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Ellen Pao: The Trolls Are Winning the Battle for the Internet

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Re: Ellen Pao: The Trolls Are Winning the Battle for the Internet

#181
post #60

Maybe they shouldn't have started the war in the first place. Stop trying to gentrify the internet. Also, people who disagree with you == trolls? Nice.

I'm seeing a lot of this meme that the internet is gentrifying, and I think it's worth discussing. I'm certain the internet isn't getting more gentrified over time.

The internet was extremely gentrified when it was populated only by a relatively tiny elite which tended toward prestigious academic affiliations and higher status. Even the old BBS scene, though a little more populist and accessible to people at home with phone lines and home computers, looks pretty genteel and exclusive by modern standards.

The internet sure felt a lot more democratic when issues like DDOS, doxing, spam, child porn distribution (just to name a few) were not that hard to avoid, so measures against them did not feel that urgent. But that atmosphere is directly related to the selective nature of the audience. Things as small as the introduction of AOL users to USENET caused massive upheavals back in the day. The "barbarians" were at the gates.

It's not coincidental that Facebook built traction against Friendster, etc. largely by restricting to people with academic affiliations, Reddit got its start from a userbase that was more "selective," etc. But then the floodgates are gradually opened to the "barbarians" who were very unlikely ever to have patronized USENET, a BBS, or even an early-2000s phpBB.

In reality, that ratchet only moves forward, and the internet population gets more and more like the general population. Pervasive commercialization is actually part of that trend away from gentrification. It's not gated communities, it's Wal-Mart, payday loan joints, low-end casinos and hawkers in the streets. It's not Singapore, it's a developing country. And for better or worse, nobody can do anything about that.

Re: Ellen Pao: The Trolls Are Winning the Battle for the Internet

#182
Reading all of this has given me the beginnings of an idea. Although I'm not a machine learning/NLP expert the idea is obviously non-trivial to an extreme (maybe impossible, currently): What if there were a forum similar in style to reddit that had a form of auto-moderation that identified logical fallacies and other irrelevant information and then highlighted those within arguments.

For example if there was an ad hominem attack "Fuck you Ellen Pao." The auto moderator would allow the post but would highlight the text red with a small bubble identifying it as ad hominem, users could react appropriately.

Or, maybe you have a long well thought out argument that has a straw man in it. The auto-mod could highlight the straw man to point out that it exists and maybe even format the post to show the point from which the rest of the position is based on that.

Maybe this wouldn't have to be actively presented but just a tool that comments were run through so users could be warned prior to their submissions. Obviously the complications with this would be ridiculous and you could never stop training the algorithm that was processing your text. But the implications of having such a thing seem pretty incredible.

Re: Ellen Pao: The Trolls Are Winning the Battle for the Internet

#183

I'm going to disagree. I've been in IRC, Forums, Newsgroups, lurked 4Chan, Reddit, and Slashdot for years. It has actually been evolving to a point, especially among the younger crowd to get bent out of shape about essentially nothing. Maybe that is because more of our lives are online than before, but if you were to go through Twitter and Tumblr and just browse around it is a huge mess of people constantly being off…

In that case, it can be said that the difference now is that the news media have joined the trolls.

And they do it because it benefits them. Feeding the troll in this case gives the trolls paychecks and influence, making the future even more trollish.

Re: Ellen Pao: The Trolls Are Winning the Battle for the Internet

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly right. Reasoning ends when the feelings start. I am not even sure if I understand -btw. usually attributed to religious people- the concept of getting offended. If somebody says something you don't like and you don't want to hear just walk away, close the tab, delete the email.

What is the point of interacting with other people if you don't feel anything?

You can work. You can learn. You can wonder. You can teach. You can discover. And you don't need to be immersed in feelings or controlled by them in order to achieve that.

Feeling is not the end of all and it's not superior to everything else, it's just another side of being human.

Re: Ellen Pao: The Trolls Are Winning the Battle for the Internet

#185
post #171
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss those days when I was proud to be a troll, when it meant tricking people into thinking in ways that they normally wouldn't. People used to love trolls! Of course, it didn't just mean that. There were also troll raids when friends would get together and make silly comments on every thread they could find, crashing the party but having fun with it. The incendiary ones used to be called flamers, but I think that…

> People used to love trolls! No they didn't. > crashing the party but having fun with it. I'm sure you and your friends were having fun with it. The people whose parties you crashed? Probably not so much.

