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>I've noticed a huge uptick in the toxicity online in the last 5-7 years. You're crazy my dude(tte). I've been on the interbutts since 1991 and Usenet days, an

>I've noticed a huge uptick in the toxicity online in the last 5-7 years. You're crazy my dude(tte). I've been on the interbutts since 1991 and Usenet days, and it's exactly as it always was. The big difference is we have reporter ding dongs on Twitter thinking Twitter, aka the comments section they removed from their web presence, is the real world. Also old people on Facebook who never learned the lessons of being on Usenet in the early 1990s, aka arguing on the internet is a lame and addictive hobby. There are minor accelerants for this; youtube really did have some kind of pathological radicalization rabbit hole in its recommendation engine for a while (now it's just boring and useless and shows you "more of the same" on "blue checked" accounts). And of course, the other media encourages polarization and demonization of the other for dumb short term. That's a purely American phenomenon, and nothing's going to change it until the people pushing this swill on MSNBC, Fox and CNN decide to change it.

x3haloed 7y ago
I recently logged into CS:GO to play something familiar and holy cow, the toxicity! Just like the old days. Online gaming has always been extremely toxic, and most internet discussion has been that way since the beginning. It reminded me of just how little of that I see in day to day internet browsing these days. I think the veracity of the toxicity is tamer, but the reach and impact is so much wider.
jxramos 7y ago
Its true those trolls have been around for some time. Its human nature to rear an ugly face under the auspices of anonymity. Makes me think about the real world vs the internet joke on Red vs Blue https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=I0grFFAxySw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=I0grFFAxySw
- mattrp 7y ago
  I would agree with the gp that it seems no one who lived in the age of Usenet flame wars would see the current state as new. Remember when people would All CAPS each other? I would also say I’ve never thought of myself as a troll .... but given the number of downvotes I get on hn, I probably am at least troll-ish. So with that in mind, here’s the troll-ish take: When people post something online it’s often in anticipation of something good coming from it. At this point there’s nothing any system or protocol can do to make this person less impacted if anything less than a unicorn floats pout of the sky dropping little unicorn turds over their one little contribution to discourse. We simply can’t change the super enormous personal expectations that one builds up as a result of commenting. At the same time there’s this real world trend that is starting to reflect the virtual world. People talking to each other face to face using the same etiquette they would in a virtual setting. I would suggest it’s not just tribal... it’s that increasingly we are unable to turn off and disconnect from the virtual world... we are literally interacting through a pseudo-real dimension in the mind precisely because we cannot put our phones down. I recently read through the post about inner monologues and I was surprised a) there were so many people who have entire theoretical conversations in their head and b) that post had so many comments - maybe it was the most comments in a single post ever. So here’s the deal - humans talk to themselves as a matter of being human. Now, a sizable portion of a humans daily interactions are online where societal norms have been adjusted, there’s simply no way the inner dialogue in the real world isn’t being impacted by this - just look at how teenage life has been decimated over recent years. As for what to do about it. #1, you personally have responsibility for making sure your inner dialogue is healthy and isn’t 100% from online sources, #2 you have to unplug for much more of the day than you think, #3 a good book wouldn’t hurt, #4 you need to learn more about history than you think — a good book that explores the topic of mob mentality in US politics is Six Frigates by Ian W Toll. You literally won’t believe how the period between the revolutionary war and the war of 1812 mirrors modern day until you read this, #5, have some empathy for other people regardless of their viewpoints, #6 realize that no matter who is in charge, it’s going to be ok. I can’t tell you how many people I know literally went apeshit when Obama got elected, sold all their stocks, bought gold and prepared for Armageddon. I also can’t tell you many people literally went apeshit when trump got elected, sold all their stock... to both groups, I say how’d that work out for you? Not very well and yet life goes on. You kind of have to be a little meh about everything...that’s my view anyway...
samatman 7y ago
In other words, except for the scale, and the fact that it's infected the mainstream media, and the accelerants making it even worse, it's the same old thing? So we can summarize as "there's been a huge uptick in the toxicity online (which was always there)?"
- madaxe_again 7y ago
  It’s the same old same old. People used to heckle in theatres, because the audience lent them anonymity. Mobs are mobs because in a mob you are the mob. Lift the social contract by granting anonymity and we fairly instantaneously resort to slinging faeces at one another. I think the GP has nailed it, however - we are reporting theatre hecklers as news, and instead of watching the play, everyone is now watching the punch-up in the aisles, and placing wagers. The problem is that the theatre is on fire, but that hasn’t quite yet eclipsed the spectacle of a good old fashioned confrontation.
  - ticmasta 7y ago
    Well one difference is the scope of participation, which was only slightly mentioned (old people on FB) - even in the lat 90's the internet was still mostly the domain of a relatively homogeneous technical-skewing audience; the composition has probably flipped since then. Judgement of whether this is good or bad aside, it is definitely easier to maintain peace and harmony when the socio/economic/cultural differences are smaller. Those days are long gone. I'm finding the only winning move is not to play (i.e. "don't go to the theatre; stay home and read a book")
  - Udik 7y ago
    I used to agree fully with what you say. But only a few days ago it occurred to me that in the early days of the web (let's say late '90, early 2000s) I thought that the internet was going to make the world a more peaceful place: everybody would have talked directly with one another, irrespective of distances and languages; we would have understood each other better and disagreements would have been smoothed out. Well, that didn't happen. What happened instead is that the ongoing discussions seem to stir up even more disagreement; and people are not really talking to each other, they rather signal their belonging to this or that faction. Also, the internet has been weaponised: leaving aside the organised "troll factories", any group that feels strongly about something can try to impose it to everyone else just by occupying as much space as possible. And then, if others express publicly their own ideas, don't you want your idea to be represented too? Then it becomes a shouting match, where each faction tries to fill as much public space as possible by shouting at the top of its lungs. Part of this is the traditional media's fault. We thought newspapers and tv networks were going to die, drowned in the huge amount of available information sources. Instead, the web is still hierarchical: few media outlets shape the conversation deciding what to report on and how, then everyone else has the choice of closing ranks around the proposed narrative or in opposition to it. The dream of global peer-to-peer conversations didn't really come to be.
devmunchies 7y ago
