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Comment by throwaway77384 | Hacker News Reader

I keep thinking back of the days of the wild west of the internet, when I was a teenager. Back then, 'trolling' felt like it was done in 'good spirit', and it seemed as though everyone was sort of 'in on it', maybe because people shared similar values and knew there was no ill-intent behind the 'trolling' of the old days. But at some point (and I suspect it has something to do with money, as always), it turned into a weird team-sport. And political. It's no longer acceptable and needs to end.

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I was a little shit as a teenager and I hate that I was. Trolling was only "in good spirit" because I was a heartless asshole that completely lacked empathy for others. What comes to mind to me as the epitome of my teenage years was thinking this was funny:

https://www.somethingawful.com/news/were-all-gonna/

A writer for the SA website made fun a website of a mother who was grieving her stillborn children. Forget any opinion you might have about the mother or her presentation: this a woman who had several children die before she ever got to know them. It's potentially one of the most traumatic things that can happen to someone, and this writer decided to ridicule how this mother grieved:

>Your poison womb is making heaven too fucking crowded.

I hate myself that I thought this was funny. I hate that I used words to belittle the LGBTQ community. I hate that I was that edgelord that held to statistics about crime rates and intelligence as they related to race. I hate that I made fun of people for their sexuality. I hate that I discounted sexism, racism, and ableism.

It was never in good fun. Some people grow out of it and others don't. I am still working constantly to better myself and catch myself when I have prejudice thoughts.

I think a lot of people online don't understand how to get attention besides by acting outrageous like this. Getting attention online by doing something good that everyone else is doing is really hard. A lot of people seek out the seemingly underemployed strategy of doing the outrageous things that others aren't.

Maybe it's got to do with the fact we're competing with everyone online for attention, and the issue could be helped if more activity was in smaller clusters, where people didn't have to resort to outrageous strategies to get attention because there's less competition. (Discord servers provide one specific example of what I'm thinking of.) But it seems like as long as the global cluster exists too, people will seek attention on it too for its greater rewards, unless there's something about the smaller clusters that's even more rewarding.

Thats exactly why you hand out bans or send the teenager to timeout - it teaches them that bad attention seeking is not desirable and not rewarded with attention.

The internet lost the lesson some time ago because even bad attention is good attention when it comes to KPIs. More sharing is good sharing.

Teenagers are complicated creatures. Admittedly, this stuff seems impossibly extreme? Maybe I am indeed rather naive. I must have frequented much more harmless online communities. I never understood the appeal of SA or 4Chan. At the same time I can see how, as teenagers, people can get sucked into these communities, where edginess lures one in with some kind of false promise of 'freedom' from the rules of a society that appears to have rejected oneself. Even if that rejection may be self-imposed. At some point it's just a competition for who can say the most horrific things. I don't know how one would counteract this. The funny thing is, I also cringe at what I wrote online as a teenager, but I never took it to these extremes. However, recognising it (and 'hating' oneself for it) is a first step in fixing the problem, hopefully.

I can't absolve the entirety of my behavior by the online communities I was a part of, but they definitely worsened and encouraged it. I wish I had better role models as a teen and maybe I wouldn't have acted that way. Unfortunately my parents weren't very involved in my life and I spent every moment I could on the internet to escape other problems in my life. I think I had a lot of anger and frustration and places like 4chan were an outlet for that. Clearly growing up with 4chan being your main cultural influence is not going to lead to a well adjusted young adult.

You should relax. It seems like you were doing it because disaster porn is funny. At least you are cognizant enough to realize this. A lot of SJWism is similar, except they don't do it for fun (though, they get enjoyment of some form from it)

Relax about what exactly? You're saying I should just accept my (long) past bigotry?

When was that? Because that is not how I remember the internet from 96 onwards at all. Even more if you were involved in gaming communities, as an example: early MMOs were prime time for dogpiling.

Trolling used to be more prank-ish but it would already at that time certainly devolve to doxxing and start affecting people's real lives. I remember it took me a long time to stop caring on not leaving traces that people could link to my real name, my real pictures or whatever online.

I remember people on online forums salivating when Google came out and was a much better search tool to link an username to an email and from there to your life outside the internet. It was scary to post something confronting these trolls because they could try to find you, they had enough free time for that.

So I don't know when the internet was really that naive and innocent place, it had more innocence but this bad side of it was very present from the get go, at least in my experience.

You are right, I don't think it was ever naive, or ok. Thinking about it, what we used to call Trolls back in the day (1998 ish gaming community boards) were just annoying users. They were considered shitposters and bans were handed out swiftly. At the same time I'd say the discourse online was more coarse, less aware of political correctness, or racial / gender sensitivities. It's hard to think back to the mindset of my former teenage self, but perhaps what's known as 'trolling' today didn't even exist back then. I've never seen someone get doxxed on the forums I frequented. But then, people were also paranoid enough to not let themselves be doxxed, perhaps? This is all so long ago.

Church of the Subgenius? Kibology? alt.pave.the.earth? The epic KFC hoax?

It's good that you used a throwaway account, because I think you already know: it was never done in 'good spirit,' not for the victims of your abuse.

What was amusing and fun to you and your friends drove people out of the industry, and is likely a very small part of why people lament imbalances in ethnicity and gender today.

Teenagers aren't great at understanding the consequences of their actions. I wasn't, you weren't, most of us aren't or weren't. It's hard to look back and realize that things you thought were in fun were not fun at all for the victims, but it's a good start.

Well, I am trying to think back to my former self, back in those mid to late 90s days. It's hard to conjure up that mindset accurately. However, I would say that there was certainly a lot of immaturity to go around. There was no doxxing, there was relatively little racism. But there was a lot of sexism. I guess nerdy male-teenage dominated gaming forums of the 90s were places where women certainly did not feel welcome. I think re-reading what was said back then nowadays would probably be rather cringey. A lot of discovery of boundaries and exploration of social extremes occurred under the monicker of a kind of new-found freedom we'd been given as teenagers by the web. And that probably drove a lot of people (especially women) away. I think I lamented that fact back then, and I lament it now. It's always been my hope that I was part of inclusion rather than exclusion, but I probably failed at times, assuming an edgy 13-year old has no idea how to conduct themselves properly online. Yet, back in the day I do not think harm was intended, even when harm was done. Nowadays I wonder whether harm is intended. I am no longer active on any communities really. I post so rarely. This is one of the exceptions, as I do find it an interesting topic. I would honestly love to know whether I actually hurt anyone online, ever. I hope I did not, but if I did, then all I can do is attempt to be more aware in the future. Which, naturally, 20 years later, I am and continue to be and try to improve. That journey never ends.

When was it? Because while my own internet childhood was innocent too, I later found out a lot of very serious harassment was going on at exact that time - me seeing side pieces of it but not knowing full extend of what went on.

Back then, you was not supposed to "feed the trolls" so victims just left.

Yeah, from reading the replies here, I am beginning to think that I frequented some rather harmless parts of the internet, while left-right-and-centre, people were getting seriously harmed. It's quite eye opening :/

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