Trolls has special enzymes to convert ambient CO2 into glucose so quite hard to practically avoid it.
IMO the only way to suppress trolls is by silencing them systematically, consistently, un-emotionally and thoroughly till their brain becomes confused as to what outcomes were to be expected. Any sign of life or gamble-able metrics coming through reignites their reward system.
How the hell do people think it's okay to call and threaten/harass someone just because they didn't pick your favorite poll option for their project? Wow.
It’s one of the worst trends in today’s culture. It’s ok to disagree with someone - even vehemently so. Threats of death have no place in convincing someone. It’s just tyranny.
It's not tyranny, and nobody is having their life threatened. It's harmless (though very annoying, of course) fun by bored internet strangers.
It's very difficult for me to understand how someone could read this situation so seriously - have you never been/observed teenage boys in their natural habitat?
These are not the people destroying lives by having people fired, ostracised, banned and depersoned over social or political facts and opinions.
Did you actually read the article? This individual received hundreds of vile messages and his contacts and family members were harassed.
If you think this represents teenagers in their natural habitat, either that natural habitat is a jail or you’re not aware of how deeply fucked up this is.
Frankly, the little fuckers should all serve time for this. If you wanna act like a gangster from the safety of mommy’s basement, maybe it’s time to meet some real gangsters.
>This individual claims they received hundreds of vile messages
Right. Looks like he deleted a message from an individual asking him for proof. I kept the archive of that.
https://archive.is/9j5zn
What's even your point? Why would I show my real name? Why is everyone blind at this? Someone asked him for proof and he simply deleted the comment. Is this how would you behave in that situation? If yes, you shouldn't be part of any FOSS movement.
Real names are not an indicator of trustworthiness or maturity, especially online, where making your real-life personal data too publicly available is just asking for trouble from turds like these (among many other bad actors that make up entirely too much of the modern Internet).
I do totally agree with you about the harassment and gaslighting though. Humanity as a whole has tolerated this sort of behavior far longer than it should have. Something's gotta be done about it. Mebbe we need to start prosecuting public death threats as a crime again?
> If you think this represents teenagers in their natural habitat
The internet? Yes? It's not _many_ teenagers, but there's always some who enjoy threatening others for laughs especially when there's no possible retribution. It's why online gaming with strangers always carries a risk of getting random abuse.
It's the adults who run websites that encourage this culture who should know better.
So, perhaps a minority of teenagers demonstrate extreme antisocial traits? I wish courts were advanced enough to start prosecuting their parents. This has to end and frankly, if it’s going to take silver bracelets and jail time, there are a lot worse uses for incarceration.
These pleas to lock up teenagers and their parents over speech are antisocial. Good thing there is the first amendment to protect you from someone using the state to personally seek revenge for any offense you caused.
Mature response, I see you live in Canada so maybe you don't understand free speech, but harassment has to be a pattern reprated by an individual against another individual or deprive someone of access to some resource and a threat needs to be credible, but thanks for weighing in on how you think another countries laws should be interpreted.
I'm more interested in ethics than the law since I'm not a lawyer. Hopefully someone challenges the constitutionality of that law though because it seems overly broad to me..
"The utilization of telecommunication devices without disclosing (one's) IDENTITY to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass any person at the called number or who receives the communications." Like you're annoying me over the internet right now and I'd like to have you charged and sentenced to 2 years for federal cyber stalking ?? Lol, that seems appropriate to you? I give up, have a good one buddy.
No one is harassing you. We're already in a precarious enough situation with all the extreme content auto bans. Maybe we could all filter our own content or create some passive barriers, what you've suggested is an over reaction that would inevitability cause more suffering than it prevented - deescalation is what is needed not escalation.
No shit. I've never claimed to be harassed. However, the engineer involved in this thread was. You and others have come onto this site and continued the harassment via telecommunications devices. But please tell me more about how to deescalate conflict, specifically how continuing to gaslight the engineer on another site is a form of de-escalation.
>You and others have come onto this site and continued the harassment via telecommunications devices.
I use this forum everyday because it is a place for civilized communication with strangers, let's keep it that way, eh? This suggestion that I'm gaslighting or cyberstalking you is why the laws that define those terms are incompatible with a Free and Open society. You're just mad and want the government to make you feel better by getting some revenge for you and don't care if that effects other peoples ability to speak in the future about something actually important.
> This individual received hundreds of vile messages and his contacts and family members were harassed.
Yet there is no proof any of this happened. If le evil 4chan hackers truly did any of this, wouldn't you expect his personal info with telephone number to be posted in the 4chan threads?
> "Threats of death have no place in convincing someone."
What I still don't understand is how we got to the point where it's not considered straight up illegal (like it used to be at one time in the not so distant past).
As recently as my own childhood (mere single-digit decades ago) vocalizing a death threat aloud with any sort of seriousness could get you in a mess of trouble with the law, and putting it in print could get you a night in jail to think about it at the very least.
That's just it. It's not in print. Print means that you were in a place at a time, and you can be tracked.
