5 ms·

Every platform that is public and anonmyous runs afoul of this, this isn't just twitter. You can look at Youtube comments, reddit, pretty much any forum. What'

by raiyu 10y ago

Every platform that is public and anonmyous runs afoul of this, this isn't just twitter. You can look at Youtube comments, reddit, pretty much any forum. What's missing is that other platforms, like Facebook, took a very hard stance on this and forced people to signup as their real identities. Twitter, can easily follow suit. That won't fix all of the problems, but it will go towards improving things and it won't require massive product updates and changes to the UX. Given that their MAU growth numbers are low, and no longer the number that they want the public market to focus on, actually instating this now wouldn't even be that damaging from a reporting perspective, and if they bled out a few users that weren't really contributing it could go a long way to improving things. Technically there is a privacy setting that twitter doesn't play up that can be used for people that want to use twitter as a consumption platform and limit the interactivity from other people. Twitter is still fundamentally different and more open than facebook and with requesting non-anonymous users they can still keep that open platform and potentially clean up some of the outlier conversations that seem to be a focus for so many people of what's wrong with twitter.

sievebrain 10y ago
HN is public and anonymous and mostly manages to not suffer this problem, due to the heavy manual labour of the moderators and a whole lot of selection bias in its userbase. To a slightly lesser extent, Slashdot has also licked that problem: for any story that attracts enough comments (more than 300) the top rated ones are often pretty good and the worthless ones start auto-collapsed. Even though Slashdot gets a lot of jip these days, some of it deserved, I've still spent many enjoyable hours reading some of the top rated comments there. Especially nice is the fact that upvotes must have an adjective attached, which gently nudges users into certain kinds of behaviour. For instance it's the only site I've encountered where people often post extremely funny comments despite the serious topics. The moderation system there encourages that sort of behaviour.
- heed 10y ago
  Also Metacritic has managed to keep foul comments under control.
- xseven 10y ago
  HN is not as mainstream as Twitter or Reddit, so I don't think we can really compare it that way
  - dabockster 10y ago
    I wouldn't necessarily consider Reddit mainstream either. Sure, it has a lot of users. But I don't hear people on the streets telling each other to look at their subreddits.
    - gedrap 10y ago
      If we can trust in Alexa, reddit is #26 globally and #9 in the US. Even with some error margin, that's damn mainstream.
bmo311 10y ago
If you think that enforcing real names induces civility and you use Facebook as an example, your argument is wrong and self-contradictory. Facebook is /proof/ that the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory doesn't need anonymity. What the Internet proves about communication is that fuckwaddery (yes, this is a word, my word) is inversely proportional to interface friction. The quicker it is to spill the contents of your mind without the filtration enabled by interface difficulty, the more crap you can put out. Since 90 percent of everything is crap, [Sturgeon] even what you are thinking 90 percent of the time is crap and you're lucky if you manage to only commit the remaining 10 percent without contaminating it with the rest. Interface difficulty enforces thinking about what you commit to discussion. Which is why pen-and-ink letter writing "is an art" and the twitterverse is a cesspool - real names or not. This is not to say that if everything went back to pen-and-paper that there would be no fuckwads. There would simply be fewer of them. Lastly, I never used my real name on Facebook or other social media. Why should I give up what I have every right to do in real life just because it's electronic? People don't care whether I'm using my real name or alias as long as they know who they're talking to. BMO's Revised Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory (Normal person + communication medium) / interface friction = fuckwad And when friction=0, you have a black hole of fuckwaddery. You usually get this when you use alcohol as a lubricant.
- CM30 10y ago
  I'd say fuckwaddery or whatever is more proportional to the distance between the user and the person they're communicating with. If someone lives in the same town, you'll be a lot more hesitant to insult the hell out of them than if they live on another continent. That might be why Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc are so screwed up. Because the userbase knows that there's a very slim chance they'll ever meet the person they're attacking online. That there's a slim chance there'll ever be any genuine consequences for their actions. Of course, making it easier and more convenient like on the sites (or limiting people to only 140 characters) definitely makes it easier to be a douche. But you're not going to send a threatening SMS message to someone sitting next to you.
  - intended 10y ago
    Bullies operate on people who are in the same school as them, it has nothing to do with distance.
glomek 10y ago
> Every platform that is public and anonmyous runs afoul of this, this isn't just twitter. You can look at Youtube comments, reddit, pretty much any forum. We had ways of dealing with this on Usenet back in the day. 1) Thick skin, and 2) killfiles. Generally, killfiles weren't for people with whom you disagreed (though they could be, if you wanted), they were for people who were assholes.
- Asooka 10y ago
  Also, on Usenet nobody knew you were the Leslie Jones. Or a dog. On Twitter, there's a little blue indicator showing everyone that yes, this is the precise person you want to attack. It could just as well be a big target icon with "SEND ME HATE" in big letters.
Asooka 10y ago
> Every platform that is public and anonmyous runs afoul of this, this isn't just twitter. You can look at Youtube comments, reddit, pretty much any forum. I would say every platform that is public and has anonymous people interacting with public personalities. If everyone on twitter was 100% anonymous you wouldn't be able to harass people like that. You would still be able to spam and harass, but you won't be harassing the Leslie Jones, you would be harassing some pseudonymous identity. There is a very important reason people used to be told "NEVER EVER WRITE YOUR PERSONAL DETAILS ONLINE EVER ANYWHERE". You don't want your real life connected with your online pseudonym that you use on fun message boards, because for some people fun is sending SWAT teams to your house. I wouldn't mind if the solution is to separate online environments to ones that are completely pseudonymous, including permanently erasing identities corresponding to people that get doxxed; and ones where you can only post with your real-life name and identity. There is obviously a need for both environments, but having pseudonymous people co-exist with real people seems to be a recipe for mostly pain.

