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Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

theatlantic.com

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Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

#71

I'm surprised at the concern over trolling compared to shilling. If someone wants to be an ass whatever, but CTR and similar seems like a much more serious problem to me.

I haven't found sources or people being confirmed as CTR shills after the election was over. If you could provide some I'd appreciate these. I agree shills can be a problem but I haven't found conclusive evidence of their influence.

Sure, he's a compilation post from Reddit.

https://np.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/56u8vz/new_evide...

Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

#73

I don't understand this article at all. I participate in two large professional forums (one for poker, one for development). The professionals are winning the internet there. There are dedicated subforums for trolls and random bs, which are pretty funny sometimes, but serve as an outlet for the garbage. I browse hacker news... It is what it is, I'm happy with it as a content sharing platform. My biggest gripe is the…

You're in the top 1% or 0.1% of filtering for quality, IMO. Go spend some "quality time" on /r/the_donald for a more typical experience.

Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

#74
THEY SEE ME TROLLIN

THEY HATIN

AND HOPING THAT THEY GONE CATCH ME RIDING QWERTY

Look bruh, when we got on this internet, we could be whoever we wanted. It didn't matter what flesh machine was punching on the keyboard, if I said I was a white Nigerian female quantum physicist, it's on you to either accept my identity or challenge it. That's how it was for decades.

Then social media came and incentivized personal identifiers like photos and videos and audio. Once personal identifiers became cheap to transmit, then old world political conflict, racial conflict, gender conflict, and the rest of the identity politics shit show quickly followed in its wake. People refused to challenge self-identification for the sake of being polite and "revolutionary" (Yeah, okay). In fact, they were attacked if they DIDN'T accept a self-identification.

So, here we are, hacking your stupid addiction to identity politics because the reason we ended up on the internet to begin with WAS to get away from that insanity as it chased us across real-life institutions, cultures, and social programs.

Maybe I want to be more than the person I was genetically and socioeconomically destined to be. Maybe I want off of this postmodern circle-jerk where humans are supposed to be ambivalent balls of energy that can be shaped however the powerful desire. The internet was essential in exploring those potentials. You call it trolling, I call it liberation.

EDIT: Downvotes only prove my point.

Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

#75
I used to laugh reading about politics in Abraham Lincoln's time: distribution of news was, at best, iffy and journalists made up stories to suit their political/social viewpoint. Remarkably like today. The Internet is indeed wondrous. Thanks to the trolls, we're back to where we were in 1860 again.

"Fake news isn’t a recent problem in the US — it almost destroyed Abraham Lincoln":

https://qz.com/842816/fake-news-almost-destroyed-abraham-lin...

Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

#76
post #15

Trolls were always winning the internet. From "RTFM" attitudes to anonymous user accounts. It's a troll playground. Don't get me wrong the internet was built to be/can be an incredible tool, but let's not misconstrue this is a new trend. EDIT: I find the issue with the candor on the internet is lack of context 90% of the time.

> From "RTFM" attitudes While agree some internet users are a bit too gung-ho with RTFM, I think it's unfair to lump them with trolls. While veterans can be harsh and unfriendly, the RTFM response is often warranted (though, again, it could be phrased more nicely -- and the default assumption should be that the person seeking help is well-intentioned). Otherwise, many online communities would be completely overrun by…

RTFM are usually jerks acting like jerk and it has nothing to do with seniority or skill. Half of those "harsh" people don't know all that much.

Overworked seniors simply don't respond on forums due to lack of time. Seniors with time and willingness to answer answer how they know. RTFM are doing what they are doing just to stroke their own ego.

Being jerk does not imply skill nor lack of it. It just being jerk.

Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

#77
post #49

If we define "troll" as anyone who posts inflammatory, bad faith, needlessly aggressive, insulting, false, or otherwise unproductive content, then the entire class of authors of the genre of news article decrying trolling and harassment are themselves trolls. >Of course, this is already happening, just out of sight of most of us Why would they consider that to be such a big problem, if it's not bothering those who ar…

I think it's more of a signal to noise problem. We've had that issue before in society (e.g. the Middle Ages), when information flow was not constructive, and therefore not _additive_. The net result was that society moved sideways, not forward. Contrast that with Victorian England, where large parts of society had "manners", which allowed for information to be constructive, and society (technology, etc) could evolve…

Regarding manners, it really depends on what those manners are.

Chinese medieval society was very orderly and mannered; there were clear standards of behavior (at least for the elites). But the manners in question were conservative and did not encourage innovation, so they did not advance rapidly and ended up far behind Europe despite having a head start. The enforced homogeneity of thought and thus destroyed opportunities to advance or get past their own biases. Read about the Imperial exam system for some reference on how this was achieved, and note that Chinese geography has the most fertile regions highly centralized.

