8 ms·

I feel like an odd man out every time this topic comes up. Like I'm sure many others here I've been involved in online communities and discussions in some form

by CPLX 11y ago

I feel like an odd man out every time this topic comes up. Like I'm sure many others here I've been involved in online communities and discussions in some form or another since it was all green text on a black background, and I don't think things are any different now than they have ever been in any way that really matters. The secret to dealing with internet trolling is some combination of ignoring it, turning your devices off now and then, and realizing that the character you are interacting with online is not actually a real person. Though -- like a character in your favorite movie or TV show -- it is of course created by a real person, it is still a fictional character. With the exception of actual actions that come into the real world, such as fake reporting to the police, interfering with someone's ability to have a job, etc, the vast vast majority of online "trolling" is solved by ignoring it. Same as it ever was.

nmrm2 11y ago
Many internet forums are no longer community-organized or community-funded like they were in the early days of the internet. Many media companies spend money moderating internet forums because their users and/or advertisers have expectations. Automatically detecting or predicting bad behavior decreases the cost of running these forums, whose purpose is profit rather than dialog. It's not a change in the nature of trolling that makes moderation more necessary than it was in the past; rather, it's the monetization of forum-posting audiences.
darkclarity 11y ago
I suspect a lot of the problems with trolling is inexperienced users not realising that the Internet is the technology equivalent of the wild west. They sign up for services, post all their details and make the sort of off-hand comments that wouldn't be picked up in close circles, except they are using a global publishing platform (social media).
- fixermark 11y ago
  The Internet continues to look less and less like the wild west, and as that trend continues (to torture the metaphor a bit), the expectation that users should go around with guns strapped to their hips will continue to diminish.
  - darkclarity 11y ago
    Yep. It's a gentrification that has been chipping away at different aspects of the Internet for as long as I can remember. A struggle between the pioneers who have learned to live (and even flourish) within the chaos, and the rest of society who want the chaos eliminated.
DanBC 11y ago
Your "solution" means many people have to not use the internet. Sucks to be them, I guess. Meanwhile, people saying they want to rape you, or posting images of dead children to you, or posting your address and saying they're going to murder you, get to carry on without hinderance.
- qb45 11y ago
  Those people you report to the police and if the police ignores you, that's the problem that needs fixing. In the good old days, people used to send you such threats by anonymous snail mail instead of twitter.
  - Gracana 11y ago
    And we can fix that problem by using wide-reaching and invasive surveillance that allows the police to de-anonymize anyone once they get the go-ahead. But that's probably (definitely) a terrible thing to do, so maybe it's better to find other ways to solve these problems.
    - qb45 11y ago
      Parent and me were talking about hardcore cases. There is no technological solution for people stubbornly following you everywhere and sending death threats. Furthermore, from some anecdotal evidence, I think most victims in such cases already know who is harassing them.
  - mdip 11y ago
    And in the good old days almost nobody was trolled because the energy required to send a message via snail mail (starting with "do I even own stamps any longer"?) is several orders of magnitude higher than composing a one sentence death-threat on twitter. It's probably a crime, yes. Unfortunately, you'll be prioritized accordingly. When prioritizing a crime that involves some anonymous troll responding with a death-threat or threat of harm that was most likely done in a moment of stupidity/weakness rather than with an actual intent to commit a crime, you're going to show up pretty low against the list of rapes, murders, assaults and thefts that are currently being handled. Once you've identified that the threat is such that it actually is a crime and can be successfully prosecuted, you have to go through the trouble of finding out who actually left that threat. Should they successfully uncover that information, the likely penalty might be so minimal that it's not even worth pursuing. Because of all of those circumstances, all but the most extreme cases of these get completely ignored (and many of the extreme ones).
mdip 11y ago
These are good points on dealing with trolling as an individual. Ignoring it is the best, and most often ignored, advice. It's too easy to get emotionally drawn into a trolling comment, which is why I've always liked the idea of sandboxing trolls in a way that allows them to think their comments are being accepted while eliminating them from the rest of the participants of the site. At a higher level, though, sites and moderators of discussion have to participate in the reduction of trolling. Failure to do so dooms a community. I've left my share of communities, mailing lists, usenet message boards and the like due to it being tiring to participate in a discussion that devolves into name-calling and wasteful trolling. My favorite example was Digg about a decade ago. At some point the trolling problem got so bad that you couldn't leave a comment of any kind without encountering a land-mine. I remember the "straw that broke the camel's back" was when I spent a few minutes leaving a multi-sentence comment and had copy/pasted part of a sentence to a place where it made more sense. I had accidentally doubled an "and". I was met with "Learn fucking English, asshole!" and was like "huh?!". The guy read my entire comment and grammar trolled me over an obvious typo? I deleted my account shortly after that. I wasn't angry -- I just came to realize that the site stopped providing me any value.
- chris_wot 11y ago
  Yeah, it was also what led to the death of Kuro5hin.
  - elihu 11y ago
    I believe K5 also stopped accepting new accounts for awhile. It's a shame; there was a lot to like about how the site worked. The collaborative review process seemed like the future of how science and journalism ought to work on the Internet. Instead it became dystopian parable of how such things don't work on the Internet.
    - chris_wot 11y ago
      Yeah, that sort of happens when someone photoshops the founder's wife's head on a pornstar. Twitter style harassment before Twitter was a thing.
rwj 11y ago
At an individual level, I agree. At the community level, I don't think it will be that easy. If trolls can destroy the SNR, the community will also be destroyed.
- astrodust 11y ago
  Exactly. If your solution is to "ignore trolls" then eventually you have to upgrade your ignore to the entire community. USENET is dead because they couldn't keep the troll/spammer population in check. Smaller forums with more control survived because they were more resilient and didn't offer as big a target.
  - kefka 11y ago
    Nope. Usenet died because of 2 reasons: The burden of carrying alt.binaries The burden of pirate media on distributed Usenet servers from alt.binaries They made a great point of attack for the MPAA and RIAA member associations. And traditionally, ISPs provided these services. I think it was 2006 when Comcast finally pulled the plug. Most other ISPs doesn't even offer a connection at all, which is a shame. But that's why it died.
    - astrodust 11y ago
      It was dead long before I saw any copyright issues being raised or before binary newsgroups were a problem. The infamous "Green Card Spammers" (http://www.wired.com/1999/04/the-spam-that-started-it-all/ http://www.wired.com/1999/04/the-spam-that-started-it-all/) shifted the tone dramatically, and from there it was inevitable that the whole community would collapse. There was very limited control over what people could post, USENET was intended to be free and open. This succeeded wildly in an academic environment where if someone was seriously out of line you could address their university and get their account pulled. As soon as the general population came on and there was no accountability to anyone it was simply a matter of time before unchecked abuse started to happen. Most providers pulled the plug because the only thing of any value left on USENET was binaries. The discussions were virtually dead.
st3v3r 11y ago
"The secret to dealing with internet trolling is some combination of ignoring it, turning your devices off now and then, and realizing that the character you are interacting with online is not actually a real person." No. Gamergate has proven that "ignoring it" and "turning your devices off" is NOT the way to fix it. Neither of those things does anything.
- qb45 11y ago
  I learned about the Gamergate drama from HN, well after the fact. This solution seems to have worked for some people :)
  - st3v3r 11y ago
    Not the people being targeted.
woodandsteel 11y ago
No, no, no, no, no. What you are missing is that human beings are social creatures, and our well-being is enormously dependent on how well our communities work. Every community has norms of behavior and ways of enforcing them. If trolling and cyberbullying are allowed, then either people in the community suffer unnecessarily, or the community collapses. Let me add that you are disempowering yourself when you don't try to ensure that your communities are good.

