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The linked webpage in the article detailing Wil Wheaton's account of the incident is a thought-provoking read of online mob behavior. http://wilwheaton.net/2018

The linked webpage in the article detailing Wil Wheaton's account of the incident is a thought-provoking read of online mob behavior. http://wilwheaton.net/2018/08/the-world-is-a-terrible-place-right-now-and-thats-largely-because-it-is-what-we-make-it/ http://wilwheaton.net/2018/08/the-world-is-a-terrible-place-...

mirimir 8y ago
Yes, frightening! Almost enough to put me off Mastodon. Edit: Seriously, just why the bloody hell would I participate in some system where a bunch of trolls could get my account deleted? I seriously doubt that could happen here, for example, because moderators base decisions on values, rather than expediency. Another alternative, which I actually prefer, is for absolutely no third-party moderation, but lots of tools for users to efficiently control what they see.
- r721 8y ago
  I think there exist some zero-moderation instances: https://telegra.ph/Instances-to-silencesuspend-on-Mastodon-06-23 https://telegra.ph/Instances-to-silencesuspend-on-Mastodon-0... (this is a list of instances I found which some sensitive people recommend to block, so free speech/zero-moderation ones are included there)
  - mirimir 8y ago
    But then other instances just blacklist them, right? Edit: And damn, the quoted post from social.i2p.rocks actually makes some sense. The language is harsh, for sure, but the support for freedom is pretty clear. Also, how hard is it to manage accounts on multiple instances? So I could see both mainstream and fully unmoderated.
    - r721 8y ago
      Yeah, this list is a blocklist which many "safe" instances use. But I thought it could be useful to find unmoderated instances too, author invested a lot of time into it.
    - egypturnash 8y ago
      Yes, we do. A number of instances have blacklisted bofa.lol, which is where this whole attack on Wheaton began. I suspect that eventually the Fediverse will be divided into two major sections: places that are okay with "pissing people off" as a source of fun, and places that require basic adult civility at the price of, say, restricting your freedom to call an absolute stranger something vile. I dunno how well the former will survive with read-only access to the latter. I would not be sad to see it wither and die, though several decades of life on the Internet suggests that's all too unlikely to happen.
      - pessimizer 8y ago
        > I dunno how well the former will survive with read-only access to the latter. I would not be sad to see it wither and die, though several decades of life on the Internet suggests that's all too unlikely to happen. In my internet experience, it will be the fun, influential one, and the "civil" one will wither and die. The problem in this case was the abuse of the reporting system, it seems, not name-calling.
        scarejunba 8y ago
        Metafilter is way better than Voat. I concur that the less fun one will wither but no guarantee that's the civil one.
        psergeant 8y ago
        HackerNews benefits strongly (imho) from strong moderation.
        dredmorbius 8y ago
        Strong, principled, consistent, and effective.
      - Kalium 8y ago
        > I suspect that eventually the Fediverse will be divided into two major sections: places that are okay with "pissing people off" as a source of fun, and places that require basic adult civility at the price of, say, restricting your freedom to call an absolute stranger something vile. Does that mean instances will enforce basic adult civility by preventing one from insulting, say, President Trump? He is by any reasonable standard an absolute stranger to the vast majority of users, who generally will have had absolutely no personal contact with him in any fashion. I don't care for the man's politics, but I also must admit I've never met him. Have I missed something? Please, help me understand!
  - ohhellno 8y ago
    I found a free speech instance but you have convinced me to stop using Mastodon. What a joke. This list has some reasonable things in it but a lot of attacking other users/instances on flimsy allegations.
    - r721 8y ago
      I am actually not sure how widely this blocklist is used, I just randomly stumbled upon it (via https://github.com/tootcafe/blocked-instances https://github.com/tootcafe/blocked-instances).
- ohhellno 8y ago