In the west we developed this system of manners based on freedom, where we let people do things we think are wrong, as long as they're not hurting us. This permits intellectual diversity, which means that when the mainstream experts have it wrong, at least someone else can come and knock them over with reality. Rationalism, not authority. Objective evidence, not subjective feelings.

My main worry is that the modern mainstream morality seems to be all about intensive efforts to homogenize thought, opinion, and policy as widely as possible, to exalt collective justice over individual rights, and to privilege subjective "lived experience" over objective evidence. Freedom of conscience and freedom of speech seem to be "out" these days and it's gonna create some real unpleasant results. It already is.

---

(Slightly off topic as well:

It's kind of a myth that society didn't move forward through the Middle Ages. While western medieval society remained in the Malthusian trap up until the 1800's, in other ways it did advance continuously over that time.

For example, studies of documents signed reveal that literacy increased continuously from the 1200s all the way until it hit nearly 99% in ~1900.

Similarly, studies of recorded ages reveal that most people didn't know their age in 1200, but more and more people knew it up until the present day. (You can tell this because people who don't know their age tend to round it to end in a 0 or 5, so you can count the over-representation of this in the data, or even by just looking at tombstones).

Something was changing through the whole medieval era.

And there are other markers (e.g. interest rates went down continuously, rationalism advanced, etc etc).)

Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

#78
post #6

What I see is some people dont like foolish words on a screen so they want to clamp down on open discourse to control dialogue because in their opinion its fruitless or mean or whatever they feel. Some silly troll spamming idiotic statements is not nearly the threat that controlling dialogue on the net and deciding what is trolling and what isnt. Socrates would be labeled a troll these days if he was on social media.

My screen is of a fixed size; my days are of a fixed length. If you want to put foolish words on your screen more power to you, but if they're on my screen or taking my time, that impedes me doing whatever I want to do with my screen or my time. That is, the more dialogue that I'm uninterested in that I lack tools to filter, the more my dialogue is being controlled by DoS. That is the fundamental paradox of open disc…

This seems to be borrowing from the 'your right to swing your fist ends at my nose' cliche. So, let's put it in those terms. 'Your right to post a comment on an open internet forum ends when it meets my right to only have things I value on my screen.' Surely most folks can see why that doesn't work at all. Moderation is already ubiquitous, and that is not the same thing at all. That's the forum's owner exercising their right to boot your account and delete your comment. I'd be interested to hear any sensible proposals for dealing with trolls that we don't already have everywhere, i.e. moderation and user-centric filtering tools.

Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

#79

Sigh The Trolls have been with the internet from the start. I would say that actually they are mostly contained (why? because its really fucking difficult to be anonymous. Plus you are more than likely to be prosecuted for whatever you've done) So whats changed? more people are on platforms like twitter, and seem to think that fake internet points are real. The vast majority of "trolling" is pretty low grade "die", "…

On the contrary... these trolls have SWATted, stalked, ddos'd, called, doxxed, and harassed normal people. They've spammed business, social media accounts, email... For some people the impact on their life is very real. I can't use my name publicly on the internet because of trolls. This impacts my life in a huge way.

Well, I can't use my name publicly on the internet either, because I enjoy trolling too much.

Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

#80
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are folks like us working on this: https://www.cipheredtrust.com/ The trick is a scalable means to do identity verification on the internet...basically a way to do it that preserves user privacy and security and it is dirt cheap so everyone can leverage it.

I'm curious about something... I've seen reports that when places started using Facebook comments, they found that the lack of anonymity didn't prevent trolling, in fact, it made everyday people more hostile. Is it just about identity? Would that do anything more than just removing the occasional death threat, instead of actually addressing the more pervasive trolling?

I consider myself mostly reasonable.

I might disagree wildly with you in a number of cases but I try to be reasonable in how I argue my points.

I stay away from pages that use Facebook comments because I don't want to be part of the problem with fake profiles and I don't want everyone to be able to trace everything I ever said back to me.

Not because I intend to say something unreasonable. Not because I fear law enforcement but because I will apply for jobs in the future. And I might want to visit arab countries in the future. Or Israel, who knows?

I think this is a reasonable position. I expect and respect if you do the same - even if I disagree wildly with your opinions I don't want you to get in trouble for them bext time you fly into a country were your ideas aren't so correct.

Or next time a president goes rogue like Erdogan.

I think full name policies scare away lots of reasonable people.

The ones who stay either don't think that far, or don't care or use a fake Facebook profile. I guess none of these attributes correlate well with insightful and polite.

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