4 ms·

The online shaming culture at tumblr, twitter and reddit was what convinced me that you need to stay pseudonymous on the internet at all cost. There are so man

The online shaming culture at tumblr, twitter and reddit was what convinced me that you need to stay pseudonymous on the internet at all cost. There are so many people that participate in this and haven't realized yet that they are being an asshole to random strangers.

iJohnDoe 3y ago
100% this. Learned in the 90s early internet about the emotional harm that I’ve seen happen to people. Slightly different topic. I think state and federal laws need to be passed regarding medical, police, evidence, and other types of private videos and photos from being leaked online. Too much of it magically leaks out and it’s just the people that are trusted with the data that are posting it online.
- iambateman 3y ago
  For sure. There was a show called “LivePD” that took live video as someone was arrested by the police. I watched for years. Now it feels so gross…if someone is having the potentially-worst moment of their life, society should offer them the decency of not putting it on live TV.
  - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
    Didn’t those people all sign releases?
    - function_seven 3y ago
      Maybe, and kinda. From a NYT opinion piece[0] a few years ago: > But “Cops” cameras, of course, are not news cameras, so unlike a traditional news crew, the shows’ producers have to obtain the written legal consent of every suspect whose face appears on camera. The producers of “Cops” claim they do. We found a different reality. Tracking down the people who have been filmed by “Cops” is not easy. But of the 11 suspects we interviewed, all but one said they either did not give their legal consent to appear on the show, were too inebriated to consent knowingly or were coerced into signing — with the police and producers, troublingly, working together to get those signatures. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/18/opinion/cops-podcast-investigation-abuse.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/18/opinion/cops-podcast-inve...
madeofpalk 3y ago
Don’t try and pretend HN takes the moral high ground. This is something - regardless of how big of a problem you think it is - that permeates. Once a month there will be a link to some GitHub or issue where everyone will pile on about some stupid issue.
- blueflow 3y ago
  Then flag it, too. HN shouldn't be the torch & pitchfork store.
- ipnon 3y ago
  Ad hominem is at least nominally against the rules here. Most egregious instances will get flagged and deleted. It’s not perfect but there is some effective immune response moving things back in the right direction.
- mettamage 3y ago
  IMO, the issues are much milder on HN than I have seen elsewhere.
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  HN is human-moderated, by both members and staff moderators. There is ... limited ... automatic moderation. Which means that some things do slip through the cracks. (There are multiple mods, though dang is the public face.) If you see something, say something: by flagging every-day dreck, or by emailing mods in the case of something exceptionally bad. I do both. Flagging is a daily thing, email for abuse / transgressions maybe a few times a quarter. Edit: Clarified first 'graph.
at_a_remove 3y ago
In the late 1980s, I got online. I refused to use my real name anywhere. I said, "Someone could run this Usenet group off to tape, restore it some time later, index it, and somehow make that available." I was derided as a paranoid fool. And yet here we are. One of my "handles" is still visible in a help file from 1993.
- ipqk 3y ago
  I was asked to provide a quote for a silly fluff lifestyle piece my friend was writing for the college's newspaper. 20 years later, that piece is number 5 when searching my fairly unique name (I've done as much as possible to scrub myself from the public internet).
  - scruple 3y ago
    I wonder if there's a service that could be created here, using AI to create sterile/whitewashed ghost accounts, and flood them all over social media, etc., for people so that the real, human identity is pushed down on the search results. For sure against TOS, but I'm not sure that I personally care.
    - Dma54rhs 3y ago
      It's a common PR SEO service, no AI.
throw382736 3y ago
This is why I still wear a mask outside. If I'm filmed, at least I'll be harder to recognize.
- IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago
  one of the COVID silver linigs
arp242 3y ago
Online I always try to talk about people as if the person I'm talking about would read it. It's always easy to be harsh when no one's watching, but the thing is that online you never know if they are. This doesn't mean I don't criticize posts or people, I just do it as if that person would read it. I started doing this after some of my weblog posts (mostly about programming) ended up on Reddit and HN, and I read some of the comments on that. Some actual quotes (mostly from Reddit's /r/programming): “moron”, “idiot”, “retard”, “you must have an IQ lower than 65”, “fucking suck at making software (and I guess generally anything)”, “you’re like the anti-vaxxer of front-end development”, “this is hate speech” (context was about a technical topic they disagreed with, no politics at all involved). And there's more ways to be unfriendly than using "bad words" like "idiot", such as not actually reading the post before commenting (frustratingly common), being excessively pedantic, very aggressive but without actually using insults, etc. I remember one guy who for some reason really had it in for me and did a line-by-line "rebuttal" on several posts, picking on the tiniest thing, resulting in some comments that were longer than the article article than he was responding to, but usually never really addressing the core point. Odd person shrug. HN has been a bit better overall, though not perfect either.
- bloopernova 3y ago
  reddit is pretty bad now, I didn't realize when I was there regularly but after a break it's really shocking. I went there last night to read any first person accounts of the streamer riot yesterday in New York's Union Square. Instead there was a lot of racism and hate.
  - arp242 3y ago
    It really depends on the sub. "Reddit" isn't really one big forum, but more like a hosting platform for lots of mostly independent forums. Some are moderated quite reasonably, some are moderated very strictly, and some barely at all. As a rough rule of thumb, the larger the sub, the worse it is. This holds true for communities in general in my experience – humanity doesn't really scale well to large groups.
  - kedean 3y ago

iJohnDoe 3y ago

100% this. Learned in the 90s early internet about the emotional harm that I’ve seen happen to people. Slightly different topic. I think state and federal laws need to be passed regarding medical, police, evidence, and other types of private videos and photos from being leaked online. Too much of it magically leaks out and it’s just the people that are trusted with the data that are posting it online.

