[deleted]
Trouble at the Koolaid Point
161–170 of 285 posts
Re: Trouble at the Koolaid Point
#162Is it known how doxers are able to get information like social security numbers? I can understand a determined party being able to find, say, your phone number and home address, but certain information just shouldn't be available to the public.
They may just be buying them:
http://peopleinfofind.com/find-social-security-number/
(and I'm sure others, that's just the first I quickly found)
I have no idea how reasonable their verification of purchasers is.
Re: Trouble at the Koolaid Point
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
http://www.ece.umd.edu/News/news_story.php?id=1788 http://www.enre.umd.edu/content/rmeyer-assessing.pdf http://nms.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/09/12/146144481245... (if you have login)
No doubt there's all kinds of interesting statistics in here. I'd be interested in finding data about the age of the people harassing others. I doubt you'd see many 40-year-olds. It's really crazy that we give adolescents all this latitude growing up -- they can't be tried as adults, their medical care is the responsibility of others, they are provided free food and medical care if needed, etc. -- and then we expect…
There's a vast difference between being harassed by, say, people who are mentally barely able to care for themselves and being harassed by the guy who lives next door.
Perhaps in terms of how that harassment should be dealt with, but not really in terms of how it affects the harassed.
Re: Trouble at the Koolaid Point
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd like to believe that. It would certainly be nice if it were true. Unfortunately it's not. Weev went to jail for reasons that had nothing to do with the bad things he did. And I think this is worth pointing out, because unjust laws are not selective like karma; if we tolerate them when they target assholes, it's not long before they start targeting innocent people.
Putting people in prison for unrelated things is a normal and celebrated aspect of the American legal system. I don't mean celebrated in some metaphorical sense, either. I mean it is actually celebrated in American culture. Think "Al Capone went to jail for tax evasion". Maybe that's not a good thing, but it sure worked in this case.
I through that Al Capone really engaged in tax evasion. Even as he did much worst things, if he was really guilty of tax evasion, then it is perfectly ok to put him in prison for tax evasion. Putting people to jail for things they are not guilty of just because they did something else bad is injustice.
Putting people to jail for things they ARE guilty of is fine even if that is not the worst thing they did.
Re: Trouble at the Koolaid Point
#165Brand problem and anonymity mismatch. Plenty of people hate brands. Microsoft, Ford, Chevy, Walmart, Green Bay Packers. You try to turn yourself into a brand, you're going to pick up hate because you're a brand not because you're a person and hating brands is culturally seen as a great idea that should be emulated as much as possible. So trying to fix hatred toward humans is pretty much a waste of time when the root…
That's an interesting take on the matter.
An internet where all online identities are decoupled from offline identities seems possible, at least in theory. The idea that using your real name online makes you act more responsibly doesn't seem to work anyway.
But wait. That would only solve part of the problem - trolls targeting women, minorities etc. Even if you have a fictional online identity, once you have visibility and say something a troll doesn't agree with, they'll still come after you.
Re: Trouble at the Koolaid Point
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
If by not solve the problem you mean not completely eliminate, then yeah. Of course. Obviously. What’s with all this binary thinking? It’s completely non-sensical and irrelevant. Twitter is an important tool for communication for many people, so if harassing people gets harder there it makes it easier for those people, even if the harassers move elsewhere. In other places they do get less direct access, so their impa…
Sure, of course the harassers can't attack people directly on Twitter if they're banned from Twitter. But what the article is talking about is also doxxing, sending things to physical addresses, etc, which are by far the more distressing elements of harassing. Kicking people off Twitter does nothing to stop or even slow those things down. It's not "binary thinking", so please don't try to dismiss it as such. It's ack…
It is binary thinking, though. A is not completely effective, so it’s completely worthless. That’s bullshit.
Obviously, for this there is no technical solution. But Twitter (and reddit) currently do a really, really shitty job and they have to do so, so much better. They make it worse.
The lasting solution is for everyone to shun harassers (if anyone you know does it, approach them, tell them to stop in no uncertain terms, always) and to shun enablers (those who downplay or minimise the effects). That’s really obvious, too, but obviously also a hard problem to solve.
Re: Trouble at the Koolaid Point
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tone is no excuse and if you agree with awful stuff, well that’s on you. Communities wanting to keep such people out is an awesome policy.
It's not no much about tone as it is about making a genuine, intellectually honest argument without resorting to ad hominem insults. Hell, one of the reasons I like coming to HN is precisely because the general consensus here is in many ways contrary to my political worldview. But I digress. You've made it clear that you regard homogeneity of opinions (and possibly outright censorship) as a good thing, and I doubt I…
Yeah, creating a safe environment for discourse is super-awesome. Those environments are the best thing ever, compared to the oppressive atmosphere of places like HN and reddit.
The thing is, arguments on HN about this topic are not intellectually honest. Far from it. They are awful, excruciating, painful, blood-pressure spiking. Filled with dishonesty, zero empathy and zero good faith. It’s an awful, awful place.
Re: Trouble at the Koolaid Point
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great attitude. But I wonder if 'refuting trolls' is the same as feeding them. What else is there to try?
Have you considered the possibility that "don't feed the trolls" may not be an effective modus operandi?
There is difference between trolls and harassers.
If I will go through this forum and add reply to every post in an attempt to get random people angry, I am a troll. If I personally target you, publish your ssn and spread lies about you, then I am harassing you.
The solution to trolling is not feeding them in majority of cases, but it will not solve harassment problem.
Re: Trouble at the Koolaid Point
#169Couple of comments: 1. I know of weev from hacker circles. He really is this douchetastic. But what's really insane to me is that there's a bunch of women in the hacker scene who adore him . I couldn't quite understand it, until I saw them also adore Adrian Lamo, and so my theory is very close to Kathy's here: hero worship distorts reality. In order to stop people from enabling abusive trolls like this, someone has t…
>> mechanism. And here's my opinion that will probably get me downvoted into hell: there is no way to stop this, other than leaving the internet.
What about ending anonymity? Much as I like the idea of remaining annoymous online (not that I am here), there are legal means to deal with the extreme end of the trolling spectrum so long as you can identify them.
The next issue that pops up of course is privacy. We need to end anonymity while making privacy the default. But that allows criminals to communicate privately - they can now, but it takes effort and many don't know how.
Re: Trouble at the Koolaid Point
#170This was a very well-written article. Though I haven't followed any of this person's journey that she's recounting and can't simply trust her retelling of what happened (based on the fact that I really don't know anything about weev or Kathy or their online presences), she hits on something important. It's shocking how numb a lot of internet culture is toward "trolling" or otherwise hateful statements.
Nobody goes around in public threatening to rape or murder strangers. This might seem naive, but honestly, why is this tolerable by so many people if the words are said on the internet rather than on the streets?
It's not pretend. These are REAL people that are being subjected to threats that at least aren't innocent and at worst are also real. People's intuition of "free speech" seems to be warped here. Should it be okay to type these things to someone? Would it be okay if you called them and said it over the phone? What if you said it to their face? Mailed it to them in a letter? Does the medium change the message?
I'm just tired of the "nut up or shut up" attitude that a lot of the internet seems to overflow with.