7 ms·
When a cold case is solved, why can't internet sleuths move on?
- jcroll 8y agoMobs of internet people with too much time on their hands will never be a force for good, ever.
- MrRubbish 8y agoAgreed, this reads like something from Tales of the Macabre.
- squirrelicus 8y agoDon't know why this is downvoted. It's a bit glib, but it's not really false. You can't just take a random selection of humans, put them on the internet together, and reasonably expect something non-bad to happen. You have to select, curate a community, before focus will align toward anything that's not "we're bored let's anonymously fuck with people"
- jcroll 8y agoIs there such a thing as a "healthy" internet community? I'd argue not. So much of our society's ills these days is people not dealing face-to-face
- squirrelicus 8y agoWell, yes, they're not hard to find, but you certainly can't find them everywhere. Could be gaming or knitting or racing or rock climbing or what have you. The formula for a healthy online community is (0) you must base the community on something objective, a skill like "we are great at (video game)", not something like an idea or opinion. (1) An actual, real threat of exclusion that's acted on. You cannot include people who don't express the community goals, such as being helpful to each other and growing skills together. (Some great small communities are based around the game Rust, the last place you'd expect to find them) (2) Excluded people must lose something. Whether it's losing the ability to play with high quality players, or losing advice on knitting patterns I would also recommend small communities. You can pretty much never create a large healthy online community. Some outliers like Day[9] exist, but as a rule, they don't.
- jcroll 8y agoTry making friends irl, you'll notice the difference
- squirrelicus 8y agoLooks like I'm defeated, guys. Healthy online communities can't exist I guess. When someone defends jcroll from down votes, he does a pathetic unhealthy thing. Now nobody can have nice things. QED. /s
- mcphage 8y agoWeren’t they, in this case? Somebody died and wasn’t identified, and they helped get this person identified.
- wencha 8y ago“I’m a huge Internet user”, that’s when you know someone’s dead serious. Are you sure she’s a reddit user? Sounds more like a SA goon to me.
- Analemma_ 8y agoI don't know if there's a word for it, but this is a common problem with any group, institution, or organization: it is very difficult for them to voluntarily shut down once they have achieved their purpose, even if the mission ended in total success.
- 0xcde4c3db 8y agoI don't know if there's a single word, but a closely related concept is Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy. "Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization."
- hutzlibu 8y agoIn this case they did not really achieve their purpose. Their purpose was also to find out who he was and why he ended up like this.
- DoreenMichele 8y agoMarch of Dimes actually succeeded in its mission to eradicate polio, then was faced with either disbanding or coming up with a new mission. They went with the latter. This is a rare success story. It is much more common for charities to essentially do counterproductive things that help keep the problem alive so they will continue to have a reason for being. This is something I have learned to be incredibly leery of. Programs to "help the homeless" are often programs that help keep people stuck. If you really care, you should be aiming at policies that reduce the incidence of homelessness, preferably via prevention, rather than big feels squee-worthy approaches where you expect some pathetic soul to grovel and be effusively grateful while their life probably remains in the toilet. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_of_Dimes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_of_Dimes
- davidkuhta 8y agoFor all the legal scholars: 1. Aren't death records public? 2. Would anyone else have a claim to knowledge of the deceased's real name? (ex: if "Lyle Stevik" didn't pay his hotel bill)
- ubernostrum 8y agoRecords are public, but the problem is one of searching for a small needle in a large haystack: ~7k people die in the United States every day. I can think of a couple ways to narrow that down and get to a probable answer, but they all would take money, manual effort, or both. To your second question, any debts owed by the deceased would be paid out of his estate. There's no guarantee that creditors would actually bother, this long after the debts were incurred, or that an inquisitive third party would be able to usefully find records of the debt being pursued.
- davidkuhta 8y agoInteresting, thanks for the info.
- 21 8y agoAnyone watched the recent cluster-fuck that was internet sleuths solving the murder of XXXTentacion?
- defen 8y agoI heard about the murder but not the cluster-fuck. Was it another Boston Bomber situation?
- krallja 8y agopored over
- sverige 8y agoOne of the more common (and grating) errors in contemporary writing -- twice in this article alone. I always envision the subject pouring something disgusting over the object.
