bullshit.
The perception of the general public's social media output as a dungheap is tantamount to saying their posts are worthless and irredeemable, and that social media only has use as a broadcast platform for famous people. I think it's less like a dungheap and more like a big pile of every student paper from the entire world: mostly useless, but even some of the useless ones are genuine and took a lot of effort, and scattered throughout the pile there's some original and useful content.
There's a baby in with the bathwater, is what I'm saying here.
You quickly learn to ignore every kind of negativity on Twitter. Sincere conversations are so rare, even if a comment looks like a reasonable disagreement, chances still are you'll get hate in return if you reply (and you'll only feel like a fool).
This is a strange article for me. It feels more like another push to be tribal rather to admit there is a problem.
The problem that I see: Social media has emboldened people to look at attention and fame as something that has to be achieved. People actively fight over it. It's a pretty self absorbed approach to label people who disagree in an extreme manner (poes law here.. but trolls is what I was suggesting.. it's not far way from calling people nazis) .
Also, something to mention.. it's rather frustrating to see people dealing with being a minor to major internet celebrity. (That's what people are fighting over and for) For the most part that was a self selected goal to get there, and when they're there they don't like the bad side of it. The article in question completely ignores who she's referring to when she talks about "hate". (Is it a pro troll army, how does she even get to the ire of their attention, has she been pretty aggressive towards them?)
Sly edit: All those who downvote me support javascript and are haters. No reason to disagree with me. /s
Have you talked to any women about their experiences online? I have friends who are not at all famous, who consistently get men messaging them out of the blue on social media. Commenting on their public photos. Some even make extra accounts after being blocked.
If you’re a dude, it’s easy to assume that the issue only affects people who are “internet celebrities”. But that’s not the case.
In my comment I was referring to the article's approach to classifying the "trolls".
According to the article.. the [implied numerous] people they classify as the enemy are there because of her "ground breaking work".
The average person doesn't get a huge wave of trolls by just being there. Being the focus of an NPR puff piece interview, I would say she is a minor celebrity.
Does she deserve the hate? The person no, the celebrity image: hesitant yes. (I have a hard time saying no to the second part due to the influence and analogues .. i.e. public figures/politicians)
I believe that people are probably fighting with the celebrity image/influence. I mean why would you care about some individual that had some opinions as is with the person in the article.
----
On to what you mentioned:
Yes, there are unhinged people. The levels of "abuse" (their definition, which I disagree with what's classified as) between someone that agressively tries to influence others and an individual. There are probably many reasons for their behavior, but I would agree that they aren't acceptable to society. Are group block lists a good reason for these individual 1 on 1 interactions? No, The Travis scenario is not healthy. (Scala reference right there.. it's a guy who maintains blocklists based on you who follow)
I don't know why you're so resistant to the idea that harassment is commonplace for certain groups of people. Look at the stark difference when this founder replaced her picture with her male cofounder's on their support chat, for example [1].
Or again, just ask women or other marginalized people in your life what their experience is like online. Tons of ordinary non-famous people I know have stories just like these.
I think the above poster isn't resistant to the idea that harassment is commonplace for many people. What they are resistant towards is the repeated insistence that we should try and extrapolate broader trends from anecdotes.
Maybe they are, but that’s not the argument they made.
Anyway, the problem with posting links to studies in online discussions is that it’s very easy to cherry-pick data that fit whatever conclusion you want to draw (here’s some research that comes to the opposite conclusion as yours [1]). Everyone ends up soapboxing and the discussion is fruitless.
The Pew study also found that men are more likely to experience harassment. I'm not sure why you seem to think it reaches the opposite conclusion.
> Men and women experience and respond to online harassment in different ways. Overall, men are somewhat more likely to experience any form of harassing behavior online: 44% of men and 37% of women have experienced at least one of the six behaviors this study uses to define online harassment.
> Similarly, women are about twice as likely as men to say they have been targeted as a result of their gender (11% vs. 5%). Men, however, are around twice as likely as women to say they have experienced harassment online as a result of their political views (19% vs. 10%).
> By contrast, women – and especially young women – encounter sexualized forms of abuse at much higher rates than men. Some 21% of women ages 18 to 29 report being sexually harassed online, a figure that is more than double the share among men in the same age group (9%). In addition, roughly half (53%) of young women ages 18 to 29 say that someone has sent them explicit images they did not ask for. For many women, online harassment leaves a strong impression: 35% of women who have experienced any type of online harassment describe their most recent incident as either extremely or very upsetting, about twice the share among men (16%).
