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The internet is as it always was, the only difference is more people, and more importantly more people without technological prowess and forum/bbs/irc experienc

The internet is as it always was, the only difference is more people, and more importantly more people without technological prowess and forum/bbs/irc experience, are accessing it and moving increasingly larger chunks of their life to the internet. As someone who fell in love with the internet when I was young because nobody knew I was young, it constantly surprises me when people put intimate details online and then become outraged that they are targeted or harassed. The internet didn't magically make everyone equal, it made everyone equally anonymous (to at least their fellow users, privacy down the stack notwithstanding)... that's why it was/seemed like an egalitarian paradise. Everyone was equal, including the trolls, because nobody knew who you were. Is it that surprising that once people started telling others who they truly were discrimination, harassment, and invective started showing up again? The internet doesn't magically make social, political, religious, and ideological rifts magically disappear, it just seemed like it did because nobody could associate users with their backgrounds. Now that we know who everyone is, the internet just makes you encounter more of these rifts due to it's global nature. But when your first experience with the internet is twitter, facebook, or any other social media this lesson is not only dismissed, but outright refuted. The internet is synonymous with identity to those people. They come completely unprepared and completely open, expecting the internet of the 90's. Obviously things are going to go sideways. In my ever so humble opinion this is the disconnect that is causing a lot of fervor around "trolls" and "harassment". Those that have been battle hardened by the early internet saw how to treat trolls: you ignore them ("don't feed the trolls") because they didn't actually have any ammo. We've given them ammo now, so here are the consequences.

