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I remember when this started happening, something trickled over to Reddit and so I investigated to get the full story. Needless to say, it was rather quite hor

• dmix 14y ago
  I didn't feel bad for Timothy Treadwell when he got eaten by a grizzly bear as covered in the film, Grizzly Man. It was almost expected given his actions.
  • ktizo 14y ago
    I felt bad for him, but not surprised at the outcome. But when grizzly bears ate Timothy Treadwell, they were not deliberately trying to be malicious, at least as far as we know.
    • 3143 14y ago
      Who's to say that 4chan users, too, are not simply motivated by instinct, knowing neither malice or conscience?
      • andreasvc 14y ago
        No, because it's bloody obvious that they're doing things specifically to hurt people. Humans don't desecrate graves by instinct, that requires malice, I'd say.
        • 3143 14y ago
          Hurting other people is an instinct.
          • andreasvc 14y ago
            Citation? I was under the impression that humans do not have instincts.
            • davyjones 14y ago
              The suckling action of infants is an instinct; not learned.
              • andreasvc 14y ago
                That's a reflex, which is different from an instinct. In any case, I think the rather creative behaviors of hurting people in this case are obviously learned.
            • xyzzyz 14y ago
              Humans are just another species of animals, why wouldn't they have an instinct? The only difference is the cultural conditioning, which suppresses instinct behavior.
              • andreasvc 14y ago
                Because humans have such a capacity for learning, instincts would serve no purpose. Instincts are rigid and humans on the contrary are very adaptable. It appears to me that the scientific consensus is that there are no human instincts, but if you believe otherwise why don't you cite an example?
                • Radix_ 14y ago
                  Mating. The route to get there becomes more flexible due to our adaptability but the desire to have sex is instinctual.
                  • andreasvc 14y ago
                    Well again I'd say that's not an instinct, just like hunger it's a desire. An instinct is a very specific pre-programmed behavior that can't be overridden, a desire or reflex doesn't fit that description.
  • andreasvc 14y ago
    That's a pretty callous thing to say. How do you get from a person was being misguided to they deserved their horrible fate?
    • dmix 14y ago
      I try to evaluate things rationally. Just as I give both Timothy (who had spent 13 summer living among bears) and this girl (who as the article says was an old time /b/ user) the benefit of the doubt, that they rationally knew the extreme dangers that existed. There's already enough tragedy that happens in this world - due to pure circumstance and things out of our control. I only have a limited amount of energy and time on this planet. My empathy is better spent on the latter individuals than on those who knowingly put themselves in direct danger of being harmed.
      • ktizo 14y ago
        I think empathy is more of an experience you feel when confronted with a situation or story, rather than something you grant to people after a process of logical judgement.
        • dmix 14y ago
          I disagree that empathy can only be the result of an emotional response and not rational thought.
          • andreasvc 14y ago
            But that's how it's generally defined, e.g. wikipedia: "Empathy is the capacity to recognize feelings that are being experienced by another sentient [...] being." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy
            • dmix 14y ago
              Although tempting, debating the meaning of empathy is probably not a beneficial contribution to this HN thread. But I will say, the initial emotional response (for ex. feeling sad someone was harmed) is largely out of our control. But spending time feeling bad after the fact is a controllable state, and is the basis of a large amount of psychological and behavioral therapy.
• ChrisNorstrom 14y ago
  The good news is Anonymous, representing the hive mind of the most primitive human desires before they've been filtered out by one's conscience, has a set attention span. They will eventually stop in about a week or two. It will get old to them and they'll move on.
  • SoftwareMaven 14y ago
    I would bet their attention span is more like a power law distribution. While the vast majority will taper off over a couple of weeks, the long tail will be there to make sure the victim gets whats coming for an "appropriate" amount of time. My assumption is that it is just like "real life" where something might be big drama in the family for a week or two. After that, only one or two people will still talk about it, but they will continue to talk about it years later. I would love to see some actual data on this.
    • andreasvc 14y ago
      Indeed, stalkers can obsess over people for years. It is not unlikely that such people could be attracted to a commotion such as this.
    • wam 14y ago
      That's an interesting hypothesis, and worth looking into. If the group is a graph connected by people becoming aware of the campaign, participating in it, and forgetting about it, then there's a feedback loop that should taper off in a predictable way. This would gel with what seems to happen. And as you point out, there's also a moment where the event becomes calcified, earning an entry into some wiki that records the biggest campaigns against individuals. This also seems to have the effect of permanently branding the individual so that if they do anything else perceived as a violation by a member of the group, a significant chunk of the network can reactivate quickly for a second round. There's also a thin line between observation and participation. Someone might be passively aware of what's going on from reading 4chan or seeing it here, and they might comment, and the comment (maybe a suggestion) could galvanize the network to act in some way (call her employer). Each individual who does this may feel moral responsibility only for a trivial fraction of the damage. "All I did was make one phone call. I'm not responsible for what other people do." Add that to a good technological mechanism for acting anonymously, and we get what we're seeing: a huge campaign of harassment unencumbered by moral and social concerns. Somewhat different from a family drama but not totally so. I'm sure there are sociological studies on how "shunning" works, but if you could get a hook into the numbers here, maybe there's a pattern that has general properties that subsume cases where people are more accountable and less anonymous. The other question that interests me is whether there's a point in the "ramping up" side of the distribution where an active intervention of some kind can mute it. The only criteria for participation in Anonymous, for example, is a commitment to the "lulz" at hand. If you're not in the current campaign, you're not provably in Anonymous. For example, just after the name began to be appropriated by people at the edges who were mostly interested in targeting scientology, and described in the news as a good campaign against a cult, we saw an attack on an epileptic support forum. This had the effect of purging people who claimed to be Anonymous but morally disavowed it. That's synonymous (hmm) with splintering the group, but the criterion of doing it solely for laughs was retained by one group and lost by the other. It'd be reasonable to call the former the "core." So there IS a form of accountability in Anonymous, and it operates strictly in the moral dimension of the action. That would imply that both the ramping up and ramping down of a campaign is exactly the same as the size of the group (as defined by devotion to "lulz") at any given moment. Perhaps tautological, but different from a family. Apply this generally to all anonymous distributed groups. It also implies that an action that subverts the moral identity of the group can subvert a campaign. If you do something so reprehensible that a large contingent of the individuals in the campaign are compelled to disavow it, then you could effectively kill the distributed campaign. Is that a net win? Probably only if you convince enough people that you did it without actually doing it. Another possibility is to engineer a compelling distraction that draws in members of the campaign. But it seems to me that with enough knowledge, an individual or a smaller group can actively and deliberately affect the tapering off, either through manipulation of attention span or manipulation of moral alignment.
• freditup 14y ago
  I hope the people who harass her are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. The fact is, sometimes hornets' nests need poking, not because of the hornets that will fly out and sting you, but so an exterminator will notice the nest and remove it shortly. While I question her motives (linking to a porn site of herself didn't exactly help) this really shows the dark side of the internet yet again.
  • andreasvc 14y ago
    Exactly. They're giving anonymity a pretty bad name.
• georgebarnett 14y ago
  I wonder how much of this issue is aggravated by the fact that we are unable to identify children on the internet. In regular society, we would not dream of putting up with anti-social behaviour of this type but online we seem only too fight for their right to do this, with what seem to be rather drastic consequences.
  • icebraining 14y ago
    I think these behaviors are extremely innocent compared to some anti-social people we put up with in regular society. Any important soccer match around here involves way more destructive behavior than this.