I was never the type to participate in the troll raid style, just the kind to nudge a conversation in a certain direction, more like taking a position in a debate that I didn't necessarily agree with to make it more interesting. I'm thinking of threads on forums where people would actually vote for their favorite trolls. But you would have had to be there to know what I mean.

Re: Ellen Pao: The Trolls Are Winning the Battle for the Internet

#186
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are just as hateful under their real names. The Facebook ad featuring a Sikh artist got a lot of really unpleasant comments from people using their real identities. I don't think anyone suggests the Youtube comments were any better after real-name policy.

Quite to the contrary, in fact. One of the big learnings from the Google real names policy was that people are JUST as willing to be terrible under their real names. What I think it is, if I may hypothesize, is merely that there is fundamentally no incentive to NOT be however you want on the internet. 9 times out of 10 nothing you say will be traced back to you, or will reflect on any aspect of your day to day life.…

These points are all well-taken. Real names don't magically make people good to one another. I don't think the problem will go away with the removal of pseudonymity.

I do see cases of people behaving hatefully in a way that is connected to their real identity sometimes having consequences in the real world, for instance this case recently in Toronto: http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/firing-of-shawn-simoes-for-o...

Of course that case is controversial, but social consequences are one thing that can help protect against this sort of behaviour (note that this is not really a free speech issue in that he was not put in jail).

So what are social consequences we can levy online, if we want to support psudonymity and stay disconnected from our meatspace identities? One such consequence is having your hateful platform (the FPH subreddit in the Reddit case) closed. I am fine with this approach.

Re: Ellen Pao: The Trolls Are Winning the Battle for the Internet

#187

I'm going to disagree. I've been in IRC, Forums, Newsgroups, lurked 4Chan, Reddit, and Slashdot for years. It has actually been evolving to a point, especially among the younger crowd to get bent out of shape about essentially nothing. Maybe that is because more of our lives are online than before, but if you were to go through Twitter and Tumblr and just browse around it is a huge mess of people constantly being off…

"If it bleeds it leads" -> "if it trolls it rolls?"

Re: Ellen Pao: The Trolls Are Winning the Battle for the Internet

#188
post #35
post #13

From what i've seen on reddit, twitter, and sometimes even on hn, some are quick to label people whose opinion differs from theirs as trolls. It doesn't matter if it is a polite or well-though out comment, they are quick to shout the word harassment or whatever -ist allows them to hold some moral high ground.

Did you see the front page of Reddit when they were blowing up at Pao over the fat people abuse subreddit? I think it's disingenuous to claim that this is just polite disagreement: http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2015/6/10/...

I'm curious as to why you're subscribed to /r/PaoMustResign, /r/EllenPao_IsA_Cunt, and /r/IAmA_troll_AmA ;)

EDIT: I suppose you were just on /r/all, but still.

Re: Ellen Pao: The Trolls Are Winning the Battle for the Internet

#189
post #146
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you see the front page of Reddit when they were blowing up at Pao over the fat people abuse subreddit? I think it's disingenuous to claim that this is just polite disagreement: http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/images/original/2015/6/10/...

It's just as disingenuous to post a screenshot of submissions from /r/PaoMustResign, /r/IAmA_troll_AmA, and /r/EllenPao_IsA_C * and claim that they're representative of the attitude of Reddit as a whole. I'd be much more interested in seeing what the front page of /r/all was for that same period of time.

I believe that screenshot is of /r/all, actually though I pulled the screenshot from a news story on daily dot as I don't have my own screenshot from that day.

Re: Ellen Pao: The Trolls Are Winning the Battle for the Internet

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly right. Reasoning ends when the feelings start. I am not even sure if I understand -btw. usually attributed to religious people- the concept of getting offended. If somebody says something you don't like and you don't want to hear just walk away, close the tab, delete the email.

What is the point of interacting with other people if you don't feel anything?

What he's saying is to have boundaries -- exercise discretion about what you let in.
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