I remember the AOL instant messenger days and people being super derogatory and vulgar for kicks. Even xbox live of 2007 was just as vulgar as today. I don't think its that the internet is more toxic, its that we are more sensitive (more easily offended). A strong immune system is the best defense. If it rolls off your back, is it really toxic?
- eropple 7y ago
  Shitlords don't just "meme". They radicalize themselves and others. I had a friend ask to crash on my couch during GamerGate because a guy on 4chan took a picture of himself with a knife in front of her apartment building and it's the people who aren't shitlords who are the problem here? What's your proposed "immune system" response to that, exactly? Or to an Elliot Rodgers, he who was cheered on by exactly this crowd? "These people are attempting to incubate a culture where you might get swatted for being vocally not a straight white man, but it is we who are too sensitive." Nah. The problem isn't the people who have the misfortune of being downrange of scumbags, and never is.
  - devmunchies 7y ago
    this whole thread has nothing to do with real world threats of physical violence. online trolling is different than your extreme example.
    - swampangel 7y ago
      If 10 people on the internet tell you they want to kill you, how do you tell if 1 of them is serious and is actually going to show up physically? The answer is that you can't, and there isn't a firm line where all trolling is on one side and harassing/violent behaviour is something different. Many of us can heuristically decide that trollish behaviour aimed at us won't extend to our person/home/workplace, and doesn't need to be taken seriously. That doesn't mean it's a rule for everyone or an excuse for that behaviour.
      - 7y ago
gota 7y ago
> Twitter, aka the comments section they removed from their web presence Oh my, I never thought about it but this is absolutely true
- anigbrowl 7y ago
  It would be if there weren't a comment section on almost every news story published in mainstream media. As someone who pressed aggressively for exactly that starting back in the 1990s I now view it as a mistake.
stanferder 7y ago
> [T]he other media encourages polarization and demonization of the other for dumb short term. That's a purely American phenomenon... I don't think that's true. The tone of American political news nowadays doesn't seem that different than British newspapers in the 1990s. "It's the Sun wot won it" was an explicit boast about The Sun's polarizing influence... in 1992. Of course both The Sun and Fox News in the US are part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. But if anything this style of news seems like it arrived in the UK ten or twenty years before it was manifest in the US.
bilbo0s 7y ago
So basically, people are assholes and always have been. Something stuck with me a long time ago when I was watching tv a lot, there was a character on Scrubs named "Dr Cox" who said people are bastard coated bastards with bastard filling.
rstupek 7y ago
I'm really tired of mainstream articles which are essentially a reporting finding 3 people on twitter who are for/against something and saying "internet is in uproar about whatever"
- CraigJPerry 7y ago
  There’s quite a lot of formulaic pieces written in UK media where the news outlet comment section has more outraged commenters than the original issue. If you use dailymail.co.uk and search for “outraged” there’s quite a few examples of this formula being used. I suppose it increases impression time of adverts which means higher price earned for them. I’m not criticising the business accumen.
  - iron0013 7y ago
    This pattern happens so often that you’d think people would start to catch on. A story about one person supposedly being “outraged” about something leads to a huge vigorous CJ of folks eager to express their anti-outrage-outrage at the straw man in front of them.
- CM30 7y ago
  Same here. And it's not just based on Twitter posts either. I've seen a depressing number of news articles (especially gaming related ones) which are based on random internet petitions signed by maybe three people. Anyone can set up an internet petition about anything. The presence of one does not meant there's some gigantic audience clamouring for some game idea/casting idea/etc.
- jessaustin 7y ago
  Well, consider the reporter's POV. It's really easy to browse Twitter for 20 minutes and then spend 10 minutes summarizing your findings. Contacting people who have any connection at all to important events and then convincing them to answer your questions about those events might take all day...
throwaway122619 7y ago
Adding to your point, I'm wondering if OP has ever had a religious group show up at their doorstep. It's the same idea; "Our ideas are right, yours are wrong." There are no laws stopping them from doing this, (short of solicitation statutes) and there's certainly no convincing them they are wrong. Just smile politely and ignore them. Really, it's the same problem just dressed up differently. Now the issue just has these new buzzwords attached to it like "algorithm" and "data privacy" and whatnot. Nothing will change until people learn to leave their pride on their desktop, but that's not the way of some cultures.
- jessaustin 7y ago
  Good analogy, but one can always banish the proselytizers with a simple "Sorry, we're Catholic!" (One doesn't even actually have to be Catholic to say this!)
mschuster91 7y ago
> I've been on the interbutts since 1991 and Usenet days, and it's exactly as it always was. Quality-wise maybe but nowhere near the same in numbers. Back in 1990-2005 it took expertise to reach the Usenet. Facebook, Reddit et al. changed the game by essentially giving every village idiot without technical knowledge the "freedom" to troll on FB, Youtube, whatever. Conspiracy theories had their own niche usenet spaces, today there are FB groups for all kinds of utter bollocks with hundreds of thousands of members and absolutely no quality or sanity control. Additionally, for newsgroups you needed some kind of client, most people could only access them after work, further reducing the user base, and there was nothing remotely similar to "likes" - today, people do everything for likes, with instantaneous feedback and no limits (practically everyone has a smartphone with FB and notifications), driving an ever faster and faster "news" cycle. > And of course, the other media encourages polarization and demonization of the other for dumb short term. That's a purely American phenomenon, and nothing's going to change it until the people pushing this swill on MSNBC, Fox and CNN decide to change it No, this is not US-only. It may be most expressed in the US (and amplified by its two-party system), but us Europeans see the same issue. Brexit is the most obvious, but France, Poland, Hungary, Austria and Germany also have problems with polarization and (mostly) the far right using outright lies to further it, with Russian financing / backing suspected and proven everywhere. The thing that must change is to get rid of Russian money in politics, and to enforce neutrality and fact based reporting in media.
- ksec 7y ago
  This. The cost of going on Internet used to be quite high, and requires some skills and knowledge. Nowadays anyone can troll, and they get repeated by other trolls, the percentage of it "may" be the same ( although I doubt it ), but the "absolute" number of those are much much higher. Remember before the iPhone, the internet was a much smaller place, and accessed mostly in front of a computer. With Smartphone you now have 4.5 Billion Internet user all using it at any time of the day. The Internet is also much faster. Creating content is easier. We are may be 10 - 100x more in online content consumption then in the 2000s. And I agree this is not US only. So yes it is definitely a social AND psychological problem. Not a technical one, no blockchain, Distributed Social Media, Machine Learning, new AI, Cloud, Servless, (WhatEver)aaS etc will solve it.
kody 7y ago
