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Trent Reznor Quits Web 2.0, Offers Cutting Advice To Haters
- calvin 17y agoMy favorite line: "...the [social media] experiment seems to have yielded a result. Idiots rule."
- pg 17y agoI think that's just the result of version 1.
- tdavis 17y agoWe're on a version way past 1... that has been the result for many years now. The second person on the Internet was probably a troll.
- vaksel 17y agoI saw this youtube video of an early 90s broadcast about this thing called internet, and they pretty much talked about how great it is to have a civilized conversation, without trolls. So early on it wasn't a problem, my guess is that trolls probably didn't really appear until AOL.
- inerte 17y agoI remember this story about a psychologist who pretented to be a woman, and I don't remember exactly who, or where, but it was in a movie about the net beginnings... Found... don't know if it counts as a troll, tough: Google for "The Strange Case of the Electronic Lover"
- cLive 17y agoYou are talking about the student researcher Selena Sol: http://selenasol.com/selena/ http://selenasol.com/selena/
- gaius 17y agoSpecifically, on the Internet, when AOL got a Usenet gateway. No-one cared when they stayed within AOL, not least because AOL had moderators. The real Internet is not HN, it's not Facebook or Livejournal. It's 4chan and the comments on Youtube. That's what we built, that's the glorious future, the pinnacle of high tech, the global collective consciousness. How proud should we be?
- bdr 17y agoHow did you decide what counts as the real Internet?
- anigbrowl 17y agoHonestly, 4chan just reminds me of alt.* in Septembers. I'm not a regular visitor, but at least 4chan doesn't pretend to be anything other than the filthy underbelly of the net, and the community there has both a sense of humor about itself and genuinely likes kittehs...plus it has the merit of being funny if you're willing to accept the possibility of being offended. What's really depressing to me is going to visit the San Francisco Chronicle website, CNN or wherever, and seeing the comment space overrun by arrogant idiots who think they're superior to 4chan, or would if they knew about it. I would far rather be trapped in a lift with a bunch of /b/tards than the over-earnest moralists (of all political stripes) that attach themselves like limpets to the mainstream news and political sites.
- samlittlewood 17y ago4chan vs. Trent Reznor would be an epic, and (I suspect) enjoyable challenge for both sides.
- sho 17y agoWhy the 4chan hate? It is what it is, doesn't pretend to be anything else, and there's a place for it. At its best, 4chan can be great. You can't compare that to YouTube comments at all. 4chan's about lulz, not pure unadulterated stupidity. They're not the same at all.
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- TJensen 17y agoYeah, I don't buy it. I was on the intertubes in the early nineties, and I distinctly remember trolls running around Usenet. That said, the caliber of trolling may have been slightly higher. :)
- tokenadult 17y agomy guess is that trolls probably didn't really appear until AOL. I'm old enough to remember that there were trolls on Usenet before AOL built its gateway to Usenet. I'm pretty sure that verifying the earliest use of "troll" in the sense of this thread and comparing that with the date of AOL's gateway opening would confirm this.
- jmatt 17y agoI agree. For me version one would have been usenet, FidoNet and BBS chat circa late 80s or early 90s. I knew then what Trent has finally figured out. Sounds like he really is "living next" to us.
- johnyzee 17y agoIdiots rule our countries. Why would online be any different? (Not being snide - wherever you look, politicians seem to unfailingly be raping and making a mockery of the democratic system. I may be slightly more cynical than usual as we discussed Berlusconi at lunch today, though). Does anyone have good real-world examples of the the kind of communities we would like to see online? I'd like to hope that degeneration into idiocracy as communities grow is not some kind of natural law.
- jnorthrop 17y agoHere is a good one: http://news.ycombinator.com http://news.ycombinator.com
- pmorici 17y agoI've always thought the degradation into idiocracy happened when people felt like they were anonymous which often times is correlated to the size of the community.
- froo 17y agoDoes anyone have good real-world examples of the the kind of communities we would like to see online? Well, I'll give a fairly decent example. I occasionally played tabletop wargames in the past locally and we have a statewide forum dedicated to it. http://www.westgamer.com http://www.westgamer.com I've seen disagreements before on the forum, but have never seen anything that would constitute trolling or abusive behaviour. I think this stems from the fact that everyone pretty much knows everyone outside of the forums and so idiotic behaviour can have real-world consequences (eg, not being able to set up games with others) There is little to no anonymity on those forums and so everyone is quite civil. I suspect that if you make people responsible for their actions that they end up being quite responsible on the forums. That's not to say there hasn't been the occasional piece of drama, it's just normally localised and doesn't make its way to the forums for everyone to read.
