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Comment by boyaka | Hacker News Reader

As if there isn't a balance in the US. It has always been my understanding that we have the right to express our freedoms as long as they don't infringe upon other peoples' freedoms.

Say you go up to somebody in public who is minding their own business and start yelling expletives at them and threaten to murder them. Obviously that is making it impossible for them to be free to do what they are doing, and they could certainly have you arrested for that (disturbing the peace or something).

It's difficult to apply this to the Internet because that person certainly has the power to NOT READ the comments from somebody that is attempting to troll them. There are plenty of services in place to ignore these trolls, but instead people let themselves be trolled and then complain about being a victim. This is nothing new, it has been happening since the beginning, but these less experienced users just haven't learned how the Internet works.

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> because that person certainly has the power to NOT READ the comments from somebody that is attempting to troll them.

You're hopelessly uninformed about the sheer quantity of messages that a harasser can send. Modern Internet trolling easily reaches ddos levels and services make blocking harassing users harder than it should be.

I agree. I am not a very social person and haven't been on the receiving end of these situations. I have encountered plenty of trolls and have had no problem ignoring them, but I suppose the trolling can reach a level where that is impossible on certain platforms.

> There are plenty of services in place to ignore these trolls.

I'm curious - what do you mean? e.g. if I'm receiving threatening emails / tweets / comments on my blog / reddit DMs, there are services that will filter them out for me?

I don't think there are; and even if there are, I'd rather have the ability to have the authorities investigate them if they are credible threats.

You could just begin reading the message, then quickly trash it and ignore the user at the first sign of negativity. You might even be able to discern it isn't worth reading just from the subject.

There are tons of social mediums out there I don't have experience with. I have a reddit account but have not done much on there, and I have a twitter but have barely used that as well so I have no clue what it's like to receive lots of communication on those platforms.

My experience is with things like email, Facebook, and chatrooms. With email you can block addresses, report it as spam, click a trash button to throw it away, make a new email and don't share it publicly. Facebook you can ignore friend requests and report people.

Chatrooms (and video game chats) always have an ignore feature, and that is where a lot of the sentiment behind my post came from. It always bugs me when people get into these long conversations with trolls to the point that they are crying and complaining for mods to ban them, when they can simply use the ignore feature. I inform them about this feature and they choose to ignore my advice and continue to complain about it. People complaining about trolls are more annoying than trolls in these cases.

Anyways, clearly I am not a social enough person to understand the problems at play here.

> You could just begin reading the message, then quickly trash it and ignore the user at the first sign of negativity. You might even be able to discern it isn't worth reading just from the subject.

Why should you? Especially if you're getting dozens of messages an hour.

It's weird when people say the victims are doing it wrong and if only they did something different everything would be okay.

Words can have a huge impact on a person's state of mind, daily routine and behavior, and even physical state.

A victim of Internet bullying who is able to filter out the attack is much better able to handle the situation than a victim of an Internet attack who is unable to filter the attack.

If, for example, someone's mass tweeting at me via their followers (e.g. a blogger who dislikes me and posts my twitter handle), I'm going to be in a much better position if I turn off Twitter notifications for awhile than I would be if I let the notifications continue to show up on my phone.

Besides, there are two things at work here. Are you suggesting people shouldn't be allowed to spam someone else? Or are you suggesting that people shouldn't be allowed to say harassing things to other people? Both?

> If, for example, someone's mass tweeting at me via their followers (e.g. a blogger who dislikes me and posts my twitter handle), I'm going to be in a much better position if I turn off Twitter notifications for awhile than I would be if I let the notifications continue to show up on my phone.

Yes, when someone makes a death threat it's good if you stay away from the windows and hire bodyguards to check the car for bombs.

> there are two things at work here. Are you suggesting people shouldn't be allowed to spam someone else?

Denial of service attacks should carry some consequence.

> Or are you suggesting that people shouldn't be allowed to say harassing things to other people?

Depends on the severity and frequency of the harassment.

Follow up question: are internet chat rooms / websites different from, say, your mailbox or your phone?

e.g. should it be OK for me to crapflood you with postcards that say 'today is your last day on earth, I will rape and kill you tonight'? Or send you texts (from different numbers via Twilo, naturally) that say the same, but with fundamentally worse grammar due to length restrictions?

I think you make a very good point, although that obviously depends on exactly how the communication takes place - e.g. repeated email/direct tweets versus forum posts, etc. Still, I just don't see any need to protect hate speech, whatever form it takes.

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