The context is that I provided research that reached the conclusion that men were more likely to experience online harassment. You provided an article that corroborates this claim, and now you're moving the goalposts to just specific types of harassment.
So for example, I've been insulted online. However, I've never had anyone persistently follow me around, even after I've taken explicit actions to evade them. The only people I know to which that has happened are women.
That comports with the article I cited…
> In seven days as “Eric Lu”, I got only one rude-ish message, and it was less severe or personal than comments I’d gotten before.
> I switched our message avatar from Eric to "Rachel," and immediately - less than one hour in after changing the photo - the heckling and name-calling resumed:
…and your study…
> Men experience more name-calling and physical threats, while women are more likely to experience sexual harassment (Pew Research Center, 2014; Powell & Henry, 2015). Pew Research Center (2014) additionally finds that young women experience certain severe forms of harassment at disproportionally high levels.
…and mine…
> In terms of specific experiences, men (30%) are modestly more likely than women (23%) to have been called offensive names online or to have received physical threats (12% vs. 8%).
> By contrast, women – and especially young women – encounter sexualized forms of abuse at much higher rates than men. Some 21% of women ages 18 to 29 report being sexually harassed online, a figure that is more than double the share among men in the same age group (9%). In addition, roughly half (53%) of young women ages 18 to 29 say that someone has sent them explicit images they did not ask for. For many women, online harassment leaves a strong impression: 35% of women who have experienced any type of online harassment describe their most recent incident as either extremely or very upsetting, about twice the share among men (16%).
Maybe "harassment" is too vague a word. It takes a big umbrella to cover both "offensive name-calling" and "stalking". But it's very weird to take the percentage of men vs. women who received any kind of online vitriol — regardless of the type or severity — and use that number as a proxy for the entire problem. Kind of like saying "more people each year get paper cuts than die in car crashes, so we should prioritize paper cut protection over auto safety."
So in the end, yes you are changing the goalpost to more specific forms of harassment. Women are more likely to receive explicit photos of have harassment sexual in nature. Men are more likely to receive physical threats. If you're exclusively talking about sexual harassment online you'd have a point, but this was never stated.
> However, I've never had anyone persistently follow me around, even after I've taken explicit actions to evade them. The only people I know to which that has happened are women. That comports with the article I cited.
No, it does not. Men and women experience stalking at nearly equal rates. The difference was only 1% (6 vs 7%) in 2014 and 2% (6 vs 8%) in 2017. And men actually experience slightly more "sustained harassment" (7 vs 6% in '14, 8 vs 7% in '17). And a large disparity in physical threats (12% vs 8%). The only category of serious harassment where there's a large disparity between men and women is sexual harassment, 4% vs 6% in '14, 4% vs 8% in '17.
Even when we break down the type of harassment by severity, there isn't much of a gendered disparity.
> Kind of like saying "more people each year get paper cuts than die in car crashes, so we should prioritize paper cut protection over auto safety."
If you think a man receiving a threat of physical violence versus a woman receiving an unwanted dick-pic has the same level of disparity between a paper cut and a fatal car crash, then sure.
Ultimately I don't have that much stake in whether or not you choose to believe in anecdotes or data. Just know that when you tell people to "just ask women" be prepared to encounter people who have done so and gotten different answers than you. Just because you've encountered a stark disparity between your experience online and the women you've talked to doesn't mean everyone else's anecdotal experience is the same. For that reason empirical observations make a much better foundation for any claim - but sometimes they don't always comport with your personal experiences.
The problem that I see: Social media has emboldened people to look at attention and fame as something that has to be achieved. People actively fight over it.
This does seem to be the problem in my view attention is a 0-sum game on one social media networks, and it's easier to get attention by being divisive and combative and by spreading outrage than by trying to actually engage with people. The places become toxic as a result.
I think Block Party more or less acknowledges that it's not about blocking actual harassment (though it probably tries to do that, too), and more about insulating people from "unwanted content". What exactly this means is only alluded to, but seems to amount to the exclusion of people who disagree with the poster.
Is this actually about stopping harassment or more about the cultivation of echo-chambers? Are "unwanted reply-guys" people who e.g. point out identical male/female disparities among CS graduates in response to allegations that tech is biased against women? And what's the consequence of this kind of blocking? Is isolating people from viewpoints outside an accepted orthodoxy supposed to be a positive for society? If the "reply-guys" followed suit, and configured their Block Party to filter out people with opposing viewpoints, would that be a positive outcome?