When reporters on Twitter freak out about the trolls on 4chan like it's some disease infecting our precious wholesome web, I can't help but remember (through my biased lenses of course) when most of the web (that I visited) looked like 4chan. What the folks who think the web is 'degrading' don't seem to realize is how much of a wild west it used to be, and how much corporations have tried to (and somewhat succeeded in) sanitizing it.
- hooande 7y ago
  if most of the web that you visited looked like 4chan, you should have been going to different sites
  - GrayTextIsTruth 7y ago
    The subtle shaming and holier-than-thou policing, like in your comment, is more harmful and toxic than the trolling. It’s what is fueling the polarization IMO. Look now I’m doing it, it’s contagious.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- GrayTextIsTruth 7y ago
  This is my experience and perception as well. I don’t understand people who think it’s always been some civil gathering.
  - at-fates-hands 7y ago
    > I don’t understand people who think it’s always been some civil gathering. In the early days of social media, the idea was to create engaging communities, which I felt for the most part happened. I was on a LOT of social media platforms in the mid aughts and really got a lot of it with the people I connected with. For me, it was actually quite positive and healthy then. In the last eight years or so? I had to get off. The overwhelming negativity, the weaponization of the platforms, the "cancel culture" and a rash of other things just make a majority of the platforms completely unusable now. On top of that, you add in the incredibly poor track record these platforms have with user data and privacy, the non-stop tracking, and the thousands of ads in your feeds? It used to be a joy to use these platforms. Now it's gotten to a point where I'm not sure what the point of social media is anymore.
platz 7y ago
Right, It's not a technology problem. Not everything can be reduced to a technology problem. This is an American, and even worldwide problem. Everyone is writing about polarization right now. Ezra Klein, who I normally loathe, has been doing the podcasting rounds lately about his new polarization book, which has a pragmatic take on the problem. He doesn't see a way out right now. Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas Ezra Klein on Politics, Polarization, and Identity https://pca.st/huei9let https://pca.st/huei9let The Weeds: The road to polarization https://pca.st/izsley78 https://pca.st/izsley78 According to Ezra, part of the reason we have this now is because our personal identities are now stacked in line with our political identities. Why this stacking occurs might just be a natural process. As for the media, It's not only the media's fault. There was a feedback loop between media and audience. When media was unbundled from the national model, only slightly more polarized people could be reliable customers and so media had to compete over them, which polarized the media, which polarized the audience etc...
- Domenic_S 7y ago
  > our personal identities are now stacked in line with our political identities. Even stronger than that, for many people their political identity IS their personal identity, and those folks can't see anybody else any other way. I was a child when Clinton was elected. We lived in a conservative neighborhood, and I remember there being disappointment but as far as I can recall everyone resumed their normal lives after that. Then when GWB was elected, I lived in a more liberal town and there was some angst, maybe a bit of protesting, but by and large everyone went back to their lives. Trump has been interesting. For many people, if you voted for Trump, you are a Nazi. As far as they're concerned, your political identity IS your personal identity. And let's be fair to both sides, for a lot of Trump supporters, being a MAGA-hat wearer is their personal identity. We're on the road to something, and it's not good.
banads 7y ago
>the other media encourages polarization and demonization of the other for dumb short term. That's a purely American phenomenon Nope, tribalism and divide et impera is a human phenomenon
nardi 7y ago
Yes, the internet’s always been toxic, but the audience has changed. It used to be a small subset of the world population that had the money, time, and know-how to get on the internet. Now it’s the entire world, and it seems to me that the average media-consumption sophistication has gone way down. Trolls used to be a smaller fraction of the whole, and easier to ignore. Now, the signal-to-troll ratio is all out of whack.
- awb 7y ago
  > It used to be a small subset of the world population that had the money, time, and know-how to get on the internet. Now it’s the entire world This. It's not that polarization and toxic ideas didn't exist, it was arguably much worse in the past with slavery, genocide, etc. You had entire countries publicly advocating for violent racism and citing sources that they claimed supported their views. It's pretty harsh to call us post-truth but not them. Their lies led to brutal consequences for millions. And it used to be the media was a pretty strict funnel (pre-Internet, pre-TV) where you had to be interesting to someone with power like a politician or an editor to get mass exposure for your ideas. Everyone else was relegated to preaching in the park. Now, we have virtual parks (websites) and preaching can reach millions.
- djanlermats2020 7y ago
  The actual problem isn't "trolls", it's people who call everyone who disagrees with them a troll.
chubot 7y ago
But it is the real world now ... People form their beliefs and make decisions in the world based on what they consume online. I frequently see Twitter memes spoken from people's mouths in person. I mostly abstain from it, but like it or not, Twitter does matter. I've also been online since 1993, and used Usenet for many years. Back then you could compartmentalize some argument as a bunch of nerds, but now it's just "people". FWIW I also agree that the wisdom of "don't feed the trolls" has been forgotten. So in that way it's gotten worse too.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- lotyrin 7y ago
  Yes. Encountering the Apache Helicopter joke on 4chan is par for the course, but I just really don't want to hear it out loud from a coworker who is senior to me in a meeting room, and have everyone else laugh along with it.
  - iron0013 7y ago
    Yikes, if that happened at your workplace I hope you talked to HR about it. That’s a “joke” in the form of a death threat.
    - gjs278 7y ago
      no it's not. it's a joke about genders.
- Mangalor 7y ago
  But weren't "nerds" always just "people"? It's the interpretation of the culture that's changed as well.
  - chubot 7y ago
    To clarify, in 1993 or even 2000, you could see a bunch of flame wars on Usenet, and you could ignore them because they "meant nothing". You could dismiss it as a nerd argument that's not connected to your life in the real world. That was usually accurate. (Although I should say there were very intelligent people on Usenet, and that's why I used it. I learned a lot there.) It's harder to do that now. You can ignore certain channels, but they spill out into the "real world" quite frequently. To give a different example, UFC fighters pick fights with each other online, often on Instagram or YouTube. So what happens online is critical to the entire sport, which has grown a tremendous amount in the past decade. It determines whether they get paid $100K or $1M. Real life happens online now. That's a somewhat random example but there are many many subcultures / industries where what happens on social media determines what happens in the real world.
kazinator 7y ago
