6 ms·

Play nice - How the internet is trying to design out toxic behaviour

24 points by r721 11y ago

unics 11y ago
Censoring the internet, what could go wrong?
- thex10 11y ago
  So unics, how would you rate your own comment in terms of civility? Say 1..5, least to most. I'd rate it 4 for civility, 1 for quality of argument, then downvote you since you haven't read the article.
  - wasjosh 11y ago
    Well done thex10! If you don't mind I'll share my rating of your comment- 5 for reading the article, 4.317 for argument. m'lord
- benten10 11y ago
  >>You f\king w\\re, I'm going to ra\e you, and kill your family and pet, and tort\* you till you beg for mercy, and I'm going to feed your pieces to your dogs, if you dare talk anything on this issue again. As you see, this works both ways. Above, it should have been clear I was clearly using threatening language for elucidation process. And yet, something _must_ have 'jumped' in you. Even if a little bit. Even after '' out the important words. Even after I toned down what I'd originally planned to write. Now imagine, I didn't make it as obvious it was for education purposes, but it was reasonably clear to guess I meant it that way. And then imagine there was no commentary. Now consider the possibility I am a random stranger who might actually have meant it. Women and minorities do* go through it every day. Every damn day. Now, you can call it free speech, and banning anything similar censoring. In which case, I will have to work on a few sockpuppet bots to prove my point more clearly ;). My point is, you are being reductive in looking the world as 'censorship', and 'free speech'. This argument has happened for thousands of years, and it speeds up if all caught up on the definitions of 'reasonable threats', 'hate speech' etcetera, and the historical contexts surrounding such issues.
  - FilterSweep 11y ago
    I've heard worse from a pull request on an open source project.
    - pjc50 11y ago
      That's not great though, is it? Do you think this might discourage people who don't like death threats from getting involved in open source?
      - adiabatty 11y ago
        That's the risk of putting yourself out there on the Internet — someone might threaten to kill you/rape you/make you unemployable. I tend to keep a low profile for this reason. That said, what's p(murdered and/or raped by someone who sent you a murder and/or rape threat|got sent a murder and/or rape threat while contributing to an open source project)? How does it compare to p(raped and/or murdered)? My hunch is that people who get sent these things don't get any physical harm from the people who send them. Psychological harm is another matter, but if people can recognize bluster for what it is, we'd all be better off, especially the death-threat recipients. (In case you're wondering, I already have persistent stalkers with subordinates. Mine are the reason why I never had a public Twitter account back when I used the service. I also take other measures to minimize my exposure to both rage-filled randos and the long-term creeps.)
  - anon4 11y ago
    Wao. Much hate. Such speech. I mean, the threat is empty because there are no people like that. Everybody hates and everybody has some choice words to say in moments of anger but nobody will just go out and hurt another over a few words on the internet. And if you would, you're an unstable inhuman psychopath who can no longer be considered a person. You would have gone and killed people no matter what age you live in and no matter what words are said to you, because you are fundamentally not a person. Animals like you are why the second amendment exists. In closing, What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I’ve been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I’m the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You’re fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little “clever” comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn’t, you didn’t, and now you’re paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You’re fucking dead, kiddo
- dominotw 11y ago
  HN routinely censors articles critical of their own startups. Yet you are here.
  - dang 11y ago
    Completely false. We routinely don't do that. I've posted about this many times.
    - dominotw 11y ago