On the Internet, you could be anywhere in the world. It's hard to track you. Not that hard, since most people don't even try to cover their tracks, but it's out of the hands of local police, and it's way, way, way off the radar of the FBI.
Unless you're a politician or perhaps a major celebrity, they don't even bother. They'll just assume that it's some rando in the middle of nowhere who didn't mean it, doesn't know where you are, and are content to just issue the threat. And 99.99% of the time, they're right. Comforting, huh?
It is illegal. And I personally think that if the FBI started taking these seriously, the number would drop substantially. Probably not enough to make the Internet a less bad place, but I'd be curious to see if it helped. I think that the anonymous death and rape threats are the core of all of the rest of the hostility, making it seem reasonable to merely use abusive language.
By "print" I meant putting the words down in a more tangible and provable medium than simply saying the words aloud, which if only heard by one person, is easily enough deniable. Your word against theirs. Printed threats were took more seriously by law enforcement when I was young because those words didn't vanish into the ether the moment you were done with them. They stayed where they were placed (on paper usually) and were therefore usable as evidence, same as recorded (video or audio) threats.
As to tracking the perpetrator, in some cases it's exceedingly hard to trace them down online, but in many of these types of cases, the person or persons making these types of threats make little to zero efforts to cover their tracks (of which there are many on the modern Internet), and would be child's play for law enforcement to trace down, especially with even the smallest bit of cooperation from ISPs.
That having been said, I'm actually against wholesale spying on the entire userbase by ISPs, even though many of them are guilty of that already, but when someone reports a crime to them that involves actual risk to the safety of others, turning over user records for the violator (easily determined who by simple time/date matching in the logs) isn't going too far really, I would think?
I dunno. Maybe I'm wrong. Perhaps I just need to accept that everything bad in the world is only gonna get worse no matter what anyone does or says about it. It's so hard to tell anymore from day to day…
People to want to have some measurable impact on the world. Some of those same people also feel powerless to effect change, through socially acceptable means. Couple that desperation with an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, and you have someone who just wants to be noticed by the world, regardless of any negative consequences. People also love to be part of a group - and for the same reasons, they don't care if that group is a harassment campaign.
They will read this thread and think "hey, I helped do that!", and get a small buzz - just like most of us feel if one of our own projects is featured on HN.
They know it's "not okay", but they just don't care.
This is a massive oversimplification, but I think it goes some way to explain why these sorts of things happen.
You're mostly just missing the quasi-Darwinian dynamic of places like 4chan where these teenage boys, clinical psychopaths and the like all gather anonymously to compete over who's most flamboyantly too cool for school, so that trying to rein things in makes you a loser by definition.
Pointing out that the garbage dump also has a nice re-use station and a recycling sorter doesn't make the parts of it on fire emit fewer noxious fumes.
Sure: I don't have any strong opinions one way or the other about Not All 4chan so feel free to amend "4chan" to "the worst bits of 4chan" if you think that's more accurate. But IME when you hear someone say "no, that's just /b/" then it seems that usually you hear some other story pretty soon afterwards which suggests that it's not just /b/.
If you look at any board with high enough traffic it pretty much resembles /b/ and /pol/. The thread on 4chan's technology board /g/ is currently filled with people going off on trans people, "cucks", liberals and communists.
Honestly, having sporadically visited the site since 2006 it's pretty much a cess pool now. It was never great, but since the mid 2010's it's more the negative, waste of time to read kind of deal.
It's because of the very design of the board software and the resulting user experience that every 4chan board (and those of its sister sites as well) becomes a cesspool of anti-social behavior once they go beyond a certain traffic threshold. The amount of negativity on any given board no matter the topic is actually proportional to the amount of threads per a given time.
The reason for that is the purging of threads that won't get bumped enough combined with the sorting by engagement not by actual votes like on Hackernews for example. This creates a high incentive to post controversial and upsetting stuff that will ensure the survival of one's thread and rewards trolls and extremists who are particuarly successful in employing that behavior. On small boards threads can exist for hours or even days. Whereas on large boards most threads will only last a few minutes, UNLESS the OP and the first few replies follow certain behavior patterns that have been proven to be successful for the survival of threads on large Futaba Channel type image boards. If the OP and the first few replies set the right tone for the following replies to follow, they will keep that thread successfully afloat.
The type of posts that will keep a thread alive on 4chan must be heavily transgressive, controversial, use in-group language and references that makes it easier to identify out-group "newf**s" etc, and be overall exciting and enagaging. It's tickling the short term reward system in the user's brains after all. This is how the mechanism of purging threads trains 4chan's user base to behave like the assholes of the internet. They are being manipulated by software design in an evolutionary matter. Nobody wants to spent time creating unsuccesful threads with little engagement that get deleted after just a few moments, it's frustrating, embarrassing and boring. So people who don't fit in either leave 4chan or adapt. That's why the site's "culture" and memes seems actually quite consistent and conforming (to only its own rules of course).