I've been on dial-up bulletin boards since 1983, Usenet since around the same 1991. Though in some ways it's the same, here is the difference: it has become more diverse. In 1991, the people you might have conversed with on Usenet were a lot similar to you. Of course, if we go to some comp.lang.* newsgroup or whatever, people are similar even today. But I mean that if you went into any newsgroup whatsoever in 1991, on any topic, everyone there would probably have been some sort of professional in a STEM field, academic or university student. Go to, say, rec.pets.dogs, and it wasn't just any dog lovers from any walk of life, but mostly engineers, programmers and sysadmins who are into dogs. That's way different from going into Reddit today, where it's now any Tom, Dick and Harry from any walk of life, who only have a certain topic of interest in common and that's it. People have social interactions online which they wouldn't have in real life. In real life, if you run into someone who is from, say, a "lower" social class, they have it written all over them, and it puts them in their place more effectively than any downvoting system. For instance, in real life, you would either never argue politics with an obvious "despicable", or else you'd immediately attribute everything they say to the limited scope of their background and just nod your head politely. Basically, there is no new divisiveness; the quiet divisiveness we already have just comes out when people get together and hide behind aliases and avatars.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  I agree. Big centralized platforms (youtube, Reddit, the chans, HN to some exent) mean that the internet riff raff (i.e. people with no interest in the niche and who may feel like trolling) are free to show up in any given niche area of the platform (e.g. a subreddit or someone's channel) and then shit all over it. A community that would have been perfectly peaceful on a newsgroup, IRC channel or forum now has to contend with literally anyone from anywhere else on the platform. The old 4chan quip about /b/ leaking is now the default state on basically every platform because the platforms are so big even a small trickle of trolls is a full on flood of crap. People are getting fed up. I think there will be some decentralization in our future.
  - quotemstr 7y ago
    I don't think it's that at all. People have always been able to visit different websites. It still happens today. The rise of mega-platforms is concerning, but not for the reason you cite. It's always been possible for "riff-raff" to notice a community.
noir_lord 7y ago
BBS in the early nineties and internet mid-90's. Always been a toxic element, it's just the echo chamber got louder to the point where it drowns out the normal people.
eitland 7y ago
5 years layer than what you describe but what I remember from the 1995 to 2000 was relatively peaceful, even the newsgroups I visited (mostly technical ones). There were dark corners but you mostly knew if you stepped into one. Then again I was mostly looking for html tutorials, facts for physics and history projects etc.
krilly 7y ago
I can assure you the YouTube rabbit hole is still there. I am constantly recommended right wing, feminist b& type vids
- scottlocklin 7y ago
  Not for me; it just tries to show me Joe Rogaine videos all day. One damn video did this! I want to punch the guy who sent it to me. Oh wait, guess I've been radicalized. FWIIW all the chimping in the threads about death threats: these were extremely common in the old days of Usenet too. I've lost track of them; from all kinds of arguably insane people, satanic cults even; more recently lunatic grad students mad I made fun of their field on my blog. So was doxxing. Nothing ever happened, and I have no respect for people who report them like it's news. While it's probably happened by now that someone's internet beef turned into actual violence, the ratio is absurdly low. If you can't abide some idiot being mad at you, stay off the internet I guess.
mcantelon 7y ago
The severity has grown but the scale of the toxicity's grown in the "human flesh search engine" era.
AndrewKemendo 7y ago
Concur with this. Flamewars have always been with us and a bb or forum flamewar was always something to watch (often annotated with a flame gif on the thread header). As with everything web, it's just scaled as the web has scaled.
el_cujo 7y ago
This is my experience as well. In the early/mid 2000s I mostly browsed sites with a small, dedicated group of regular users. These sites were (mostly) civil and had a "small town" feel where you kind of knew everyone or at least recognized their username. Even back then though, I went on a few sites where the userbase was big enough that you'd be mostly interacting with people who you may never see again on that site, and as a result it was quite a bit less civil than the small sites. I think the big difference between today vs. back then with respect to toxicity, is now that the web is so centralized, most sites the average person probably visits (twitter, reddit, etc) involves them interacting with strangers who they may never interact with again, so there is less of a feeling like they need to "hold back" like you might when talking to someone you know you'll meet again. Probably the only exception to this (for me at least) was Facebook, because back when I used it I almost exclusively interacted with people I knew, so there was still that same incentive to not be an asshole because you'd actually meet these people again later. These days a lot of people interact with strangers in the comments of pages/groups for like politics and other stuff, and I feel like that's where most of the nastiness is.
ping_pong 7y ago
Exactly this. On Usenet there were still moderated groups, because there were assholes that were willing to start flame wars. The term "flame war" came from Usenet, as did "trolling". The original meaning of "trolling" was making a post that provoked a huge number of responses, be it good or bad. Now it has morphed to meaning you say something shitty. > That's a purely American phenomenon This is wrong. Europe turned nationalistic and right wing much earlier than the US. Look through the last 10 years and it's been something they've struggled with for the entire decade and earlier.
- KozmoNau7 7y ago
  The US has been struggling with it since the very start. KKK, segregation, McCarthyism, the list goes on.
  - ping_pong 7y ago
    Europe has been categorically worse, considering the scale of antisemitism, ie. the Holocaust.
    - KozmoNau7 7y ago
      Someone else being just as bad/worse is not a valid excuse. My point is that racism and right-wing nationalism isn't something that somehow started in Europe in the last couple of decades and then came to the US. It's been there since the beginning on both sides of the Atlantic, and systematic racism in the US has been a thing since before the founding fathers put ink to paper. In addition, you can't just say "Europe" as one unit. There are vast cultural differences between even neighboring countries. Europe does not act as one united country, it's a patchwork of localized opinions and cultures.
      - ping_pong 7y ago
        The OP said it was a "purely American phenomenon." I proved it's not. I don't know what you're arguing, it's not relevant at all.
kerkeslager 7y ago
The solution is the same as it was in 1991 as well: don't feed the trolls.
- praptak 7y ago
  This was shown repeatedly not to work. The only troll-free forums are those with good moderators.
  - kerkeslager 7y ago
    By what metric was this shown to not work? I've been on lots of forums where the only rules were "no personal attacks and no porn" and they worked just fine. If the forum has a topic, then moderating to keep on topic is reasonable. Polite disagreement and discussion is the hallmark of a healthy forum. There is of course more to curating a community than its moderation policy.
  - thinkingemote 7y ago
    In terms of forums, the trolls existed but people knew how to ignore them. They didn't remove the troll, they just didn't feed them.
    - praptak 7y ago
      You may ignore the trolls. Still there is always enough trolls and enough easily baited people for the S/N ratio to drop. "Just ignore the troll" is a good personal advice it is just not sufficient for the forum as a whole.