  After reading the list of recommended instances to ban I am officially turned off of Mastodon. Some of the sites banned are for good reason but many/most(?) seem to be vague personal grievances from people overly concerned about how people say things. This language politicization will not make many English-second-language people comfortable as one mistake could potentially ruin them. Meanwhile, the "do gooder" moralists are the only ones who can truly say what they think and all they do is produce lists of people they hate. Sorry. Not getting on the Mastodon bandwagon!
  - wallacoloo 8y ago
    I was really surprised when the original article said mastodon was blacklist by default (and that instance whitelisting was only possible via forking the code!) I’m actually not certain this is true. I used Mastodon briefly and I remember there was one account out there that auto-followed every user it saw tooting. That way that bot’s instance would build connections to every instance it could see, which gives both (A) metrics - you can get a rough estimate of how many instances are alive at any time - and (B) a way for instances to discover smaller/newer instances if they choose to (I.e follow this bot, and now the global feed visible to your instance sees just about everything). If Mastodon is blacklist by default, then it must have some other discovery mechanism? Or maybe the terminology just isn’t being applied in the way I understand it (e.g. perhaps it is whitelist-by-default, in that you explicitly connect to instances of your choice, but this implicitly whitelists every instance that whitelisted instance is connected to, recursively, and the blacklist is built atop this)?
    - skybrian 8y ago
      I believe other instances get automatically subscribed (without admin's preapproval) when any user follows someone on the other instance.
mc32 8y ago
Maybe I’m naive, but I’ve thought the idea of “groups” on Twitter would improve things. You join groups you like, you set your account to open or group only or private and you control who can interact with you. You could join global groups or very narrow groups, as you saw fit and created your own if none fit you. Obviously the big drawback would be plunging “engagemrnt” and slower growth. I think it would be healthier. If you’re a wallflower, you find your groups, if you want to spout off, you join those groups... if you want miss manners, you join hers, if you want sailors, you join theirs.
- projektir 8y ago
  Something like this could help. What modern "social networks" lack is proper separation and barriers to entry. Previously BBS just accomplished it by being separate, owned by private individuals, and topic based. Both Reddit and Twitter broke that.
- buovjaga 8y ago
  https://thomask.sdf.org/blog/2018/08/19/from-gnu-social-to-mastodon.html https://thomask.sdf.org/blog/2018/08/19/from-gnu-social-to-m... "There was a cool feature in GNU social called groups that has never existed on Twitter or on Mastodon. A user can register a group on their server—for example there was one about gardening called “!grow”. If you subscribe to the group and then put “!grow” in one of your messages, all the other subscribers see it in their home timeline. It’s similar to subscribing to a hashtag except the group’s creator can moderate members. ... It’s kind of fascinating to me that this feature wound up in GNU social even though they didn’t have solutions for long term management. It enabled some cool interactions. It caused a bunch of consternation when things went wrong. Users bumbled their way through. Is it a good design? Eh, probably not. I imagine that’s why they’re not supported in Mastodon."
zaroth 8y ago
My initial impression — and I by no means have any handle on the specific situation, is that this whole thing had nothing whatsoever to do with Wil, and everything to do with testing a capability. Wil happened to walk in on a type of weapons test. I think the attack in this case would be considered a “success”. Or was it just for lulz? Was there any cost to the attackers? Are they throwaway accounts or real identities? Is it at least forever tied to that account so that there could possibly be some future reackoning? So many questions about the whole incident and response.
- deleted 8y ago
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- deleted 8y ago
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itbeho 8y ago
You can see a glimmer of why he has so much trouble with trolls though in that post. He refers to Trump as "Shitler" and his supporters as "cultists" and then a few paragraphs later admonishes the reader to "Please do your best to be kind, and make an effort to make the world less terrible." "Do what I say but not what I do..." is a terrible way to get people around to one's way of thinking.