If Block Party is effective in actually curbing actual harassment, stalking, etc. then that's a great effect and Tracy is right that it's something platforms should do themselves. But I get the sense that it's less about harassment and more about "unwanted content".
The issue is that Block Party seems to be unwilling to distinguish the latter from the former.
Although with the current implementation it looks like it doesn't really matter. All this app seems to do is make it so that all mentions by users outside a whitelist get sent to a spam folder: https://www.blockpartyapp.com/how-it-works/
Regardless of current implementation, I still don't understand the problem in principle. Why does Block Party need to distinguish the former from the latter? What is wrong with providing tools to users for filtering unwanted content (by their own definition)?
What's the problem of helping people insulate themselves into an echo-chamber? Increased polarization, diminished empathy for people with different values, greater social-sorting, lower trust in institutions, and plenty of other problems.
Yeah, I do get that. Personally, I wouldn't use Block Party nor Social Media in general, for all the reasons that you outline. I don't want those things. Nevertheless, I see no major problem in providing tools to people who have a different set of priorities to myself. Particularly if they purport to solve other social problems, such as harassment.
As in all things, there's a trade-off. For me, the social benefit of a functional Block Party outweighs the risks. I take at face-value the founder's claimed issues with abusive content and assume that many others deal with similar. It is a shame that those doing the abuse had insufficient empathy, but that ship has already sailed.
At the end of the day, I don't believe you can win this one. Even if your concerns were overwhelming - which I think they are not. Simply, you cannot force people to read content they'd prefer not to. If this abuse is a genuine issue, someone will inevitably provide those tools. Either Block Party or another provider.
The problem with opinion bubbles is that you're forced into them algorithmically. I have no objection to people blocking opinions that they don't want to hear, especially the dumb low-effort comebacks that only survive on twitter because it's too difficult to debunk them within the format. If I only want to hear encouragement, there's no reason to feel guilty about it.
This attitude is frustrating, because the general response to content moderation by fiat is “who are social media companies to decide for us?” Then someone builds a tool to let users decide for themselves, and the goalposts shift to “is creating echo chambers like this good for society?”
It really makes me feel like the goal is not freedom of speech, but forcing everyone to listen.
I'm always annoyed by articles like this which never include a link to the actual web/app that's being discussed. I see many Wired articles do the same thing.
Is there some publishing rule against providing a link to the website/app that's being discussed?
Early on, twitter seemed to be aiming for a much more open ecosystem with an eventual range of 3rd party clients and such. If twitter was an open protocol, instead of a company, it probably would have that.
I suspect that an as open protocol, it would be withstanding the current political problems of social media much better. Wikipedia, rss podcasts, the www, email... these are all pretty unscathed relative to twitter or fb. A lot of this comes down to user control.
Building on twitter or fb's platform isn't good enough. We badly need these networks to be displaced by open protocols. I suspect it's too late though. FB is already a too big to fail, economically. Ironic, considering their whole function could be filled bu a non-company or companies several order of magnitudes smaller.
Whether your problem is too much abuse or too much canceling, your problem is protocol squatters like fb and twitter. You have far fewer of these problems in your podcast feed, email, on wikipedia or whatever. It's not that culture problems don't exist. They exist everywhere, but the protocols don't amplify them like platforms do.
Tools like this are extremely necessary and important. I think that platforms (Twitter, Reddit, etc) don't have a real incentive to build out powerful tools to stop this stuff. If you aren't detecting that comments are noxious garbage, then those comments just look like engagement. It's much harder for a platform to notice/quantify the loss from folks leaving or not engaging because of the bad behavior they see, not to mention the direct harm to folks receiving the hate.
When I emailed Daniel (dang) about it ages ago it sounded like there wasn't much automation in moderation on HN. If HN doesn't have the tools, then I expect random Discord, subreddit, etc moderators are also doing their work by having humans wade through manually.
I think Tracy Chou / Block Party are more likely to succeed than the platforms are, since in this case the incentives are actually aligned.
Why not just walk away from all this garbage. Social media is trash. It can't help but be trash. Reddit, Twitter, FB is just dumpster diving in stolen and recycled garbage to only find the occasional nugget of something original and interesting. If you need an app on top of your app to manage your emotions you're going down the wrong path. You're headed for sewage plant.