x3haloed 7y ago

I recently logged into CS:GO to play something familiar and holy cow, the toxicity! Just like the old days. Online gaming has always been extremely toxic, and most internet discussion has been that way since the beginning. It reminded me of just how little of that I see in day to day internet browsing these days. I think the veracity of the toxicity is tamer, but the reach and impact is so much wider.

jxramos 7y ago

Its true those trolls have been around for some time. Its human nature to rear an ugly face under the auspices of anonymity. Makes me think about the real world vs the internet joke on Red vs Blue https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=I0grFFAxySw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=I0grFFAxySw

mattrp 7y ago
I would agree with the gp that it seems no one who lived in the age of Usenet flame wars would see the current state as new. Remember when people would All CAPS each other? I would also say I’ve never thought of myself as a troll .... but given the number of downvotes I get on hn, I probably am at least troll-ish. So with that in mind, here’s the troll-ish take: When people post something online it’s often in anticipation of something good coming from it. At this point there’s nothing any system or protocol can do to make this person less impacted if anything less than a unicorn floats pout of the sky dropping little unicorn turds over their one little contribution to discourse. We simply can’t change the super enormous personal expectations that one builds up as a result of commenting. At the same time there’s this real world trend that is starting to reflect the virtual world. People talking to each other face to face using the same etiquette they would in a virtual setting. I would suggest it’s not just tribal... it’s that increasingly we are unable to turn off and disconnect from the virtual world... we are literally interacting through a pseudo-real dimension in the mind precisely because we cannot put our phones down. I recently read through the post about inner monologues and I was surprised a) there were so many people who have entire theoretical conversations in their head and b) that post had so many comments - maybe it was the most comments in a single post ever. So here’s the deal - humans talk to themselves as a matter of being human. Now, a sizable portion of a humans daily interactions are online where societal norms have been adjusted, there’s simply no way the inner dialogue in the real world isn’t being impacted by this - just look at how teenage life has been decimated over recent years. As for what to do about it. #1, you personally have responsibility for making sure your inner dialogue is healthy and isn’t 100% from online sources, #2 you have to unplug for much more of the day than you think, #3 a good book wouldn’t hurt, #4 you need to learn more about history than you think — a good book that explores the topic of mob mentality in US politics is Six Frigates by Ian W Toll. You literally won’t believe how the period between the revolutionary war and the war of 1812 mirrors modern day until you read this, #5, have some empathy for other people regardless of their viewpoints, #6 realize that no matter who is in charge, it’s going to be ok. I can’t tell you how many people I know literally went apeshit when Obama got elected, sold all their stocks, bought gold and prepared for Armageddon. I also can’t tell you many people literally went apeshit when trump got elected, sold all their stock... to both groups, I say how’d that work out for you? Not very well and yet life goes on. You kind of have to be a little meh about everything...that’s my view anyway...

samatman 7y ago

In other words, except for the scale, and the fact that it's infected the mainstream media, and the accelerants making it even worse, it's the same old thing? So we can summarize as "there's been a huge uptick in the toxicity online (which was always there)?"

madaxe_again 7y ago
It’s the same old same old. People used to heckle in theatres, because the audience lent them anonymity. Mobs are mobs because in a mob you are the mob. Lift the social contract by granting anonymity and we fairly instantaneously resort to slinging faeces at one another. I think the GP has nailed it, however - we are reporting theatre hecklers as news, and instead of watching the play, everyone is now watching the punch-up in the aisles, and placing wagers. The problem is that the theatre is on fire, but that hasn’t quite yet eclipsed the spectacle of a good old fashioned confrontation.
- ticmasta 7y ago
  Well one difference is the scope of participation, which was only slightly mentioned (old people on FB) - even in the lat 90's the internet was still mostly the domain of a relatively homogeneous technical-skewing audience; the composition has probably flipped since then. Judgement of whether this is good or bad aside, it is definitely easier to maintain peace and harmony when the socio/economic/cultural differences are smaller. Those days are long gone. I'm finding the only winning move is not to play (i.e. "don't go to the theatre; stay home and read a book")
- Udik 7y ago
  I used to agree fully with what you say. But only a few days ago it occurred to me that in the early days of the web (let's say late '90, early 2000s) I thought that the internet was going to make the world a more peaceful place: everybody would have talked directly with one another, irrespective of distances and languages; we would have understood each other better and disagreements would have been smoothed out. Well, that didn't happen. What happened instead is that the ongoing discussions seem to stir up even more disagreement; and people are not really talking to each other, they rather signal their belonging to this or that faction. Also, the internet has been weaponised: leaving aside the organised "troll factories", any group that feels strongly about something can try to impose it to everyone else just by occupying as much space as possible. And then, if others express publicly their own ideas, don't you want your idea to be represented too? Then it becomes a shouting match, where each faction tries to fill as much public space as possible by shouting at the top of its lungs. Part of this is the traditional media's fault. We thought newspapers and tv networks were going to die, drowned in the huge amount of available information sources. Instead, the web is still hierarchical: few media outlets shape the conversation deciding what to report on and how, then everyone else has the choice of closing ranks around the proposed narrative or in opposition to it. The dream of global peer-to-peer conversations didn't really come to be.

devmunchies 7y ago

I remember the AOL instant messenger days and people being super derogatory and vulgar for kicks. Even xbox live of 2007 was just as vulgar as today. I don't think its that the internet is more toxic, its that we are more sensitive (more easily offended). A strong immune system is the best defense. If it rolls off your back, is it really toxic?

