"People like bullies." -- Daniel Kahneman
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/06/05/british-voter...
The vanishing civility: The game of jerks, bozos and assholes
31–40 of 204 posts
Re: The vanishing civility: The game of jerks, bozos and assholes
#32A little meta-civility goes a long way, too. If one is inclined to call people jerks, bozos and assholes, perhaps one is not understanding people very well. It’s much more effective to work learn about people, their predilections, biases and experiences. No one is a “checkbox” asshole. Much better to focus on specific behaviors, instead of writing off a person as a type. When I see a company describe its “no assholes…
IMHO, most people who misbehave online are decent people that get carried away in the emotion of the moment. If the community calls them upon it and force them to own up they comments, they will probably appologize. This requires explict rules and bounderies, as well as the community being able to disengage the minute the infractor does not show any signs of remorse.
On the other hand most online misbehavior comes from a minority of repeat infractors. I am willing to believe that the majority of those are not checkbox assholes, but inmature individuals that do not know any better. However, I do not think trying to understand them and accomodate them do any good to either the community of the asshole-to-be. The best online communities I have been part of do have a sort of virtual sign at the entrance saying: "Your manners have to be this tall in for you to ride this game."
If you fail to meet the requirements, your posts are erased (or never put thru in the first place). In an ideal world, a moderator may contact you and invite you to express your point with a minimum of decency. If this cannot be achived by personal message, a broadcast announcing an otherwise worthwhile post have been deleted due to open disregard for civility rules can be an acceptable compromise.
Finally, there is such thing as a "checkbox asshole", and nothing you do will make them change, because they trive on negative emotions they trigger. You just dont feed the trolls, keep hellbanning them over and over, and hope they get tired and go trolling elsewhere.
Re: The vanishing civility: The game of jerks, bozos and assholes
#33When I was the editor of Dr. Dobb's, we were very concerned about how to create a lively discussion forum that was free from jerks and unpleasant people. Ultimately, we settled on two components: treat everyone respectfully even those who seemed to be trolling, and delete all insulting posts. This largely worked. Similar elements seem to work here on HN too. That the efficacy of this approach is repeatable suggests t…
That the efficacy of this approach is repeatable suggests that the problem exists primarily b/c sites are willing to put up with bad behavior. Many people, even people running discussion forums with years of experience, simply do not know how to fix it and often believe it cannot be fixed. It is also common for them to "put out the fire with gasoline." On an email list, I used to say "fighting against the fighting is…
>> Many people do not know how to address bad behavior that doesn't involve some form of fighting, punishment, etc and this tends to deepen the problem rather than resolve it.
While I would agree with this, I would add that banning and punishing people only makes them try harder to continue to be the thorn in your side and make every else just that much more miserable.
Multiple accounts, using proxies, and other means to cloak your IP address then leads to spending untold hours trying to track this people down and block them instead of actually doing moderation and even site improvements.
It's a zero sum game in the end.
source: ran several BBS's in the late 90's early aughts.
Re: The vanishing civility: The game of jerks, bozos and assholes
#34"Vanishing" implies that there was some Golden Age of civility that has now gone by. This is not really true. I would argue that this impression comes from the fact that media options were much more limited in the recent past, and therefore had to appeal to and not offend a wider range of audiences than current sources. Watching TV programs from the 50s/60s, for example, they do seem quite polite and civil. Now thoug…
In other words, curation. For every readers letter that reached the opinion pages, 100s or perhaps even 1000s ended up in the bin at the hands of the editor.
What seems to have happened is a mentality change. Rather than seeing ads as a funding source for journalism, journalism (or a watered down variant) has become the means of pushing ads in peoples faces.
Re: The vanishing civility: The game of jerks, bozos and assholes
#35Actually I see the present problem as exactly the opposite. More and more we live in a culture where people think it's their right to feel offended and for anyone saying anything that makes them fell that way to just be shut up by someone (some faculty department for instance). It is becoming basically a Politically Correct culture of censorship and we keep seeing opinion texts (just like this one) that appeal to tha…
> More and more we live in a culture where people think it's their right to feel offended for anyone saying anything that makes them fell that way to just be shut up by someone (some faculty department for instance).
Um, it is someone's right to feel offended, you can't control how anyone else feels. Now others can determine whether someone taking offense at something is reasonable in the situation, but people have the right to feel whatever they feel.
Now sometimes it becomes problematic when people who feel offended attempt to shut down discourse, that much is true.
> It is becoming basically a Politically Correct culture of censorship and we keep seeing opinion texts (just like this one) that appeal to that censorship like if it was a good thing. I don't see it as more and more people becoming jerks, I see it as more and more people becoming thin skinned.
Or maybe there are whole groups of people who had to accept unkind behavior in the past in silence, who now are demanding better treatment. Women in the workplace have had to (and still do) put up with all manner of misogynist nonsense and more women and men are saying this is no longer acceptable. To that, some will complain that things are becoming too 'PC' but the fact is that poor behavior that was tolerated in the past is no longer tolerated.
Same deal with race. A few decades ago it was ok to refer to a grown black man as, "boy" in any context. It was okay to disparage other races openly at home, at work, in public, now it largely isn't. Some will cry 'Censorship!' or whatever but the fact is that social norms of decency are relegating those attitudes to history. The people complaining are the ones who refuse to accept that those attitudes belong in the past.
