What's that, we're not marching smoothly towards the left wing socialist worker's paradise?
Must be trolls.
Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say
131–140 of 439 posts
Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say
#132A troll is anyone with an incompatible worldview. That's why when /r/democrats starts posting in /r/republicans everyone says everyone else is trolling.
Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Go spend some "quality time" on /r/the_donald for a more typical experience. /the_donald has almost 400k subscribers. It is what it is. Do you assume these people are stupid, or do their beliefs and interests (and sense of humour) differ from yours?
>>Do you assume these people are stupid
I dunno... every time Trump fucks up in a big way, the_donald folks genuinely think he is playing "five-dimensional chess" and that he fucked up on purpose as a way to outmaneuver his opponents without them realizing it.
So yes, they are absolutely, definitively stupid. I mean how else do you explain the attribution of superhuman intelligence to someone who is an incredible cretin?
Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say
#134I 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…
Just because you don't have cancer doesn't mean cancer isn't a problem.
Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say
#135I 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…
The author is a prominent woman journalist, so her experience of the internet probably involves more harassment than most people's.
Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
See, this is the problem. Don't blame it on "trolls", analyze where you screwed up and how you could have defended yourself better so you know what to do next time. Then open up shop under a different alias. If you're not vigilant about your own security and safety, no one else will do it for you. Take responsibility for your own actions.
Someone literally came to my house, where I live.
Why was that information available on the internet?
That's the kind of risk you take if you make that kind of information available on the internet. Think of all the possible things someone could do with your address and assume those will be done. That's the type of precaution you should be taking.
Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say
#137The internet is as it always was, the only difference is more people, and more importantly more people without technological prowess and forum/bbs/irc experience, are accessing it and moving increasingly larger chunks of their life to the internet.
As someone who fell in love with the internet when I was young because nobody knew I was young, it constantly surprises me when people put intimate details online and then become outraged that they are targeted or harassed. The internet didn't magically make everyone equal, it made everyone equally anonymous (to at least their fellow users, privacy down the stack notwithstanding)... that's why it was/seemed like an egalitarian paradise. Everyone was equal, including the trolls, because nobody knew who you were. Is it that surprising that once people started telling others who they truly were discrimination, harassment, and invective started showing up again? The internet doesn't magically make social, political, religious, and ideological rifts magically disappear, it just seemed like it did because nobody could associate users with their backgrounds. Now that we know who everyone is, the internet just makes you encounter more of these rifts due to it's global nature.
But when your first experience with the internet is twitter, facebook, or any other social media this lesson is not only dismissed, but outright refuted. The internet is synonymous with identity to those people. They come completely unprepared and completely open, expecting the internet of the 90's. Obviously things are going to go sideways.
In my ever so humble opinion this is the disconnect that is causing a lot of fervor around "trolls" and "harassment". Those that have been battle hardened by the early internet saw how to treat trolls: you ignore them ("don't feed the trolls") because they didn't actually have any ammo. We've given them ammo now, so here are the consequences.
Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say
#138It think the problem is now too many people are on the internet. Back in the 90's, it was a great place to hang out. In the 2000's, you had fun sites with great user commentary like Fark, Digg, Slashdot, and Reddit. Now everybody and their kid has a cellphone with internet access. Your average person is an asshole, so that's reflected online because of how saturated it all is now.
It's just an extension of the Eternal September.
Any community that comes in contact with a larger community that does not respect their customs has problems, but it Usenet, email conventions, Burning Man, victims of imperialism, or a local book club.
We have lots of evidence of this. The unfortunate thing is that I can't come up with examples of anything positive coming about as a result: The smaller community is either destroyed or weakened, and the larger community rarely replicates the strengths of the smaller ones.
We can talk about the strength of diversity, and I'm all for it! But this isn't a melding to create something new, this is tearing apart the "other" and continuing on barely altered.
Humans are poorly built to handle large communities, and we've not really come up with an artificial means to deal with such situations.
Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say
#139No, Internet was always like this (even worse), just there was much less people on it, and expectations were different. Back in the days of USENET there was a lot of quite unpleasant people you'd run into occasionally, but we've seen it as a part of the scene. Like going on a punk concert and someone spills a beer on you or a fight breaks out. It's not nice experience, but it's the part of the show, partially it's what makes it what it is. In my view it's not trolls who are destroying the Internet, but those who are trying to regulate every single aspect of it, instead of teaching people to more self respect and defiance as a way to deal with assholes. And author is right about that one, it will turn all human interaction into a superficial social equivalent of Potemkin villages where we'll be afraid to speak up without 2 pages of legal disclaimers first.
Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's what they're trying to do. But I'm getting really, really, really tired of people conflating the "other side" stuff with the trolling stuff. Look at all the stuff sent to Leslie Jones last summer. Do you honestly think that was meant to be a dialog? Of course not. That was trolling. That was harassment. And that is what people are trying to filter out.
If i say "leslie jones sucks" am I trolling or do I think she actually sucks at her job. If a million people one after another go on leslie jones profile and say "leslie is a horrible actress" is that trolling ? harrassment ? If someone says "Trump sucks" should they be filtered out ? Do I think its a dialogue, heck no. Do I think it should be filtered, double heck no.
No. I am rejecting your reply. Go back and look at what happened to Leslie Jones, then try again. This is not simply "Leslie Jones Sucks".