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This is just an ugly side of humanity that has always been there, but is magnified by the combination of anonymity, disenfranchisement, and ever more addicting

This is just an ugly side of humanity that has always been there, but is magnified by the combination of anonymity, disenfranchisement, and ever more addicting Skinner-box style entertainment. We are a tribal species; in the past this type of behavior would be socialized out of you or else you would be a recluse. You didn't have the opportunity to sit in your own filth and project your self-loathing onto anyone across the Internet. As a species we're just not emotionally equipped to deal with the current reality.

InclinedPlane 9y ago
That's a cop-out. This isn't genetic, this isn't universal, this is a cultural trend.
- dasil003 9y ago
  A cop-out? No, it's an explanation. How are you going to reverse the trend? First you have to understand the underlying factors. It's incredibly naive to think this type of impulse never existed before just because it's permanently recorded and visible for the first time.
  - InclinedPlane 9y ago
    Humans aren't feral, their patterns of behavior are dictated by culture, education, etc, regardless of "impulses". People may have impulses to hurt or steal from others, but those impulses can be controlled and the impacts of those impulses can be diminished on society. Socio-cultural norms and education teach people that there are other ways to get what you want than theft, for example, and provide strong discouragement against engaging in such "anti-social" behavior. On top of that there are legal proscriptions against such behavior. All of this adds together to massively reduce the level of murder, rape, and theft in civilized humans vs. hypothetical feral human populations. And the same dynamics can occur with individuals hurling abuse online. Those individuals could experience consequences for their actions (from twitter, valve, potentially the criminal justice system in some cases, etc.) from institutions as well as from society as a whole. Telling a game developer "I will rape you!" should be an action that dramatically curtails the perpetrators career options and results in losing friends, but today it doesn't. Sure, people hold dark impulses inside them routinely, everyone understands that. That doesn't mean they are uncontrollable. This is a recent phenomenon, which itself is proof enough that it is not due to some uncontrollable universal urge.
    - percival_krusen 9y ago
      How do you hold people accountable without compromising anonymity, though? And if you compromise anonymity, how do you avoid a chilling effect on those who depend on it for e.g., political activism? Seems like a dilemma to me.
      - InclinedPlane 9y ago
        Anonymity isn't an issue for some of these things. For example, when you're interacting in a customer service context on, say, steam, you are not anonymous. Valve can change its TOU to make it so that you forfeit all claims to redress if you use abuse during a customer service interaction, and can further scale that up to include additional consequences (banning you from participation in certain ways or from certain benefits). Additionally, "in band" consequences don't have to compromise anonymity. On twitter or facebook, for example, you can have abuse reports that are verified result in different levels of account restriction. You can make it so that the account's posts are no longer visible in other people's timelines as replies, for example (e.g. they are only visible to people who specifically follow that user or when specific posts are linked to directly). You can restrict accounts in other ways and even block access to accounts for short periods of time. Or you can ban people forever. All of these techniques have been used for years and years to prevent abusive behavior, the only reason they haven't been used effectively against this particular sort of abuse is because of apathy on the part of most platform owners, but that can change easily.
- jnwatson 9y ago
  I don’t think this is a trend at all. Just go to a baseball game and you’ll see plenty of people yelling invectives at the umpire and players. That’s not new at all. Road rage is another related symptom. There’s something special about pseudo-anonymity than enables a small percentage of people to act like jerks. The horrible comments are just a function of anonymity at scale.
Digital-Citizen 9y ago
We've been perfectly well-equipped to deal with this, but some people are particularly thin-skinned and apparently believe that it's the world's job to adjust to their delicate ego rather than understanding that part of growing up is understanding one's own agency. Playwrights hundreds of years ago didn't like people publicly disapproving their plays, or low ticket sales due to bad word-of-mouth. People have been conveying disapproving reviews for as long as people have been doing something which can be reviewed. That hasn't changed even though there are so many more things which can be reviewed now. There's nothing unique about this situation in the context of video games. What's telling about this article is that the phrase "free speech" doesn't make an appearance or get any serious consideration. Free speech means people will say things you don't like, convey ideas you disagree with. A principled approach to free speech is not censorship -- "moderation" as the first screenshot complainer is said to have written ("If I quit gamedev, it wont be because of money, or lack of love for the craft, it will be because of the attitude of the vocal 0.1% of gamers who nobody will moderate."[sic] some uncredited person allegedly wrote). Calling a harangue "abuse" is an attempt at conflating something dismissably rare ("0.1%" we're told) and indistinguishable from free speech with actual abuse. We're also told that stalking a game programmer's family happens less frequently than someone's harangue. But virtually no exposition is wasted on something which could very well be genuinely abusive of someone else. If the disapproving reviews come from such a small minority, they should be easy to ignore or skip past, and one should gain practice in using their advanced technical skill to make a computer not show them what they don't want to read. Also, readers can choose their reaction to seeing a screed; talking about them as abuse victims denies their agency. They don't have to choose to be an alleged victim (the "abused"), they can choose to conclude that someone who replies with "CUNT" repeatedly (as "SaintNick" replied to "ChineseRoom") is irrational and not to be taken seriously. And please stop talking about "voting with your wallet", a phrase that can be justifiably be said to mean that one intends for wealthy people to deserve more "votes" than poorer people. It should be sufficient to explain that one could choose not to buy the next game that publisher releases, which is probably what one meant to say in the first place.
- InclinedPlane 9y ago
  This is not about criticism this is about abuse. They are entirely different things. "Free speech" is also mostly irrelevant here. Nobody has the rights to dox or make threats of rape or homicide. Indeed, many of these behaviors are illegal but there's not much that can be done about them because the police don't have the resources to deal with them.