pdelbarba 10y ago
Honest question: how would you reconcile privacy-centric communities like Reddit and definitely-not-privacy-centric communities like Facebook? They both have the same patterns of information bubbles generally feed content in similar ways (broadly speaking) and they both have strong troll subgroups. If anything, Facebook might have a lower overall incidence of trolling because you run the risk of having your profile picture on the evening news.
- nradov 10y ago
  Does Facebook actually have less trolling? I don't know how anyone could quantify it but subjectively there seems to be a lot. It's easy to create fake accounts, and some people just don't care.
  - pdelbarba 10y ago
    In an absolute sense I imagine they probably have more, given that they have something like 1.5 billion users. I think the type of trolling might be more mild in general though, back when I used it regularly it was mostly just 20 page political debates hinging on gross misunderstandings by both parties... Obviously this is just my experience though.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Enough so that the retiring US Attorney for Chicago specifically called it out for the city's murder problem. https://archive.fo/203tP https://archive.fo/203tP
    - nradov 10y ago
      Criminal street gang members threatening and dissing each other doesn't qualify as trolling. If we're calling that trolling now then the term has lost all meaning. And that retiring US Attorney didn't cite any evidence of one social media system being worse than the others.
      - dredmorbius 10y ago
        "Trolling: A person who posts inflammatory or otherwise unwanted material on an electronic forum, especially anonymously." http://www.thefreedictionary.com/trolling http://www.thefreedictionary.com/trolling "Troll: One who posts a deliberately provocative message to a newsgroup or message board with the intention of causing maximum disruption and argument." https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=troll&defid=5096 https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=troll&defid=... Provoking gangland warfare to the tune of http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-open-letter-zachary-fardon-20170313-htmlstory.html http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-open-le... There's been an absolute epidemic within this thread of people attempting to redefine trolling in such a way as to minimise either the problem or the source article. It's beyond stupid, beyond credible, and beyond sustaining any credibility of those doing it. Ya trollin' me, bra?
freeflight 10y ago
>The internet doesn't magically make social, political, religious, and ideological rifts magically disappear, it just seemed like it did because nobody could associate users with their backgrounds. But one could argue that our modern "Social Media Internet" gives exactly that impression. Whether it's Google, Facebook, Twitter or whatnot: People are being funneled into "ideological bubbles" based on their preferences and being surrounded just by people who share their views. Thus many people assume they are on the "right side" because everybody in their Internet-social circles thinks exactly like them. That's why many people act so surprised/outraged if they happen to come across somebody from another "social media echo chamber" with completely opposing views.
- pdelbarba 10y ago
  I remember reading "The Filter Bubble" about 6 years ago or so and thinking it was the dumbest thing since purple ketchup. Fast forward to the past 24 months and the concept has become more real than the internet itself...
- Balgair 10y ago
  Well, for a lot of the world, Facebook is synonymous with the internet as an idea. In India, FB has negotiated with a lot of mobile carriers to exempt themselves from being counted towards data usage. This means that some double digit percentage of the world thinks that FB is the internet. How can you expect people to not be in a filter bubble when their idea of the net is FB and FB only?
  - H4CK3RM4N 10y ago
    Just in case anyone wants to see the numbers on this, I can't find a better collation. https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-idea-theyre-using-the-internet/ https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-id...
- ahartman00 10y ago
  "People are being funneled into "ideological bubbles"" I'm not as convinced they are being funneled. I remember back in high school, my friends and I would sit around in a circle, in meat space. "War is wrong" And we would go around the circle: "yup", "absolutely", etc "Some other liberal talking point" yup, of course, so true.... I feel they are self selecting. Look at the election, when liberals were 3x more likely to unfriend people. [1] And I think they have been self selecting since before the internet. Also there is a geographic component. Rural areas vote red, urban vote blue. We have had geographic filter bubbles for decades. 1. http://fortune.com/2016/12/19/social-media-election/ http://fortune.com/2016/12/19/social-media-election/
noobermin 10y ago
The majority of people who say "don't feed the trolls" have never been the focus of a trolling campaign, I've found. It is easy to claim this when you aren't under constant violent harassment and scrutiny. It is not fair to expect everyone else to have a "battle-hardened" stoicism when you've probably never experienced such a life. I've never experienced such harassment myself and used to sing the "ignore" mantra too, until I tried to imagine myself in the shoes of those who receive frequent harassment, and I'm not sure I would be able to ignore at the same level they are expected to. Also, I'm not sure you are arguing whether a cause of the issue is identity being coupled to your internet presence, but I'm not sure we can go back to the internet of the early 2000's or late 90's, so we need to deal with the world as it exists now instead of thinking appeal to tradition will solve issues we have today.
- ocschwar 10y ago
  "Don't feed the trolls" was a useful thing to say back when the word meant something far more specific than just "someone behaving badly on the Internet."
  - bhntr3 10y ago
    Yeah, the meaning has shifted. It used to be that if people knew you were trolling, you weren't a good troll. Now a troll is just an asshole on the internet.
    - kazinator 10y ago
      Some of the newbies don't understand that "troll" refers to "trolling" as in "fishing troller": evoking the metaphor of casting a net to collect responses like fish. They imagine "troll" as a metaphor invoking the humanoid creature from Scandinavian folklore, which, in the Three Billy Goats Gruff story, is a nasty, unpleasant, violent creature who wants to eat everyone who crosses his bridge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Billy_Goats_Gruff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Billy_Goats_Gruff Hence the asshole angle.
      - 10y ago
un-devmox 10y ago
Take, for example the referee of the KY game who got his business trolled as well as death threats. I don't think he did anything to "feed" the trolls however he may be irreparably damaged by such people. I don't think you can ignore them and hope they just go away when your business is threatened as well as your life.
dasil003 10y ago
I've been on the internet since the 80s even, so your line of thinking resonates with me. But what's different now is that a troll actually got elected president, this shows how we've come from trolls being toothless. It's probably always been the case that perception makes reality, but never before has a pseudonymous forum such as the internet held so much sway on perception.
- mirimir 10y ago
  Wasn't "Celebrity Apprentice" rather trollish?
WhitneyLand 10y ago
>the internet is as it always was I remember buying computer parts via e-mail. Occasionally they arrived before I sent money. Think the odds are fairly low of that happening now. Sadly, I guess a lot of it is no more complicated than road rage. Being kind, empathetic, a good citizen is negatively correlated with emotional proximity. Add tons of people? Less emotional proximity = trolls. Add thousands of miles of distance? No public will to help child war refugees in Syria, and so on. Such of large percentage of the nastiness would never happen face to face or with a neighbor.
ams6110 10y ago
Back when I first started using USENET (late 1980s) it seemed like most people used their real names. Maybe that was just the newsgroups I read. I didn't really notices the pervasive pseudonyms until web forums and chatrooms started taking off.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Keep in mind that username policies were often specified by the institutions people were connecting through, largely major research universities. So that may not have indicated personal choice. (My own early / Usenet handles were ... pseudonyms.)
- heisenbit 10y ago
  Not true. It depended a lot which newsgroups you frequented. There were some where pseudonyms were common and conduct was civilized. There were some where flaming trolls roamed freely. Generally things get worse - ask your parents. Crime is on an all time high - just ask Sessions. It always was getting worse ask people from the antique. I someone asked me these days the getting worse is getting worse.
camillomiller 10y ago
What about reddit or 4chan, tho? Everyone's anonymous there, and it ain't like the brightest proof for your example. They're mostly the sewer of the Web.
- mirimir 10y ago
  That's why people go there. Nobody's forcing you to.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