      Do know why 'AirBnb' was removed from the title ? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10763732 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10763732
      - sillysaurus3 11y ago
        http://hnrankings.info/10763732/ http://hnrankings.info/10763732/ If any censorship was going on, it would have fallen off the front page. As it stands, it stayed above #10 for 16 solid hours. The title was edited to remove clickbait.
      - dang 11y ago
        I think we thought that bit was linkbait. We routinely take out baity "you" phrases from titles. The story itself stayed on the front page, as you pointed out at the time. There have been many negative Airbnb stories on the front page of HN—indeed there was one today. FWIW, "don't censor stories for being negative about a YC startup" is literally the #1 rule of HN moderation: it's the first thing PG said to me when showing me how to moderate HN. I don't even think I had time to sit down before he said it. That doesn't mean we don't moderate such stories; we may, if they break the HN guidelines (such as by being linkbaity). It means that we consciously moderate them less than we normally would, and we're pretty meticulous about it.
        dominotw 11y ago
        ah ok. Thank you for your explanation dang. I am quite sure how I got that idea into my head. I stand corrected. thanks.
FilterSweep 11y ago
I had considered a much longer criticism of this article, but I soon realized that there was no sense in complaining about a service which is no longer "ours." The internet of today (Internet 2.x), is little more than an advertising space, a vehicle through which users mistakenly approach as an encyclopedia housing the world's information, while in actuality, the user is product. So I'll just touch on one point instead: Humor > "But Mrgan insists it hasn’t led to sterile, sanitised comments. “People are still making jokes, being a little bit snarky, getting really opinionated,” she says. “The personal attacks, name-calling and abuse have gone, but the same feel has really stayed.”" Has Mrgan ever been to Reddit, the site so bold as to deem itself "The Front Page of the Internet" before? I absolutely disagree with her insistence. While the information is often great in some specialty areas, the humor is completely dry, overly snarky, and most users appear (caveat: IMO) to be treading on eggshells in avoidance of "Being downvoted" and having their comment hidden from the world. If you were to go to a standup comedy show, you would see a _plethora_ of philosophically different types of humor. Deprecating humor, Self-deprecating humor, sarcasm, parody, allegorical comedy, etc. etc. The "new internet" is in the process of filtering out most of this. To repeat my caveat, this is all my opinion, but a sterile Internet very quickly only reduces itself to plain sarcasm and snark, and honestly, sarcasm is the lowest form of wit. Back in the "good old days" During the 90's and the 00's, the onus was on the user his-or-herself to ignore and filter out toxic behavior. And it's a shame I'm saying this in my 20s.
- thex10 11y ago
  Why are we jumping to the conclusion that the whole internet would follow the same rules though? I imagine some sites would want to cultivate certain kinds of humor (it might allow abuse, but at least not everyone's walking on eggshells), and others don't (and would rather enforce some rules in the hopes of cultivating an abuse-minimized environment). Why wouldn't each individual service be able to make its own tradeoffs? Then users would vote with their feet and hangout in the places they like best anyway.. > Back in the "good old days" During the 90's and the 00's, the onus was on the user his-or-herself to ignore and filter out toxic behavior. And it's a shame I'm saying this in my 20s. Back in the day they had to close their eyes and ignore. Now in the day they craft software that ignores and filters out toxic behavior before it even gets to their eyes. ;) You think we're regressing?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
boona 11y ago
Ugh, that's what I get for reading a Guardian article, little substance, an insult to liberals (or North-American libertarians), and finally a safe space for third-wave feminists, never mind that they have now become the dominant group in the media and are constantly shutting down anyone with a different of opinion. Shame on me for clicking that link.
rustynails 11y ago
