Ellen Pao: The Trolls Are Winning the Battle for the Internet
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
However, modern media (like Gawker, Vox, Salon, Slate, etc) can somehow turn 3 tweets from anonymous people with no followers into a national shit storm. These media outlets feed the trolls, because it gets them clicks. So, it is of my opinion that the "trolls" aren't "winning" the battle, they just haven't left, and never will. The news outlets are click junkies and know they can foment faux rage by enticing people who otherwise we would have just ignored 10+ years ago. Of course they look large in numbers if you're putting them under the microscope. The thing people who have little online experience miss is that they are making things worse by giving people attention and trying to "silence" them.
Usenet still exists, and nobody is stopping people from using it. It's just not where trolls go to be heard anymore, because nobody is there to hear them. ;)
Of course, that's a non-sequitur to the claim that Reddit is an entity that has no obligation to be a platform for entirely-uncensored expression, though even that is a cop-out argument against those who cite Reddit as having a reputation of free expression.
Basically, this whole discussion is gibberish.
If I get the community to help me build a orphanage, it is wrong for me to decide I rather do something else with the building once built.
When I use the word subjective, it means that an individual personally gets to decide the truth of something. You can't make something illegal just by changing your mind, but you can make it immoral. We probably have different understandings of subjectivity and objectivity.
This interface between objective and subjective is the "magic" of the legal system. If you can argue in a court of law, successfully enough to convince a jury (or judge, depending on the criminal / civil nature of the case), that, say for instance, a corporation is a person in the same sense as an individual human being, then as far as the law is concerned it is now an objective truth that corporations are people.
I generally think of a continuum where 100% subjective means only you agree and 100% objective means everybody on the planet agrees. Questions of legality tend towards the objective side of the continuum, and questions of morality tend towards the subjective side. Very little is at either end of it. (Maybe ice cream is 98% objectively delicious or something.) It would have helped if I clarified this before just spitting out that laws != morals because objective != subjective.
It's quite trendy now to push the meaning of censorship all the way back to a legal definition around the first amendment and say things like private companies can't censor people. That's simply not true. Removing information is censorship.
Reddit was born on the spirit of freedom of speech and repealing it, while fully with their rights, will be the death of Reddit.
Was it though?
"back when I was running things, if there was anything racist, sexist, or homophobic I'd ban it right away. I don't think there's a place for such things on reddit. Of course, now that reddit is much bigger, I understand if maybe things are different." http://www.vox.com/2015/7/15/8967721/reddit-yishan-wong-elle...
https://np.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3dautm/conten...
Also first sentence on http://www.reddit.com/rules "reddit is a pretty open platform and free speech place, but there are a few rules"
Speaking of which, why is anti-vaxxer rhetoric protected even though it contributes to the harm of children. I can think of illegal speech that was banned because of it being harmful to children (and which is likely less lethal than anti-vaxxer rhetoric).
That's very interesting. Could you elaborate please? I'd really like to know more.
(As a side note to any lawyers, is text protected speech when it originates as a description of an actual harmful act of which video/images would not be legal speech? I don't think it was made illegal, but I wonder if it could be (at least if it were at some level of detail).)
Instead, they use their power for clickbait, and that means that the few times they do cover it they're dismissed as just another one of those "This unemployed veteran consumed bath salts--you'll never guess what happened next" or "1 easy tip for getting out of criminal charges--the ACLU hates this (white) guy".
It does happen.
That said, I don't know if I agree with the comment you have replied to.
Fixing this is really hard and requires constant application of lots of energy.
Step one of "How to Deal with Bullies": Show minimal reaction. [1]
They are effectively abusing public resources with potentially fatal outcomes.
I seriously don't care if somebody is smart and I have something to learn I will regardless of her style, slurs or whatever. I learned that in primary school where I was exposed to underpaid teachers who hated everybody who was smart. :)
Feeling is not the end of all and it's not superior to everything else, it's just another side of being human.
And they do it because it benefits them. Feeding the troll in this case gives the trolls paychecks and influence, making the future even more trollish.
It seems that one of the most powerful online political classes have lumped hatred and abuse in with disagreement, mockery and satire.
I don't think it's good for the conversation between the group of user's that dislike where Reddit and other big social media sites are headed and the people that are taking them there.
> It seems that one of the most powerful online political classes have lumped hatred and abuse in with disagreement and mockery.
Its pretty common, online and off, for people of all classes to ascribe disagreement with their preferred position with "hatred and abuse". Mistaking this common error for a feature of a particular "powerful online class" is, AFAICT, the same kind of misperception of persecution as the error itself.
No they didn't.
> crashing the party but having fun with it.
I'm sure you and your friends were having fun with it. The people whose parties you crashed? Probably not so much.
> No they didn't.
... Poe's law?
Regardless, the things people are complaining about on Reddit aren't satire. I don't think a debate over word meanings is helpful.
Like holding a straight face and carefully putting forwards an extreme position which you do not hold while making use of the correct memes and language so that it appears congruent to outsiders.
A humorous effect is created because a line can be drawn between those of the audience that know what you're doing and those that do not. A selection of the audience watches on as people that are not in the know either get angry with you or agree with your bizarre statements.
It's effectively hidden satire and that's why it was so fun and so potent.
Sadly corporate environment isn't anywhere near as tolerant of this.
More and more political debates have turned to a battle of "framing" rather than actually debating the positive and negative sides of some action (or inaction).
edit: although tangentially relevant, this case in Canada is hair raising: http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/christie-blatchfor...
