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Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

theatlantic.com

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Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

#231

Post by pessimizer »

kazinator wrote: post #218
bhntr3 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the meaning has shifted. It used to be that if people knew you were trolling, you weren't a good troll. Now a troll is just an asshole on the internet.

Some of the newbies don't understand that "troll" refers to "trolling" as in "fishing troller": evoking the metaphor of casting a net to collect responses like fish. They imagine "troll" as a metaphor invoking the humanoid creature from Scandinavian folklore, which, in the Three Billy Goats Gruff story, is a nasty, unpleasant, violent creature who wants to eat everyone who crosses his bridge: https://en.wikipedia.org…

You measure the success of a troll by the ratio of the number of characters the troll types to the number of characters typed in response. It wasn't a term describing disagreeing with or threatening people, it described annoying and distracting people.

The ultimate troll is a well-timed and placed piece of copypasta, which at ctrl-c ctrl-v is impossible to beat.

Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

#232

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

jknoepfler wrote: post #67

I don't understand this article at all. I participate in two large professional forums (one for poker, one for development). The professionals are winning the internet there. There are dedicated subforums for trolls and random bs, which are pretty funny sometimes, but serve as an outlet for the garbage. I browse hacker news... It is what it is, I'm happy with it as a content sharing platform. My biggest gripe is the…

> My biggest gripe is the obvious advertorial/astroturfing that I think is probably something hn offers as a service, but I'm not stupid, so I ignore it.

I've been warned that I would be banned for implying that astroturfing was happening on this site without proof.

Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

#233

Post by paulryanrogers »

bandushrew wrote: post #224
noobermin wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of people who say "don't feed the trolls" have never been the focus of a trolling campaign, I've found. It is easy to claim this when you aren't under constant violent harassment and scrutiny. It is not fair to expect everyone else to have a "battle-hardened" stoicism when you've probably never experienced such a life. I've never experienced such harassment myself and used to sing the "ignore" mantra too…

I have multiple internet presence's. My "real" presence is empty of anything except professional presence. LinkedIn, github etc etc. My "real" presence never engages, never debates and is effectively not there except when it engages with the real world via resumes etc. My actual presence is scattered across the internet in multiple pseudonymous social networks and eagerly discusses topics I am passionate about. It oc…

I've tried this approach too. Though it's challenging to maintain the constant vigilance that's sometimes required. I doubt it's a workable solution for most of the people I know.

Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

#234

Post by jackvalentine »

bandushrew wrote: post #224
noobermin wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of people who say "don't feed the trolls" have never been the focus of a trolling campaign, I've found. It is easy to claim this when you aren't under constant violent harassment and scrutiny. It is not fair to expect everyone else to have a "battle-hardened" stoicism when you've probably never experienced such a life. I've never experienced such harassment myself and used to sing the "ignore" mantra too…

I have multiple internet presence's. My "real" presence is empty of anything except professional presence. LinkedIn, github etc etc. My "real" presence never engages, never debates and is effectively not there except when it engages with the real world via resumes etc. My actual presence is scattered across the internet in multiple pseudonymous social networks and eagerly discusses topics I am passionate about. It oc…

I don't say this to troll you but googling your HN name reveals more than enough to know your real name, where you live and start linking it all to other non-programming hobbies (piano!).

Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

#235

Post by inopinatus »

milesrout wrote: post #203
noobermin wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of people who say "don't feed the trolls" have never been the focus of a trolling campaign, I've found. It is easy to claim this when you aren't under constant violent harassment and scrutiny. It is not fair to expect everyone else to have a "battle-hardened" stoicism when you've probably never experienced such a life. I've never experienced such harassment myself and used to sing the "ignore" mantra too…

1. 'Trolling' is not harassment. You can harass someone by trolling them incessantly , but harassing people is not 'trolling' them. Don't use them as synonyms. 2. They've never been the focus of a harassment campaign because they're not stupid enough to put their personal details out there on the internet and then be surprised that people will use that to harass them. They also don't feed the trolls in the first plac…

> 2. They've never been the focus of a harassment campaign because they're not stupid enough to put their personal details out there on the internet and then be surprised that people will use that to harass them. They also don't feed the trolls in the first place.

This is a) simple victim blaming and b) impossible to fix in some situations. Illustration of (b) is that the companies of which I'm a director are a matter of public record, and for very little money indeed you can buy online a copy of that record including my home address and telephone number.

Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

#236

Post by jwtadvice »

I remember when the internet was primarily shock videos and Newgrounds flash animations, and really crappy expages raw HTML webpages with flaming GIF animations.

That internet was horrible. It was filled with goatse, tubgirl, lemonparty, crush videos and much more.

The internet today doesn't have that. But it is politicized. And just like mainstream media control of the politics has created a race to control platforms and communities.

The internet has fracturous communities that break down into camps of people who are collectively gas-lighting one another. And in spaces where there is an established groupthink - anything that questions that groupthink is immediately a threat to the entire ecosystem of that space. And so the term "troll" has come to mean "anyone that doesn't agree with the groupthink."