I find that's a huge mindfuck and manipulation of behavior, while not intended by the original designers of these types of image board software, it's still a thing to be aware of how these sites control their user's behavior. It's funny how this actually contrasts with the self-perception of their users as being based and elitist. They're actually in a huge online re-education camp that keeps them hooked via small bursts of endorphin.
The boards' topics have only in part to do with the toxicity of views and behaviors expressed on them. I propose the hypothesis that it's actually the limited amount of threads being kept at any single time that is a huge factor that increases evolutionary pressure on the user base. In result it's what rewards toxic behavior on sites like 4chan, and this board mechanism is responsible for training a subculture of young men to believe that this is acceptable or empowering behavior online. So they excert this learned behavior outside the mechanisms of image boards and also bring it into the real world and into politics where they are being used by political professional actors for campaigns of course since their previously trained behavior and thought patterns that get activated by those political manipulators are not based on reflection and introspection but on manipulation and getting rewards (in the form of "lulz". Thus "owning" your opponent takes the place of real intellectual political debates). Decreasing the amount of allowed threads and increasing the user traffic will both accelerate this behavioral re-education process in its users. 4chan and the like as a mass propaganda tool to manipulate a subset of the population is excellent! It's like an army boot camp for political trolls, if it didn't exist you'd have to invent and engineer it like 4chan.
I think your analysis is true, but it's important to add that all websites that reward posts one way or another experience similar phenomena. The way posts are rewarded tends to select for a certain types of posts. Twitter, for example, generally rewards for engagement and enforces short posts, and I think that's why a culture of political gotchas, confrontation and aggressiveness and is so prevalent there. And I know for a fact this isn't just an attribute of English Twitter. While moderation removes right wing extremist politics, mostly only on English Twitter, this only imperfectly mitigates one manifestation of a reward structure that encourages users to behave aggressively to one another. And again, if you look at non-English Twitter, even this is missing and in general, behaviour is not much different than 4chan.
Yep, that's definitely something you can observe. I think we've had a rich history so far of experiencing different types of online community software (newsgroups, web comment sections, IRC, BB forums, myspace, tumblr, etc) and I think we can classify them by the effect they have on their users' interaction with one another. Shifts in overall online behavior (at least perceived by the general public and the old school press) can be attributed to a shift in software used, I think.
Many of the old online communities still exist and often times the old conversations and interactions are still online. This would make for interesting and I think fruitful and enlightening material for social studies.
Ask anyone who has participated in various online communities and they can tell you pretty well how moderation and other users influence the overall social conduct in the respective online spaces quite differently. Most people can at least tell you about specific shifts in their online community and it would be interesting to find out what decisions of the site owners or software developers created this shift, if at all.
I think as a software user interface designer you have a responsibility to be aware of your creation's psychological and behavioral effects. Sadly only the big social media companies really invest in this research and weaponize it for profit maximization. But I think this knowledge should become more widely available and more people especially the users should be made aware of it.
To me people on Twitter and on 4chan aren't free in the sense of the enlightenment:
“Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another.”
I like this analysis, though I personally believe the current culture and prevalent behavior that you describe as "toxic" has more to do with anonymity in and of itself, as well as how it's moderated, rather than how the site functions. Some of the slower boards, and spinoff sites have a vastly different culture as a result of this, and the contrast is sometimes jarring.
From the few comments I've read by the original creator of the site, Moot, he described the function of the site as a "survival of the fittest", where the best and most interesting ideas would stick around. He said this in the context of memes, as when the site used to be known for those, but I believe it holds some value, as people generally don't forget things even after the thread's gone, and it gets brought up again, or it gets saved in some image folder. Unfortunately, controversial content will always get the most engagement on any platform, be it through upvotes, bumps, or the sheer number of posts. You can see that on sites like this just as well, but also on the news on TV. Bad news reaches far and wide, that's just human behavior. Online this mostly becomes a question of how it's moderated and if you can even moderate it after a certain point. I believe Moot eventually gave up on this after events like Chanology and gamergate were really taxing on him, and I'm not sure the new site's moderator is very invested in regards to this.
It's interesting to note, that instigating raids is a bannable offense (rule 4), and I've witnessed many posts calling for this get deleted. But often, especially on this site, this cannot be contained once the cat's out of the bag, as just hopping on the next IP address is enough to continue posting, and people quickly move to other means of communication.
I don't remotely condone this but I do see how they'd want to punish someone for reneging on a social contract, thus making their efforts pointless, and since it's 4chan they went extremely disproportionate with the punishment.
So perhaps these 4chan-ers who think disproportionate punishment appropriate should themselves experience some disproportionate punishment - e.g., handcuffs court dates, court costs, and jail time - Book 'em, and see how funny they & their parents think it is then.
Just because you want to punish someone for 'breaking a social contract' does not give you free license to become judge, jury, and executioner with any penalty you feel like at the moment.
The next step to that is maybe we feel like they are irredeemable sick f*ks already showing strong dark triad traits, and society is better off without them, so off with their heads. Since we can all dish out whatever penalty wwe feel like when we feel wronged, no problem, right?