- azeotropic 8y ago
  The most interesting thing to me is how Wil's antagonists seem to have successfully taken advantage of Wil's mythos (consciously or not) to create cognitive dissonance. I'm not sure Wil gets that he's never going to have any inner peace while holding on to a mythos that regards him as subhuman because of things he can't control like his race or sex. Some of the thoughts in that post feel like they're from another century. Almost ike reading Jonathan Edwards' diary, where any time he catches himself feeling happy he has to go off an meditate on how he is but a lowly worm deserving of death. In both cases it's actually pretty self-absorbed, but at least Edwards had the good sense not to complain to other people (or even to himself in his diary) that the metaphorical hair shirt he'd put on was uncomfortable. In that sort of mythos, the only peace the righteous can expect is a life of suffering, since happiness and success are signs of worldliness (or, in Wil's case privilege).
- naasking 8y ago
  > He refers to Trump as "Shitler" and his supporters as "cultists" and then a few paragraphs later admonishes the reader to "Please do your best to be kind, and make an effort to make the world less terrible." Definitely, this post is littered with examples like this, like pointing out Gunn getting fired while Gunn himself cheered when the exact same thing happened to Roseanne. There's just so much hypocrisy on every side. If you want the moral high ground, then don't reach for weapons when someone disagrees with you. People enjoy when weapons wielded against those they view as enemies, but decry the injustice of them being used against those they see as friends. But in the end, war only benefits the war mongers. Dehumanizing people is never a reasonable response, and so weapons should never be needed, especially against fellow citizens.
eridius 8y ago
It's also incredibly biased towards Wil (no surprise, as he wrote it). In reality, Wil himself was the harasser and abuser, and the reports against him were completely justified. He got bofa'd and in response started reporting other users for even the slightest provocation. And it wasn't just reporting other users; he was specifically reporting a bunch of trans women, which really puts him in a poor light considering the fiasco with his Twitter blocklist that he put a ton of LGBT people on and pretty much ruined the lives of a bunch of independent trans artists who suddenly lost their source of income. Now it's certainly possible that a group of people decided to mob him with reports, but personally I think it's pretty likely that those 60 reports overnight were all legitimate reactions to his campaign of abuse against other people.
- skybrian 8y ago
  Maybe, but why should we believe this version of the story rather than the other one? Do you have a source?
  - merlish 8y ago
    You'd be better off believing neither, but taking the participants' stories as what they believe happened. Then drawing your own conclusions. (Sorry, not picking on you in particular; I'm just quite annoyed to see this thread treating the incident as a spam problem to be solved technically. There were also people who really did not like Wil Wheaton, and then suddenly found him in their online home.)
  - lilyball 8y ago
    My source is a whole bunch of comments on Mastodon that I read as the whole thing was going down, plus a bunch of more comments on Twitter talking about what happened after it was all over. I don't have specific links as I didn't save any, but there were a lot of independent sources on this at the time. Edit: found a new tweet that summarizes this: https://twitter.com/eiwbm_cat/status/1035716245914624003?s=21 https://twitter.com/eiwbm_cat/status/1035716245914624003?s=2...
  - ghusbands 8y ago
Zanni 8y ago
As a conservative who typically votes Republican, it frustrates me that an otherwise thoughtful individual like Wil Wheaton in the middle of a plea for empathy and understanding drops language like "President Shitler" and says of Twitter "the most lucid and concise indictment I can give Twitter is: it's the service that Donald Trump uses to communicate with and incite his cultists." Dude, if that's how you think and talk about people whose political opinions you disagree with, how can you expect anything better in return? I'm appalled by how you were treated. I'm on your side. But I get the distinct impression that if the shoe were on the other foot, and you knew how I voted, you would not be on mine.
- martimarkov 8y ago
