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Trouble at the Koolaid Point

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Re: Trouble at the Koolaid Point

#91

Post by fleitz »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #82
fleitz wrote: post #59

This was really eye opening for me, I had no idea weev was involved in such things, I always thought of him as the guy who hacked iPads.

Which is really frustrating, because Weev has been openly bragging about ruining Sierra's life for years. But every time it comes up, everyone seems to go "Weev is a hero! LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU SAYING BAD THINGS ABOUT THE HERO." And then everyone goes on talking about whatever he's in the news for now and never ever talks about the trolling. So nobody knows about it.

Yes, my opinion is definitely not one of a hero, even the iPad thing was unprofessional, I mostly don't think he needed to go to jail for it, however, maybe that's karma, he went to jail for something he shouldn't have because he didn't go to jail for something he perhaps should have.

It's so strange that he did this before the iPad incident, and it's not mentioned at all. Did no one Google him?

Re: Trouble at the Koolaid Point

#93

Post by taliesinb »

freshflowers wrote: post #24
jmduke wrote: post #3

This is an excellent, brave thing to write and I originally had a long comment highlighting a bunch of particularly poignant paragraphs that I deleted because really you should just read the entire thing. Neither I nor the vast majority of the people I know have ever been subject to online harassment and it makes me thankful that there are incredible people like Kathy out there. Lord knows I wouldn't have the courage…

Now that you mention Reddit, I've abandoned it because that cesspool is overflowing. It's no longer just the obscure subs, misogynist thrash from mainstream subs is hitting the front page on a daily basis.

Me too. You end up feeling ambushed, because you'll be reading a bunch of witty, smart, and/or playful comments on some Reddit post, thinking "I don't know these people but they're fun", and then you randomly encounter some unchallenged misogyny or racism in the midst of it with plenty of upvotes. Can these people really exist? Do I want to even be reading something that people who repulse me are also reading?

If you stick to subreddits thing are much better. For example, I lurk on r/rust a lot, and like other high-quality subreddits they have a stickied code of conduct to establish the ground rules. And the community there is extremely friendly and encouraging.

Re: Trouble at the Koolaid Point

#94

Post by makomk »

jmduke wrote: post #3

This is an excellent, brave thing to write and I originally had a long comment highlighting a bunch of particularly poignant paragraphs that I deleted because really you should just read the entire thing. Neither I nor the vast majority of the people I know have ever been subject to online harassment and it makes me thankful that there are incredible people like Kathy out there. Lord knows I wouldn't have the courage…

From what I've seen, incredibly stringent moderation creates the illusion of a high-quality community more than anything else. For example, a while ago Something Awful forum member's boyfriend posted something claiming that she'd been raped by another forum member, and the admin at the time decided to handle it by permanently banning everyone involved including the alleged victim. You wouldn't have seen any criticism of this on the forums at the time because doing so was a bannable offence; I'm not sure most people who used the forums even knew it happened. There were rumours that some of the moderators were blackmailing women on the forums for nude pics earlier on, but again they didn't make it onto the forums themselves.

Re: Trouble at the Koolaid Point

#95

Post by leoc »

jmduke wrote: post #8
verroq wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>willingly allows to exist subreddits devoted towards domestic abuse and snuff Serious question: why does this even bother you?

That's a completely valid question, and the answer isn't something concrete. I think on one hand it's just overall indicative of the site's priorities (and again, I completely acknowledge that it's those same priorities which also helped foster the subreddits that I love) -- on the other hand, I think it's just the sense of heebie-jeebies, like being a pro bono lawyer for the mob or something -- as though my presence…

An important part of the question here is are the subquestions of what should be regarded as a "common carrier"-like thing (a category which probably includes email traffic and public Internet traffic at the TCP/UDP level), and what should be tolerated on those services, and what should be regarded as not similar to a "common carrier" (which clearly includes, say, the official Wikipedia version of a Wikipedia page or the non-advertising content of an issue of the New York Times), and what should be tolerated in those venues. Part of the problem of Reddit is that it blurs the lines between the two categories and sends vague or contradictory messages about which side of the line it's on. Things that make Reddit look more like a single publisher or "community" include:

* the single /r/whatever namespace, which was meant to be used as the marker for the canonical or default reddit on a particular topic (and is still used by users for that purpose, whatever disclaimers Reddit may want to hide behind now)

* the partly-shared moderation across subreddits

* talk about "the Reddit community" and "Redditors" (wait, it's not a community but rather "a community of communities"? http://www.redditblog.com/2014/09/every-man-is-responsible-f... ? Excuse me while I pick myself up off the floor), the Snoo branding and individual subreddits' customisation thereof, the promotion of shared Reddit meetups http://www.redditblog.com/2014/05/global-reddit-meetup-day-i... , and in general the consistent effort to promote a common identity for "Reddit" and "Redditors"

* other technical features like Reddit gold which likewise encourage the perception of Reddit as a single platform

The just-a-platform argument is hard one for any message board or single-host/owner, single-login cluster of message-boards to sustain. Reddit's even more poorly placed to sustain it than others. Twitter, for example, is much better placed to do so, even though it's a single-owner/host, single-login publishing system.