This whole things sounds like a Fat Bastard:
I can't stop eating. I eat because I'm unhappy, and I'm unhappy because I eat. It's a vicious cycle. Now, if you'll excuse me, there's someone I'd like to get in touch with and forgive... myself.
It's deliberately made to be addictive too. These social media sites really need to be heavily regulated, with that in mind. Preferably out of existence.
A global ban on internet advertising, if it were possible, would probably be one of the few solutions to all of this mess that attacks the root cause.
I also have a feeling that having any sort of reach on these platforms inherently invites toxic behavior, but I think it is important to consider that certain groups often face more toxic behavior than others. And with that in mind, I think it is admirable to try and make these internet services less toxic for those groups.
For better or for worse social media can provide a lot of social capital and real capital.
I love services like these -- by having strong end-user read-side filtering, you can run services with less platform-level publication censorship.
Platforms like Twitter have unique platform dynamics which make "dogpiling" and stuff like that particularly bad (no current social media platform is as good at handling moderation and abuse as USENET was...). Solving that is awesome.
I find that anybody who uses the term mansplaining loses credibility. If others opinion becomes disposable to you due to their gender identity, then you are a sexist.
What would be the use case for this versus just having a Twitter account set to private? Personally I've never understood the appeal of private Twitter accounts since it seems to defeat the whole purpose of a fully-public platform, but it seems like this would largely do the same.
With this, people you don't know can still reply to your tweets and dm you and so on, the notifications for those messages are just put in a second folder. So when you have the mental energy to look through all of it, you can, but you're not exposed to it by default.
Additionally, other people you don't know will still be able to see your tweets. You can still yell into the void. So, it's a public twitter account without the potential annoyances of a public twitter account.
The idea of a "spam folder" for social media harassment doesn't really make sense. An email is a private communication. But social media is public. If someone throws a hot take at you on social media, not only is it not private, it is about as public as it can get.
Something about this degree of forced intimacy feels very unnatural; maybe because it is -- it's to some extent engagement hacking meant to juice ad dollars. So I appreciate the desire to try and encourage more intimate, tightly woven spaces over faceless sprawl. Unfortunately, the problem with rejecting the world and retreating into the woods is that you forfeit the commons.
And that is the issue here. We won't solve the myriad issues of the public commons this way. What is needed is frankly a more ambitious and systematic solution, one that addresses the effective and perverse incentive structure for producing and selling conspiracy theories, tailor made to every tribe.
How shit is Twitter, that most knowledgeable people agree this is a reasonable purpose for a new firm? This work should have been done a decade ago. It's not as if Twitter were busy working on profitability...
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 137 ms ] threadher other projects are similarly on the leadingest of edges, dealing with digital juries, construction kits for digital policy, information truthfulness collaboration tools, many more.
so far almost all digital systems are authoritarian "we say so" little fiefs & moderations is warnings or bans, & that's it. it's remarkably savage & opaque & often imo cruel. glad to see some attempts to bring real governance & process & human sociological cooperativity into the wild wild net. thanks all you trying to advance our resocialization.
[1] https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~axz/pub_details.html?id=squ...
She complains about insufficient positive engagement, but she erred in using a different account to reply to questions than the toplevel post. This makes an AMA post harder to navigate because comments from the OP are highlighted in most ways people view reddit, and many clients have an AMA mode with additional UI based around the assumption that the post and answers will use the same account.
She complains that her comments were downvoted into oblivion. I don't know if many of them had negative scores briefly, but the only ones that do now are complaints about downvotes and a comment containing a personal attack. The currently-downvoted comments are not a positive contribution to the discussion.
Finally, she didn't respond to what is now the highest-scoring question regarding her product collecting and storing data it doesn't obviously need, such as user location. If I was considering using this product, I'd like to know why it collects and stores my location.
> her comments were downvoted into oblivion
Haven't investigated this specific AMA, but in general, any reply to a AMA, by a account other than the one that posted the AMA, pretending to be the account that posted the AMA, should in fact be downvoted into oblivion.
> > pretending to be the account that []posted[] the AMA [emphasis added]
It does not read that way to me. Take a look at that thread -- if you were someone who asked a question in good faith only to get a flippant response by someone who doesn't respect the rules of the space, what do you think it tells you about that person? I can't imagine that earned her any political capital.
From the title of the AMA, it was intended as an advert from the start.