eropple 7y ago
Shitlords don't just "meme". They radicalize themselves and others. I had a friend ask to crash on my couch during GamerGate because a guy on 4chan took a picture of himself with a knife in front of her apartment building and it's the people who aren't shitlords who are the problem here? What's your proposed "immune system" response to that, exactly? Or to an Elliot Rodgers, he who was cheered on by exactly this crowd? "These people are attempting to incubate a culture where you might get swatted for being vocally not a straight white man, but it is we who are too sensitive." Nah. The problem isn't the people who have the misfortune of being downrange of scumbags, and never is.
- devmunchies 7y ago
  this whole thread has nothing to do with real world threats of physical violence. online trolling is different than your extreme example.
  - swampangel 7y ago
    If 10 people on the internet tell you they want to kill you, how do you tell if 1 of them is serious and is actually going to show up physically? The answer is that you can't, and there isn't a firm line where all trolling is on one side and harassing/violent behaviour is something different. Many of us can heuristically decide that trollish behaviour aimed at us won't extend to our person/home/workplace, and doesn't need to be taken seriously. That doesn't mean it's a rule for everyone or an excuse for that behaviour.
    - 7y ago

gota 7y ago

> Twitter, aka the comments section they removed from their web presence Oh my, I never thought about it but this is absolutely true

anigbrowl 7y ago
It would be if there weren't a comment section on almost every news story published in mainstream media. As someone who pressed aggressively for exactly that starting back in the 1990s I now view it as a mistake.

stanferder 7y ago

> [T]he other media encourages polarization and demonization of the other for dumb short term. That's a purely American phenomenon... I don't think that's true. The tone of American political news nowadays doesn't seem that different than British newspapers in the 1990s. "It's the Sun wot won it" was an explicit boast about The Sun's polarizing influence... in 1992. Of course both The Sun and Fox News in the US are part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. But if anything this style of news seems like it arrived in the UK ten or twenty years before it was manifest in the US.

bilbo0s 7y ago

So basically, people are assholes and always have been. Something stuck with me a long time ago when I was watching tv a lot, there was a character on Scrubs named "Dr Cox" who said people are bastard coated bastards with bastard filling.

rstupek 7y ago

I'm really tired of mainstream articles which are essentially a reporting finding 3 people on twitter who are for/against something and saying "internet is in uproar about whatever"

CraigJPerry 7y ago
There’s quite a lot of formulaic pieces written in UK media where the news outlet comment section has more outraged commenters than the original issue. If you use dailymail.co.uk and search for “outraged” there’s quite a few examples of this formula being used. I suppose it increases impression time of adverts which means higher price earned for them. I’m not criticising the business accumen.
- iron0013 7y ago
  This pattern happens so often that you’d think people would start to catch on. A story about one person supposedly being “outraged” about something leads to a huge vigorous CJ of folks eager to express their anti-outrage-outrage at the straw man in front of them.
CM30 7y ago
Same here. And it's not just based on Twitter posts either. I've seen a depressing number of news articles (especially gaming related ones) which are based on random internet petitions signed by maybe three people. Anyone can set up an internet petition about anything. The presence of one does not meant there's some gigantic audience clamouring for some game idea/casting idea/etc.
jessaustin 7y ago
Well, consider the reporter's POV. It's really easy to browse Twitter for 20 minutes and then spend 10 minutes summarizing your findings. Contacting people who have any connection at all to important events and then convincing them to answer your questions about those events might take all day...

throwaway122619 7y ago

Adding to your point, I'm wondering if OP has ever had a religious group show up at their doorstep. It's the same idea; "Our ideas are right, yours are wrong." There are no laws stopping them from doing this, (short of solicitation statutes) and there's certainly no convincing them they are wrong. Just smile politely and ignore them. Really, it's the same problem just dressed up differently. Now the issue just has these new buzzwords attached to it like "algorithm" and "data privacy" and whatnot. Nothing will change until people learn to leave their pride on their desktop, but that's not the way of some cultures.

jessaustin 7y ago
Good analogy, but one can always banish the proselytizers with a simple "Sorry, we're Catholic!" (One doesn't even actually have to be Catholic to say this!)

mschuster91 7y ago

> I've been on the interbutts since 1991 and Usenet days, and it's exactly as it always was. Quality-wise maybe but nowhere near the same in numbers. Back in 1990-2005 it took expertise to reach the Usenet. Facebook, Reddit et al. changed the game by essentially giving every village idiot without technical knowledge the "freedom" to troll on FB, Youtube, whatever. Conspiracy theories had their own niche usenet spaces, today there are FB groups for all kinds of utter bollocks with hundreds of thousands of members and absolutely no quality or sanity control. Additionally, for newsgroups you needed some kind of client, most people could only access them after work, further reducing the user base, and there was nothing remotely similar to "likes" - today, people do everything for likes, with instantaneous feedback and no limits (practically everyone has a smartphone with FB and notifications), driving an ever faster and faster "news" cycle. > And of course, the other media encourages polarization and demonization of the other for dumb short term. That's a purely American phenomenon, and nothing's going to change it until the people pushing this swill on MSNBC, Fox and CNN decide to change it No, this is not US-only. It may be most expressed in the US (and amplified by its two-party system), but us Europeans see the same issue. Brexit is the most obvious, but France, Poland, Hungary, Austria and Germany also have problems with polarization and (mostly) the far right using outright lies to further it, with Russian financing / backing suspected and proven everywhere. The thing that must change is to get rid of Russian money in politics, and to enforce neutrality and fact based reporting in media.

ksec 7y ago
This. The cost of going on Internet used to be quite high, and requires some skills and knowledge. Nowadays anyone can troll, and they get repeated by other trolls, the percentage of it "may" be the same ( although I doubt it ), but the "absolute" number of those are much much higher. Remember before the iPhone, the internet was a much smaller place, and accessed mostly in front of a computer. With Smartphone you now have 4.5 Billion Internet user all using it at any time of the day. The Internet is also much faster. Creating content is easier. We are may be 10 - 100x more in online content consumption then in the 2000s. And I agree this is not US only. So yes it is definitely a social AND psychological problem. Not a technical one, no blockchain, Distributed Social Media, Machine Learning, new AI, Cloud, Servless, (WhatEver)aaS etc will solve it.

kody 7y ago

When reporters on Twitter freak out about the trolls on 4chan like it's some disease infecting our precious wholesome web, I can't help but remember (through my biased lenses of course) when most of the web (that I visited) looked like 4chan. What the folks who think the web is 'degrading' don't seem to realize is how much of a wild west it used to be, and how much corporations have tried to (and somewhat succeeded in) sanitizing it.