How do you define hate, abuse and trolls? In certain countries atheists are considered terrorists. Those who blog about atheism are haters and a bigot. It's justified to hack them to death, imprison them or whip them.
In other countries female drivers are abusing the sensibilities of men.
Who is to say which ones are doing the censorship right, lol.
What a horrible country. I hate it deeply.
by their own admission and by the evidence, the plaintiffs however did engage in a pattern of behavior and organized others into the same pattern which resulted in a person not only being harassed but also losing their job.
it is not enough to say, 'I feel harrassed' or 'I feel hurt' - that does not meet the legal test. You have no right not to be offended.
by the token of 'feelings', I could say that your response is 'hate speech' towards me and that I 'felt' harrassed and I 'felt' that my personal safety was in jeopardy.
If I were to claim that, I should rightfully be pointed in the direction of a mental health professional, not a court of law.
If you hurt my feelings, that's neither a criminal nor civil offense.
"Sticks and stones..." silly me, I thought we all learned this in elementary school
One of the worst aspects of our country IMO. I wish we had millions of people willing to defend the basic right to say what you want.
Please don't speak for the majority of Canadians. I am not in agreement with this and I speculate that many people living in Canada would object to it as well.
> Most smart people I know have decided to just not discuss anything sensitive because of the internet lynchmob looking for any slight mistake
> This seems unlikely to be a good development. At some point the conversations will only have the extremists left.
We need to talk about this, but without heavy moderation which will introduce a different set of problems, I don't see how.
However I don't think it's a great idea to put forth one's amateurish "insight" as discussion worthy in a public forum. It promotes the idea that any position is "valid" when many simply aren't. Having a "discussion", which everyone seems to think is oh so important, is absolutely useless if it's between people who don't have any clue about the topic they are discussing. So, if the "internet lynchmob" has stopped people speaking publicly about things which they have no business doing, I can't say I feel sad about it.
Aside from that, I do have an objection to the term: real advocates for social justice are doing something constructive. Literal warriors make war, which is destructive. That may have grim uses, but it isn't preferable to make our civil society as hostile as a war zone. Why do we need to appropriate the trappings of literal warriors, and why can't we embrace constructiveness instead of associating advocacy with destruction?
Framing advocacy as warfare is inaccurate and unwise. Appealing to people with your arguments and example and negotiating points of agreement are huge parts of effective advocacy.
Defining people as opponents to kill, disable or dominate isn't effective advocacy - and recent wars might even indicate that they aren't focuses for effective warfare, either. Furthermore, it tells your "opponents" that the only way to deal with you is to suppress you by force. When people get locked obsessively into these conflicts beyond reconciliation, it's sick and self-perpetuating rather than cathartic and it doesn't help anybody.
The defining trait of SJW is not that they are activists for a cause. If they were just trying to win hearts and minds so they could win at the ballot box, that would be one thing. The defining trait is that they use any means at their disposable to defeat their enemies: naming and shaming, purging, getting people fired, getting people banned from communities, lawsuits, criminal complaints, etc. That is the mentality of warfare, and deserves to be called as such.
Unfortunately, the people "on the other side" will tend to see things the same way. And our tendency is to define the enemy group vaguely, over-generalizing by including lots of people who are not really malicious or even wrong. Maybe our anger makes us hungry for targets. Or maybe we are just so upset about the disagreement itself that we are happy to have a list of bad things the other side does as a way of trying to discredit people who are not involved in those bad things, but disagree with us. Not everyone is honest about why they want to hurt the people they publicly declare as enemies. Sometimes it is just intolerance of disagreement, or simple sadism.
Even if the damage among the "combatants" didn't matter, it is often the "civilian bystanders" who are hurt. This is totally nuts. Even if these issues are worth being passionate about, they are not rationally comparable to warfare, they don't rationally justify war tactics. This isn't the Thunderdome, it's the civil society we all have to live in. And we don't have a real choice about whether that society includes people we disagree with, so it's better if we come to terms with that and find ways either to fence off or compromise in the common space, to mutual advantage.
For example, I think you're stacking the deck with your talk about "left-aligned mobs" and that you are intentionally eliding the history of right-wing fascism to make "your side" look better than "the other side." I'm a realist, I don't think people will usually be civil without special effort. So for all I know based on your rhetoric, you'd identify me as an enemy and a threat based on my views, and even kill me if you had the chance; I will defensively avoid testing that. But that's as far as I should rationally go. The important part is that whatever our disagreements, and they may be very deep, I don't need to assume that we are at war, that I am a warrior and you are my enemy, and focus on somehow figuratively "killing" you. In my view, that would actually be very silly and self-destructive. I don't actually benefit from trying to damage you, it's pointless, it doesn't help my causes and it pollutes the civil society I have to live in. (Of course it is another issue if you decide to literally threaten me and my lawful interests, but then it is a purely defensive and practical issue; I don't need to respond to that by declaring war on your "tribe" and I certainly can't pre-empt that by turning every disagreement into an intractable "war.")
For example, I think you're stacking the deck with your talk about "left-aligned mobs" and that you are intentionally eliding the history of right-wing fascism to make "your side" look better than "the other side."
I mention that because we were talking about social justice warriors, who are on the left. If there was a term "Right-wing Warriors" or such to describe right-wing people who wanted to dox, shame, purge, ban, and use any tactic necessary to fire leftists, then that would make sense. It would be completely appropriate to label such people as "warriors", if they are engaging as politics as warfare rather than as a way to convince people.