> I made Silicon Valley publish its diversity data (which sucked, obviously), got micro-famous for it, then got so much online harassment that I started a whole company to try to fix it. I'm Tracy Chou, founder and CEO of Block Party. AMA
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/icqpsm/i_made_silicon...
I think you have to be careful with the vocabulary here. If a white man is being abused online, and he complains about it, his complaint may be rendered illegitimate on the basis of being "tone policing". He may be told that "freedom of speech does not mean freedom from its consequences". He may be told that the people abusing him are under no obligation to educate him and are doing "unpaid emotional labor".
"I call out bad behavior, they are trolling, you engage in targeted online harassment."
If anything, I've noticed that women and minorities seem to have more of a blank check to get really crass and say things like "go fuck yourself", etc. I see people being mocked on the basis of being "mediocre white men" far more often on Twitter than I see them mocked on the basis of being "mediocre women of color". Gendered/racialized equivalents of "toxic masculinity" and "whiteness" aren't as widely employed.
(Agreed that social media can be terrible; I hope this initiative makes it better.)
She initiated the interaction by quote tweeting him
Therefore it's mostly women and colored people who get targeted for this sort of abuse, being not men and not white.
(I'm not calling you wrong here.. I'm just pointing out that it's very hard to correlate a user with a real identity.. there are a lot of people out there)
But I know it's something many others have observed too - it's not like I'm inventing this out of nothing.
Comment after comment shitting on their achievements, presumably from mediocre men who feel threatened by a successful woman in the field.
Not just here either. It's an industry-wide problem.
However, you aren't. There's a history here that you seem to be ignoring.
> I see people being mocked on the basis of being "mediocre white men" far more often on Twitter than I see them mocked on the basis of being "mediocre women of color"
Wowza.
Has it occurred to you that centuries of colonization and slavery have rendered marginalized groups in such a way as to be viewed with mediocrity as a default? And territorial, warmongering, profiteering people (among whom, white men have become most wealthy and "successful") are rendered as great?
I'm disappointed but unsurprised that this becomes the focus of the conversation rather than the core purpose, which is to prevent harassment generally. Unless you're coming with stats (not anecdotes that are potentially actually about harassers) that show that the claims in the article about who is most targeted for abuse, you're both creating division and distracting from those who are in need of more help, for what?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21484347
At the very least this sentence would appear to violate statute of limitations :-) But the bigger problem is that the punishment has no deterrent value--there is no way for me to change my great-grandparent's behavior. And it is straightforwardly unjust to convict me for a crime I didn't commit.
I think this is actually a pretty racist idea--that because you share genes with someone, you are partially responsible for crimes they've committed. It would be like if someone in a small town committed a crime, and the town responded by having the police begin always harassing every member of the criminal's race.
What is being accomplished here?
I've been called an "entitled white dude" even on Hacker News (for not wanting my face to be used by Airbnb "anti-racist" algorithms.) The funny thing is, I'm not even white. I just like privacy.
It opened my eyes to tone policing.
It's not unique, try being Armenian, Kurdish, or Palestinian on twitter. It's intense, and you're outnumbered.
Incredible that the whole article (basically an ad) is full of attacks on people based on their gender and skin color, while singing the buzzwords of diversity snd tolerance. American society truly is bizarre.
> As she sees it, it's because the predominately white men who start, run and invest in most big tech companies are less likely to personally experience harassment.
And here's the single other instance of the word "men":
> As she sees it, it's because the predominately white men who start, run and invest in most big tech companies are less likely to personally experience harassment.
Basically every other mention of gender or race is some variant of "women and people of color are particularly targeted for online abuse". What are you reading as "attacks on people based on their gender and skin color"?
But, it is also a real thing. It’s all too common to see people say online “the statistics say you’re wrong, so it must’ve not happened”.
One’s life isn’t a collection of statistics, but of anecdotes.
With that being said, I enjoy using this phrase as a buzzword with my wife when she tries to tell me I’m wrong about an opinion I hold based off my lived experience. She finds it infuriating ;).
For instance if someone says they experienced X event, but statistics say that X only happens to 1% of people it's entirely fair to bring up the fact that empirical evidence suggests it's a rare occurrence.
It's spread far and wide. Coca-cola, for example, was just in the news for telling its workers to be less white.
To what extent the powerful people promoting critical race theory believe it -- as opposed to feeling compelled to promote it or be called racist and "canceled" -- is hard to determine.
