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Trouble at the Koolaid Point

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Re: Trouble at the Koolaid Point

#181

Post by DanBC »

Argorak wrote: post #138
DanBC wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moderation is hard toget right and it leaves the door open to destructive trolling. So, while I agree wth you that moderated spaces are better than unmoderated we need to rememberthat it's not a panacea.

It's pretty hard to learn moderation. There are almost no good resources and you have to learn through failure and reflection. (I've been moderating bulletin boards for 15 years)

Meatball wiki has a lot of great information. The trolling stuff, and makin things unfun and uninteresting are useful. The stuff about vested contributors and concern trolls are pretty good too.

http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/VestedContributor

http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/TrollingTactic

Re: Trouble at the Koolaid Point

#182

Post by jMyles »

pmjordan wrote: post #64
gknoy wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they meant more that it was the trolls' targeting critera ("Has lots of Attention, and 'doesn't deserve it" implies someone you can google, or who has a relatively large following), NOT that it was any implication that the target deserves such abuse.

I read it as "If you don't want to be harassed, you shouldn't have a public presence." FWIW, immediately before that sentence, the thread-starter called into question the real danger of doxxing and calls to "action" based on the released information/misinformation.

> "If you don't want to be harassed, you shouldn't have a public presence."

I did not at all mean that. What I meant was that doxxing is a complex attack surface. If someone is already high-profile and public, they can't really be dox'd. If someone isn't, then staying anonymous is a more harder task than avoiding being dox'd. That's all I was saying.

If anything, I think that people who choose not to be anonymous need more social / political support, not less.

Re: Trouble at the Koolaid Point

#183

Post by AnimalMuppet »

phkahler wrote: post #169
peterwwillis wrote: post #139

Couple 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 t…

Two comments. First, weev is known, not anonymous. That hasn't seemed to stop him, if Kathy's post can be believed.

Second, do you remember the old Smurf attack? You sent pings to a bunch of networks' broadcast address, with a forged address. So the machines on the networks replied to the pings. For one packet sent out, you could get a hundred aimed at the victim's machine. You can wind up with something like that here: If you end anonymity, then someone can forge something horrible as coming from you, and all the honest, morally upright people online will come down on you in outrage. (In her article, Kathy mentions trolls/harassers already using tactics like this.)

Re: Trouble at the Koolaid Point

#184

Post by w0rd-driven »

The immediate "solution" I thought of came from "who watches the watchers?" Why not form a anti-troll trolling group that's sole purpose is to dox the doxers as it were? I then realized all you're doing is changing the victim but at least a tiny bit of karmic justice is served in the process.

There seems to be no real constructive, intellectual or positive way to deal with this problem. Sociopaths aren't technically sane so how do you deal with an insane person? Expose them as having a mental illness and getting them locked away for treatment does seem like one avenue. Like reverse-swatting, you inform mental institutions of would-be patients but everyone is a tad bit insane so there's a lot of room for abuse.

This is not an easy problem to solve, verging on unsolvable from an individual perspective. How does one change culture to make this unacceptable? Because in the 10 years since this started, I don't see any positive momentum. Not really. Sure, I do see well more exposure because it's become extremely prolific but it really feels like nothing is being done about it, just talked about ad nauseum. That just really reinforces that it is a tough problem to solve.

Re: Trouble at the Koolaid Point

#185

Post by rturben »

zzzeek wrote: post #179
rturben wrote: post #170

This 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 ar…

> 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), saying this is so unnecessary. The harassment Kathy has received is widely documented, for years. Do a little googling up front instead of unnecessarily dishing out assorted seeds of dou…

The intent of the sentence was to point out that her article is important because it speaks out about something that's outrageous, regardless of if the reader knows who is writing it.

I did google both of them, and read some of her other blog posts. I'm not going to proclaim though that I really understand what's happening after 25 minutes on google. It's irrelevant to her deeper point.