Opposed to the real world, wannabe bullies have zero chance of seeing a reaction from their victims if those do not react. Online bullies like there DO lose their interest. Just look at past outrages on reddit to see. People need to despise that these short-term hype shitstorms are not worth reacting to'. Maybe ask PR campaigners how they handle it, there should be decades of research.
I am obviously excluding actual stalkers, sociopaths etc. Those are hard problems but not one you can as easily treat and not a widespread problem.
We have laws against it, we punish murderers, but murder still happens! All of our attempts over thousands of years have failed to eradicate murder! There has to be more we can do! Do you have suggestions?
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In case my point isn't made clear: there are some things that are simply facts of life. You will not be able to solve them. People are emotional and will react on those emotions. Sometimes people will do terrible things while acting on these emotions. Sometimes we will fight with one another, sometimes we will throw fists at one another, sometimes we will call each other names. We'll bury each other 6' under ground. These are things that happen. We know they happen. We expect them to happen. While none of us wishes these things happen, we recognize that they will happen. That recognition of things that will happen is what makes those things normal. Normal things do not get our attention. We haven't been trained to care about expected, normal things.
I recognize that tomorrow morning, the sun will rise. It's a very special event. It means the sun is still burning and providing light and life to the planet. It's a normal occurrence though. The sun will rise the day after tomorrow. In fact, the sun will likely rise every day for the rest of my life. It's an expected occurrence. It's a normal one. I don't celebrate it. I don't pay attention to it, most of the time. Some days I might appreciate the sunrise and the beauty of it. Most days it gets ignored.
Some days I notice some terrible occurrence happening in the world. Those terrible things happen every day. They're normal. So most days. They get ignored.
There's plenty of question of how much we're willing to spend to solve the problem, of course (to give a terrible ad absurdium example, it's trivial to stop Internet bullying by shutting off the internet). But when we just hand-wave and say "Can't be fixed," we aren't helping.
In fact, personal abuse online has risen online and I blame people being so open with their personally identifying information. I made a related post on this issue here [0]. The solution is not one that people want to subscribe to. They'd rather share their lives on FB and Twitter for the world to see. "The world" includes nasty people and bullies. If people don't want nasty people and bullies to have access to this information, people need to stop sharing it with the world.
It is much easier to harass someone in a credible manner when you have information about them. No information? Nothing to attack. But so many people want to shove their name, gender, sexuality, religion, age, beliefs, and who-knows-what-else in front of everyones' eyes to see. So people who dislike _____ now have something to attack. People who dislike ____ will always and forever exist. Always. Until we remove the right for individuals to hold their own beliefs or have freedom.
There's nothing about human culture that's consistent except its inconsistency and adaptability. It might not be obvious within a few decades, but big changes do happen.
There's potentially a big difference.
I'm not defending the slur - it's abhorrent. But if the magnitude matters to you, let's try to be accurate when we describe what we're counting.
She was bullied and forced to resign. This is the standard operating procedure of many here on HN and on the Internet (Mozilla CEO anyone?): Someone just can't have a differing opinion. They need to be bullied, tormented, silenced, fired, and marginalized until they admit that their opinion is wrong.
It was all based on mis-information (many still don't know why the AmA employee was fired) and mob mentality.
Just remember this conversation when you get fired because someone does research on your your Internet comments and decides that one of your opinions is deemed "offensive". It will most likely happen someday.
I also find it a little funny that when someone in a git repository doesn't use specific gender pronouns, they are called out as biased (and bullied). But when hundreds and thousands of people call a woman racial slurs (so much worse), it's defended.
This is my point exactly: Most people talking about 'equality' are lying. They want equality when someone is against their own personal beliefs, but are just fine spewing the same hate and bigotry when the roles are reversed.
I suspect, possibly incorrectly, that it's being done heavily by people who have never tried to support a family and don't realize the extreme damage their "hobby" has on the world.
I don't LIKE that people get that kind of scrutiny... But I think it should be legal, and we have to live with the unfortunate consequences.
As to the graphic designer... I don't have a good answer for that. Keep your unpopular opinions at arm's length from your professional life...? :(
Did you read those words I wrote? Yes or no? Feel free to yell at someone, but it shouldn't be me.
I want accurate reporting, don't demonize me for that, okay. Units matter. If OP has proof that it was "thousands of people calling her a ching-chong cunt," then I'd like to see it. If instead, OP has proof that 2,400 accounts upvoted an image labeling her "ching chong ding dong," then report that.
Is this a known/established fact? I see in the article a paragraph about how she received thousands of positive notes/emails but nothing about the # or volume of hate. It may not be documented here, but I'm curious if it was actually as widespread as implied.
We're still human beings, and even though we all abstractly know that throwaway accounts exist, when you're getting 10,000 PMs that say you suck, it matters. Besides, evidence from Twitter suggests that it's demonstrably more often an easily-led mob than hundreds of sock-puppets these days.
It's weird that you object to the racial slur but ignore the sexual slur.
There were plenty of other threads for you to talk about the firing (not Pao) and failing admin relationship (not Pao) or censorship (not Pao).
I did see lots of posts saying things like "Ellen Pao is LITERALLY Hitler", but not any overtly racist ones that I can recall.