I'm curious. Do others see this (among other faults) as a criticism and attack on everything masculine? It's pretty thinly veiled to pretend to be egalitarian. Unicorns and rainbows, every reference is to a woman, how girls are suppressed, bad behaviour is like "football" fans. They even slipped in a misogyny! Feminist bingo! It fascinates me. We condemn the KKK for treating groups of people differently. Yet, when feminism (referred in the article) makes sexist and false statements, it's lorded by the media. For example, in Australia, domestic violence was a "man" thing. When a mother killed her daughter/son is was never domestic violence. "Men" need to be educated. However, when you have a group (feminism, KKK) that prioritise one group over another, you get these propaganda campaigns that tend to spread worldwide. They encourage intolerance and demonise others. Now, a fundamental problem with this article's proposal Is that you can be as intolerant as you like as long as you don't say curse words (unicorns and rainbows) and threaten to hit/kill someone. The truth is that far more damage has been done by far more subtle propaganda campaigns, especially in the last 5 years. Not one of them would be stopped by this proposal.
Animats 11y ago
First problem: anonymity + some assholes = mess (the Penny Arcade version:[1]) Facebook dealt with this by requiring "real names". Except from some whining from drag queens, this has worked well. Wikipedia has an ongoing struggle with this, but because everything on Wikipedia can be undone, users have reputations, and the asshole fraction isn't that large, Wikipedia continues to work. Any system where fake identities can be created in bulk at low cost suffers badly from this problem. Email, especially. Interestingly, if you have conversations, and not much happens based on single messages, it's less of a problem. Twitter and IRC are examples. Second problem: once the bulk junk identity problem is under control, how do you get people to behave reasonably well? Wikipedia does this surprisingly well, with a complex set of rules and an explicit requirement of civility. (Many new editors complain that it's hard to edit Wikipedia, but that's because they treat it like a blog. Think of it more like checking out something from Github and submitting a pull request.) Newspaper comment sections do this badly. Karma-based systems such as the one here and on Slashdot do it reasonably well. Fancier karma systems are possible; Civil Comments seems to be using something like the ELO algorithm. It takes a lot of user time to crowdsource such rankings, and that's a scarce resource. Not many people want to do Mechanical Turk work for free. [1] https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19 https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19
- mseidl 11y ago
  Wasn't there something in the last few years in S. Korea where in order to curb online harassment/stupid people so they made everybody use their real name and it only dropped by like 0.02 percent. It was really negligible.
Nadya 11y ago
Correction. If you're a lying, abusive, or manipulative woman on Twitter you'll get drowned in "harassment" (a redefining of the word "disagreement") . Then you can turn around and pretend to be the victim because of your gender and/or sexual identity and useful idiots will lap it up and defend you. Regardless if you're a known pedophile, a spouse beater, a harasser from the Something Awful forums, or known scam-artist. Are you aware of the abuse Randi is known for in the FreeBSD community? She's the last person who should be speaking about dealing with it while she dishes it out herself left and right. As far as Twitter goes, men receive abuse twice as often as women [0]. At the moment, if you're a prominent man on Twitter and you offend the wrong people you'll get drowned in toxic behavior and risk losing your job over hurting someone's fee-fees. [0] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2733071/Men-twice-abuse-women-Twitter-ones-trolling.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2733071/Men-twice-ab...
- dang 11y ago
  Please stop turning HN threads into the same old tedious flamewars. This site is for conversation, not pre-recorded rants. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11184341 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11184341 and marked it off-topic.

