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A symptom of the web being the lawless frontier. Eventually, the law will begin to close in on this frontier as it has on every other.
by emmett 18y ago
A symptom of the web being the lawless frontier. Eventually, the law will begin to close in on this frontier as it has on every other.
- pg 18y agoOr customs, at least. The reason trolling doesn't work in the real world is that there are long evolved customs for neutralizing such people, like the idea of private buildings. The first generation of online communities had no protection against them. But these tend to evolve quickly in response to abuses.
- akd 18y agoBut Internet escapism is in large part a rejection of these long-evolved customs. The people who flock to places like /b/ want a place where everything goes. Sure, there will be the equivalent of "private buildings" on the Internet, but there will always be free-for-all places, just as there are places in the real world where typical customs are more relaxed (e.g. Burning Man)
- pg 18y agoMy guess is that as the web matures, there will be some places populated mainly by trolls, like /b/, and that everywhere else will evolve protections against them. I haven't been to Burning Man, but it doesn't sound like it's a complete free for all. Doesn't it have customs banning certain types of asshole behavior?
- adrianwaj 18y agoI just came back from /b/ with a decapitated man's head laying alongside his genitally-dismembered body now seared into my mind. Sounds like a daily hangout for some. I just posted this to my Friendfeed: "A good idea is to have a cross-site commenting system such as Disqus that enables both identity-verified and anonymous commenting and comment viewing. This separates commenters into two groups, those who want to be anonymous and those that do not. The system would not be fault-free, but it would promote responsibilty, encourage better commenting and improve user experience without necessitating modding - one's named identity is the moderating factor. It may not be as fun, but would filter out spam, trolls and junk." Plastic.com has the feature to post a comment as anonymous even whilst logged-in. Trolls would absolutely love this. Also, anonymous comments can be set to hidden.
- jackchristopher 18y agoAnother reason we need to keep anonymity, is that it allows people to report sensitive information, they don't want their names attach to.
- ivankirigin 18y agoFunny anecdote (though I've never been to burning man): There is a very common practice of shirt-cocking, where men only where shirts and nothing on the bottom. A brigade of annoyed burners decided to solve this with a pants cannon. The range was good and the platform was mobile, and shirt-cockers would get bombed with pants and everyone would laugh at them. So, yeah, there is _some_ policing.
- william42 18y agoSo bsaically what we need is an internet pants-cannon?
- ivankirigin 18y agoThat mass of laughing people pointing at the shirtcockers also helped. Community policing with editors that have big guns is already pretty common on the internet. Here we have flag options for the community, and a set of editors. To shoot pants at shirtcocking trolls.
- YuriNiyazov 18y agoI've been to Burning Man. Its history is such that in the first couple of years it had no customs banning anything. A common interpretation is that this was due to the type of personality of the average attendee (the "we are all in this together" type). An alternative interpretation is that it was less about the predominant personality type (assuming there even is such a thing, as opposed to just situational influence) and just about the relatively low number of attendees (hundreds or single thousands at the time). As it grew to its current size (over 50 thousand attendees last year) more and more rules had to be introduced, and they even have a 'conflict-resolution' group called the Black Rock Rangers.
- emmett 18y agoMy experience with Justin.tv has shown me there is a more dangerous kind of troll who will call the police on you, prank call at all hours of the night, make prank deliveries, etc. These more dangerous trolls are mostly enabled by the weak security in our phone system, rather than the internet. Actually, as I write this, I realize that the solution will not be laws (although I would certainly derive pleasure from seeing these people jailed). The real solution will be VOIP; turning phones into the internet. When you can turn your phone into accept-whitelist-only with a click, mass prank calling will be stopped. When identity can be cryptographically determined, fake calls to pizza places or the police will be stopped. So we don't actually need laws; we just need a secure phone system.
- shawndrost 18y agoWow, it would be fantastic to have your phone controlled by software. For one thing, you could apply the same kind of anti-spam techniques, and since there is a canonical phone number distributor, they would be even more effective.