>So perhaps these 4chan-ers who think disproportionate punishment appropriate should themselves experience some disproportionate punishment - e.g., handcuffs court dates, court costs, and jail time - Book 'em, and see how funny they & their parents think it is then.
That seems potentially proportionate but in general you seem to share (a lesser version of) their mindset - that disproportionate punishments are fine when it's against those who have wronged you.
That was my (first) point, too though I am not sure if there were death threats - ctrl-f 'death' returned nothing on the issue, and surely he'd mention them while explaining the harassments.
This case may or may not involve death threats, but a great many others do. They're very common. So common that he may not even have bothered to mention it.
So I was speaking more generally. I believe that the FBI should start taking Internet death threats seriously, even though the fact is that the vast majority of them aren't. They have a serious chilling effect and are already felonies. All that would be needed would be the will to enforce existing laws.
They're not prioritized because it would require a lot of work just to scare some kid (who would almost certainly be given little to no sentence). But the larger effect might be more significant.
Not so much. I'm trying to illustrate thae consequences of that view, and the results of applying standards resembling the 4chan-ers views to the 4chan-ers themselves.
I.e., they see X as appropriate punishment, they should themselves be subject to X -- let them live by their own rules. Currently, they do not - they make their own rules, make all kinds of threats, and then just laugh about it on their chats in their basements.
What is actually effective is highly reliable and under-proportionate penalties, but that would require massive tracking systems that almost none of us would be willing to even consider, much less implement. E.g., if every anti-social act resulted in a fine between $5-$500 (scaled for income/wealth so it wasn't just a license for rich ppl to be a*holes), it would rapidly decline. But it would require a nearly insane tracking and judicial system.
I was in the threads and I didn't see a single person posting personal information or encouraging harassment.
Cookieengineer randomly decided to claim that "70 people" had called him to harass him. He's now deleted the tweet and there's absolutely no evidence that anyone called him or that his number was even accessible online.
I dunno, 15 years ago the doxxing and death threats was reserved to child molesters and animal abusers, and vote flooding done just for fun. But I guess people got too drunk on that power.
My memories are fairly vague, but I do remember the "Pool's closed" raid leading to some random grandmother getting flooded with phone calls from /b/tards.
The Chris Chan saga also started in 2007, from what I just looked up.
There was definitely a gradual decline, but it was happening even back in the 00s.
I think it’s gotten worse, especially after GamerGate led to people tasting political power, but I think “reserved” was never completely true - even in the 2000s it had the same reputation for leaking unpleasantly. Mobs are simply volatile.
It's likely not the same people but instead a slow culture shift as new people come in and push the limits a little bit more. There's also a feedback loop as the more extreme actions will drive out less extreme users and attract more extreme users.
"4chan was always this bad" is a surviving meme with no merit.
10 years ago you could have a thread without /pol/ buzzwords coming up. 10 years ago the snarl word of the day was "hipster" for god's sake, you can look back through the archives and see the decline.
Depends on the board. I have an RSS feed of /pol/ which provides me one of the best sources of unfiltered news and social trends available, without having to wade through any of the other shit on there. Plenty of bright autists in there.
Bear in mind the boards, the culture, etc. shift over time and vary. Some boards might be semi-normal (it's still 4chan) while others are toxic. Hard to tell, but looks like the /pol/ group is somewhat behind this, which is the political snakepit of the site.
And the author of the temporary-audacity fork has refused to actually evidence the "spam mails" or phone calls, probably because you cannot find either of his addresses online using his username and thus it makes no sense for them to be spammed.
What happened here is that they had a poll, /g/ turned up, suggested a name and got it voted in. He said no because democracy only matters when the guy in charge gets what he wants, and now he's crying like a bitch and trying to rally equally bitchy people to his side. Simple. He even posted the threads that debunk himself but I'm also sure he deleted the tweets with them so he couldn't burn himself any more.
The reality of the situation is that the repo creator can't handle internet banter slighty hotter than Facebook for the elderly, got mad, fed the trolls and made things up.
The given deletion reason was pretty funny, too: “Offensive; Derogatory naming. (short for "special need"; a person who
acts like a complete retard.)”[1]
His phone number and IRL identity are not easily available and he hasn’t posted any proof. The guy can’t even code C and only does webdev.
Edit: lmao seething
Learn how to google hack and check his ”cookiengineer” accounts for yourself
If you have to resort to brazen and ignorant reddit-tier downvoting instead of looking for actual evidence and just shouting ”TRUST VICTAMS” you honestly do not deserve the internet.
You don't understand the issue, make no effort to do so and already know the answer. You made up your mind before entering this thread. Perhaps time for some self-reflection?
The threads on this matter are publicly visible on the technology board and there's no indication of personal contacts such as phone numbers being out there. It also seems a bit exaggerated to have 600 chats open simultaneously for something so small. Could this be misrepresented for internet points? The "harassments" on github seemed to be limited on name proposals..