Here's one. There were lots of others that used the term cunt or used racial slurs.
https://np.reddit.com/r/punchablefaces/comments/39dl6s/ching...
I mean, it's a comment on a thread in a sub called "punchable faces", the thread links to an Imgur image of Pao labled "ching chong ding dong", has 2,400 upvotes.
I would say we should not confuse an upvote with a post.
When he says that the "troll" label is overly used, that does not mean he is claiming it was inappropriate in any particular case, such as when applied to what was directed at Pao.
But it's more complicated than it looks. Pao and stuff are giving 0 cares about political correctness being a cancer far more evil than fat hate.
We don't need owners at reddit to act like priest or therapist spreading their "morality". It doesn't work.
Why are jerks like Trump surging? People have had it with the hypocriscy and suppression of truth.
You can't speak simple truths without staking your career on it. Armies on twitter claim to be harassment victims while themselves being criminally harassers [1][2]
[1] http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2015/07/02/the-fact-a... [2] http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/christie-blatchfor...
I'd be much more interested in seeing what the front page of /r/all was for that same period of time.
EDIT: I suppose you were just on /r/all, but still.
A demonstration of this is in the article:
"In May, the company banned harassment of individuals from the site. Last month, we took down sections of the site that drew repeat harassers. Then, after making these policy changes to prevent and ban harassment, I, along with several colleagues, was targeted with harassing messages, attempts to post my private information online and death threats. These were attempts to demean, shame and scare us into silence."
On one hand, these people affiliated with reddit did not appreciate these alleged "attempts to demean, shame and scare us into silence" when they were the recipients.
Yet these same people were perfectly willing, and perhaps even proud, to silence other reddit users, whether at an individual level or by eliminating entire subreddits.
In fact, the article in this case could very well be seen as an attempt to "demean, shame and scare" the alleged "trolls" into silence. It engages in the sort of behavior that it is deeming as unacceptable!
And the hilarious thing is, the "trolls" didn't even "win". Reddit's new CEO is implementing even stricter censorship measures, all of it most likely in the hopes of making reddit more appealing for advertisers. If you stand back and look at this whole fiasco from a distance, Reddit higher-ups want to make more money, and in order to do so, they decide they need to curb their more "unsightly" elements. But attacking free speech is a dicey proposition, so what do they do? They hire a woman and make her do it. If redditors are dumb sheep and take it quietly, great. If not, wrap the whole thing around her neck and throw her under the bus (reminds you of the Bourne Trilogy deson't it), then come riding in on a white horse to "save" reddit from "chairman Pao".
And so far, it's working perfectly. The "trolls" celebrate their victory by having the sensationalist media blast them on their sexism, Pao's reputation is utterly destroyed and she's essentially too toxic to employ anywhere, and Reddit still gets to wipe the floor with free speech.
tldr; heavy moderation actually causes trolling on sites like Reddit.
>taking extreme action against small infractions can exacerbate antisocial behavior (e.g., unfairness can cause users to write worse). Though average classifier precision is relatively high (0.80), one in five users identified as antisocial are nonetheless misclassified. Whereas trading off overall performance for higher precision and have a human moder- ator approve any bans is one way to avoid incorrectly blocking innocent users, a better response may instead involve giving antisocial users a chance to redeem themselves.
The whole thing with Pao got out of control because somebody was routinely deleting comments and shadowbanning people who mentioned the trouble her husband was in. Whether it was her, another admin or a moderator doing the banning that was what fueled the fire.
Moderation on Reddit is insane, a single basement dweller with sociopathic tendencies (99% of forum moderators everywhere) can control the conversation totally, they constantly ban discussion that they don't agree with and there is absolutely no transparency. It happens to be a wonderful way of incubating hate groups by eliminating cross pollination of ideas, but it also tends to piss people off.
Furthermore, supposing that reddit users revolting against the clamping-down of reddit management constitutes the "biggest trolling attacks in history" is a little disingenuous. What about all the people who got internet famous for dumb stuff like the mustard guy or folks that got pranked by Sacha Baron Cohen or the jackass guys? Those were arguably trolling, and they got made into major motion pictures that got commercials and put into theaters!
Reddit trolls just post nasty comments on reddit, a place that probably half of America barely knows about and definitely doesn't care about.
I'm not saying that the nasty stuff that happened to her didn't happen, or that it's somehow not a big deal. It obviously is a big deal to her, and a great many other people as well.
But that doesn't make it the "largest trolling attack in history"
It sure as hell destroyed Usenet, though. I remember, because I was there when it happened.
At least when we lost Usenet there was somewhere else for all those discussions to migrate to: the Web. If they destroy the Web, where are the discussions supposed to go then?
Reddit is not the WHOLE internet. Just because trolls are causing havoc at reddit doesn't mean that they're winning everywhere.
Further any one website isn't the whole internet. Usenet was a unified system, the myraid websites that people troll on right now are not. Facebook is different from Reddit which is different from slashdot which is different from HN which is different from etc.
Does anyone honestly believe this? Even Ellen in the op-ed says
> As the trolls on Reddit grew louder and more harassing in recent weeks, another group of users became more vocal. First a few sent positive messages. Then a few more. Soon, I was receiving hundreds of messages a day, and at one point thousands. These messages were thoughtful, well-written and heartfelt, in stark contrast to the trolling messages, which were usually made up of little more than four-letter words. Many shared their own stories of harassment and thanked us for our stance.
I think most people see trolls as just trolls. People are going to be jerks sometimes - whether under their real name (facebook / youtube) or anonymously.