  I don’t think he disagrees with the political view but rather with his moral code, compass or even his lack of humanity. From my view (not related to the USA) it does seem like a correct statement. None of the masses that voted for him have shown empathy towards others or have a logical argument. That being said if he didn’t win and it was a different candidate with the logic lacking masses I think a similar statement would be valid as well.
- charcoal23 8y ago
  I'm finding it difficult to see how a Trump voter can complain about tone. Trump himself is usually toxic and abrasive, and relies heavily on petty insults with the eloquence usually found on grade school playgrounds. His followers proudly wore "fuck your feelings" on their clothing, and that seems to have been their operational philosophy ("cucks! snowflakes! get out of your safe spaces!") before they realized how much the rest of the country hated them. Now, ironically, they complain about insults and not being accepted. With all that in mind, is it any surprise people on the Left treat Trump with zero respect? And can you not understand how ridiculous it is to demand that respect when respect has not been given by your side. From the president on down, there has been no grace, no diplomacy, no kindness. This is a classic "remove the log in your own eye before complaining about the mote in another's" situation. And that's without getting into how this administration is the most corrupt in modern American history. Perhaps the most corrupt ever in our nation. And is intent on doing as much looting & damage as possible before they're finally kicked out. Difficult to treat someone with respect when they're behaving in such a reprehensible fashion.
whiddershins 8y ago
Mobbing on social media seems to be a real problem. Many articles have be written about it and we need solutions. I think it sucks that Wil can’t function on social media because of it. As for the essay, it is philosophically a huge contradiction. He’s upset that twitter allows Alex Jones to post, while being upset he is being essentially blocked on social media? But then he calls the sitting president of the United States juvenile and hateful nicknames? So which is it? The essay writes from the assumption he has the moral high ground and is being victimized. The mobbing stuff is a legit problem and attack and makes me sympathetic. The rest completely undermines his point.
- extra88 8y ago
  Alex Jones's speech is not equivalent to Wil's. Jones is accused of inciting harassment and violence, and defaming private citizens. Objecting to Jones's presence and to harassment is not hypocrisy. There are two arguments against Twitter; one is they're not equally applying their own standards, ignoring the behaviors of people like Jones and Trump while punishing people who are seen as victims. The other is Twitter's standards and tools for dealing with harassment are insufficient. I don't know if the former is true or not but the latter seems to be proven by people finding it impossible to use the platform, as-is. I don't really understand the thinking behind leaving a large platform because people you don't like also use it. The vast majority of people using Twitter, Reddit, etc. are not objectionable. To act like the presence of a few bad ones A) will harm your reputation if you also use it and/or B) your use constitutes an endorsement of them or even of the platform, seems silly. Leaving because you're personally harassed or have a hard time finding the content or conversation you're looking for is not silly.
13years 8y ago
The interesting observation if I understood Wil's account correctly, is that it appears he was likely mobbed by the very people with whom he would likely share common values. I think this speaks to a deeper more disturbing pattern of social interaction in the space of social media. In many ways I see it is regressing our ability to have real conversations in the same way we would in the real world. Animosity is building between people/groups that I'm not sure would happen to the same degree otherwise.
- cvwright 8y ago
  Unfortunately I think you have it backwards. Some people just really, really like to fight, and to purge heretics from the group of pure believers. It also doesn't help that the smallest misstep is sufficient to switch one from "pure believer" to "heretic" in the blink of an eye. I'll go ahead and link the famous "whale cancer" article from SSC: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/14/living-by-the-sword/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/14/living-by-the-sword/