by CPLX 11y ago

nmrm2 11y ago

Many internet forums are no longer community-organized or community-funded like they were in the early days of the internet. Many media companies spend money moderating internet forums because their users and/or advertisers have expectations. Automatically detecting or predicting bad behavior decreases the cost of running these forums, whose purpose is profit rather than dialog. It's not a change in the nature of trolling that makes moderation more necessary than it was in the past; rather, it's the monetization of forum-posting audiences.

darkclarity 11y ago

I suspect a lot of the problems with trolling is inexperienced users not realising that the Internet is the technology equivalent of the wild west. They sign up for services, post all their details and make the sort of off-hand comments that wouldn't be picked up in close circles, except they are using a global publishing platform (social media).

fixermark 11y ago
The Internet continues to look less and less like the wild west, and as that trend continues (to torture the metaphor a bit), the expectation that users should go around with guns strapped to their hips will continue to diminish.
- darkclarity 11y ago
  Yep. It's a gentrification that has been chipping away at different aspects of the Internet for as long as I can remember. A struggle between the pioneers who have learned to live (and even flourish) within the chaos, and the rest of society who want the chaos eliminated.

DanBC 11y ago

Your "solution" means many people have to not use the internet. Sucks to be them, I guess. Meanwhile, people saying they want to rape you, or posting images of dead children to you, or posting your address and saying they're going to murder you, get to carry on without hinderance.