- ThomPete 17y agoThe Well is fantastic
- snorkel 17y agoIt's not that social media has failed but rather Trent is realizing that his audience contains many antisocial malcontents and now he's recoiling in horror.
- roc 17y agoOn the unfiltered internet -every- audience gets quickly dominated by antisocial malcontents. So there's no way to infer from their presence whether they're a representative sample. I mean, people troll and spew racial slurs on -home improvement sites-. I don't think that means Whirlpool and Bob Villa themselves attract the dregs.
- c00p3r 17y agoThat is good, because it is so easy to sell to them.
- iamelgringo 17y agoOne thought after reading this: Troll filtering is a big, wide open market.
- DTrejo 17y agoAnd there are plenty of places to train your algorithm
- randallsquared 17y ago...but lots of disagreement as to exactly which ones are the trolls.
- swombat 17y agohttp://www.socialmod.com/ http://www.socialmod.com/
- misuba 17y agoThey're solving a different problem. There's a whole class of trolling that's impossible to identify out of context.
- anigbrowl 17y agoI've been thinking about this for a while. What it needs is shareable trust networks, so you can see ratings weighted by the votes of those who you particularly approve of or despise. Attempts at objective moderation just end up creating echo chambers and/or popularity contests. I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this thread is too small to contain...but I am making notes to write it up in some useful form.
- dejb 17y ago> I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this thread is too small to contain This isn't going to be like Fermat's theorem all over again is it? Seriously though I agree that you need a system that copes with the fact that different people have different tastes. Not a generic 'good' vs 'bad/spam'.
- ghshephard 17y agoIs anybody surprised that, with 600K+ followers, many of whom are already self-selected as "edgy" or "alternate" that some small percentage of them wouldn't be absolutely manical raving lunatics? Trent could probably solve some of this with technology and create a self-policing environment, in which a core group of half-sane fans could administrate/police/censor to the betterment of all - There's a reason why Wikipedia's NPOV cabal and anti-vandalism bots make it a better place. Likewise with keeping the community small (and hopefully self selected to be at least semi-lucid) ala the HN approach is also good. Big, uncontrolled, and lunatic is a recipe for all sorts of wackiness and cruft.
- absconditus 17y agoAnonymity seems to play a larger role than the size of the group. Join any moderately active IRC channel and you are sure to see someone acting up eventually. A channel that I frequent with fewer than 50 people has a regular troll that bugs the channel almost daily and occasional racists.
- sketerpot 17y agoCan you ban or killfile him? With such a small population, the IRC channel could probably get away with blocking the whole IP address range that he could possibly occupy. You shouldn't have to put up with jackasses like that. Seriously, bans work. I know at least one forum which has kept trolls away for years with the mighty ban-hammer, and maintained consistent quality of posts by making chronic idiocy a ban-worthy offense.
- adrianwaj 17y agoQuite right, and that's got a lot to do with NIN's style of music. You wouldn't expect Lionel Ritchie to experience the same thing if he emulated Reznor online. He'd probably get some middle-aged air-heads but no suicidal mischief-makers.
- froo 17y agoYou wouldn't expect Lionel Ritchie to experience the same thing if he emulated Reznor online. Well, having been on the receiving end of something I thought I'd share my experience. There are raving lunatic fans all around the place, regardless of what genre the artists are in. During the campaign to get Rick Astley voted as Best Act Ever for last years MTV Europe Music Awards, I started receiving large volumes of hate mail from one or two of Astley's fans (I've never seen anything quite like it before or since... and I've seen some pretty angry emails). I was also getting some quite vitriolic comments posted about me by these same fans on many blogs around the web (Thanks Google Alerts!)... these fans, I found out, just happened to be women in their mid 40's who have a "thing" for Astley. Having spoken to several people close to Astley (I can't say who) they have mentioned who these people are and that they were "loonies" and could effectively be ignored. So, I imagine Reznor would get more than his fair share and I feel for him, I really do (I experienced about 3 weeks of it, and that was 3 weeks too much) - raving lunatic fans are everywhere. Anyway, back to the story at hand, I think Trent talking about verified forum profiles is great, but I think that you could take it one step further. Some sort of centralised system for verified identities online with a simple API that people could plug into their forums/comment systems on blogs. Only want verified people to comment on your blog - easy, same with forums? - easy I think when you start removing the anonymous posting aspect of parts of the web, it becomes civil. That's why I never post anywhere anonymously, I self regulate and I find I don't troll - unfortunately I expect there is a significant contingent online that don't have the same self control and do cause problems for others. I think right now is that we're seeing a tipping point from when trolling was an accepted fact of the web the experience that new users are experiencing as how to act given it's becoming more widespread, and those people are simply emulating that. It's a problem that is just snowballing. </rant>
- rw 17y agoGreat piece. As far as social networking goes, this stood out: > Anyway, we're in a world where the mainstream social networks want any and all people to boost user numbers for the big selloff and are not concerned with the quality of experience.