mirimir 8y ago

Yes, frightening! Almost enough to put me off Mastodon. Edit: Seriously, just why the bloody hell would I participate in some system where a bunch of trolls could get my account deleted? I seriously doubt that could happen here, for example, because moderators base decisions on values, rather than expediency. Another alternative, which I actually prefer, is for absolutely no third-party moderation, but lots of tools for users to efficiently control what they see.

r721 8y ago
I think there exist some zero-moderation instances: https://telegra.ph/Instances-to-silencesuspend-on-Mastodon-06-23 https://telegra.ph/Instances-to-silencesuspend-on-Mastodon-0... (this is a list of instances I found which some sensitive people recommend to block, so free speech/zero-moderation ones are included there)
- mirimir 8y ago
  But then other instances just blacklist them, right? Edit: And damn, the quoted post from social.i2p.rocks actually makes some sense. The language is harsh, for sure, but the support for freedom is pretty clear. Also, how hard is it to manage accounts on multiple instances? So I could see both mainstream and fully unmoderated.
  - r721 8y ago
    Yeah, this list is a blocklist which many "safe" instances use. But I thought it could be useful to find unmoderated instances too, author invested a lot of time into it.
  - egypturnash 8y ago
    Yes, we do. A number of instances have blacklisted bofa.lol, which is where this whole attack on Wheaton began. I suspect that eventually the Fediverse will be divided into two major sections: places that are okay with "pissing people off" as a source of fun, and places that require basic adult civility at the price of, say, restricting your freedom to call an absolute stranger something vile. I dunno how well the former will survive with read-only access to the latter. I would not be sad to see it wither and die, though several decades of life on the Internet suggests that's all too unlikely to happen.
    - pessimizer 8y ago
      > I dunno how well the former will survive with read-only access to the latter. I would not be sad to see it wither and die, though several decades of life on the Internet suggests that's all too unlikely to happen. In my internet experience, it will be the fun, influential one, and the "civil" one will wither and die. The problem in this case was the abuse of the reporting system, it seems, not name-calling.
      - scarejunba 8y ago
        Metafilter is way better than Voat. I concur that the less fun one will wither but no guarantee that's the civil one.
      - psergeant 8y ago
        HackerNews benefits strongly (imho) from strong moderation.
        dredmorbius 8y ago
        Strong, principled, consistent, and effective.
    - Kalium 8y ago
      > I suspect that eventually the Fediverse will be divided into two major sections: places that are okay with "pissing people off" as a source of fun, and places that require basic adult civility at the price of, say, restricting your freedom to call an absolute stranger something vile. Does that mean instances will enforce basic adult civility by preventing one from insulting, say, President Trump? He is by any reasonable standard an absolute stranger to the vast majority of users, who generally will have had absolutely no personal contact with him in any fashion. I don't care for the man's politics, but I also must admit I've never met him. Have I missed something? Please, help me understand!
- ohhellno 8y ago
  I found a free speech instance but you have convinced me to stop using Mastodon. What a joke. This list has some reasonable things in it but a lot of attacking other users/instances on flimsy allegations.
  - r721 8y ago
    I am actually not sure how widely this blocklist is used, I just randomly stumbled upon it (via https://github.com/tootcafe/blocked-instances https://github.com/tootcafe/blocked-instances).
ohhellno 8y ago
After reading the list of recommended instances to ban I am officially turned off of Mastodon. Some of the sites banned are for good reason but many/most(?) seem to be vague personal grievances from people overly concerned about how people say things. This language politicization will not make many English-second-language people comfortable as one mistake could potentially ruin them. Meanwhile, the "do gooder" moralists are the only ones who can truly say what they think and all they do is produce lists of people they hate. Sorry. Not getting on the Mastodon bandwagon!
- wallacoloo 8y ago
  I was really surprised when the original article said mastodon was blacklist by default (and that instance whitelisting was only possible via forking the code!) I’m actually not certain this is true. I used Mastodon briefly and I remember there was one account out there that auto-followed every user it saw tooting. That way that bot’s instance would build connections to every instance it could see, which gives both (A) metrics - you can get a rough estimate of how many instances are alive at any time - and (B) a way for instances to discover smaller/newer instances if they choose to (I.e follow this bot, and now the global feed visible to your instance sees just about everything). If Mastodon is blacklist by default, then it must have some other discovery mechanism? Or maybe the terminology just isn’t being applied in the way I understand it (e.g. perhaps it is whitelist-by-default, in that you explicitly connect to instances of your choice, but this implicitly whitelists every instance that whitelisted instance is connected to, recursively, and the blacklist is built atop this)?
  - skybrian 8y ago
    I believe other instances get automatically subscribed (without admin's preapproval) when any user follows someone on the other instance.

mc32 8y ago

Maybe I’m naive, but I’ve thought the idea of “groups” on Twitter would improve things. You join groups you like, you set your account to open or group only or private and you control who can interact with you. You could join global groups or very narrow groups, as you saw fit and created your own if none fit you. Obviously the big drawback would be plunging “engagemrnt” and slower growth. I think it would be healthier. If you’re a wallflower, you find your groups, if you want to spout off, you join those groups... if you want miss manners, you join hers, if you want sailors, you join theirs.

projektir 8y ago
Something like this could help. What modern "social networks" lack is proper separation and barriers to entry. Previously BBS just accomplished it by being separate, owned by private individuals, and topic based. Both Reddit and Twitter broke that.
buovjaga 8y ago
https://thomask.sdf.org/blog/2018/08/19/from-gnu-social-to-mastodon.html https://thomask.sdf.org/blog/2018/08/19/from-gnu-social-to-m... "There was a cool feature in GNU social called groups that has never existed on Twitter or on Mastodon. A user can register a group on their server—for example there was one about gardening called “!grow”. If you subscribe to the group and then put “!grow” in one of your messages, all the other subscribers see it in their home timeline. It’s similar to subscribing to a hashtag except the group’s creator can moderate members. ... It’s kind of fascinating to me that this feature wound up in GNU social even though they didn’t have solutions for long term management. It enabled some cool interactions. It caused a bunch of consternation when things went wrong. Users bumbled their way through. Is it a good design? Eh, probably not. I imagine that’s why they’re not supported in Mastodon."