qb45 11y ago
Those people you report to the police and if the police ignores you, that's the problem that needs fixing. In the good old days, people used to send you such threats by anonymous snail mail instead of twitter.
- Gracana 11y ago
  And we can fix that problem by using wide-reaching and invasive surveillance that allows the police to de-anonymize anyone once they get the go-ahead. But that's probably (definitely) a terrible thing to do, so maybe it's better to find other ways to solve these problems.
  - qb45 11y ago
    Parent and me were talking about hardcore cases. There is no technological solution for people stubbornly following you everywhere and sending death threats. Furthermore, from some anecdotal evidence, I think most victims in such cases already know who is harassing them.
- mdip 11y ago
  And in the good old days almost nobody was trolled because the energy required to send a message via snail mail (starting with "do I even own stamps any longer"?) is several orders of magnitude higher than composing a one sentence death-threat on twitter. It's probably a crime, yes. Unfortunately, you'll be prioritized accordingly. When prioritizing a crime that involves some anonymous troll responding with a death-threat or threat of harm that was most likely done in a moment of stupidity/weakness rather than with an actual intent to commit a crime, you're going to show up pretty low against the list of rapes, murders, assaults and thefts that are currently being handled. Once you've identified that the threat is such that it actually is a crime and can be successfully prosecuted, you have to go through the trouble of finding out who actually left that threat. Should they successfully uncover that information, the likely penalty might be so minimal that it's not even worth pursuing. Because of all of those circumstances, all but the most extreme cases of these get completely ignored (and many of the extreme ones).

mdip 11y ago

These are good points on dealing with trolling as an individual. Ignoring it is the best, and most often ignored, advice. It's too easy to get emotionally drawn into a trolling comment, which is why I've always liked the idea of sandboxing trolls in a way that allows them to think their comments are being accepted while eliminating them from the rest of the participants of the site. At a higher level, though, sites and moderators of discussion have to participate in the reduction of trolling. Failure to do so dooms a community. I've left my share of communities, mailing lists, usenet message boards and the like due to it being tiring to participate in a discussion that devolves into name-calling and wasteful trolling. My favorite example was Digg about a decade ago. At some point the trolling problem got so bad that you couldn't leave a comment of any kind without encountering a land-mine. I remember the "straw that broke the camel's back" was when I spent a few minutes leaving a multi-sentence comment and had copy/pasted part of a sentence to a place where it made more sense. I had accidentally doubled an "and". I was met with "Learn fucking English, asshole!" and was like "huh?!". The guy read my entire comment and grammar trolled me over an obvious typo? I deleted my account shortly after that. I wasn't angry -- I just came to realize that the site stopped providing me any value.

chris_wot 11y ago
Yeah, it was also what led to the death of Kuro5hin.
- elihu 11y ago
  I believe K5 also stopped accepting new accounts for awhile. It's a shame; there was a lot to like about how the site worked. The collaborative review process seemed like the future of how science and journalism ought to work on the Internet. Instead it became dystopian parable of how such things don't work on the Internet.
  - chris_wot 11y ago
    Yeah, that sort of happens when someone photoshops the founder's wife's head on a pornstar. Twitter style harassment before Twitter was a thing.

rwj 11y ago

At an individual level, I agree. At the community level, I don't think it will be that easy. If trolls can destroy the SNR, the community will also be destroyed.

astrodust 11y ago
Exactly. If your solution is to "ignore trolls" then eventually you have to upgrade your ignore to the entire community. USENET is dead because they couldn't keep the troll/spammer population in check. Smaller forums with more control survived because they were more resilient and didn't offer as big a target.
- kefka 11y ago
  Nope. Usenet died because of 2 reasons: The burden of carrying alt.binaries The burden of pirate media on distributed Usenet servers from alt.binaries They made a great point of attack for the MPAA and RIAA member associations. And traditionally, ISPs provided these services. I think it was 2006 when Comcast finally pulled the plug. Most other ISPs doesn't even offer a connection at all, which is a shame. But that's why it died.
  - astrodust 11y ago
    It was dead long before I saw any copyright issues being raised or before binary newsgroups were a problem. The infamous "Green Card Spammers" (http://www.wired.com/1999/04/the-spam-that-started-it-all/ http://www.wired.com/1999/04/the-spam-that-started-it-all/) shifted the tone dramatically, and from there it was inevitable that the whole community would collapse. There was very limited control over what people could post, USENET was intended to be free and open. This succeeded wildly in an academic environment where if someone was seriously out of line you could address their university and get their account pulled. As soon as the general population came on and there was no accountability to anyone it was simply a matter of time before unchecked abuse started to happen. Most providers pulled the plug because the only thing of any value left on USENET was binaries. The discussions were virtually dead.

st3v3r 11y ago

"The secret to dealing with internet trolling is some combination of ignoring it, turning your devices off now and then, and realizing that the character you are interacting with online is not actually a real person." No. Gamergate has proven that "ignoring it" and "turning your devices off" is NOT the way to fix it. Neither of those things does anything.

qb45 11y ago
I learned about the Gamergate drama from HN, well after the fact. This solution seems to have worked for some people :)
- st3v3r 11y ago
  Not the people being targeted.

woodandsteel 11y ago

No, no, no, no, no. What you are missing is that human beings are social creatures, and our well-being is enormously dependent on how well our communities work. Every community has norms of behavior and ways of enforcing them. If trolling and cyberbullying are allowed, then either people in the community suffer unnecessarily, or the community collapses. Let me add that you are disempowering yourself when you don't try to ensure that your communities are good.