24 points by r721 11y ago

unics 11y ago

Censoring the internet, what could go wrong?

thex10 11y ago
So unics, how would you rate your own comment in terms of civility? Say 1..5, least to most. I'd rate it 4 for civility, 1 for quality of argument, then downvote you since you haven't read the article.
- wasjosh 11y ago
  Well done thex10! If you don't mind I'll share my rating of your comment- 5 for reading the article, 4.317 for argument. m'lord
benten10 11y ago
>>You f\king w\\re, I'm going to ra\e you, and kill your family and pet, and tort\* you till you beg for mercy, and I'm going to feed your pieces to your dogs, if you dare talk anything on this issue again. As you see, this works both ways. Above, it should have been clear I was clearly using threatening language for elucidation process. And yet, something _must_ have 'jumped' in you. Even if a little bit. Even after '' out the important words. Even after I toned down what I'd originally planned to write. Now imagine, I didn't make it as obvious it was for education purposes, but it was reasonably clear to guess I meant it that way. And then imagine there was no commentary. Now consider the possibility I am a random stranger who might actually have meant it. Women and minorities do* go through it every day. Every damn day. Now, you can call it free speech, and banning anything similar censoring. In which case, I will have to work on a few sockpuppet bots to prove my point more clearly ;). My point is, you are being reductive in looking the world as 'censorship', and 'free speech'. This argument has happened for thousands of years, and it speeds up if all caught up on the definitions of 'reasonable threats', 'hate speech' etcetera, and the historical contexts surrounding such issues.
- FilterSweep 11y ago
  I've heard worse from a pull request on an open source project.
  - pjc50 11y ago
    That's not great though, is it? Do you think this might discourage people who don't like death threats from getting involved in open source?
    - adiabatty 11y ago
      That's the risk of putting yourself out there on the Internet — someone might threaten to kill you/rape you/make you unemployable. I tend to keep a low profile for this reason. That said, what's p(murdered and/or raped by someone who sent you a murder and/or rape threat|got sent a murder and/or rape threat while contributing to an open source project)? How does it compare to p(raped and/or murdered)? My hunch is that people who get sent these things don't get any physical harm from the people who send them. Psychological harm is another matter, but if people can recognize bluster for what it is, we'd all be better off, especially the death-threat recipients. (In case you're wondering, I already have persistent stalkers with subordinates. Mine are the reason why I never had a public Twitter account back when I used the service. I also take other measures to minimize my exposure to both rage-filled randos and the long-term creeps.)
- anon4 11y ago
  Wao. Much hate. Such speech. I mean, the threat is empty because there are no people like that. Everybody hates and everybody has some choice words to say in moments of anger but nobody will just go out and hurt another over a few words on the internet. And if you would, you're an unstable inhuman psychopath who can no longer be considered a person. You would have gone and killed people no matter what age you live in and no matter what words are said to you, because you are fundamentally not a person. Animals like you are why the second amendment exists. In closing, What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I’ve been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I’m the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You’re fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little “clever” comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn’t, you didn’t, and now you’re paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You’re fucking dead, kiddo
dominotw 11y ago
HN routinely censors articles critical of their own startups. Yet you are here.
- dang 11y ago
  Completely false. We routinely don't do that. I've posted about this many times.
  - dominotw 11y ago
    Do know why 'AirBnb' was removed from the title ? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10763732 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10763732
    - sillysaurus3 11y ago
      http://hnrankings.info/10763732/ http://hnrankings.info/10763732/ If any censorship was going on, it would have fallen off the front page. As it stands, it stayed above #10 for 16 solid hours. The title was edited to remove clickbait.
    - dang 11y ago
      I think we thought that bit was linkbait. We routinely take out baity "you" phrases from titles. The story itself stayed on the front page, as you pointed out at the time. There have been many negative Airbnb stories on the front page of HN—indeed there was one today. FWIW, "don't censor stories for being negative about a YC startup" is literally the #1 rule of HN moderation: it's the first thing PG said to me when showing me how to moderate HN. I don't even think I had time to sit down before he said it. That doesn't mean we don't moderate such stories; we may, if they break the HN guidelines (such as by being linkbaity). It means that we consciously moderate them less than we normally would, and we're pretty meticulous about it.
      - dominotw 11y ago
        ah ok. Thank you for your explanation dang. I am quite sure how I got that idea into my head. I stand corrected. thanks.

FilterSweep 11y ago

I had considered a much longer criticism of this article, but I soon realized that there was no sense in complaining about a service which is no longer "ours." The internet of today (Internet 2.x), is little more than an advertising space, a vehicle through which users mistakenly approach as an encyclopedia housing the world's information, while in actuality, the user is product. So I'll just touch on one point instead: Humor > "But Mrgan insists it hasn’t led to sterile, sanitised comments. “People are still making jokes, being a little bit snarky, getting really opinionated,” she says. “The personal attacks, name-calling and abuse have gone, but the same feel has really stayed.”" Has Mrgan ever been to Reddit, the site so bold as to deem itself "The Front Page of the Internet" before? I absolutely disagree with her insistence. While the information is often great in some specialty areas, the humor is completely dry, overly snarky, and most users appear (caveat: IMO) to be treading on eggshells in avoidance of "Being downvoted" and having their comment hidden from the world. If you were to go to a standup comedy show, you would see a _plethora_ of philosophically different types of humor. Deprecating humor, Self-deprecating humor, sarcasm, parody, allegorical comedy, etc. etc. The "new internet" is in the process of filtering out most of this. To repeat my caveat, this is all my opinion, but a sterile Internet very quickly only reduces itself to plain sarcasm and snark, and honestly, sarcasm is the lowest form of wit. Back in the "good old days" During the 90's and the 00's, the onus was on the user his-or-herself to ignore and filter out toxic behavior. And it's a shame I'm saying this in my 20s.