zaroth 8y ago

My initial impression — and I by no means have any handle on the specific situation, is that this whole thing had nothing whatsoever to do with Wil, and everything to do with testing a capability. Wil happened to walk in on a type of weapons test. I think the attack in this case would be considered a “success”. Or was it just for lulz? Was there any cost to the attackers? Are they throwaway accounts or real identities? Is it at least forever tied to that account so that there could possibly be some future reackoning? So many questions about the whole incident and response.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

itbeho 8y ago

You can see a glimmer of why he has so much trouble with trolls though in that post. He refers to Trump as "Shitler" and his supporters as "cultists" and then a few paragraphs later admonishes the reader to "Please do your best to be kind, and make an effort to make the world less terrible." "Do what I say but not what I do..." is a terrible way to get people around to one's way of thinking.

azeotropic 8y ago
The most interesting thing to me is how Wil's antagonists seem to have successfully taken advantage of Wil's mythos (consciously or not) to create cognitive dissonance. I'm not sure Wil gets that he's never going to have any inner peace while holding on to a mythos that regards him as subhuman because of things he can't control like his race or sex. Some of the thoughts in that post feel like they're from another century. Almost ike reading Jonathan Edwards' diary, where any time he catches himself feeling happy he has to go off an meditate on how he is but a lowly worm deserving of death. In both cases it's actually pretty self-absorbed, but at least Edwards had the good sense not to complain to other people (or even to himself in his diary) that the metaphorical hair shirt he'd put on was uncomfortable. In that sort of mythos, the only peace the righteous can expect is a life of suffering, since happiness and success are signs of worldliness (or, in Wil's case privilege).
naasking 8y ago
> He refers to Trump as "Shitler" and his supporters as "cultists" and then a few paragraphs later admonishes the reader to "Please do your best to be kind, and make an effort to make the world less terrible." Definitely, this post is littered with examples like this, like pointing out Gunn getting fired while Gunn himself cheered when the exact same thing happened to Roseanne. There's just so much hypocrisy on every side. If you want the moral high ground, then don't reach for weapons when someone disagrees with you. People enjoy when weapons wielded against those they view as enemies, but decry the injustice of them being used against those they see as friends. But in the end, war only benefits the war mongers. Dehumanizing people is never a reasonable response, and so weapons should never be needed, especially against fellow citizens.

eridius 8y ago

It's also incredibly biased towards Wil (no surprise, as he wrote it). In reality, Wil himself was the harasser and abuser, and the reports against him were completely justified. He got bofa'd and in response started reporting other users for even the slightest provocation. And it wasn't just reporting other users; he was specifically reporting a bunch of trans women, which really puts him in a poor light considering the fiasco with his Twitter blocklist that he put a ton of LGBT people on and pretty much ruined the lives of a bunch of independent trans artists who suddenly lost their source of income. Now it's certainly possible that a group of people decided to mob him with reports, but personally I think it's pretty likely that those 60 reports overnight were all legitimate reactions to his campaign of abuse against other people.

skybrian 8y ago
Maybe, but why should we believe this version of the story rather than the other one? Do you have a source?
- merlish 8y ago
  You'd be better off believing neither, but taking the participants' stories as what they believe happened. Then drawing your own conclusions. (Sorry, not picking on you in particular; I'm just quite annoyed to see this thread treating the incident as a spam problem to be solved technically. There were also people who really did not like Wil Wheaton, and then suddenly found him in their online home.)
- lilyball 8y ago
  My source is a whole bunch of comments on Mastodon that I read as the whole thing was going down, plus a bunch of more comments on Twitter talking about what happened after it was all over. I don't have specific links as I didn't save any, but there were a lot of independent sources on this at the time. Edit: found a new tweet that summarizes this: https://twitter.com/eiwbm_cat/status/1035716245914624003?s=21 https://twitter.com/eiwbm_cat/status/1035716245914624003?s=2...
- ghusbands 8y ago