Yesterday someone suggested that I was a traitor to my country and would be hunted down because I fact checked a group hysteria. I've been called everything under the sun and have received all sorts of threats. But in that community I'm the one who is labeled a troll.

(I've been criticized, and even temporarily banned from HN on the premise that I was a troll. In that case, I had been explaining and defending the Chinese case for their sovereignty over territory in the South China Sea. It was not bearable on this forum.)

Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

#237

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

pdeuchler wrote: post #217
Baeocystin wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trolls are a completely different thing than criminal harassment, and it is disingenuous to equate the two. The primary danger is that by lumping people with legitimate criminal complaints in with people who are sad because someone said some mean words to them on the internet, you don't make others more concerned about rudeness, you make them less concerned when someone has a real problem.

Also worth noting that criminal harassment via the internet is largely a failing of law enforcement, not a failing of the infrastructure of the internet or a sudden arrival of a new species of really mean humans. There are some privacy/free speech issues down this road, but by and large LE have abdicated their responsibilities in this area. And while it's a different discussion all together, I think examining why con…

> LE have abdicated their responsibilities in this area.

On the contrary. One of my side-projects is involved with the running an Internet-to-PSTN wake-up-call service. The service is free-to-use in the US (because domestic calling is so cheap) which also means it gets used by criminal-harassers who send wake-up calls at 4am to their targets (we do aggressively rate-limit which helps mitigate these issues). We are frequently contacted by local police departments across the country (we don't spoof our Caller ID) seeking information about who made the call (roughly 25% of the time we get a subpoena or court order) and almost always we see the call request came from an IP address hiding behind a simple PHP web proxy script or a Tor node.

While my story is an anecdote it does demonstrate that it is very easy to hide your identity online for quick hit-and-run harrassment - it's not that LE have abdicated - it's that they've done all they can do - because what can you do with an IP address allocated to Egypt?

While the issue I've described is a societal problem, it does have a technical solution: if the phone numbering system were redesigned so they worked more like email addresses then people could change their phone numbers or use disposable numbers and aliases which would put an immediate end to unwanted calls... but that's not going to happen.

Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

#238

Post by stcredzero »

fao_ wrote: post #222
kebman wrote: post #213

That fact is, there are no more trolls than before. No really. There aren't. Not even since the time of Socrates, and we all know what happened to him. There are however a lot of people who'd like to silence pesky individuals and organizations who have recently started winning even more pesky debates, such as all those anti-establishment rednecks, patriots, anti-immigrationitsts and right wingers who got Trump into p…

> We absolutely must have democracy and freedom of speech. You're conflating "Freedom of speech" with "The right to be listened to" and "The right to have a platform". The government isn't going to hunt these people down because they have expressed Foo views, nor is, for example, Google. Google, YouTube, Facebook, etc. as private companies are allowed to decide what they do and do not want on their platform (Excludin…

You're conflating "Freedom of speech" with "The right to be listened to" and "The right to have a platform".

Those concepts are inherently fuzzy and related in messy ways. Back in the day, AT&T claimed that it had built its long-distance network, and that it was in its rights to exclude others from using it. The effect of this was monopoly, however, so regulators stepped in and new laws were passed.

If "de-platforming" has the effect of censorship, then it might as well be censorship. If de-platforming resulted in no-one wanting to listen to certain speakers, then it would be private citizens convincing other private citizens in a way consistent with democratic values. But in actuality, de-platforming as practiced on college campuses often results in a group of people too intimidated to talk and too intimidated to attend, contrary to their desires. It's not convincing people. It's threatening and bullying them while just avoiding running afoul of law enforcement. (Or, in some cases, showing up in large enough numbers to frustrate law enforcement.)

Would you really call those people anti-establishment? They voted in favour of the corruption of the political system

Do you actually believe that all of them knew that's what they were doing? I know for a fact that some subset of them want the system to get more corrupt, so it will collapse sooner. David Pakman recently interviewed an ex-white supremacist who claimed that subgroup voted for Trump so the system would fail sooner.

Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

#239

Post by chansecodina »

bandushrew wrote: post #224
noobermin wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of people who say "don't feed the trolls" have never been the focus of a trolling campaign, I've found. It is easy to claim this when you aren't under constant violent harassment and scrutiny. It is not fair to expect everyone else to have a "battle-hardened" stoicism when you've probably never experienced such a life. I've never experienced such harassment myself and used to sing the "ignore" mantra too…

I have multiple internet presence's. My "real" presence is empty of anything except professional presence. LinkedIn, github etc etc. My "real" presence never engages, never debates and is effectively not there except when it engages with the real world via resumes etc. My actual presence is scattered across the internet in multiple pseudonymous social networks and eagerly discusses topics I am passionate about. It oc…

All it takes is a couple opsec slip-ups to give a dedicated group of attackers the clue they need to link your identities together. Maybe you'll never make a mistake or say something that the wrong kind of person takes umbrage with, but is it really fair to put that task on every single Internet user?
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