Interestingly, it seems especially clear that Black and Indingeous leaders are especially skeptical of identity politics.
(at least this is my experience; I'm white.)
Get involved in mutual aid or mobilization for your local BLM / defund the police actions. I'll be surprised if this doesn't comport with your experience.
And yet...
the right part of the quote of what she dealt with is IMO relevant and should be quoted in full to keep the message intact (for anyone who hasn't read the actual article):
> "Everything from the casual mansplaining-reply guys to really targeted, persistent harassment and stalking and explicit threats that have led me to have to go to the police and file reports."
reply-guy is IMO (in its weakest form) a product of the twitter algorithm that divides and makes people try to interact in hope of getting seen. But it's the whole range she talks about.
Do you really find it surprising a lot of online harassment is targeted towards women and minorities? And is it abrasive to point that out?
In other words, phrases like 'mansplaining' are just as offensive as phrases like 'man-up' or 'stop being such a girl' when being said with a serious or negative tone; and I think the use of such language exacerbates the problem rather than simply pointing it out.
Yes, I think that language is abrasive and contrary to the goal of unification. No, I don't find it surprising that the internet can be a horrible place.
Punching up vs punching down
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm not sure how I feel about that. Certainly, individuals have the right to wall themselves off from counter-arguments, but polite public discourse between ideological opposites is a precious thing, as is the ability to sit down after a hard day at work and not read 10 spelling mistakes squeezed into a 280 character death threat.
If it's not happening on a particular platform, then preventing the possibility of it happening isn't going to outweigh even modest benefits.
The need for productive conversation between people of differing opinions will still exist and it is still critically important that it be solved, but if you're looking for diamonds, don't start digging in a dung heap.
The perception of the general public's social media output as a dungheap is tantamount to saying their posts are worthless and irredeemable, and that social media only has use as a broadcast platform for famous people. I think it's less like a dungheap and more like a big pile of every student paper from the entire world: mostly useless, but even some of the useless ones are genuine and took a lot of effort, and scattered throughout the pile there's some original and useful content.
There's a baby in with the bathwater, is what I'm saying here.
The problem that I see: Social media has emboldened people to look at attention and fame as something that has to be achieved. People actively fight over it. It's a pretty self absorbed approach to label people who disagree in an extreme manner (poes law here.. but trolls is what I was suggesting.. it's not far way from calling people nazis) .
Also, something to mention.. it's rather frustrating to see people dealing with being a minor to major internet celebrity. (That's what people are fighting over and for) For the most part that was a self selected goal to get there, and when they're there they don't like the bad side of it. The article in question completely ignores who she's referring to when she talks about "hate". (Is it a pro troll army, how does she even get to the ire of their attention, has she been pretty aggressive towards them?)
Sly edit: All those who downvote me support javascript and are haters. No reason to disagree with me. /s
If you’re a dude, it’s easy to assume that the issue only affects people who are “internet celebrities”. But that’s not the case.
According to the article.. the [implied numerous] people they classify as the enemy are there because of her "ground breaking work".
The average person doesn't get a huge wave of trolls by just being there. Being the focus of an NPR puff piece interview, I would say she is a minor celebrity.
Does she deserve the hate? The person no, the celebrity image: hesitant yes. (I have a hard time saying no to the second part due to the influence and analogues .. i.e. public figures/politicians)
I believe that people are probably fighting with the celebrity image/influence. I mean why would you care about some individual that had some opinions as is with the person in the article.
----
On to what you mentioned:
Yes, there are unhinged people. The levels of "abuse" (their definition, which I disagree with what's classified as) between someone that agressively tries to influence others and an individual. There are probably many reasons for their behavior, but I would agree that they aren't acceptable to society. Are group block lists a good reason for these individual 1 on 1 interactions? No, The Travis scenario is not healthy. (Scala reference right there.. it's a guy who maintains blocklists based on you who follow)
Or again, just ask women or other marginalized people in your life what their experience is like online. Tons of ordinary non-famous people I know have stories just like these.
[1] https://www.kapwing.com/blog/why-i-dont-use-my-real-photo/
Here's some research on the distribution of online harassment with respect to gender that's a bit more rigorous than "just ask women": https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/08944393198655...
Anyway, the problem with posting links to studies in online discussions is that it’s very easy to cherry-pick data that fit whatever conclusion you want to draw (here’s some research that comes to the opposite conclusion as yours [1]). Everyone ends up soapboxing and the discussion is fruitless.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2017/07/11/online-haras...