iambateman 3y ago
For sure. There was a show called “LivePD” that took live video as someone was arrested by the police. I watched for years. Now it feels so gross…if someone is having the potentially-worst moment of their life, society should offer them the decency of not putting it on live TV.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
  Didn’t those people all sign releases?
  - function_seven 3y ago
    Maybe, and kinda. From a NYT opinion piece[0] a few years ago: > But “Cops” cameras, of course, are not news cameras, so unlike a traditional news crew, the shows’ producers have to obtain the written legal consent of every suspect whose face appears on camera. The producers of “Cops” claim they do. We found a different reality. Tracking down the people who have been filmed by “Cops” is not easy. But of the 11 suspects we interviewed, all but one said they either did not give their legal consent to appear on the show, were too inebriated to consent knowingly or were coerced into signing — with the police and producers, troublingly, working together to get those signatures. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/18/opinion/cops-podcast-investigation-abuse.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/18/opinion/cops-podcast-inve...

madeofpalk 3y ago

Don’t try and pretend HN takes the moral high ground. This is something - regardless of how big of a problem you think it is - that permeates. Once a month there will be a link to some GitHub or issue where everyone will pile on about some stupid issue.

blueflow 3y ago
Then flag it, too. HN shouldn't be the torch & pitchfork store.
ipnon 3y ago
Ad hominem is at least nominally against the rules here. Most egregious instances will get flagged and deleted. It’s not perfect but there is some effective immune response moving things back in the right direction.
mettamage 3y ago
IMO, the issues are much milder on HN than I have seen elsewhere.
dredmorbius 3y ago
HN is human-moderated, by both members and staff moderators. There is ... limited ... automatic moderation. Which means that some things do slip through the cracks. (There are multiple mods, though dang is the public face.) If you see something, say something: by flagging every-day dreck, or by emailing mods in the case of something exceptionally bad. I do both. Flagging is a daily thing, email for abuse / transgressions maybe a few times a quarter. Edit: Clarified first 'graph.

at_a_remove 3y ago

In the late 1980s, I got online. I refused to use my real name anywhere. I said, "Someone could run this Usenet group off to tape, restore it some time later, index it, and somehow make that available." I was derided as a paranoid fool. And yet here we are. One of my "handles" is still visible in a help file from 1993.

ipqk 3y ago
I was asked to provide a quote for a silly fluff lifestyle piece my friend was writing for the college's newspaper. 20 years later, that piece is number 5 when searching my fairly unique name (I've done as much as possible to scrub myself from the public internet).
- scruple 3y ago
  I wonder if there's a service that could be created here, using AI to create sterile/whitewashed ghost accounts, and flood them all over social media, etc., for people so that the real, human identity is pushed down on the search results. For sure against TOS, but I'm not sure that I personally care.
  - Dma54rhs 3y ago
    It's a common PR SEO service, no AI.

throw382736 3y ago

This is why I still wear a mask outside. If I'm filmed, at least I'll be harder to recognize.

IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago
one of the COVID silver linigs

arp242 3y ago

Online I always try to talk about people as if the person I'm talking about would read it. It's always easy to be harsh when no one's watching, but the thing is that online you never know if they are. This doesn't mean I don't criticize posts or people, I just do it as if that person would read it. I started doing this after some of my weblog posts (mostly about programming) ended up on Reddit and HN, and I read some of the comments on that. Some actual quotes (mostly from Reddit's /r/programming): “moron”, “idiot”, “retard”, “you must have an IQ lower than 65”, “fucking suck at making software (and I guess generally anything)”, “you’re like the anti-vaxxer of front-end development”, “this is hate speech” (context was about a technical topic they disagreed with, no politics at all involved). And there's more ways to be unfriendly than using "bad words" like "idiot", such as not actually reading the post before commenting (frustratingly common), being excessively pedantic, very aggressive but without actually using insults, etc. I remember one guy who for some reason really had it in for me and did a line-by-line "rebuttal" on several posts, picking on the tiniest thing, resulting in some comments that were longer than the article article than he was responding to, but usually never really addressing the core point. Odd person shrug. HN has been a bit better overall, though not perfect either.

bloopernova 3y ago
reddit is pretty bad now, I didn't realize when I was there regularly but after a break it's really shocking. I went there last night to read any first person accounts of the streamer riot yesterday in New York's Union Square. Instead there was a lot of racism and hate.
- arp242 3y ago
  It really depends on the sub. "Reddit" isn't really one big forum, but more like a hosting platform for lots of mostly independent forums. Some are moderated quite reasonably, some are moderated very strictly, and some barely at all. As a rough rule of thumb, the larger the sub, the worse it is. This holds true for communities in general in my experience – humanity doesn't really scale well to large groups.
- kedean 3y ago