hooande 7y ago
if most of the web that you visited looked like 4chan, you should have been going to different sites
- GrayTextIsTruth 7y ago
  The subtle shaming and holier-than-thou policing, like in your comment, is more harmful and toxic than the trolling. It’s what is fueling the polarization IMO. Look now I’m doing it, it’s contagious.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
GrayTextIsTruth 7y ago
This is my experience and perception as well. I don’t understand people who think it’s always been some civil gathering.
- at-fates-hands 7y ago
  > I don’t understand people who think it’s always been some civil gathering. In the early days of social media, the idea was to create engaging communities, which I felt for the most part happened. I was on a LOT of social media platforms in the mid aughts and really got a lot of it with the people I connected with. For me, it was actually quite positive and healthy then. In the last eight years or so? I had to get off. The overwhelming negativity, the weaponization of the platforms, the "cancel culture" and a rash of other things just make a majority of the platforms completely unusable now. On top of that, you add in the incredibly poor track record these platforms have with user data and privacy, the non-stop tracking, and the thousands of ads in your feeds? It used to be a joy to use these platforms. Now it's gotten to a point where I'm not sure what the point of social media is anymore.

platz 7y ago

Right, It's not a technology problem. Not everything can be reduced to a technology problem. This is an American, and even worldwide problem. Everyone is writing about polarization right now. Ezra Klein, who I normally loathe, has been doing the podcasting rounds lately about his new polarization book, which has a pragmatic take on the problem. He doesn't see a way out right now. Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas Ezra Klein on Politics, Polarization, and Identity https://pca.st/huei9let https://pca.st/huei9let The Weeds: The road to polarization https://pca.st/izsley78 https://pca.st/izsley78 According to Ezra, part of the reason we have this now is because our personal identities are now stacked in line with our political identities. Why this stacking occurs might just be a natural process. As for the media, It's not only the media's fault. There was a feedback loop between media and audience. When media was unbundled from the national model, only slightly more polarized people could be reliable customers and so media had to compete over them, which polarized the media, which polarized the audience etc...

Domenic_S 7y ago
> our personal identities are now stacked in line with our political identities. Even stronger than that, for many people their political identity IS their personal identity, and those folks can't see anybody else any other way. I was a child when Clinton was elected. We lived in a conservative neighborhood, and I remember there being disappointment but as far as I can recall everyone resumed their normal lives after that. Then when GWB was elected, I lived in a more liberal town and there was some angst, maybe a bit of protesting, but by and large everyone went back to their lives. Trump has been interesting. For many people, if you voted for Trump, you are a Nazi. As far as they're concerned, your political identity IS your personal identity. And let's be fair to both sides, for a lot of Trump supporters, being a MAGA-hat wearer is their personal identity. We're on the road to something, and it's not good.

banads 7y ago

>the other media encourages polarization and demonization of the other for dumb short term. That's a purely American phenomenon Nope, tribalism and divide et impera is a human phenomenon

nardi 7y ago

Yes, the internet’s always been toxic, but the audience has changed. It used to be a small subset of the world population that had the money, time, and know-how to get on the internet. Now it’s the entire world, and it seems to me that the average media-consumption sophistication has gone way down. Trolls used to be a smaller fraction of the whole, and easier to ignore. Now, the signal-to-troll ratio is all out of whack.

awb 7y ago
> It used to be a small subset of the world population that had the money, time, and know-how to get on the internet. Now it’s the entire world This. It's not that polarization and toxic ideas didn't exist, it was arguably much worse in the past with slavery, genocide, etc. You had entire countries publicly advocating for violent racism and citing sources that they claimed supported their views. It's pretty harsh to call us post-truth but not them. Their lies led to brutal consequences for millions. And it used to be the media was a pretty strict funnel (pre-Internet, pre-TV) where you had to be interesting to someone with power like a politician or an editor to get mass exposure for your ideas. Everyone else was relegated to preaching in the park. Now, we have virtual parks (websites) and preaching can reach millions.
djanlermats2020 7y ago
The actual problem isn't "trolls", it's people who call everyone who disagrees with them a troll.

chubot 7y ago

But it is the real world now ... People form their beliefs and make decisions in the world based on what they consume online. I frequently see Twitter memes spoken from people's mouths in person. I mostly abstain from it, but like it or not, Twitter does matter. I've also been online since 1993, and used Usenet for many years. Back then you could compartmentalize some argument as a bunch of nerds, but now it's just "people". FWIW I also agree that the wisdom of "don't feed the trolls" has been forgotten. So in that way it's gotten worse too.

deleted 7y ago
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lotyrin 7y ago
Yes. Encountering the Apache Helicopter joke on 4chan is par for the course, but I just really don't want to hear it out loud from a coworker who is senior to me in a meeting room, and have everyone else laugh along with it.
- iron0013 7y ago
  Yikes, if that happened at your workplace I hope you talked to HR about it. That’s a “joke” in the form of a death threat.
  - gjs278 7y ago
    no it's not. it's a joke about genders.
Mangalor 7y ago
But weren't "nerds" always just "people"? It's the interpretation of the culture that's changed as well.
- chubot 7y ago
  To clarify, in 1993 or even 2000, you could see a bunch of flame wars on Usenet, and you could ignore them because they "meant nothing". You could dismiss it as a nerd argument that's not connected to your life in the real world. That was usually accurate. (Although I should say there were very intelligent people on Usenet, and that's why I used it. I learned a lot there.) It's harder to do that now. You can ignore certain channels, but they spill out into the "real world" quite frequently. To give a different example, UFC fighters pick fights with each other online, often on Instagram or YouTube. So what happens online is critical to the entire sport, which has grown a tremendous amount in the past decade. It determines whether they get paid $100K or $1M. Real life happens online now. That's a somewhat random example but there are many many subcultures / industries where what happens on social media determines what happens in the real world.

