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If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault (2011)

anildash.com

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Re: If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault (2011)

#51

Post by JasonFruit »

dahart wrote: post #18
knolax wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah no, when's the last time you've actually seen the rules enforced?

All the time. I see dang smoothing things out like almost daily. You can also turn on “showdead” in your profile options, and maybe you’ll become more aware of it.

I keep showdead on all the time, because sometimes I see insightful, thoughtful answers that are dead for no reason intrinsic to the comment. Then I can vouch for them, and I hope they become visible to others — though the workings of that system are opaque to me.

I get annoyed reading the same smarmy-sounding "Please don't post unsubstantive comments" replies from dang all the time — but it's what makes this site work, when so many others don't.

Re: If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault (2011)

#52

Post by zzo38computer »

braythwayt wrote: post #34
malvosenior wrote: post #16

I feel like Anil Dash is pretty much the last person who should be talking about internet “assholes”. He’s very often on the front lines of Twitter mobs and is generally extremely caustic. He should reflect on his own behavior online before preaching to anyone else.

This is a fairly classic ad hominem comment. What difference does it make who makes this argument, if the argument itself is sound? On the other hand, if the man is 50% saint, 50% angel, and 50% genius, what difference would that make, if the argument itself was terrible? Comments suggesting that he shouldn't make this argument do not actually address the argument itself. In the best case, they are a distraction from…

I agree with you that it does not matter who makes this argument (even though I do not entirely agree with the argument being made, but that has nothing to do with who makes such argument).

(Even if someone write a computer program or book or movie or whatever but they are murderer and whatever, if the program/book/movie is good then it is good, anyways. And if it is no good, then it is no good, anyways.)

Re: If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault (2011)

#53

Post by codinghorror »

uniformlyrandom wrote: post #5

Well, duh. The problem is applying these policies - because blindly applying policies usually leads to mixed results (innocents banned, trolls using a loophole in policy and proliferating). But to quote the author - > we have a way to prevent gangs of humans from acting like savage packs of animals. In fact, we’ve developed entire disciplines based around this goal over thousands of years. We 'just' need to introduce…

Did you see this: a random jury of your online peers https://www.minds.com/minds/blog/power-to-the-people-the-min...

I support this kind of stuff in theory but it is incredibly difficult to get to scenarios where this actually happens. You need to be massive scale for it to occur with any regularity.

Re: If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault (2011)

#54

Post by gtirloni »

goldcd wrote: post #38
goldcd wrote: post #25

I think it depends on the website you're wanting to run.. I was part of a now-dead "threaded message board", which had a somewhat cliquey view of what should/shouldn't be posted. In the evening when the moderators were away, the discussion became more interesting as it strayed off-topic. Eventually the community wanted 'to fork' so I decided to build something myself. I'm not IT trained, so first version was PL/SQL o…

I now realize, I didn't add a conclusion. My little site is 'local' - I don't have to deal with the world turning up. I don't need admins, I don't need a TOS, I don't need arbitration systems etc etc. There's a good community of people who just get along. Rough edges were knocked off a long time ago. We're a little niche ignored by the world - and we like it that way. Issues with 'toxic' influx come when you're tryin…

If you don't mind the question, what's the niche?

Re: If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault (2011)

#55

Post by lifeisstillgood »

>>> Advertisers, hold sites accountable if your advertising appears next to this hateful stuff.

This.

One thing that could be very effective is screenshotting genuine brand ad next to vile screed.

How long would it take for a 'bot to look like a white sheet wearing moron to YouTube, and then a little bit of sentiment analysis and you could automate this. Just publish the "daily worst brand fuck" on FB or YouTube.

(Alongside the "monitor tweet feed of politicians for death threats and pass to the cops" idea I have when I get the time I am really honestly going to ...)

Re: If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault (2011)

#56

Post by goldcd »

barbecue_sauce wrote: post #41
goldcd wrote: post #25

I think it depends on the website you're wanting to run.. I was part of a now-dead "threaded message board", which had a somewhat cliquey view of what should/shouldn't be posted. In the evening when the moderators were away, the discussion became more interesting as it strayed off-topic. Eventually the community wanted 'to fork' so I decided to build something myself. I'm not IT trained, so first version was PL/SQL o…

You're not IT trained but you knew Oracle PL/SQL? Edit: I know it's gauche to complain about downvotes, so I'll explain my question further. I find his situation extremely interesting as I associate Oracle with the "IT-iest" of "IT" things.