Re: The vanishing civility: The game of jerks, bozos and assholes
#36When I was the editor of Dr. Dobb's, we were very concerned about how to create a lively discussion forum that was free from jerks and unpleasant people. Ultimately, we settled on two components: treat everyone respectfully even those who seemed to be trolling, and delete all insulting posts. This largely worked. Similar elements seem to work here on HN too. That the efficacy of this approach is repeatable suggests t…
I suspect the answer is something along the lines of:
The subject matter and associated demographics of some sites is such that, with appropriate moderation systems and commitment to consistently dealing with bad (or at least the worst) behavior, discussion forums can maintain a reasonable signal to noise ratio. The worst offenders usually get bored and go away after being banned enough times.
But a site that deals primarily with political topics? Even on HN, the level of discourse is far lower than with more fact-based technical topics. And even politically-oriented blogs and sites that I consider to have somewhat readable comments, are far more "raucous" than would be tolerated here.
And as for comments on controversial topics on truly mainstream sites like your local newspaper? That's pretty much a lost cause. There's so little signal to start with.
Re: The vanishing civility: The game of jerks, bozos and assholes
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
That the efficacy of this approach is repeatable suggests that the problem exists primarily b/c sites are willing to put up with bad behavior. Many people, even people running discussion forums with years of experience, simply do not know how to fix it and often believe it cannot be fixed. It is also common for them to "put out the fire with gasoline." On an email list, I used to say "fighting against the fighting is…
>> Many people do not know how to address bad behavior that doesn't involve some form of fighting, punishment, etc and this tends to deepen the problem rather than resolve it. While I would agree with this, I would add that banning and punishing people only makes them try harder to continue to be the thorn in your side and make every else just that much more miserable. Multiple accounts, using proxies, and other mean…
Yes. Technical tools can be useful, but technical solutions do not solve social problems. Social problems require social solutions, something technically oriented people who run online communities sometimes seem to just not get.
Thank you for adding that info.
Re: The vanishing civility: The game of jerks, bozos and assholes
#38Actually I see the present problem as exactly the opposite. More and more we live in a culture where people think it's their right to feel offended and for anyone saying anything that makes them fell that way to just be shut up by someone (some faculty department for instance). It is becoming basically a Politically Correct culture of censorship and we keep seeing opinion texts (just like this one) that appeal to tha…
Yeah, same thought while reading this. I come from a generation where bagging your friends was common and played a large role in building character. Now if you honk at somebody to prevent an accident, you're flipped the bird. Even mild constructive criticism comes across as a massive assault against one's pride.
Re: The vanishing civility: The game of jerks, bozos and assholes
#39Straight to the point. My colleague clearly and succinctly explained why an inappropriate behavior occurred and what motivated him to respond. If this happens visibly to the team it is likely that the person behind the behavior will take this as an attack, especially if he/she is a true asshole. Not good for long-term working climate. Also, it has a flavor of "white-knighting" oneself if it's done in front of the tea…
Note that as a general adage, this is "praise in public and criticize in private" (which doesn't just go for managers/higher ups).
But it's not bullet-proof. When the criticism is private, there is no signal to the rest of the group that the behavior in question is not appropriate. The person being criticized certainly isn't going to say anything. This can lead to the situation where the behavior by one person is stopped, but as a whole it continues due to the fact that there is no social signal to the rest of the group to stop.
So, as with many things, there is no clear cut approach that works all of the time. Knowing when to signal something publicly or privately is a skill like any other.
Re: The vanishing civility: The game of jerks, bozos and assholes
#40Actually I see the present problem as exactly the opposite. More and more we live in a culture where people think it's their right to feel offended and for anyone saying anything that makes them fell that way to just be shut up by someone (some faculty department for instance). It is becoming basically a Politically Correct culture of censorship and we keep seeing opinion texts (just like this one) that appeal to tha…
In my experience, by far the worst thing about political correctness as a cultural force has been anti-PC backlash over the last 20 years. In my lifetime, that's been a far more destructive force than even the most cartoonish forms of PC overreach that people like to cite. Since the mid-'90s we have lived in a world where assholes have been given a blank check to be as dumb and toxic as they want- all they have to do is preface it with, "Now, it might not be politically correct to say this, but..." They also have a blank check after the fact because they can blow off any fallout from some dumb, toxic thing that they said with excuses like, "I'm too busy to be politically correct all the time".
I have literally never in my life been affected by political correctness, and I would guess that the reality is that hardly anyone else has been either (especially the people that complain the longest and loudest about it). But I would argue that the most toxic elements of American culture and American politics nowadays come from people who feel empowered to be assholes, because they can blow off any criticism by claiming that their assholishness is just a lack of political correctness rather than plain old asshole behavior.
Put another way, I remember several decades before political correctness existed as a concept that people were generally aware of. I think it has enabled a spike in asshole behavior that hasn't been good for anyone involved. Some of those assholes are stereotypical overly PC people doing stereotypically overly PC things, but in my opinion something like 99% of those assholes (that we wouldn't have, were it not for the PC movement) are the vocally anti-PC people who think they can and should embrace the most toxic versions of themselves because to do anything else would be to give in to the PC people that they imagine are lurking around every corner. It has enabled them to be the worst they can be, and to double down on it by lionizing the worst assholes they can find, all in the name of being anti-PC.