kazinator 7y ago

I've been on dial-up bulletin boards since 1983, Usenet since around the same 1991. Though in some ways it's the same, here is the difference: it has become more diverse. In 1991, the people you might have conversed with on Usenet were a lot similar to you. Of course, if we go to some comp.lang.* newsgroup or whatever, people are similar even today. But I mean that if you went into any newsgroup whatsoever in 1991, on any topic, everyone there would probably have been some sort of professional in a STEM field, academic or university student. Go to, say, rec.pets.dogs, and it wasn't just any dog lovers from any walk of life, but mostly engineers, programmers and sysadmins who are into dogs. That's way different from going into Reddit today, where it's now any Tom, Dick and Harry from any walk of life, who only have a certain topic of interest in common and that's it. People have social interactions online which they wouldn't have in real life. In real life, if you run into someone who is from, say, a "lower" social class, they have it written all over them, and it puts them in their place more effectively than any downvoting system. For instance, in real life, you would either never argue politics with an obvious "despicable", or else you'd immediately attribute everything they say to the limited scope of their background and just nod your head politely. Basically, there is no new divisiveness; the quiet divisiveness we already have just comes out when people get together and hide behind aliases and avatars.

dsfyu404ed 7y ago
I agree. Big centralized platforms (youtube, Reddit, the chans, HN to some exent) mean that the internet riff raff (i.e. people with no interest in the niche and who may feel like trolling) are free to show up in any given niche area of the platform (e.g. a subreddit or someone's channel) and then shit all over it. A community that would have been perfectly peaceful on a newsgroup, IRC channel or forum now has to contend with literally anyone from anywhere else on the platform. The old 4chan quip about /b/ leaking is now the default state on basically every platform because the platforms are so big even a small trickle of trolls is a full on flood of crap. People are getting fed up. I think there will be some decentralization in our future.
- quotemstr 7y ago
  I don't think it's that at all. People have always been able to visit different websites. It still happens today. The rise of mega-platforms is concerning, but not for the reason you cite. It's always been possible for "riff-raff" to notice a community.

noir_lord 7y ago

BBS in the early nineties and internet mid-90's. Always been a toxic element, it's just the echo chamber got louder to the point where it drowns out the normal people.

eitland 7y ago

5 years layer than what you describe but what I remember from the 1995 to 2000 was relatively peaceful, even the newsgroups I visited (mostly technical ones). There were dark corners but you mostly knew if you stepped into one. Then again I was mostly looking for html tutorials, facts for physics and history projects etc.

krilly 7y ago

I can assure you the YouTube rabbit hole is still there. I am constantly recommended right wing, feminist b& type vids

scottlocklin 7y ago
Not for me; it just tries to show me Joe Rogaine videos all day. One damn video did this! I want to punch the guy who sent it to me. Oh wait, guess I've been radicalized. FWIIW all the chimping in the threads about death threats: these were extremely common in the old days of Usenet too. I've lost track of them; from all kinds of arguably insane people, satanic cults even; more recently lunatic grad students mad I made fun of their field on my blog. So was doxxing. Nothing ever happened, and I have no respect for people who report them like it's news. While it's probably happened by now that someone's internet beef turned into actual violence, the ratio is absurdly low. If you can't abide some idiot being mad at you, stay off the internet I guess.

mcantelon 7y ago

The severity has grown but the scale of the toxicity's grown in the "human flesh search engine" era.

AndrewKemendo 7y ago

Concur with this. Flamewars have always been with us and a bb or forum flamewar was always something to watch (often annotated with a flame gif on the thread header). As with everything web, it's just scaled as the web has scaled.

el_cujo 7y ago

This is my experience as well. In the early/mid 2000s I mostly browsed sites with a small, dedicated group of regular users. These sites were (mostly) civil and had a "small town" feel where you kind of knew everyone or at least recognized their username. Even back then though, I went on a few sites where the userbase was big enough that you'd be mostly interacting with people who you may never see again on that site, and as a result it was quite a bit less civil than the small sites. I think the big difference between today vs. back then with respect to toxicity, is now that the web is so centralized, most sites the average person probably visits (twitter, reddit, etc) involves them interacting with strangers who they may never interact with again, so there is less of a feeling like they need to "hold back" like you might when talking to someone you know you'll meet again. Probably the only exception to this (for me at least) was Facebook, because back when I used it I almost exclusively interacted with people I knew, so there was still that same incentive to not be an asshole because you'd actually meet these people again later. These days a lot of people interact with strangers in the comments of pages/groups for like politics and other stuff, and I feel like that's where most of the nastiness is.

ping_pong 7y ago

Exactly this. On Usenet there were still moderated groups, because there were assholes that were willing to start flame wars. The term "flame war" came from Usenet, as did "trolling". The original meaning of "trolling" was making a post that provoked a huge number of responses, be it good or bad. Now it has morphed to meaning you say something shitty. > That's a purely American phenomenon This is wrong. Europe turned nationalistic and right wing much earlier than the US. Look through the last 10 years and it's been something they've struggled with for the entire decade and earlier.

KozmoNau7 7y ago
The US has been struggling with it since the very start. KKK, segregation, McCarthyism, the list goes on.
- ping_pong 7y ago
  Europe has been categorically worse, considering the scale of antisemitism, ie. the Holocaust.
  - KozmoNau7 7y ago
    Someone else being just as bad/worse is not a valid excuse. My point is that racism and right-wing nationalism isn't something that somehow started in Europe in the last couple of decades and then came to the US. It's been there since the beginning on both sides of the Atlantic, and systematic racism in the US has been a thing since before the founding fathers put ink to paper. In addition, you can't just say "Europe" as one unit. There are vast cultural differences between even neighboring countries. Europe does not act as one united country, it's a patchwork of localized opinions and cultures.
    - ping_pong 7y ago
      The OP said it was a "purely American phenomenon." I proved it's not. I don't know what you're arguing, it's not relevant at all.

kerkeslager 7y ago

The solution is the same as it was in 1991 as well: don't feed the trolls.

praptak 7y ago
This was shown repeatedly not to work. The only troll-free forums are those with good moderators.
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  By what metric was this shown to not work? I've been on lots of forums where the only rules were "no personal attacks and no porn" and they worked just fine. If the forum has a topic, then moderating to keep on topic is reasonable. Polite disagreement and discussion is the hallmark of a healthy forum. There is of course more to curating a community than its moderation policy.
- thinkingemote 7y ago
  In terms of forums, the trolls existed but people knew how to ignore them. They didn't remove the troll, they just didn't feed them.
  - praptak 7y ago
    You may ignore the trolls. Still there is always enough trolls and enough easily baited people for the S/N ratio to drop. "Just ignore the troll" is a good personal advice it is just not sufficient for the forum as a whole.