Re: Trouble at the Koolaid Point

#186

Post by [deleted] »

wtracy wrote: post #37

Is 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.

[deleted]

Re: Trouble at the Koolaid Point

#187

Post by rturben »

ChiperSoft wrote: post #180
rturben wrote: post #170

This 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 ar…

> 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 isn't tolerated, but there is no recourse for response. Words said on the streets can be met with physical response, meaning directly removing the offending individual by force, or even physically harming them for their behavior. Words said online can only be met by moder…

I guess it's just concerning that the people who would say this kind of stuff online don't think about what they're doing. They wouldn't say it to someone's face, isn't it common sense that saying it over a tweet isn't that different?

Re: Trouble at the Koolaid Point

#188

Post by DanBC »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #143
smoyer wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree completely and yet ... I feel a bit responsible too. In my mind, Kathy has credibility because she built it the old fashioned way - being worthy of trust. Being a Java developer, I watched JavaRanch grow and I especially loved watching her presentations (the BoS talks are amazing). And yet I under-appreciated what these attacks were doing to her as well as how severe they'd become. No having celebrity of my o…

Great attitude. But I wonder if 'refuting trolls' is the same as feeding them. What else is there to try?

This is the tricky bit.

I suggest

i: a small short website that can serve as a point of accurate information

ii: support for the person under attack. Whether privately by email (or similar) or a short single "please don't let the attacks get to you".

iii: disengaging from the trolls, and building a culture where responding to trolling is avoided.

The UK had some high profile arrests, trials, and imprisonments recently. I'm not sure if it made much difference in the frequency or severity of trolling.

This report from 2013 says that 2,000 reports are made to police in London each year. I don't know how many of those are the severe end. http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-24160004

This report says that 1,700 reports of online abuse reached courts http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23502291

Re: Trouble at the Koolaid Point

#189

Post by zorpner »

zyx321 wrote: post #124
arrrg wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this sexist trash was removed. Thankfully. I’m happy the MetaFilter will not give misogynists like yourself a place to be. And that’s perfectly alright. Keeping awful people out is the right of any community.

Can we please keep this us vs them bullshit off HN? The linked blog, whether you agree with it or not, keeps a reasonably neutral tone throughout (even if the author's frustration is obvious). Agreeing with it does not automatically make someone a misogynist, and criticizing a moderator does not automatically make someone an awful person.

Are you joking? The article is classic "fuck-you-I-got-mine" woman-to-woman sexism that completely ignores, as a trivial example, the comparable ratios of women to men in education and training that falls off in the workplace.

This is literally tech sexism 101, and the fact that you're willing to wade into the discussion blathering about logical fallacies and neutral tone without bothering to educate yourself in the basics is the actual problem.

Re: Trouble at the Koolaid Point

#190

Post by dubfan »

vertex-four wrote: post #136
McDoku wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freedom of speech mean that these ideas can be challenged in the public sphere. Anything else is the department of arm chair theorist. Freedom ain't free. It calls for noble labour.

> Freedom of speech mean that these ideas can be challenged in the public sphere. I will note that much of HN doesn't seem to believe this - when the Brendan Eich thing happened, and people were choosing to boycott Mozilla for his views (thus using their freedom of association and freedom of speech to call for him to be removed from that post), many seemed to believe that Brendan Eich's rights to freedom of speech an…

> Free speech and free thought should not mean that anybody give anybody else a free pass to cause harm or spread ideas that are likely to cause harm

But then you don't have free speech or thought anymore. You only have the freedom to express ideas that are deemed to be acceptable by whoever holds the most sociopolitical power at any one time. And there's never a guarantee that the progressive side will hold that power forever.

And the Mozilla boycotters weren't just "choosing not to associate with him". They were calling for him to be fired for participating in a political campaign they disagreed with. This is exactly what McCarthyism was about. It's amazing how progressives have forgotten the danger of this now that they control the social narrative.

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