thex10 11y ago
Why are we jumping to the conclusion that the whole internet would follow the same rules though? I imagine some sites would want to cultivate certain kinds of humor (it might allow abuse, but at least not everyone's walking on eggshells), and others don't (and would rather enforce some rules in the hopes of cultivating an abuse-minimized environment). Why wouldn't each individual service be able to make its own tradeoffs? Then users would vote with their feet and hangout in the places they like best anyway.. > Back in the "good old days" During the 90's and the 00's, the onus was on the user his-or-herself to ignore and filter out toxic behavior. And it's a shame I'm saying this in my 20s. Back in the day they had to close their eyes and ignore. Now in the day they craft software that ignores and filters out toxic behavior before it even gets to their eyes. ;) You think we're regressing?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

boona 11y ago

Ugh, that's what I get for reading a Guardian article, little substance, an insult to liberals (or North-American libertarians), and finally a safe space for third-wave feminists, never mind that they have now become the dominant group in the media and are constantly shutting down anyone with a different of opinion. Shame on me for clicking that link.

rustynails 11y ago

I'm curious. Do others see this (among other faults) as a criticism and attack on everything masculine? It's pretty thinly veiled to pretend to be egalitarian. Unicorns and rainbows, every reference is to a woman, how girls are suppressed, bad behaviour is like "football" fans. They even slipped in a misogyny! Feminist bingo! It fascinates me. We condemn the KKK for treating groups of people differently. Yet, when feminism (referred in the article) makes sexist and false statements, it's lorded by the media. For example, in Australia, domestic violence was a "man" thing. When a mother killed her daughter/son is was never domestic violence. "Men" need to be educated. However, when you have a group (feminism, KKK) that prioritise one group over another, you get these propaganda campaigns that tend to spread worldwide. They encourage intolerance and demonise others. Now, a fundamental problem with this article's proposal Is that you can be as intolerant as you like as long as you don't say curse words (unicorns and rainbows) and threaten to hit/kill someone. The truth is that far more damage has been done by far more subtle propaganda campaigns, especially in the last 5 years. Not one of them would be stopped by this proposal.

Animats 11y ago

First problem: anonymity + some assholes = mess (the Penny Arcade version:[1]) Facebook dealt with this by requiring "real names". Except from some whining from drag queens, this has worked well. Wikipedia has an ongoing struggle with this, but because everything on Wikipedia can be undone, users have reputations, and the asshole fraction isn't that large, Wikipedia continues to work. Any system where fake identities can be created in bulk at low cost suffers badly from this problem. Email, especially. Interestingly, if you have conversations, and not much happens based on single messages, it's less of a problem. Twitter and IRC are examples. Second problem: once the bulk junk identity problem is under control, how do you get people to behave reasonably well? Wikipedia does this surprisingly well, with a complex set of rules and an explicit requirement of civility. (Many new editors complain that it's hard to edit Wikipedia, but that's because they treat it like a blog. Think of it more like checking out something from Github and submitting a pull request.) Newspaper comment sections do this badly. Karma-based systems such as the one here and on Slashdot do it reasonably well. Fancier karma systems are possible; Civil Comments seems to be using something like the ELO algorithm. It takes a lot of user time to crowdsource such rankings, and that's a scarce resource. Not many people want to do Mechanical Turk work for free. [1] https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19 https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19

mseidl 11y ago
Wasn't there something in the last few years in S. Korea where in order to curb online harassment/stupid people so they made everybody use their real name and it only dropped by like 0.02 percent. It was really negligible.

Nadya 11y ago

Correction. If you're a lying, abusive, or manipulative woman on Twitter you'll get drowned in "harassment" (a redefining of the word "disagreement") . Then you can turn around and pretend to be the victim because of your gender and/or sexual identity and useful idiots will lap it up and defend you. Regardless if you're a known pedophile, a spouse beater, a harasser from the Something Awful forums, or known scam-artist. Are you aware of the abuse Randi is known for in the FreeBSD community? She's the last person who should be speaking about dealing with it while she dishes it out herself left and right. As far as Twitter goes, men receive abuse twice as often as women [0]. At the moment, if you're a prominent man on Twitter and you offend the wrong people you'll get drowned in toxic behavior and risk losing your job over hurting someone's fee-fees. [0] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2733071/Men-twice-abuse-women-Twitter-ones-trolling.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2733071/Men-twice-ab...

dang 11y ago
Please stop turning HN threads into the same old tedious flamewars. This site is for conversation, not pre-recorded rants. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11184341 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11184341 and marked it off-topic.