pdelbarba 10y ago

Honest question: how would you reconcile privacy-centric communities like Reddit and definitely-not-privacy-centric communities like Facebook? They both have the same patterns of information bubbles generally feed content in similar ways (broadly speaking) and they both have strong troll subgroups. If anything, Facebook might have a lower overall incidence of trolling because you run the risk of having your profile picture on the evening news.

nradov 10y ago
Does Facebook actually have less trolling? I don't know how anyone could quantify it but subjectively there seems to be a lot. It's easy to create fake accounts, and some people just don't care.
- pdelbarba 10y ago
  In an absolute sense I imagine they probably have more, given that they have something like 1.5 billion users. I think the type of trolling might be more mild in general though, back when I used it regularly it was mostly just 20 page political debates hinging on gross misunderstandings by both parties... Obviously this is just my experience though.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Enough so that the retiring US Attorney for Chicago specifically called it out for the city's murder problem. https://archive.fo/203tP https://archive.fo/203tP
  - nradov 10y ago
    Criminal street gang members threatening and dissing each other doesn't qualify as trolling. If we're calling that trolling now then the term has lost all meaning. And that retiring US Attorney didn't cite any evidence of one social media system being worse than the others.
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      "Trolling: A person who posts inflammatory or otherwise unwanted material on an electronic forum, especially anonymously." http://www.thefreedictionary.com/trolling http://www.thefreedictionary.com/trolling "Troll: One who posts a deliberately provocative message to a newsgroup or message board with the intention of causing maximum disruption and argument." https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=troll&defid=5096 https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=troll&defid=... Provoking gangland warfare to the tune of http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-open-letter-zachary-fardon-20170313-htmlstory.html http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-open-le... There's been an absolute epidemic within this thread of people attempting to redefine trolling in such a way as to minimise either the problem or the source article. It's beyond stupid, beyond credible, and beyond sustaining any credibility of those doing it. Ya trollin' me, bra?

freeflight 10y ago

>The internet doesn't magically make social, political, religious, and ideological rifts magically disappear, it just seemed like it did because nobody could associate users with their backgrounds. But one could argue that our modern "Social Media Internet" gives exactly that impression. Whether it's Google, Facebook, Twitter or whatnot: People are being funneled into "ideological bubbles" based on their preferences and being surrounded just by people who share their views. Thus many people assume they are on the "right side" because everybody in their Internet-social circles thinks exactly like them. That's why many people act so surprised/outraged if they happen to come across somebody from another "social media echo chamber" with completely opposing views.

pdelbarba 10y ago
I remember reading "The Filter Bubble" about 6 years ago or so and thinking it was the dumbest thing since purple ketchup. Fast forward to the past 24 months and the concept has become more real than the internet itself...
Balgair 10y ago
Well, for a lot of the world, Facebook is synonymous with the internet as an idea. In India, FB has negotiated with a lot of mobile carriers to exempt themselves from being counted towards data usage. This means that some double digit percentage of the world thinks that FB is the internet. How can you expect people to not be in a filter bubble when their idea of the net is FB and FB only?
- H4CK3RM4N 10y ago
  Just in case anyone wants to see the numbers on this, I can't find a better collation. https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-idea-theyre-using-the-internet/ https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-id...
ahartman00 10y ago
"People are being funneled into "ideological bubbles"" I'm not as convinced they are being funneled. I remember back in high school, my friends and I would sit around in a circle, in meat space. "War is wrong" And we would go around the circle: "yup", "absolutely", etc "Some other liberal talking point" yup, of course, so true.... I feel they are self selecting. Look at the election, when liberals were 3x more likely to unfriend people. [1] And I think they have been self selecting since before the internet. Also there is a geographic component. Rural areas vote red, urban vote blue. We have had geographic filter bubbles for decades. 1. http://fortune.com/2016/12/19/social-media-election/ http://fortune.com/2016/12/19/social-media-election/