Zanni 8y ago

As a conservative who typically votes Republican, it frustrates me that an otherwise thoughtful individual like Wil Wheaton in the middle of a plea for empathy and understanding drops language like "President Shitler" and says of Twitter "the most lucid and concise indictment I can give Twitter is: it's the service that Donald Trump uses to communicate with and incite his cultists." Dude, if that's how you think and talk about people whose political opinions you disagree with, how can you expect anything better in return? I'm appalled by how you were treated. I'm on your side. But I get the distinct impression that if the shoe were on the other foot, and you knew how I voted, you would not be on mine.

martimarkov 8y ago
I don’t think he disagrees with the political view but rather with his moral code, compass or even his lack of humanity. From my view (not related to the USA) it does seem like a correct statement. None of the masses that voted for him have shown empathy towards others or have a logical argument. That being said if he didn’t win and it was a different candidate with the logic lacking masses I think a similar statement would be valid as well.
charcoal23 8y ago
I'm finding it difficult to see how a Trump voter can complain about tone. Trump himself is usually toxic and abrasive, and relies heavily on petty insults with the eloquence usually found on grade school playgrounds. His followers proudly wore "fuck your feelings" on their clothing, and that seems to have been their operational philosophy ("cucks! snowflakes! get out of your safe spaces!") before they realized how much the rest of the country hated them. Now, ironically, they complain about insults and not being accepted. With all that in mind, is it any surprise people on the Left treat Trump with zero respect? And can you not understand how ridiculous it is to demand that respect when respect has not been given by your side. From the president on down, there has been no grace, no diplomacy, no kindness. This is a classic "remove the log in your own eye before complaining about the mote in another's" situation. And that's without getting into how this administration is the most corrupt in modern American history. Perhaps the most corrupt ever in our nation. And is intent on doing as much looting & damage as possible before they're finally kicked out. Difficult to treat someone with respect when they're behaving in such a reprehensible fashion.

whiddershins 8y ago

Mobbing on social media seems to be a real problem. Many articles have be written about it and we need solutions. I think it sucks that Wil can’t function on social media because of it. As for the essay, it is philosophically a huge contradiction. He’s upset that twitter allows Alex Jones to post, while being upset he is being essentially blocked on social media? But then he calls the sitting president of the United States juvenile and hateful nicknames? So which is it? The essay writes from the assumption he has the moral high ground and is being victimized. The mobbing stuff is a legit problem and attack and makes me sympathetic. The rest completely undermines his point.

extra88 8y ago
Alex Jones's speech is not equivalent to Wil's. Jones is accused of inciting harassment and violence, and defaming private citizens. Objecting to Jones's presence and to harassment is not hypocrisy. There are two arguments against Twitter; one is they're not equally applying their own standards, ignoring the behaviors of people like Jones and Trump while punishing people who are seen as victims. The other is Twitter's standards and tools for dealing with harassment are insufficient. I don't know if the former is true or not but the latter seems to be proven by people finding it impossible to use the platform, as-is. I don't really understand the thinking behind leaving a large platform because people you don't like also use it. The vast majority of people using Twitter, Reddit, etc. are not objectionable. To act like the presence of a few bad ones A) will harm your reputation if you also use it and/or B) your use constitutes an endorsement of them or even of the platform, seems silly. Leaving because you're personally harassed or have a hard time finding the content or conversation you're looking for is not silly.

13years 8y ago

The interesting observation if I understood Wil's account correctly, is that it appears he was likely mobbed by the very people with whom he would likely share common values. I think this speaks to a deeper more disturbing pattern of social interaction in the space of social media. In many ways I see it is regressing our ability to have real conversations in the same way we would in the real world. Animosity is building between people/groups that I'm not sure would happen to the same degree otherwise.

cvwright 8y ago
Unfortunately I think you have it backwards. Some people just really, really like to fight, and to purge heretics from the group of pure believers. It also doesn't help that the smallest misstep is sufficient to switch one from "pure believer" to "heretic" in the blink of an eye. I'll go ahead and link the famous "whale cancer" article from SSC: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/14/living-by-the-sword/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/14/living-by-the-sword/