It's been a long time since I've seen a 4chan raid, and they are always ruthless. The author of the fork's comment sounds about right. This isn't cancel culture though, this is older and angrier.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
The other week they killed a SNES emulator engineer doing the same thing. (Yes I know 4chan and kiwi farms are different but it's the same old story). Law enforcement needs to get serious about tracking these kids down and putting them in prison.
Their responsibility there is highly objectionable. This week, they collaborated to talk a different confused and lost young man out of pursuing transsexualism, saving his life in the spiritual sense and, very likely, the physical also.
It's also hard to say that you've "killed" someone if you had zero physical involvement in somebody's death. But I guess words are very flexible these days.
It's also hard to say you've killed someone when there's zero existing evidence of that somebody's death as well. It's also hard to say that you've killed someone when you never did that, because y'know, message boards are not one person.
If you take out a hit on someone you have zero physical involvement. If you order troops into a certain death situation you have zero physical involvement. If you drive someone to suicide you have zero physical involvement.. Where did you get the notion you need to be pulling the trigger to be morally responsible for someone's death? I call that killing.
If you ordered a hit, you ordered a hit. Why don't you just say that?
> Where did you get the notion you need to be pulling the trigger to be morally responsible for someone's death?
"Where" is a weird question since I didn't get that notion in the first place. But "being morally responsible for somebody's death" is a vastly more nebulous notion than homicide.
I think people have grown accustomed to moderation that immediately lose their cool when this moderation ceases to exist. Rather trying to argue or prove their skills, they should've immediately shut[^1] them down ("this name sounds bad and to reduce spamming I'll delete those issues") and proceed to not engage further, or as it was said back in the day "don't feed the trolls". Checking the 4chan archives it seem folks there became more engaged when the author started getting angry rather for the name.
[^1]: But saying something that will allude to politically correctness ("cannot use it because sneed is slang? for special needs") or indifference ("fuck the haters") will be like throwing gas in the fire.
Sneed isn't slang for "special needs" - its a reference to a throw away joke in The Simpsons. "Sneeds Feed and Seed, formerly Chucks" - the humour in the joke is s/eed/uck/g.
Its relevant in this context as the "joke" is the name is now "Sneeds Sneedacity, formerly Auds".
the problem is that the majority of the internet users are clueless in general and they act as a mob.
one ill-minded person spewed utter lies against a project name and then the mob jumped along him to lynch the author and the maintainer.
those people don't have the decency to apologize or even try to restore what they destroyed. They only become louder and louder and ofc, try to make some money on top of it.
You would be surprised at how little people bother to look up information nowadays, even if it's five seconds away with Google.
Don't go on hearsay, or even just a glance of Google, actually investigate what you're looking for.
Edit: Boy I sure do love powertripping bundles of sticks who flag anything they can't fucking use their lips to smack down. Invalid clowns.
About the greatest sin you can commit on the Internet is to ask for participation openly and then ignore it.
It happened to YC over their “HN votes for who gets a grant” and it happened to this dude over “What do I call this fork?”
Contrastingly, Pitbull is beloved for his choice to go to Kodiak after a joke campaign to send him there managed to manipulate the Facebook poll he posted.
Of course people will have half a dozen reasons why their participation in this thing is meaningful but this sort of thing is a strong predictor for their behaviour.
What about turning the phone or at least the sound off? People could "raid" my phone number I would barely notice it at all if not for the (now small) call UI poping up. Seems people really like to play the victim even when the fix cannot be simpler.
I wouldn't do that. But give me a single piece of proof that his phone number is 4channel. The fact is people are searching for his number, but it's nowhere to be found.
>Why is this comment being flagged - is asking for evidence bad now?
Seems so.
The author, cookieguy when challenged about these claims starts deleting tweets/comments they have made.
It seems an awful lot to me that the cookieguy is drumming all this up on purpose to get peoples attention or sympathy, etc like you suggest may be the case. Some of the screenshots I've seen where he goes on huge rants that make little sense tell me the guy may have some mental issues.
Reminder the author of the "privacy fork" of Audacity worked to de-anonymize TOR and I2P traffic. Concerns expressed by users on the project's github page kept getting deleted.
Yeah, I saw that too, but he only posted claims and not any proof.
It looks kinda shady.
Well I didn't like the elimination of alternatives from the github poll because they didn't follow the agenda of the mods of the fork, but now I am alarmed with this thing.
They haven't even started working on the project and they are already talking about monetizing it.
How are you going to ask for people's money if you haven't done any work?
Seem to me like those professional victims that make money from "soft" people. I hope there was no-one who was guilt-tripped to throw money to those individuals.
====
the sad part is that websites like hn are echo chamber for twitter drama and on top of that incubate and protect such narratives.
It strikes me that the real mistake here was setting up an online poll to name something in 2021. If you're going to do that, and if you're going to include a joke name you're not willing to accept if it wins, you're kind of inviting 4chan to the party, and by this time we all know how that's likely to go.