Not yet sure how much of this notion stems from the focus on the problem and how much is actual increase, but it's a problem nonetheless. Why do we tolerate as much trolling as we do? Why do we continue to see trolls as just trolls when we have evidence of people being bullied to suicide via the signal-magnification effect of online interaction?
I would doubt that. I think it's an outgrowth of more information created (so the trolls, if you're looking for them, will have more trolling as well).
It's just like how the news is claiming things are always getting worse. They're not. Things are better than ever, we're just getting much better at hearing about the outlier cases of when bad things do happen.
I really worry that if we don't find a way to fix the abuse problem, pseudonymity online will be looked back on by future generations as our time's Klan hood.
Abuse stories like these make me embarrassed to support any form of privacy online. Platforms need to take a stand and find a way reduce hate and abuse, or public opinion (and my own) will turn against support of privacy. If it turns out pseudonymity is fundamentally incompatible with safety of the abused online then I'll take the latter, but I'd rather search for a way to have both.
Platforms banning abusive subcommunities seems like a good start.
What bothers me is that members of the general population have little self-respect and ridiculously low standards of discussions and reasoning. And sadly, this is as much a problem off-line as it is on-line.
Exactly. These communities form because there are people that share the beliefs, for better or worse. And it any online community, a "troll" is someone who goes against the norms.
Censorship is a slippery slope. The fact that you have people, like the OP, stating that if bullying doesn't stop he'll turn "against support of privacy" is downright scary.
This may be one of the most hyperbolic things I've read on HN in a very long time.
A social shift to consider people who don't use their real names online as "creepy" or "with something to hide" may not be as impossible as you want it to be.
"Co-founder and CTO at Whirlscape, makers of the Minuum keyboard http://minuum.com, xavier@whirlscape.com"
I'm not sure that's really "posting anonymously"
The Facebook ad featuring a Sikh artist got a lot of really unpleasant comments from people using their real identities.
I don't think anyone suggests the Youtube comments were any better after real-name policy.
Before online communities, most people interacted in social circles small enough that their identity actually meant something to the other participants.
But on widely circulated/public posts on facebook, the audience is so large, that "John Doe from Indiana" might as well be anonymous.
What I think it is, if I may hypothesize, is merely that there is fundamentally no incentive to NOT be however you want on the internet. 9 times out of 10 nothing you say will be traced back to you, or will reflect on any aspect of your day to day life. I consider the internet a window into the uninhibited mindset of the average person, and that although we may find it distasteful, to censor it would be paramount to burying our heads in the sand about our own nature.
What's worrying is that rather than find avenues to deal with it in reasonable or moderated fashion, the narratives often seem to shift to the most extreme and often dogmatic-seeming angles, more as talking points than measured response.
I do see cases of people behaving hatefully in a way that is connected to their real identity sometimes having consequences in the real world, for instance this case recently in Toronto: http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/firing-of-shawn-simoes-for-o...
Of course that case is controversial, but social consequences are one thing that can help protect against this sort of behaviour (note that this is not really a free speech issue in that he was not put in jail).
So what are social consequences we can levy online, if we want to support psudonymity and stay disconnected from our meatspace identities? One such consequence is having your hateful platform (the FPH subreddit in the Reddit case) closed. I am fine with this approach.
It is a slippery slope when one starts enacting vengeance as a response to speech actions deemed unacceptable, the canonical questions being "who draws the line" and "what happens when the line moves under coercion from malicious entities". I aspire towards, as I said, a more measured approach.
Let me make my view perfectly clear; there is a level of harassment that becomes _material_ and is no longer simply a speech issue, but given your citing of FPH, I don't believe that's what is necessarily being discussed. (I also think that's a difficult instance to discuss, due to the frank level of "politicking" that's been involved in that whole situation, although that (the building of a self serving movement either for or against a social justice issue) is another potentially worrying bit of fallout from a "warlike" mindset and response (for lack of a better word). Aggressive action only polarizes further; and while I agree with your core point that social pressure is key, I think it must be well crafted.)
If you already think there will be no ramifications of friends/people knowing your opinion, then a pseudonym doesn't give you much incremental benefit.
If, however, the potential ramifications are great, a pseudonym does a lot to distance the ramifications from you individually.
The problems run deep. Much older than the internet.
That's an extremely bad analogy. It's reasonable to expect that anyone wearing a Klan hood has inflicted some kind of harm or pain onto others, but it's not at all reasonable to expect that the typical user of a pseudonymous forum has participated in abuse.
I don't feel embarrassed to support free speech when I see it abused.
Your line of thought would have us all registered with the state before we could use the internet - a tragic outcome that some on this planet are already subjected to.
Unfortunately I don't think we'll come up with a simple set of universally applicable rules and move on.
I do know that my abuse-free internet experience is very much a bubble, and every time I have been given the opportunity to see the experience of a "woman with an opinion" online I get to realize this. So let's as a society say "this isn't acceptable" and then deal with the much more difficult question of "what to do about it".
In any other commercial venue if a patron started shouting racist and sexist epithets, we would be ok with the owner throwing them out. We don't get caught up in slippery slope fallacies.
I can't scientifically prove that Fat-people Hate was objectively abusive but that's the beauty of social norms, I can say "I think it's abusive" and put pressure on businesses to remove its platform. Which is what I'm doing :)
- it never works because people just simply fool the censors with twisting words the right way so the censors don't understand it but the smarter readers do. Entire genre was created for this sort of stuff in my country.
