Banned from Kickstarter for Being a Stalking Victim
rachelmarone.com
Banned from Kickstarter for Being a Stalking Victim
1–10 of 236 posts
Re: Banned from Kickstarter for Being a Stalking Victim
#2Kickstarter, if you care about your reputation, fix this and make sure it never happens again.
Re: Banned from Kickstarter for Being a Stalking Victim
#3I'd like to know what solution those that are critizing Kickstarter offer. After all, banning an IP is close to pointless.
Re: Banned from Kickstarter for Being a Stalking Victim
#4I'd like to know what solution those that are critizing Kickstarter offer. After all, banning an IP is close to pointless.
Banning IPs works well enough even for vastly bigger sites like Wikipedia. Combined with an open proxy checker, it's surprisingly effective.
It's not perfect, but for ANY site of sufficient size with unmoderated user content, this problem eventually has to be dealt with. Threatening to ban the victims is not a solution.
Kickstarter earns 5% from every single successful project: they can afford putting some effort into moderation and protecting their customers.
Re: Banned from Kickstarter for Being a Stalking Victim
#5I imagine there are laws that this cyberstalker is breaking, and surely kickstarter can assist in providing the authorities with the relevant information to kickstart an investigation/tro/arrest?
Re: Banned from Kickstarter for Being a Stalking Victim
#6I'd like to know what solution those that are critizing Kickstarter offer. After all, banning an IP is close to pointless.
In short, you try to make it not worth the cyberstalker's (or troll, spammer, etc.) while. No matter how many protections you put up, if you make your service available to the public, people will be able to register and harass other users. So, firstly you make it harder for them to do this (to a degree). Some methods include:
1. Verified accounts - e.g. a confirmation email.
2. Social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) - obvious caveat being, some people don't have them, or won't want to sign up with them, etc.
Then, you make it harder for the cyberstalker to determine they've been banned. "Hellbanning" is a good example of this - you ban the user, but don't notify them. Everyone else just doesn't see the comment. There are variations, but the idea is to make it harder for the person on the other end of the screen to determine when to switch accounts.
Thirdly, you implement some sort of user control. For example, an "ignore" button - press this, and suddenly that user's comments aren't visible to you any more. Without notifying them, of course. Alternatively, let the project owner hellban/ignore any user from their project.
And then there's the other stuff - community moderation like Reddit and HN, automatic spam filtering, disallowing registrations from throwaway emails like Mailinator, and other stuff like that.
No matter what they implement, "please go away because you're being stalked" is NOT the right choice. There are technical solutions to this kind of thing, and if they're not perfect, they're certainly better than nothing. And at the end of the day, it's not about being perfect, it's about making the person that's sitting on the other end of the screen not want to spend the time to harass you, or post spam, or troll, or whatever else.
Re: Banned from Kickstarter for Being a Stalking Victim
#7I don't think that it is necessarily fair to be extremely critical of Kickstarter. I think that we should consider the viewpoint of the respondent to her, he probably thinks that she in some way caused the stalker to spam her project. I agree 100% that this problem should be fixed - but I don't think that Kickstarter would intentionally ban her account for this situation if they had the full story, and now that it has come to light I hope that apologies are made and this situation is corrected.
Re: Banned from Kickstarter for Being a Stalking Victim
#8This is incredibly dumb on Kickstarter's part. Why not just give project managers the ability to turn off comments if spam is getting out of control? Unless I'm missing something, comments are not an integral part of Kickstarter's function.
Anyway, if comments were turned off, a potential contributor could just reach out via email or some type of private message if they had a concern about the project.
And obviously banning a project and a user for "engaging with a spammer" without any warning is just appalling.
"If there is any chance that Rachel will receive spam from a stalker on her project, she should not create one." This statement is just so stupid. Kickstarter should be responsible for dealing with spam if they want to be taken seriously.
Re: Banned from Kickstarter for Being a Stalking Victim
#9This is exactly the situation Kickstarter should be on top of. Imagine someone was going to make a hugely disruptive project and some BigCo PR firm hires a bunch of astroturfers to post 400 comments about how the project leader is a fraud.
Now we know the astroturfers don't even need to ward off backers, they can just get Kickstarter to shut the project down. Megaupload song vs. UMG sockpuppets anybody?
Re: Banned from Kickstarter for Being a Stalking Victim
#10I don't think that it is necessarily fair to be extremely critical of Kickstarter. I think that we should consider the viewpoint of the respondent to her, he probably thinks that she in some way caused the stalker to spam her project. I agree 100% that this problem should be fixed - but I don't think that Kickstarter would intentionally ban her account for this situation if they had the full story, and now that it ha…
he probably thinks that she in some way caused the stalker to spam her project.
No matter what happened here, this entire concept is horribly, horribly wrong. It's blaming the victim -- saying that it's somehow her fault for "causing" the stalker to do something... as opposed to the stalker's fault, for stalking.