119 comments
[ 0.14 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] threadIMO the only way to suppress trolls is by silencing them systematically, consistently, un-emotionally and thoroughly till their brain becomes confused as to what outcomes were to be expected. Any sign of life or gamble-able metrics coming through reignites their reward system.
4chan folks voted for the name
after refusing to accept the name (since the the fork had a serious intent), the folks started to threaten him and his family
for what followed and author’s comment, see his exact comment: https://github.com/temporary-audacity/audacity/issues/48#iss...
It's very difficult for me to understand how someone could read this situation so seriously - have you never been/observed teenage boys in their natural habitat?
These are not the people destroying lives by having people fired, ostracised, banned and depersoned over social or political facts and opinions.
If you think this represents teenagers in their natural habitat, either that natural habitat is a jail or you’re not aware of how deeply fucked up this is.
Frankly, the little fuckers should all serve time for this. If you wanna act like a gangster from the safety of mommy’s basement, maybe it’s time to meet some real gangsters.
This individual claims they received hundreds of vile messages. We can't confirm that.
I operate here under my real name. What is your real name? Where do you work? Why are you choosing to continue this harassment?
I do totally agree with you about the harassment and gaslighting though. Humanity as a whole has tolerated this sort of behavior far longer than it should have. Something's gotta be done about it. Mebbe we need to start prosecuting public death threats as a crime again?
The internet? Yes? It's not _many_ teenagers, but there's always some who enjoy threatening others for laughs especially when there's no possible retribution. It's why online gaming with strangers always carries a risk of getting random abuse.
It's the adults who run websites that encourage this culture who should know better.
https://www.thefire.org/resources/free-speech-freshman-orien...
https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/USCODE-2011-title47/USCO...
https://github.com/tenacityteam/tenacity/issues/99
In good news, the police are involved now. I hope that every single piece of trash involved goes to prison for a very long time.
I use this forum everyday because it is a place for civilized communication with strangers, let's keep it that way, eh? This suggestion that I'm gaslighting or cyberstalking you is why the laws that define those terms are incompatible with a Free and Open society. You're just mad and want the government to make you feel better by getting some revenge for you and don't care if that effects other peoples ability to speak in the future about something actually important.
Yet there is no proof any of this happened. If le evil 4chan hackers truly did any of this, wouldn't you expect his personal info with telephone number to be posted in the 4chan threads?
What I still don't understand is how we got to the point where it's not considered straight up illegal (like it used to be at one time in the not so distant past).
As recently as my own childhood (mere single-digit decades ago) vocalizing a death threat aloud with any sort of seriousness could get you in a mess of trouble with the law, and putting it in print could get you a night in jail to think about it at the very least.
On the Internet, you could be anywhere in the world. It's hard to track you. Not that hard, since most people don't even try to cover their tracks, but it's out of the hands of local police, and it's way, way, way off the radar of the FBI.
Unless you're a politician or perhaps a major celebrity, they don't even bother. They'll just assume that it's some rando in the middle of nowhere who didn't mean it, doesn't know where you are, and are content to just issue the threat. And 99.99% of the time, they're right. Comforting, huh?
It is illegal. And I personally think that if the FBI started taking these seriously, the number would drop substantially. Probably not enough to make the Internet a less bad place, but I'd be curious to see if it helped. I think that the anonymous death and rape threats are the core of all of the rest of the hostility, making it seem reasonable to merely use abusive language.
But I doubt we'll ever find out.
As to tracking the perpetrator, in some cases it's exceedingly hard to trace them down online, but in many of these types of cases, the person or persons making these types of threats make little to zero efforts to cover their tracks (of which there are many on the modern Internet), and would be child's play for law enforcement to trace down, especially with even the smallest bit of cooperation from ISPs.
That having been said, I'm actually against wholesale spying on the entire userbase by ISPs, even though many of them are guilty of that already, but when someone reports a crime to them that involves actual risk to the safety of others, turning over user records for the violator (easily determined who by simple time/date matching in the logs) isn't going too far really, I would think?
I dunno. Maybe I'm wrong. Perhaps I just need to accept that everything bad in the world is only gonna get worse no matter what anyone does or says about it. It's so hard to tell anymore from day to day…
I'm not surprised that they don't. But I really think they should.
They will read this thread and think "hey, I helped do that!", and get a small buzz - just like most of us feel if one of our own projects is featured on HN.
They know it's "not okay", but they just don't care.
This is a massive oversimplification, but I think it goes some way to explain why these sorts of things happen.
Honestly, having sporadically visited the site since 2006 it's pretty much a cess pool now. It was never great, but since the mid 2010's it's more the negative, waste of time to read kind of deal.
The reason for that is the purging of threads that won't get bumped enough combined with the sorting by engagement not by actual votes like on Hackernews for example. This creates a high incentive to post controversial and upsetting stuff that will ensure the survival of one's thread and rewards trolls and extremists who are particuarly successful in employing that behavior. On small boards threads can exist for hours or even days. Whereas on large boards most threads will only last a few minutes, UNLESS the OP and the first few replies follow certain behavior patterns that have been proven to be successful for the survival of threads on large Futaba Channel type image boards. If the OP and the first few replies set the right tone for the following replies to follow, they will keep that thread successfully afloat.