- just by trying to censor people you are pushing many different groups to the same platform and they gonna overthrow the ruling class anyways because together they are stronger and they are going to get rid of censorship. Look at the history for some countries with censorship.
On the top of that, how will define what safe means? This is really a double edge sword.
Please watch this video, this sums up pretty nicely my opinion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNJyDyCocGQ
Guys who disagree: I do not care about karma loss because representing a non-popular view on things, but if you take the effort to downvote please have the courage to put a comment in as well.
Sounds like a personal problem.
I don't think we'd like to trivialize online abuse and threats, but comparing it to the klan? Seriously.
With Ms. Pao, she's shrewd in trying to get all the sympathy mileage from the Kleiner case to Reddit. Everyone loves a victim.
EDIT: Thanks pc86
In other words, pseudonymity is, if anything, the one safeguard we have left against the sort of cyberbullying that happens with disturbing regularity. Advocating for its removal for the sake of "online safety" is the textbook definition of "backfire" (and, I'd imagine, would count as tragic irony).
1) No one abuses her online 2) People abuse her, she dismisses it as noise 3) People abuse her, and she reacts and attempts to control it
I think we should be aiming for number 2.
I am not disagreeing with you, just saying you can't expect people not to pick #1 or use #3 to make a buck or two.
I think I get your point, that it is healthy to be able to deal with the world as it is, but that doesn't mean that we have to accept or embrace it as it is.
Maybe that's dreamy-eyed nonsense, but I think when you talk about aims you have to let ideals in, not just stick to what is practical tomorrow.
If you want to spout hate and slurs over the internet, go right ahead, I think people do need to develop thick skin to idiots, but I wouldn't be sad if a few of the small number of people making threats of harm were tracked down and charged appropriately.
That said, my opinion of her is that she is far from the champion that this battle needs. I believe that the most common view of Pao is not too savory, between her husbands ponzi scheme, the details that came out of the KPCB trial and the plethora of other poor decision taken by her, she has made it easy to find faults with her character.
I think that nicely proves her point. Even if you don't care for her decisions, she still shouldn't be treated the way she is.
Trolls don't win if you ignore them -- the shitshow that's been Reddit this past month is almost entirely because Ellen and co. can't/won't stop reacting to short-sighted outcries from Reddit's userbase.
Yishan, Ellen, Alexis, Steve, even Sam, and everyone else involved needs to shut the fuck up (publicly) about Reddit for a few weeks. This whole "airing of grievances" is actually what's killing Reddit, not the trolls.
What I want to see is legal action taken against Yishan for fueling this well beyond its natural life. He had to violate an NDA of some kind with all the extra fuel he's been throwing onto this...
It referred to trolling the way fishermen troll for fish.
It didn't really have anything to do with the "ogre" definition of troll, but that's what it means in most people's minds now.
it bothers me when people say we need to take something off the internet... no really, we dont, it was put there for a reason, no matter how misguided that reason may be. hate speech, no matter how distasteful is still free speech. dont want to see it on reddit, dont look for it! i mean quite frankly, if you are fat and self conscious, going to a "fat haters" forum is probably going to end poorly for you.
as for her statistic about 40% of internet users saying they have been bullied... welcome to the real world lady! run that same quiz in a random highschool and i'd bet its double that percentage... people are mean. why should the internet not reflect real life? art imitates life.
it also bothers me these people saying we need to change hiring practices and other such nonsense. many things self regulate, leave them alone.
For example if there was an ad hominem attack "Fuck you Ellen Pao." The auto moderator would allow the post but would highlight the text red with a small bubble identifying it as ad hominem, users could react appropriately.
Or, maybe you have a long well thought out argument that has a straw man in it. The auto-mod could highlight the straw man to point out that it exists and maybe even format the post to show the point from which the rest of the position is based on that.
Maybe this wouldn't have to be actively presented but just a tool that comments were run through so users could be warned prior to their submissions. Obviously the complications with this would be ridiculous and you could never stop training the algorithm that was processing your text. But the implications of having such a thing seem pretty incredible.
There is a lot of denial about the nature of the intellectual bell curve. The majority of people are not that smart and cannot make thoughtful contributions to most discussions. The majority of people will at least some of the time lose decorum and make vicious personal attacks when they perceive themselves as being threatened or as being wronged. Upvoting and downvoting is an action, and action requires motivation. Thus, unless an audience is especially smart and valuing of rationality, comments are most likely to get upvotes when they provoke an emotional reaction.
To have a high quality discussion board you must have a critical mass of reasonable, smart people. You must avoid letting in the hoi polloi. And you must quickly ban users who make dumb comments or violate decorum.
However, most internet business models are based on advertising. Advertising revenues are based on eyeballs. And a normal stupid person's eyeballs are worth just as much as smart person's eyeballs (perhaps more, the smart person probably has adblock installed).
Thus the central conflict. Business models are based on making it as easy as possible for normal people to get engaged in the platform. But the result of normal people getting engaged will be vicious and unsavory content. Also if it is easy to create account, then it is easy to switch accounts if one account is banned. So it becomes impossible to silence the unsavory users.
I think that ultimately Reddit will end up as sort of the Wikipedia version of a newspaper. All pretense of being free speech or democratic will be dropped in the major subreddits. Rather it will be a media site on a variety of issues that is mostly top-down, and controlled by the actions of entrenched, established users and moderators.