InclinedPlane 9y ago

That's a cop-out. This isn't genetic, this isn't universal, this is a cultural trend.

dasil003 9y ago
A cop-out? No, it's an explanation. How are you going to reverse the trend? First you have to understand the underlying factors. It's incredibly naive to think this type of impulse never existed before just because it's permanently recorded and visible for the first time.
- InclinedPlane 9y ago
  Humans aren't feral, their patterns of behavior are dictated by culture, education, etc, regardless of "impulses". People may have impulses to hurt or steal from others, but those impulses can be controlled and the impacts of those impulses can be diminished on society. Socio-cultural norms and education teach people that there are other ways to get what you want than theft, for example, and provide strong discouragement against engaging in such "anti-social" behavior. On top of that there are legal proscriptions against such behavior. All of this adds together to massively reduce the level of murder, rape, and theft in civilized humans vs. hypothetical feral human populations. And the same dynamics can occur with individuals hurling abuse online. Those individuals could experience consequences for their actions (from twitter, valve, potentially the criminal justice system in some cases, etc.) from institutions as well as from society as a whole. Telling a game developer "I will rape you!" should be an action that dramatically curtails the perpetrators career options and results in losing friends, but today it doesn't. Sure, people hold dark impulses inside them routinely, everyone understands that. That doesn't mean they are uncontrollable. This is a recent phenomenon, which itself is proof enough that it is not due to some uncontrollable universal urge.
  - percival_krusen 9y ago
    How do you hold people accountable without compromising anonymity, though? And if you compromise anonymity, how do you avoid a chilling effect on those who depend on it for e.g., political activism? Seems like a dilemma to me.
    - InclinedPlane 9y ago
      Anonymity isn't an issue for some of these things. For example, when you're interacting in a customer service context on, say, steam, you are not anonymous. Valve can change its TOU to make it so that you forfeit all claims to redress if you use abuse during a customer service interaction, and can further scale that up to include additional consequences (banning you from participation in certain ways or from certain benefits). Additionally, "in band" consequences don't have to compromise anonymity. On twitter or facebook, for example, you can have abuse reports that are verified result in different levels of account restriction. You can make it so that the account's posts are no longer visible in other people's timelines as replies, for example (e.g. they are only visible to people who specifically follow that user or when specific posts are linked to directly). You can restrict accounts in other ways and even block access to accounts for short periods of time. Or you can ban people forever. All of these techniques have been used for years and years to prevent abusive behavior, the only reason they haven't been used effectively against this particular sort of abuse is because of apathy on the part of most platform owners, but that can change easily.
jnwatson 9y ago
I don’t think this is a trend at all. Just go to a baseball game and you’ll see plenty of people yelling invectives at the umpire and players. That’s not new at all. Road rage is another related symptom. There’s something special about pseudo-anonymity than enables a small percentage of people to act like jerks. The horrible comments are just a function of anonymity at scale.

Digital-Citizen 9y ago

We've been perfectly well-equipped to deal with this, but some people are particularly thin-skinned and apparently believe that it's the world's job to adjust to their delicate ego rather than understanding that part of growing up is understanding one's own agency. Playwrights hundreds of years ago didn't like people publicly disapproving their plays, or low ticket sales due to bad word-of-mouth. People have been conveying disapproving reviews for as long as people have been doing something which can be reviewed. That hasn't changed even though there are so many more things which can be reviewed now. There's nothing unique about this situation in the context of video games. What's telling about this article is that the phrase "free speech" doesn't make an appearance or get any serious consideration. Free speech means people will say things you don't like, convey ideas you disagree with. A principled approach to free speech is not censorship -- "moderation" as the first screenshot complainer is said to have written ("If I quit gamedev, it wont be because of money, or lack of love for the craft, it will be because of the attitude of the vocal 0.1% of gamers who nobody will moderate."[sic] some uncredited person allegedly wrote). Calling a harangue "abuse" is an attempt at conflating something dismissably rare ("0.1%" we're told) and indistinguishable from free speech with actual abuse. We're also told that stalking a game programmer's family happens less frequently than someone's harangue. But virtually no exposition is wasted on something which could very well be genuinely abusive of someone else. If the disapproving reviews come from such a small minority, they should be easy to ignore or skip past, and one should gain practice in using their advanced technical skill to make a computer not show them what they don't want to read. Also, readers can choose their reaction to seeing a screed; talking about them as abuse victims denies their agency. They don't have to choose to be an alleged victim (the "abused"), they can choose to conclude that someone who replies with "CUNT" repeatedly (as "SaintNick" replied to "ChineseRoom") is irrational and not to be taken seriously. And please stop talking about "voting with your wallet", a phrase that can be justifiably be said to mean that one intends for wealthy people to deserve more "votes" than poorer people. It should be sufficient to explain that one could choose not to buy the next game that publisher releases, which is probably what one meant to say in the first place.

InclinedPlane 9y ago
This is not about criticism this is about abuse. They are entirely different things. "Free speech" is also mostly irrelevant here. Nobody has the rights to dox or make threats of rape or homicide. Indeed, many of these behaviors are illegal but there's not much that can be done about them because the police don't have the resources to deal with them.