Play nice - How the internet is trying to design out toxic behaviour

Yes, I do.

Software could have been, and always can be, improved at the "regex level" (finding bad worse, slanderous words, etc.) but the money is now in catering an experience to where things one simply disagrees with can create a false positive as "toxic behavior." And it often does.

The dialogue has completely regressed, and will continue to do so as long as catering to as wide an audience as possible is the Modus Operandi of Internet 2.x

And it's quite simplistic to write off the past as "closing ones eyes and ignoring." At the very least, IRC channels had moderators.

Unicorns and rainbows, every reference is to a woman, how girls are suppressed, bad behaviour is like "football" fans. They even slipped in a misogyny! Feminist bingo!

It fascinates me. We condemn the KKK for treating groups of people differently. Yet, when feminism (referred in the article) makes sexist and false statements, it's lorded by the media. For example, in Australia, domestic violence was a "man" thing. When a mother killed her daughter/son is was never domestic violence. "Men" need to be educated. However, when you have a group (feminism, KKK) that prioritise one group over another, you get these propaganda campaigns that tend to spread worldwide. They encourage intolerance and demonise others.

Now, a fundamental problem with this article's proposal Is that you can be as intolerant as you like as long as you don't say curse words (unicorns and rainbows) and threaten to hit/kill someone. The truth is that far more damage has been done by far more subtle propaganda campaigns, especially in the last 5 years. Not one of them would be stopped by this proposal.

Facebook dealt with this by requiring "real names". Except from some whining from drag queens, this has worked well.

Wikipedia has an ongoing struggle with this, but because everything on Wikipedia can be undone, users have reputations, and the asshole fraction isn't that large, Wikipedia continues to work.

Any system where fake identities can be created in bulk at low cost suffers badly from this problem. Email, especially. Interestingly, if you have conversations, and not much happens based on single messages, it's less of a problem. Twitter and IRC are examples.

Second problem: once the bulk junk identity problem is under control, how do you get people to behave reasonably well? Wikipedia does this surprisingly well, with a complex set of rules and an explicit requirement of civility. (Many new editors complain that it's hard to edit Wikipedia, but that's because they treat it like a blog. Think of it more like checking out something from Github and submitting a pull request.)

Newspaper comment sections do this badly. Karma-based systems such as the one here and on Slashdot do it reasonably well. Fancier karma systems are possible; Civil Comments seems to be using something like the ELO algorithm. It takes a lot of user time to crowdsource such rankings, and that's a scarce resource. Not many people want to do Mechanical Turk work for free.

[1] https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19

If you're a lying, abusive, or manipulative woman on Twitter you'll get drowned in "harassment" (a redefining of the word "disagreement") . Then you can turn around and pretend to be the victim because of your gender and/or sexual identity and useful idiots will lap it up and defend you. Regardless if you're a known pedophile, a spouse beater, a harasser from the Something Awful forums, or known scam-artist.

Are you aware of the abuse Randi is known for in the FreeBSD community? She's the last person who should be speaking about dealing with it while she dishes it out herself left and right.

As far as Twitter goes, men receive abuse twice as often as women [0]. At the moment, if you're a prominent man on Twitter and you offend the wrong people you'll get drowned in toxic behavior and risk losing your job over hurting someone's fee-fees.

[0] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2733071/Men-twice-ab...