The type of posts that will keep a thread alive on 4chan must be heavily transgressive, controversial, use in-group language and references that makes it easier to identify out-group "newf**s" etc, and be overall exciting and enagaging. It's tickling the short term reward system in the user's brains after all. This is how the mechanism of purging threads trains 4chan's user base to behave like the assholes of the internet. They are being manipulated by software design in an evolutionary matter. Nobody wants to spent time creating unsuccesful threads with little engagement that get deleted after just a few moments, it's frustrating, embarrassing and boring. So people who don't fit in either leave 4chan or adapt. That's why the site's "culture" and memes seems actually quite consistent and conforming (to only its own rules of course).
I find that's a huge mindfuck and manipulation of behavior, while not intended by the original designers of these types of image board software, it's still a thing to be aware of how these sites control their user's behavior. It's funny how this actually contrasts with the self-perception of their users as being based and elitist. They're actually in a huge online re-education camp that keeps them hooked via small bursts of endorphin.
The boards' topics have only in part to do with the toxicity of views and behaviors expressed on them. I propose the hypothesis that it's actually the limited amount of threads being kept at any single time that is a huge factor that increases evolutionary pressure on the user base. In result it's what rewards toxic behavior on sites like 4chan, and this board mechanism is responsible for training a subculture of young men to believe that this is acceptable or empowering behavior online. So they excert this learned behavior outside the mechanisms of image boards and also bring it into the real world and into politics where they are being used by political professional actors for campaigns of course since their previously trained behavior and thought patterns that get activated by those political manipulators are not based on reflection and introspection but on manipulation and getting rewards (in the form of "lulz". Thus "owning" your opponent takes the place of real intellectual political debates). Decreasing the amount of allowed threads and increasing the user traffic will both accelerate this behavioral re-education process in its users. 4chan and the like as a mass propaganda tool to manipulate a subset of the population is excellent! It's like an army boot camp for political trolls, if it didn't exist you'd have to invent and engineer it like 4chan.
Many of the old online communities still exist and often times the old conversations and interactions are still online. This would make for interesting and I think fruitful and enlightening material for social studies.
Ask anyone who has participated in various online communities and they can tell you pretty well how moderation and other users influence the overall social conduct in the respective online spaces quite differently. Most people can at least tell you about specific shifts in their online community and it would be interesting to find out what decisions of the site owners or software developers created this shift, if at all.
I think as a software user interface designer you have a responsibility to be aware of your creation's psychological and behavioral effects. Sadly only the big social media companies really invest in this research and weaponize it for profit maximization. But I think this knowledge should become more widely available and more people especially the users should be made aware of it.
To me people on Twitter and on 4chan aren't free in the sense of the enlightenment:
“Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another.”
From the few comments I've read by the original creator of the site, Moot, he described the function of the site as a "survival of the fittest", where the best and most interesting ideas would stick around. He said this in the context of memes, as when the site used to be known for those, but I believe it holds some value, as people generally don't forget things even after the thread's gone, and it gets brought up again, or it gets saved in some image folder. Unfortunately, controversial content will always get the most engagement on any platform, be it through upvotes, bumps, or the sheer number of posts. You can see that on sites like this just as well, but also on the news on TV. Bad news reaches far and wide, that's just human behavior. Online this mostly becomes a question of how it's moderated and if you can even moderate it after a certain point. I believe Moot eventually gave up on this after events like Chanology and gamergate were really taxing on him, and I'm not sure the new site's moderator is very invested in regards to this.
It's interesting to note, that instigating raids is a bannable offense (rule 4), and I've witnessed many posts calling for this get deleted. But often, especially on this site, this cannot be contained once the cat's out of the bag, as just hopping on the next IP address is enough to continue posting, and people quickly move to other means of communication.
Just because you want to punish someone for 'breaking a social contract' does not give you free license to become judge, jury, and executioner with any penalty you feel like at the moment.
The next step to that is maybe we feel like they are irredeemable sick f*ks already showing strong dark triad traits, and society is better off without them, so off with their heads. Since we can all dish out whatever penalty wwe feel like when we feel wronged, no problem, right?
That seems potentially proportionate but in general you seem to share (a lesser version of) their mindset - that disproportionate punishments are fine when it's against those who have wronged you.
So I was speaking more generally. I believe that the FBI should start taking Internet death threats seriously, even though the fact is that the vast majority of them aren't. They have a serious chilling effect and are already felonies. All that would be needed would be the will to enforce existing laws.
They're not prioritized because it would require a lot of work just to scare some kid (who would almost certainly be given little to no sentence). But the larger effect might be more significant.
I.e., they see X as appropriate punishment, they should themselves be subject to X -- let them live by their own rules. Currently, they do not - they make their own rules, make all kinds of threats, and then just laugh about it on their chats in their basements.
