This has happened before and will happen again. The first internet-based 'televised' event I know of is the 'ripper' event on IRC channel #shroomery. Logs are stilla vailable online, one instance at http://b00mb0x.org/blog/pic/chattrans.html
19 year old from Florida commits suicide on Justin.tv
101–110 of 197 posts
Re: 19 year old from Florida commits suicide on Justin.tv
#102Pills? If you're going to live broadcast your own death, make it more interesting than watching paint dry. Sheesh.
TicketStumbler founders - Get a life.
Re: 19 year old from Florida commits suicide on Justin.tv
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
In a word: anonymity.
Reddit recently had a discussion about this. Here is the top rated comment in the thread. Sysiphuslove: "I don't think it's so much the anonymity of the poster as the anonymity of the victim. There's obviously a 'real person' on the other end of the conversation, but there's no face, no voice...a victim online is stripped of his humanity just enough to salve the conscience, but not enough to make an unsatisfying targ…
In this case if anonymity is to blame then it has to be anonymity of the poster - the victim was live on webcam.
Re: 19 year old from Florida commits suicide on Justin.tv
#104Wow, check this out: http://dl-client.getdropbox.com/u/315/random_pics/bad_move_m... ... The image shows two messages on the bodybuilder.com forums.
"A poster has said he was going to OD on JTV in the link here: http://www.justin.tv/feels_like_ecstacy. It seems like he is not breathing by the looks of the stream. Please track his IP and alert someone."
And in response, a bodybuilder.com forum moderator said:
"he's an attention whore, you should see all the threads he starts, then deletes"
This might've all turned out differently had the moderators acted on the information available. I'm not saying that it should be illegal for the moderators to not care, just that I personally would have at least looked at the information the poster provided before dismissing it as "just another attempt at attention whoring".
If you wanted to get to know the kid a little bit, or if you wanted to know the mentality of someone on the brink of suicide, here's a link to Bigg's blog: http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.ListAll...
Re: 19 year old from Florida commits suicide on Justin.tv
#105Question: how do I downvote people.
You need a certain (small) amount of karma before you can downvote people. At that point, you'll see a downarrow below each comment uparrow.
That was done to prevent people from creating new accounts for the purpose of repeatedly downvoting someone.
Re: 19 year old from Florida commits suicide on Justin.tv
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seriously people? I didn't expect this to be taken well by most here (in fact it was an experiment to see if there was a limit to down-voting), but some of you seem to be on a war path now. It doesn't really matter what the Justin.tv CEO said. He pasted some boiler plate because there's nothing more to be said; the deed had been done. What do you want? An apology for not finding the video? For not policing the Intern…
An interesting, but rather unanticipated (I expect), side effect of your experiment is that even when you post something that's not too contentious, you're getting voted down to oblivion. That shows there are plenty of HN users who do not understand HN policy. PG himself has said don't to crazy levels (such as under -10) unless it's obviously spam or the like..
If he intends to experiment with the downvote threshold as he states, I certainly won't stand in his way.
Re: 19 year old from Florida commits suicide on Justin.tv
#107Question: how do I downvote people.
You need to reach a certain "Karma" threshold. (I believe it is something in the range of 50-100)
Re: 19 year old from Florida commits suicide on Justin.tv
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seriously people? I didn't expect this to be taken well by most here (in fact it was an experiment to see if there was a limit to down-voting), but some of you seem to be on a war path now. It doesn't really matter what the Justin.tv CEO said. He pasted some boiler plate because there's nothing more to be said; the deed had been done. What do you want? An apology for not finding the video? For not policing the Intern…
how does this have anything to do with what you posted? your comment was insensitive, regardless of what justin.tv executives did or didn't do.
So?
Re: 19 year old from Florida commits suicide on Justin.tv
#109I'm holding back tears. We must find a way to make the internet a nicer place. Such astonishing cruelty breeds here. Why?
Can't be done. What we need to do (and should have before the internet) is have a better support system for people with mental health issues. Once you're broadcasting the fact that you're thinking about suicide on the net, it's only a matter of time. It's a shame that people seem to have spurred him on, but there's a really high chance people in his life saw something coming (or would have if they knew what to look for) and didn't act, and that even if he hadn't done it yesterday, he'd do it at some point in the future.
Re: 19 year old from Florida commits suicide on Justin.tv
#110Protip: This is not Justin.TV's fault. This is no ones fault but the adult's (he was over 18). It really is that simple - though you wouldn't know it from the media. America: where self-entitlement lives on and accountability goes to die.
This seems like the last Seinfeld episode, where they were arrested under a Good Samaritan law for observing a crime but doing nothing to help the victim. If the account in this article is accurate, there were people watching the video feed for "hours" after he took the pills before calling the police. He might be alive if someone called earlier. A similar thing happened in the Joel on Software Offtopic forum. Idiosy…
If you call the cops every time someone on the net says they're going to do something harmful to themselves or another, law enforcement would never get anything useful done.
While I can't imagine egging someone on in that case, it's not our collective responsibility to prevent strangers from harming themselves.