noobermin 10y ago

The majority of people who say "don't feed the trolls" have never been the focus of a trolling campaign, I've found. It is easy to claim this when you aren't under constant violent harassment and scrutiny. It is not fair to expect everyone else to have a "battle-hardened" stoicism when you've probably never experienced such a life. I've never experienced such harassment myself and used to sing the "ignore" mantra too, until I tried to imagine myself in the shoes of those who receive frequent harassment, and I'm not sure I would be able to ignore at the same level they are expected to. Also, I'm not sure you are arguing whether a cause of the issue is identity being coupled to your internet presence, but I'm not sure we can go back to the internet of the early 2000's or late 90's, so we need to deal with the world as it exists now instead of thinking appeal to tradition will solve issues we have today.

ocschwar 10y ago
"Don't feed the trolls" was a useful thing to say back when the word meant something far more specific than just "someone behaving badly on the Internet."
- bhntr3 10y ago
  Yeah, the meaning has shifted. It used to be that if people knew you were trolling, you weren't a good troll. Now a troll is just an asshole on the internet.
  - kazinator 10y ago
    Some of the newbies don't understand that "troll" refers to "trolling" as in "fishing troller": evoking the metaphor of casting a net to collect responses like fish. They imagine "troll" as a metaphor invoking the humanoid creature from Scandinavian folklore, which, in the Three Billy Goats Gruff story, is a nasty, unpleasant, violent creature who wants to eat everyone who crosses his bridge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Billy_Goats_Gruff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Billy_Goats_Gruff Hence the asshole angle.
    - 10y ago

un-devmox 10y ago

Take, for example the referee of the KY game who got his business trolled as well as death threats. I don't think he did anything to "feed" the trolls however he may be irreparably damaged by such people. I don't think you can ignore them and hope they just go away when your business is threatened as well as your life.

dasil003 10y ago

I've been on the internet since the 80s even, so your line of thinking resonates with me. But what's different now is that a troll actually got elected president, this shows how we've come from trolls being toothless. It's probably always been the case that perception makes reality, but never before has a pseudonymous forum such as the internet held so much sway on perception.

mirimir 10y ago
Wasn't "Celebrity Apprentice" rather trollish?

WhitneyLand 10y ago

>the internet is as it always was I remember buying computer parts via e-mail. Occasionally they arrived before I sent money. Think the odds are fairly low of that happening now. Sadly, I guess a lot of it is no more complicated than road rage. Being kind, empathetic, a good citizen is negatively correlated with emotional proximity. Add tons of people? Less emotional proximity = trolls. Add thousands of miles of distance? No public will to help child war refugees in Syria, and so on. Such of large percentage of the nastiness would never happen face to face or with a neighbor.

ams6110 10y ago

Back when I first started using USENET (late 1980s) it seemed like most people used their real names. Maybe that was just the newsgroups I read. I didn't really notices the pervasive pseudonyms until web forums and chatrooms started taking off.

dredmorbius 10y ago
Keep in mind that username policies were often specified by the institutions people were connecting through, largely major research universities. So that may not have indicated personal choice. (My own early / Usenet handles were ... pseudonyms.)
heisenbit 10y ago
Not true. It depended a lot which newsgroups you frequented. There were some where pseudonyms were common and conduct was civilized. There were some where flaming trolls roamed freely. Generally things get worse - ask your parents. Crime is on an all time high - just ask Sessions. It always was getting worse ask people from the antique. I someone asked me these days the getting worse is getting worse.

camillomiller 10y ago

What about reddit or 4chan, tho? Everyone's anonymous there, and it ain't like the brightest proof for your example. They're mostly the sewer of the Web.

mirimir 10y ago
That's why people go there. Nobody's forcing you to.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]