Sortof...

Always loved computers, but unlike maybe most people here, for what I could do with them (not the beauty of their logic blah).

Did a Masters in Bioinformatics, that came with a few Oracle lectures... and then as this was in 2000 was enough to get a job.. and well I was given some problems and there was a shelf of books. shrugs

Re: If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault (2011)

#57

Post by goldcd »

gtirloni wrote: post #54
goldcd wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I now realize, I didn't add a conclusion. My little site is 'local' - I don't have to deal with the world turning up. I don't need admins, I don't need a TOS, I don't need arbitration systems etc etc. There's a good community of people who just get along. Rough edges were knocked off a long time ago. We're a little niche ignored by the world - and we like it that way. Issues with 'toxic' influx come when you're tryin…

If you don't mind the question, what's the niche?

The original site was - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popbitch (scurrilous media gossip from within the machine)

Mine? - Mainly what people have eaten for lunch...

..but if I had to come up with a proper answer it's that it's connected a pretty disparate bunch of people who once had a random common interest, over what happened to them in the next decade or so.

A shared diary?

Re: If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault (2011)

#58

Post by makomk »

ve55 wrote: post #10

This post is more reasonable for smaller curated communities, but as we can see from, well, every large social website that exists currently, it can be difficult to scale. I'm curious what the other thinks the solution would be to an obvious example like Twitter. When a website consists of so many groups of users that everyone's definition of 'assholes' contradicts the others, you find that banning them gets to be pr…

There is a belief, shared by many of the folks who make arguments like this, that there is some obvious definition of "assholes" shared by every decent person, and that anyone who claims not to be able to see it is actively siding with the assholes. I'm pretty sure most of them don't actually have the same definition, but somehow they never realise this.

You can see a hint of this in the final paragraph of this blog post: "Because if your website is full of assholes, it’s your fault. And if you have the power to fix it and don’t do something about it, you’re one of them." Either you purge the people he thinks are assholes, or you're one of the assholes who needs to be purged.

Re: If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault (2011)

#59

Post by uniformlyrandom »

codinghorror wrote: post #53
uniformlyrandom wrote: post #5

Well, duh. The problem is applying these policies - because blindly applying policies usually leads to mixed results (innocents banned, trolls using a loophole in policy and proliferating). But to quote the author - > we have a way to prevent gangs of humans from acting like savage packs of animals. In fact, we’ve developed entire disciplines based around this goal over thousands of years. We 'just' need to introduce…

Did you see this: a random jury of your online peers https://www.minds.com/minds/blog/power-to-the-people-the-min... I support this kind of stuff in theory but it is incredibly difficult to get to scenarios where this actually happens. You need to be massive scale for it to occur with any regularity.

Yes, - and a lot of online communities on the internet has reached that scale. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit...

In case of reddit, the problem is even more interesting. There are subreddits, so it is naturally segregated, and moderators and community are local. The communities can use downvotes to 'stone' an offender, and local elected moderators can enforce a ban. In case moderator or community mishandles the process, 'federal' admins can intervene. So we are pretty much at medieval level of justice there (much better than whatever constitutional dictatorship facebook and twitter have).

Re: If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault (2011)

#60

Post by dahart »

JasonFruit wrote: post #51
dahart wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the time. I see dang smoothing things out like almost daily. You can also turn on “showdead” in your profile options, and maybe you’ll become more aware of it.

I keep showdead on all the time, because sometimes I see insightful, thoughtful answers that are dead for no reason intrinsic to the comment. Then I can vouch for them, and I hope they become visible to others — though the workings of that system are opaque to me. I get annoyed reading the same smarmy-sounding "Please don't post unsubstantive comments" replies from dang all the time — but it's what makes this site wo…

Those two things are related. The warning messages are what happens before the account gets shadow-banned. Sometimes you can walk back in a dead commenter’s history to see what caused the problem and it’s obvious. Sometimes it’s not apparent because it can happen for multiple reasons.

Personally, I’d rather have the constant out-of-bounds reminders than not. I’ve never seen one of those warning messages on a comment that didn’t deserve it, I’ll take the ‘please play nice’ requests all day if it quells ugly flame bait, and that’s exactly what it seems to do. He’s giving people both notification that it’s out of bounds and advance warning that there could be consequences. Much worse is out there and easy to find. Do you have examples that are much better, on a comparably sized forum?

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