> Men and women experience and respond to online harassment in different ways. Overall, men are somewhat more likely to experience any form of harassing behavior online: 44% of men and 37% of women have experienced at least one of the six behaviors this study uses to define online harassment.
> Similarly, women are about twice as likely as men to say they have been targeted as a result of their gender (11% vs. 5%). Men, however, are around twice as likely as women to say they have experienced harassment online as a result of their political views (19% vs. 10%).
> By contrast, women – and especially young women – encounter sexualized forms of abuse at much higher rates than men. Some 21% of women ages 18 to 29 report being sexually harassed online, a figure that is more than double the share among men in the same age group (9%). In addition, roughly half (53%) of young women ages 18 to 29 say that someone has sent them explicit images they did not ask for. For many women, online harassment leaves a strong impression: 35% of women who have experienced any type of online harassment describe their most recent incident as either extremely or very upsetting, about twice the share among men (16%).
That comports with the article I cited…
> In seven days as “Eric Lu”, I got only one rude-ish message, and it was less severe or personal than comments I’d gotten before.
> I switched our message avatar from Eric to "Rachel," and immediately - less than one hour in after changing the photo - the heckling and name-calling resumed:
…and your study…
> Men experience more name-calling and physical threats, while women are more likely to experience sexual harassment (Pew Research Center, 2014; Powell & Henry, 2015). Pew Research Center (2014) additionally finds that young women experience certain severe forms of harassment at disproportionally high levels.
…and mine…
> In terms of specific experiences, men (30%) are modestly more likely than women (23%) to have been called offensive names online or to have received physical threats (12% vs. 8%).
> By contrast, women – and especially young women – encounter sexualized forms of abuse at much higher rates than men. Some 21% of women ages 18 to 29 report being sexually harassed online, a figure that is more than double the share among men in the same age group (9%). In addition, roughly half (53%) of young women ages 18 to 29 say that someone has sent them explicit images they did not ask for. For many women, online harassment leaves a strong impression: 35% of women who have experienced any type of online harassment describe their most recent incident as either extremely or very upsetting, about twice the share among men (16%).
Maybe "harassment" is too vague a word. It takes a big umbrella to cover both "offensive name-calling" and "stalking". But it's very weird to take the percentage of men vs. women who received any kind of online vitriol — regardless of the type or severity — and use that number as a proxy for the entire problem. Kind of like saying "more people each year get paper cuts than die in car crashes, so we should prioritize paper cut protection over auto safety."
> However, I've never had anyone persistently follow me around, even after I've taken explicit actions to evade them. The only people I know to which that has happened are women. That comports with the article I cited.
No, it does not. Men and women experience stalking at nearly equal rates. The difference was only 1% (6 vs 7%) in 2014 and 2% (6 vs 8%) in 2017. And men actually experience slightly more "sustained harassment" (7 vs 6% in '14, 8 vs 7% in '17). And a large disparity in physical threats (12% vs 8%). The only category of serious harassment where there's a large disparity between men and women is sexual harassment, 4% vs 6% in '14, 4% vs 8% in '17.
Even when we break down the type of harassment by severity, there isn't much of a gendered disparity.
> Kind of like saying "more people each year get paper cuts than die in car crashes, so we should prioritize paper cut protection over auto safety."
If you think a man receiving a threat of physical violence versus a woman receiving an unwanted dick-pic has the same level of disparity between a paper cut and a fatal car crash, then sure.
Ultimately I don't have that much stake in whether or not you choose to believe in anecdotes or data. Just know that when you tell people to "just ask women" be prepared to encounter people who have done so and gotten different answers than you. Just because you've encountered a stark disparity between your experience online and the women you've talked to doesn't mean everyone else's anecdotal experience is the same. For that reason empirical observations make a much better foundation for any claim - but sometimes they don't always comport with your personal experiences.
This does seem to be the problem in my view attention is a 0-sum game on one social media networks, and it's easier to get attention by being divisive and combative and by spreading outrage than by trying to actually engage with people. The places become toxic as a result.
Empathy is not imagining how you would feel if that shit was said to you.
Empathy is more like imagining how you would feel if that shit was said to you right after you'd lost all your money and had your dick amputated.