- rms 17y agoFunny, I just saw him play tonight. He always puts on a good show. He's from Pittsburgh and we got a particularly good setlist. http://twitter.com/trent_reznor/status/2049368290 http://twitter.com/trent_reznor/status/2049368290 probably sums up Trent's feelings in a tweet.
- mishmash 17y agoAnonymity isn't the problem. The problem is that Trent's mind still cares enough about what other people think of him that it is consumed by the act of surveying his status and trying to please the please-able. That's a dead end. Instead, I suggest that at least on a personal level, we should let go and try to realize that nothing* really matters online. As you begin to welcome anonymity, a certain type of apathy appears. You may even surprise yourself that you don't actually care that some troll just told you to "an hero" or whatever else it is they're bringing. Although we're not funded yet, my startup is working on bringing the ideas of anonymity (along with privacy/security) to the mainstream. We believe, that for many, many use cases, identity simply doesn't matter. *mostly ;)
- adrianwaj 17y agoI'd stand by my identity consistently if it meant revealing the identities of others.
- ScottWhigham 17y agoAm I the only one that gets a little pissy thinking that this is nothing but pure content thievery? There was a sum total TWO paragraphs of OC there - the rest was a re-post of Trent's entire post. A link would have sufficed. A couple of quotes would've been fine but the whole post? That's content theft as far as I'm concerned.
- mapleoin 17y agothere's the link to the original post at the beginning. I found reading the whole post on stereogum's site more relaxing however.
- bartl 17y ago> A link would have sufficed. Maybe it was self protection against edits or deletion for the original post.
- ScottWhigham 17y agoAnd maybe I need the source code to Windows just in case they change something that I didn't want them to change.
- carbon8 17y agoMaybe you do. That's solidly among the reasons some of us use open software.
- snorkel 17y agoAlthough Trent Reznor is not some poor blogger needing ad revenue and so he probably wouldn't mind his missives being rebroadcast verbatim.
- ScottWhigham 17y agoI don't see how that matters. Theft is theft, isn't it? The flip side could be that, since Trent Reznor is an important name, he could feel the need to stand up for all the little guys who get their content stolen yet can't afford to do anything about it.
- tlrobinson 17y agoAfter witnessing his minor meltdown on Twitter the other day I thought to myself celebrities will really need to learn to ignore the trolls. I'm sure Trent will be just the first of many Twitter celebrities to go through this.
- timmaah 17y agoI think the majority of celebrities that are established celebrities, will realize they don't need the bs and just stop (like reznor is doing). It stops being fun for them and it comes down to business. If they are not getting enough out of it to put up with the crap, they will stop or pawn it off on PR people to do it for them. Same reason Obama and the likes don't watch cable news.
- trapper 17y agoInterestingly, the only troll-less social places on the internet are those who are started by, and frequented by a "guru" who everyone respects. I visit a handful of such places for different subject areas and they are completely different than the majority of the internet.
- whughes 17y agoThere's an important distinction between a guru and an idol, though. Reznor doesn't seem to fulfill that description; a too-distant figure can turn the respect into something like worship, with the accompanying zealotry.
- bartl 17y agoIt's a shame that he quits, as he is one of those few people who could make it work. When he quits, it's almost like "game over" for the medium.
- mlLK 17y agoGiven Trent's recent sentiments on Web2.0 I took it upon myself to transcribe his feelings to you by rewriting the chorus for his first smash hit, Head Like A Hole from the album Pretty Hate Machine. web two point oh black as your soul he'd rather die than give trolls control [orig] http://www.lyricsfreak.com/n/nine+inch+nails/head+like+a+hole_20100900.html http://www.lyricsfreak.com/n/nine+inch+nails/head+like+a+hol...
- greengirl512 17y agoAwesome!
- maukdaddy 17y agoWow that's really good. You should spend the rest of today finishing the entire song =)
- mlLK 17y agoI dunno about the rest of the day, but by all means, you should feel free take the lyrical reigns of parody too and finish some other verse. . .there's a little Weird Al in all of us. :D