Re: Trouble at the Koolaid Point

#96

Post by antirez »

She really understands social networks trolling and how it works in details, very good article. It is something like inescapable in the internet, and this is very sad. I ran an italian social network site for many years and this was our main problem. If you read Twitter, this is huge. Moreover a few companies are making the problem worse by polarizing and using this in order to attack competitors. The DMCA thing is spot-on: creating facts from nothing, since there are enough people saying it, it must be true. Nobody bothers to actually check. However, doesn't this just reflect a general lack of "information analysis" skills of most people on the internet? The "button" trolls are able to touch to enable certain behaviors in other people, sounds very related to their inability to take apart true information from false information. Logical analysis from faked one. So after all the root cause is that most communities are not the quality they should be.

Re: Trouble at the Koolaid Point

#97

Post by zimpenfish »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #82
fleitz wrote: post #59

This was really eye opening for me, I had no idea weev was involved in such things, I always thought of him as the guy who hacked iPads.

Which is really frustrating, because Weev has been openly bragging about ruining Sierra's life for years. But every time it comes up, everyone seems to go "Weev is a hero! LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU SAYING BAD THINGS ABOUT THE HERO." And then everyone goes on talking about whatever he's in the news for now and never ever talks about the trolling. So nobody knows about it.

Yeah, I thought he was just a daft hacker caught by bad laws until I saw the article about his new swastika tattoo a couple of days ago. Between that and finally catching up on the finer details of 'gamergate', I'm thoroughly depressed about the state of the world.

Re: Trouble at the Koolaid Point

#98

Post by verroq »

iSnow wrote: post #50
serf wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I think it's just the sense of heebie-jeebies That's the start of most 'war-on-obscenity' arguments, and usually leads to no constructive ideas. I hate the topic (abusive pornography/snuff) as much as you, but that rational is inappropriate given the peoples' wide variety of tastes in this world, if the material is indeed legal for your region of the world. >> More broadly speaking, I would be very willing to bet…

>historically that has only served to push users to other services. But this is exactly what you want - get rid of the low-quality users and offload them somewhere else. reddit has gotten itself quite a questionable image tolerating pornographic jailbait, necrophiliac porn, stolen nudes and domestic abusers on its platform for very long.

And who is to say these users are inherently low quality? Enjoying any anything socially unacceptable doesn't preclude them from creating content you may enjoy in another subreddit.

Re: Trouble at the Koolaid Point

#99

Post by fenomas »

verroq wrote: post #6
jmduke wrote: post #3

This is an excellent, brave thing to write and I originally had a long comment highlighting a bunch of particularly poignant paragraphs that I deleted because really you should just read the entire thing. Neither I nor the vast majority of the people I know have ever been subject to online harassment and it makes me thankful that there are incredible people like Kathy out there. Lord knows I wouldn't have the courage…

>willingly allows to exist subreddits devoted towards domestic abuse and snuff Serious question: why does this even bother you?

Reddit isn't the government; they're not under any obligation to permit all-speech-no-matter-how-odious. The site chooses who to provide with a platform - why shouldn't the poster you quoted judge them based on that choice?

Re: Trouble at the Koolaid Point

#100

Post by cmdkeen »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #77
cmdkeen wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a commercial one. Twitter doesn't have to allow them to carry on in this fashion, and it is a massive enabler of trolls. It's attitude towards online abuse is shockingly neglectful. Trolls will always act, but that doesn't mean we have to put up with letting them use the some of the most powerful communications mediums of all time to do so. Twitter has a massive pulpit to make statements that influence socia…

That doesn't solve the problem, it just moves it to other venues.

It's much harder to use Reddit to issue a death threat to someone when they don't use Reddit. Twitter especially is a tool for magnifying hate in a way that other venues just aren't. The article specifically mentions instances of weev's tweets appearing in her timeline due to retweets, Twitter suggesting she follow him.
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