by raiyu 10y ago

sievebrain 10y ago

HN is public and anonymous and mostly manages to not suffer this problem, due to the heavy manual labour of the moderators and a whole lot of selection bias in its userbase. To a slightly lesser extent, Slashdot has also licked that problem: for any story that attracts enough comments (more than 300) the top rated ones are often pretty good and the worthless ones start auto-collapsed. Even though Slashdot gets a lot of jip these days, some of it deserved, I've still spent many enjoyable hours reading some of the top rated comments there. Especially nice is the fact that upvotes must have an adjective attached, which gently nudges users into certain kinds of behaviour. For instance it's the only site I've encountered where people often post extremely funny comments despite the serious topics. The moderation system there encourages that sort of behaviour.

heed 10y ago
Also Metacritic has managed to keep foul comments under control.
xseven 10y ago
HN is not as mainstream as Twitter or Reddit, so I don't think we can really compare it that way
- dabockster 10y ago
  I wouldn't necessarily consider Reddit mainstream either. Sure, it has a lot of users. But I don't hear people on the streets telling each other to look at their subreddits.
  - gedrap 10y ago
    If we can trust in Alexa, reddit is #26 globally and #9 in the US. Even with some error margin, that's damn mainstream.

bmo311 10y ago

If you think that enforcing real names induces civility and you use Facebook as an example, your argument is wrong and self-contradictory. Facebook is /proof/ that the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory doesn't need anonymity. What the Internet proves about communication is that fuckwaddery (yes, this is a word, my word) is inversely proportional to interface friction. The quicker it is to spill the contents of your mind without the filtration enabled by interface difficulty, the more crap you can put out. Since 90 percent of everything is crap, [Sturgeon] even what you are thinking 90 percent of the time is crap and you're lucky if you manage to only commit the remaining 10 percent without contaminating it with the rest. Interface difficulty enforces thinking about what you commit to discussion. Which is why pen-and-ink letter writing "is an art" and the twitterverse is a cesspool - real names or not. This is not to say that if everything went back to pen-and-paper that there would be no fuckwads. There would simply be fewer of them. Lastly, I never used my real name on Facebook or other social media. Why should I give up what I have every right to do in real life just because it's electronic? People don't care whether I'm using my real name or alias as long as they know who they're talking to. BMO's Revised Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory (Normal person + communication medium) / interface friction = fuckwad And when friction=0, you have a black hole of fuckwaddery. You usually get this when you use alcohol as a lubricant.

CM30 10y ago
I'd say fuckwaddery or whatever is more proportional to the distance between the user and the person they're communicating with. If someone lives in the same town, you'll be a lot more hesitant to insult the hell out of them than if they live on another continent. That might be why Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc are so screwed up. Because the userbase knows that there's a very slim chance they'll ever meet the person they're attacking online. That there's a slim chance there'll ever be any genuine consequences for their actions. Of course, making it easier and more convenient like on the sites (or limiting people to only 140 characters) definitely makes it easier to be a douche. But you're not going to send a threatening SMS message to someone sitting next to you.
- intended 10y ago
  Bullies operate on people who are in the same school as them, it has nothing to do with distance.

glomek 10y ago

> Every platform that is public and anonmyous runs afoul of this, this isn't just twitter. You can look at Youtube comments, reddit, pretty much any forum. We had ways of dealing with this on Usenet back in the day. 1) Thick skin, and 2) killfiles. Generally, killfiles weren't for people with whom you disagreed (though they could be, if you wanted), they were for people who were assholes.

Asooka 10y ago
Also, on Usenet nobody knew you were the Leslie Jones. Or a dog. On Twitter, there's a little blue indicator showing everyone that yes, this is the precise person you want to attack. It could just as well be a big target icon with "SEND ME HATE" in big letters.

Asooka 10y ago

> Every platform that is public and anonmyous runs afoul of this, this isn't just twitter. You can look at Youtube comments, reddit, pretty much any forum. I would say every platform that is public and has anonymous people interacting with public personalities. If everyone on twitter was 100% anonymous you wouldn't be able to harass people like that. You would still be able to spam and harass, but you won't be harassing the Leslie Jones, you would be harassing some pseudonymous identity. There is a very important reason people used to be told "NEVER EVER WRITE YOUR PERSONAL DETAILS ONLINE EVER ANYWHERE". You don't want your real life connected with your online pseudonym that you use on fun message boards, because for some people fun is sending SWAT teams to your house. I wouldn't mind if the solution is to separate online environments to ones that are completely pseudonymous, including permanently erasing identities corresponding to people that get doxxed; and ones where you can only post with your real-life name and identity. There is obviously a need for both environments, but having pseudonymous people co-exist with real people seems to be a recipe for mostly pain.