Imo the way forward is not demonizing either social group, but to give each their own forum for expression. The word 'troll' is an extremely slippery slope...
I would presume she's still a millionaire, though I don't have access to her current finances. Of what is she still an executive?
It left me just flabbergasted by how little provoked them, or how they somehow thought their behavior was appropriate or justified.
These scattered but blessedly brief experiences have been so horrible that I have completely given up on it. I wish it were not the case -- Aaron Swartz is one of my heroes - but I am afraid this particular legacy of his has just spoiled.
Part of 'trolling' (in the sense being talked about here) is knowing what to use against the victim for maximum shock value or impact. I don't think Pao was hated because she was a woman or asian. I think that she was hated, and therefore they found an easy way to disparage her by throwing slurs about her gender and race. It's shocking to see such words and that's precisely why people use them.
I don't think that the world would be a better place if it we cloned it as is and scrubbed all negative references for race/gender/other protected characteristic. I think people will be just as nasty. They'll be nasty using different words to strike at different vulnerabilities. The problem isn't "racism" or "sexism", it's people being plain, old-fashioned mean.
But that balancing act is getting harder. The trolls are winning.
The success of the original balancing act was that there wasn't one--it was an open platform, it was a loose federation, and it was decentralized. By creating these massive walled gardens and trying to monetize them, companies like Reddit have suddenly had to take a stand.
Short surprise that they're running into problems that didn't exist before they decided to create these massive platforms. If you democratize access to mass point-to-point communications, guess what? By definition, half of your users are of below average empathy and responsibility.
But to attract more mainstream audiences and bring in the big-budget advertisers, you must hide or remove the ugly.
Gentrification of the Internet.
As the threats became really violent, people ended their messages with “stay safe.”
Threats can be graphic, not violent--if they're violent, they're not threats.
They removed areas where the trolls had self segregated (ex. fatshaming) forcing them back into the rest of the community. They failed to properly ignore the trolls and reacted to them up to the extent of claiming that the resignation of a member of their executive had something to do with their actions.
I predict that the Reddit troll problem is going to get much worse before it gets better.
Further, people are choosing to get angry over the false binary of freedom vs harassment, and choosing to ignore the third option of choosing empathy, tact, or clear and fair discussion over slinging barbs at others.
I'm reading comments along the lines of 'well, it couldn't have been that bad' or 'I don't know enough about the extent of the harassment, but I'm going to comment about semantics or the 100 percent accuracy [as opposed to, say, 90 percent] of her claims anyway!' Your comments are pointless and dance around the actual issue of abuse. You fail to feel any sort of empathy because you yourself are not the victim.
I hear people making fun of the concept of 'microaggression' because they fail to adequately understand its meaning. The point is that it's really easy to throw a one-line insult to someone, but in aggregate it can cause great distress, because the throwaway comments of a thousand people can feel like one very persistent stalker. People dismiss this by saying 'oh it's normal' and recommend they just ignore it. Frankly, the point is that it should not be normal, and some people have difficulty ignoring it.
And I know some will deliberately choose to misconstrue what I'm saying here. No, I'm not saying that we should censor the Internet and ban all controversial discussion. I would just hope that more people become aware that it is a real issue that people face, and that commenters should be aware of their own actions and reevaluate how they choose respond to conflicts.
That's an insane thing to say. I know she's the former CEO but anybody saying this is losing perspective. There are countless communities not on Reddit and they can't be represented by Reddit. I know it's probably a conscious exaggeration but it's getting hard to tell, people take this forum shit so seriously.
Incivility has always been a problem in human society--it's magnified by the internet, because of the lack of consequences.
They are gaining ground everywhere. Winning the argument is more important than being right.
If you don't do any moderation, you get a sewer, and then you get shut down. You can try to exclude only illegal stuff and stand on free speech, but in terms of content you still have a sewer. To be fair, most of the stuff that moves through sewers is not deadly poison, just crap and water. Some people like sewers, so sewer cities continue to be built for people to live in, but most people find them unattractive, so they never take over the world.
To make something more attractive out of all the crap people emit, you need a modicum of moderation, which always comes from other people. Which means it is essentially unfair, capricious, and creates incentives to endless mediocrity and pandering. But even if we accept that rather than going back to the sewers, one man's perfect moderator is the other man's little Hitler. So maybe we should just crowdsource moderation! Brilliant! But "democratic" crowd moderation is essentially a way of diffusing responsibility for censorship. The censorship of whoever happens to brigade your posts (maybe with sockpuppets, or external links) is not any more free, or pleasant, than any other censorship. Meanwhile, upvoting and downvoting takes on a massive life of its own and creates arenas for endless meta-gaming like subcommunities trying to push each other out. This takes over the site. If you manage the site, have fun managing all that effectively, and try not to get sucked in.
If what you want is fairness, all you can do is publish explicit policy (NOT legal ToS) so people know and agree to what they're getting into - then enforce that policy universally to the letter. That will be fair only in the limited sense that everyone agrees to it the same, like the rules of chess. But human-based moderation will never be fair.
Rather, what I am concerned about is the broader conversation which takes place in articles like TFA, by prominent people such as Pao, and by journalists. This broader conversation uses the word "troll" - but who gets to decide which opinions are in that bucket, and therefore not acceptable?