- donutte 8y agoThis is really interesting: It was then that the realization set in in the subreddit: after all these years, after hundreds of thousands of hours of theorizing and plotting and thinking and organizing, they might never find out the true identity of Lyle Stevik. His identity was known to the police, and to DNA Doe, but it was never revealed to the subreddit. And it might never be; as of press time, the family has declined to share the information. It seems like there’s two ways to look at this. The first is... the subreddit didn’t materially contribute to solving the case, apart from putting up $1500 for DNA sequencing. The critical research was done by a specialist volunteer org, and law enforcement located and contacted the family. It seems like being able to identify folks using genetic ancestry is a really valuable service; it also seems like a good thing that, to the average redditor, this service is a black box that produces a single bit of output. If the person (family, in this case) who has been identified doesn’t want their name to be public, that should be their choice. So, that all is working as intended. But at the same time... In 20 years, nobody ever put up the money for DNA testing. Why would they? There must be millions of cases like this, and for most of that time sequencing cost a lot more than $1500. The price is still going down, so eventually someone would have done this. Maybe once the cost of sequencing hit $50, or $1. I don’t know, at what point do we start DNA testing every single cold case Doe, since forever? Probably not for a long, long time. Maybe long enough to be forgotten entirely. The folks on the subreddit cared, is my point, when no one else did. They picked this person to care about, out of all the unsolved mysteries to choose from. I don’t think there’s any particular explanation; he just happened to catch their fancy, and then they spent a lot of time thinking about him. In a weird digital-era way, he was kind of their friend. And it makes a lot of sense that there would be some shock and isolation at having their care rejected, having their “friendship” invalidated. I can get that. And I kind of think that if the family grokked how much these folks cared about their person, and how little anyone else did, their response might be a little different.
- sverige 8y agoWhat you say makes sense, but no one asked them to care. Further, those feelings do not in any way give them the right to intrude into the life of a family they've never even met. It's a classic case of "none of your business." But perhaps some still feel otherwise. What happens if some stranger starts "caring" about their depression and anger over their "loss"? There's a real problem when people cannot recognize that some boundaries should not be crossed.
- dec0dedab0de 8y agoThat was interesting, but could it be a disguised ad for DNA Doe?
- paulie_a 8y agoPeople like to be know it alls. The internet amplifies it.
- Dylan16807 8y ago> And, probably most, they want to know why he did what he did — hole up at a hotel in the middle of nowhere, and end his life. And that is almost certainly an impossible question, one that no amount of internet sleuthing will answer. That's a strange statement. Outside of "can you ever really know another person, man?" there are plenty of suicides and attempts that are very straightforward to explain.
- ClintEhrlich 8y agoI once unsolved a murder I discovered online, causing very unwelcome consequences for the victim's family. So I can relate to some aspects of this story. First, trying to solve a cold-case can utterly consume you in a way that is impossible to truly comprehend unless you've lived it. It haunted my dreams and waking hours, even ones when all I wanted to do was think about something else for long enough to relax. Second, no matter how good your intentions or how just your cause, there will be people who resent your work. It could be law enforcement or forensic experts, who don't want an "amateur" to expose their mistakes and oversights. It could be the victim's family, who don't want to revisit the loss of their loved one, even if the reality they've made peace with is built on falsehoods and errors. I was fortunate that my work freed an innocent man who was serving life in prison, which retroactively validated my otherwise bizarre decision to start obsessing over a 15-year-old murder. It would be really, REALLY difficult to develop a similar obsession, feel like your time and effort produced a breakthrough, and then not get any closure. That doesn't excuse their behavior, but I understand the emotional frustration.
- akudha 8y agomy work freed an innocent man who was serving life in prison If you are allowed to, can you share the story?
- ClintEhrlich 8y agoSorry, I didn't mean to imply the story was a secret. It was the murder of Michelle O'Keefe, for which Sgt. Raymond Jennings was wrongfully convicted. I wrote about Ray's exoneration in the Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-jeff-sessions-can-offer-justice-to-the-wrongfully-convicted/2017/04/12/ea3b3a3e-0e42-11e7-ab07-07d9f521f6b5_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-jeff-sessions-ca... There's more details in a prior post on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12010760 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12010760 NBC News also did an episode of Dateline about it: https://www.instagram.com/p/BMnDkslA3wi/ https://www.instagram.com/p/BMnDkslA3wi/
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