I think Block Party more or less acknowledges that it's not about blocking actual harassment (though it probably tries to do that, too), and more about insulating people from "unwanted content". What exactly this means is only alluded to, but seems to amount to the exclusion of people who disagree with the poster.
Is this actually about stopping harassment or more about the cultivation of echo-chambers? Are "unwanted reply-guys" people who e.g. point out identical male/female disparities among CS graduates in response to allegations that tech is biased against women? And what's the consequence of this kind of blocking? Is isolating people from viewpoints outside an accepted orthodoxy supposed to be a positive for society? If the "reply-guys" followed suit, and configured their Block Party to filter out people with opposing viewpoints, would that be a positive outcome?
If Block Party is effective in actually curbing actual harassment, stalking, etc. then that's a great effect and Tracy is right that it's something platforms should do themselves. But I get the sense that it's less about harassment and more about "unwanted content".
If someone is forced to wade through offensive crap to see the quality posts, well they had no choice in the matter.
The latter scenario is clearly worse and this service is not really flawed.
Although with the current implementation it looks like it doesn't really matter. All this app seems to do is make it so that all mentions by users outside a whitelist get sent to a spam folder: https://www.blockpartyapp.com/how-it-works/
As in all things, there's a trade-off. For me, the social benefit of a functional Block Party outweighs the risks. I take at face-value the founder's claimed issues with abusive content and assume that many others deal with similar. It is a shame that those doing the abuse had insufficient empathy, but that ship has already sailed.
At the end of the day, I don't believe you can win this one. Even if your concerns were overwhelming - which I think they are not. Simply, you cannot force people to read content they'd prefer not to. If this abuse is a genuine issue, someone will inevitably provide those tools. Either Block Party or another provider.
It really makes me feel like the goal is not freedom of speech, but forcing everyone to listen.
Is there some publishing rule against providing a link to the website/app that's being discussed?
For the app: https://www.blockpartyapp.com/signup/
I suspect that an as open protocol, it would be withstanding the current political problems of social media much better. Wikipedia, rss podcasts, the www, email... these are all pretty unscathed relative to twitter or fb. A lot of this comes down to user control.
Building on twitter or fb's platform isn't good enough. We badly need these networks to be displaced by open protocols. I suspect it's too late though. FB is already a too big to fail, economically. Ironic, considering their whole function could be filled bu a non-company or companies several order of magnitudes smaller.
Whether your problem is too much abuse or too much canceling, your problem is protocol squatters like fb and twitter. You have far fewer of these problems in your podcast feed, email, on wikipedia or whatever. It's not that culture problems don't exist. They exist everywhere, but the protocols don't amplify them like platforms do.
When I emailed Daniel (dang) about it ages ago it sounded like there wasn't much automation in moderation on HN. If HN doesn't have the tools, then I expect random Discord, subreddit, etc moderators are also doing their work by having humans wade through manually.
I think Tracy Chou / Block Party are more likely to succeed than the platforms are, since in this case the incentives are actually aligned.
This whole things sounds like a Fat Bastard:
I can't stop eating. I eat because I'm unhappy, and I'm unhappy because I eat. It's a vicious cycle. Now, if you'll excuse me, there's someone I'd like to get in touch with and forgive... myself.
A global ban on internet advertising, if it were possible, would probably be one of the few solutions to all of this mess that attacks the root cause.
For better or for worse social media can provide a lot of social capital and real capital.
Platforms like Twitter have unique platform dynamics which make "dogpiling" and stuff like that particularly bad (no current social media platform is as good at handling moderation and abuse as USENET was...). Solving that is awesome.
Mansplaining is a particular activity, an obnoxious one. The "man" part of the term is in reference to men being far more likely to engage in it.
"Mansplaining" is not equivalent to "[a] man explaining". There's another term for that: "explaining".
Additionally, other people you don't know will still be able to see your tweets. You can still yell into the void. So, it's a public twitter account without the potential annoyances of a public twitter account.
Something about this degree of forced intimacy feels very unnatural; maybe because it is -- it's to some extent engagement hacking meant to juice ad dollars. So I appreciate the desire to try and encourage more intimate, tightly woven spaces over faceless sprawl. Unfortunately, the problem with rejecting the world and retreating into the woods is that you forfeit the commons.
And that is the issue here. We won't solve the myriad issues of the public commons this way. What is needed is frankly a more ambitious and systematic solution, one that addresses the effective and perverse incentive structure for producing and selling conspiracy theories, tailor made to every tribe.