It is easy to say racists are trolls, it's uncontroversial for the most part. But what about, say, gender-critical radical feminists? These are people who challenge certain received beliefs around what gender means, or should mean. They are not hateful, and they are 100% serious about making the world better for women, yet are often accused of transphobia (and worse) for what they believe. They get death threats (from other people who also call themselves feminists) and the rest of it. And it would be so easy to place them in the "troll" category.
But those solutions (a) take effort and (b) implicitly decrease your potential audience because you aren't piggy-backing on some other organization's social networking. So it's understandable why people who get their jollies on upsetting other people would prefer an easier solution for them, like Reddit letting them say whatever they choose to unhindered because "Freedom of speech."
I'm 100% in favor of people who want to talk about topics Reddit has rejected setting up their own competitor. Maybe it will even become as big as Reddit. It's happened before.
The trolls aren't "winning" because "the trolls" aren't an organization. They don't have an ideology that they're pushing, or some end-goal that they're hoping to achieve. They're a byproduct of free speech that we all have to deal with.
But most importantly, they're not even able to be categorized uniformly. What is trolling to one person, may be comedy, satire, or even just _disagreement_ to another.
I'm sure there were many offensive, harassing, and vitriolic comments and directed at her, however they were a result of her incompetent actions and failure to understand the culture that caused the problem, not due to trolls or trolling.
Without any reason, just as a fishing expedition for millions of dollars, she basically publicly labeled a bunch of men as sexist pigs. Talking about trolling, ehh..
Don't visit reddit.
As an analogy, Steam and Battle.net and other gaming platforms have something going for them, maybe by accident: by using one account across lots of games, the risks incurred by cheating are amplified. If you cheat (or harass) in one game, your account can be banned across all games. This means that if you care about your account on one game still existing, you're disincentivized from cheating in other games, even if you don't care about them.
I play League of Legends regularly, and Riot Games has put in huge amounts of work in figuring out a way to discipline abusive players that will actually induce them to reform. They have shown that most people, when branded as abusive, will often reform their behavior immediately - as if they did not realize (or did not internalize) what kind of person they were being. See, for example, http://www.polygon.com/2015/1/6/7500045/riot-games-league-of... . But it's saddening that all of Riot's work in reforming players or banning them if they can't get along with others cannot be used to weed out these toxic players in other games. I love gaming, but, for me, the absolute worst thing about this hobby is how awful everyone is to each other, and I would love to see a systematic solution.
I wish something like Steam's centralized identity existed across online forums. I wish we used one account everywhere, and the use of a widely-connected account was required to sign up to things - but the details of who you are, and how to associate your identity on one site with your identity on another site, is totally masked to everyone. Site owners and users cannot tell that userA on reddit is also userA on, say, some Disqus blog. But your reputation would still be preserved across sites: if you were reported as a spammer or a bully or a cheater on one site, it would be visible to the other sites you were on. And if those sites wanted to ban you based on your common reputation, they could.
This puts a large burden on the identity management platform. They have to handle everyone's privacy and security, deal with accounts being hacked and used for spam or abuse, provide mechanisms for people to prove their behavior has improved and remove black marks from their records, deal with websites that submit false abuse claims, etc. And (hopefully) they have to be resilient to law enforcement trying to use these records to complete expose users on every website. But at least they could do it in one place, instead of every website having to solve all of these problems independently.
It seems to me that good behavior in 'tribal' human society was enforced by having to, well, remain in one's tribe, and having to convince everyone to put up with you if you want to survive. It also seems that being labeled, with numbers, as a 'bully' or a 'cheater' can have a positive effect in reforming people's behavior. We would need a centralized reputation system like what I've described to do this.
This is on the list of "things I would like to build".
[edited for awkward phrasing]
There is. Unfortunately, it's the NSA that operates it.
Also, people who disagree with you == trolls? Nice.
The internet was extremely gentrified when it was populated only by a relatively tiny elite which tended toward prestigious academic affiliations and higher status. Even the old BBS scene, though a little more populist and accessible to people at home with phone lines and home computers, looks pretty genteel and exclusive by modern standards.
The internet sure felt a lot more democratic when issues like DDOS, doxing, spam, child porn distribution (just to name a few) were not that hard to avoid, so measures against them did not feel that urgent. But that atmosphere is directly related to the selective nature of the audience. Things as small as the introduction of AOL users to USENET caused massive upheavals back in the day. The "barbarians" were at the gates.
It's not coincidental that Facebook built traction against Friendster, etc. largely by restricting to people with academic affiliations, Reddit got its start from a userbase that was more "selective," etc. But then the floodgates are gradually opened to the "barbarians" who were very unlikely ever to have patronized USENET, a BBS, or even an early-2000s phpBB.
In reality, that ratchet only moves forward, and the internet population gets more and more like the general population. Pervasive commercialization is actually part of that trend away from gentrification. It's not gated communities, it's Wal-Mart, payday loan joints, low-end casinos and hawkers in the streets. It's not Singapore, it's a developing country. And for better or worse, nobody can do anything about that.
I feel bad for Ellen and have nothing against her, I don't really go on reddit much. I am aware that she was more or less a scapegoat. But still, for some reason, AND even though the second sentence of the article almost saves face, this statement still bothers me. Sure, she got picked on by reddit quite a bit for lack of transparency, and got thrown under the bus by other high-ranking officials at Reddit.
But to come out and make yourself seem like a champion still illustrates her inflated sense of importance - she's a millionaire exec in an interim position who made mistakes, and got called out in an online forum.