What is actually effective is highly reliable and under-proportionate penalties, but that would require massive tracking systems that almost none of us would be willing to even consider, much less implement. E.g., if every anti-social act resulted in a fine between $5-$500 (scaled for income/wealth so it wasn't just a license for rich ppl to be a*holes), it would rapidly decline. But it would require a nearly insane tracking and judicial system.
Cookieengineer randomly decided to claim that "70 people" had called him to harass him. He's now deleted the tweet and there's absolutely no evidence that anyone called him or that his number was even accessible online.
The Chris Chan saga also started in 2007, from what I just looked up.
There was definitely a gradual decline, but it was happening even back in the 00s.
10 years ago you could have a thread without /pol/ buzzwords coming up. 10 years ago the snarl word of the day was "hipster" for god's sake, you can look back through the archives and see the decline.
I haven't been a 4chan user for a long time (pre-Sarkeesian era), so my comment shouldn't be interpreted as an expert opinion on the decline of 4chan.
That said, doxxing and raiding someone in this way just because they're unpopular wouldn't have been out of the ordinary in 2010.
And the author of the temporary-audacity fork has refused to actually evidence the "spam mails" or phone calls, probably because you cannot find either of his addresses online using his username and thus it makes no sense for them to be spammed. What happened here is that they had a poll, /g/ turned up, suggested a name and got it voted in. He said no because democracy only matters when the guy in charge gets what he wants, and now he's crying like a bitch and trying to rally equally bitchy people to his side. Simple. He even posted the threads that debunk himself but I'm also sure he deleted the tweets with them so he couldn't burn himself any more.
The reality of the situation is that the repo creator can't handle internet banter slighty hotter than Facebook for the elderly, got mad, fed the trolls and made things up.
https://github.com/Sneeds-Feed-and-Seed/sneedacity
It apparently got added to the AUR but was subsequently removed.
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/sneedacity-git/
Here's the google webcache:
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zCMLFh...
The given deletion reason was pretty funny, too: “Offensive; Derogatory naming. (short for "special need"; a person who acts like a complete retard.)”[1]
‘Sneed’ is a joke from The Simpsons.[2]
[1]: https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/aur-requests/2021-July... [2]: https://static.simpsonswiki.com/images/b/bb/Sneed's_feed_and...
Edit: lmao seething
Learn how to google hack and check his ”cookiengineer” accounts for yourself
If you have to resort to brazen and ignorant reddit-tier downvoting instead of looking for actual evidence and just shouting ”TRUST VICTAMS” you honestly do not deserve the internet.
> given option purely for jokes
This doesn't mix well and looks like a rigged poll for me. Even in Tropico if you allow election and lose it you lose the mission.
Sounds about the same to me, except 4chan doesn’t pretend they’re doing good when they dox people.
So they're even, at worst.
> Where did you get the notion you need to be pulling the trigger to be morally responsible for someone's death?
"Where" is a weird question since I didn't get that notion in the first place. But "being morally responsible for somebody's death" is a vastly more nebulous notion than homicide.
[^1]: But saying something that will allude to politically correctness ("cannot use it because sneed is slang? for special needs") or indifference ("fuck the haters") will be like throwing gas in the fire.
Its relevant in this context as the "joke" is the name is now "Sneeds Sneedacity, formerly Auds".
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sneeds-feed-and-seed
Edit: Boy I sure do love powertripping bundles of sticks who flag anything they can't fucking use their lips to smack down. Invalid clowns.
It has nothing to do with being special needs.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sneeds-feed-and-seed
It happened to YC over their “HN votes for who gets a grant” and it happened to this dude over “What do I call this fork?”
Contrastingly, Pitbull is beloved for his choice to go to Kodiak after a joke campaign to send him there managed to manipulate the Facebook poll he posted.
Of course people will have half a dozen reasons why their participation in this thing is meaningful but this sort of thing is a strong predictor for their behaviour.
This seems like an attempt to garner sympathy to make their fork the "offical new fork of Audacity"
[edit] Why is this comment being flagged - is asking for evidence bad now?
The author, cookieguy when challenged about these claims starts deleting tweets/comments they have made.
It seems an awful lot to me that the cookieguy is drumming all this up on purpose to get peoples attention or sympathy, etc like you suggest may be the case. Some of the screenshots I've seen where he goes on huge rants that make little sense tell me the guy may have some mental issues.
I can only see that as a point in their favor.
Yeah, I saw that too, but he only posted claims and not any proof. It looks kinda shady. Well I didn't like the elimination of alternatives from the github poll because they didn't follow the agenda of the mods of the fork, but now I am alarmed with this thing. They haven't even started working on the project and they are already talking about monetizing it. How are you going to ask for people's money if you haven't done any work? Seem to me like those professional victims that make money from "soft" people. I hope there was no-one who was guilt-tripped to throw money to those individuals.
==== the sad part is that websites like hn are echo chamber for twitter drama and on top of that incubate and protect such narratives.