Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

It looks like your account is teetering on the edge of using HN primarily to argue about politics and ideology. That's not what this site is for, and we ban accounts that use it this way—we have to, in order to preserve the intended use of the site, which is stories and conversation that gratify intellectual curiosity.

Again, you can sit around here complaining about 'victim blaming' all you want, but you aren't actually providing any real solutions. Thus you're just wasting everyone's time by doing so, including your own. It doesn't fucking matter whether it's victim blaming. Victim blaming is irrelevant. Being sent rude messages on the internet is a minor wrong, and so nobody is actually in any serious way a victim, and they do deserve to be blamed if they reveal their address or phone number or something on the internet, that's blatantly foolish and everyone has said that it is foolish and not to do it for decades.

The reality is that the internet is not a one-way medium. Long gone are the days where you can just send and never receive. Well, that isn't even true, because you can send and never receive. What you can't do is take the 'send and never receive' attitude of old and try to apply it while also receiving. You can't pick and choose what messages you get. You can't, and you shouldn't try to. It's a loser's game. You will never succeed, thank the lord. Because there are those of us out there who don't want to have everything filtered and controlled by some algorithm that decides what is rude or not, and that's the reality of how Twitter or Facebook would be censored: the same algorithms that are used as justification for racial profiling and which produced the lovely Taylor Swift twitter bot that Microsoft had (which started spouting feminist propaganda as soon as they removed its learning abilities, I should add) would be used to censor Twitter and Facebook.

If people's information is gleaned from whois records or whatever, then yes obviously that's terrible. If you go out of your way to protect your own privacy - or just don't foolishly reveal it to the world - and then it gets out anyway, obviously that's a bad thing and it's not your fault.

What we're talking about are the people that use sites like Twitter, and then get upset when someone sends them a rude message on Twitter. We're not even talking about physical hate mail here people. We're talking about literally people getting messages on Twitter, getting offended, and writing patronising articles about it. If you choose to use that cesspool of a site, then you ARE asking for it.

That's stupid and you know it. No matter how much you might want it to be otherwise, people exist. People disagree with you. To varying degrees, they might be hostile about it. Some would characterise my comments in this thread as hostile and worthy of being censored. I think that's ludicrous, and yet there we are.

I think everyone can agree that the most egregious examples of harassment are bad. Sending someone a new picture of gore from a newly created Twitter account every hour for years (or whatever example is trotted out every time this comes up) or scouring DNS records for their address and swatting someone? Yeah obviously that's bad, we all know that's bad. Those are harassment to the level of being criminal offences anyway, there are ways to deal with them.

And I think that everyone agrees that telling someone that their ideas are 'stupid and naive' is perhaps a little hostile, but not to the extent that it needs to be censored.

So what's the middle ground? Are we allowed to swear? Are we going to apply the Americans' ideas of what is offensive to the internet? Because I sure as fuck don't come from America and I sure as fuck don't appreciate being told what is and is not acceptable from a country where it's illegal to say the word 'shit' on TV but it's legal for the Westboro Baptist Church to harass people mourning at the military funerals of gay soldiers. You can sort your own shit out before you start policing the language and behaviour of people in other countries talking to other people from other countries over the international medium that is the internet.

If you want to filter offensive language from your twitter replies, go ahead. Twitter and Facebook are already incredibly filtered thought bubbles, that ship has sailed. It's not going to get any worse if you can automatically filter out everything with language you find 'offensive'.

But this 'let's build a future internet without assholes' stuff is pathetic. What I consider an arsehole, you might consider someone just defending their pronouns or whatever it was that kid stabbed his teacher for the other day.

No he is pointing out irony. He is saying that a lot of people feel like they should be anonymous, but that others, fit whatever reason shouldn't be allowed to. Celebrities, pundits etc.

It's akin to celebs complaining about gun control, stating they hate guns and would never have one themselves, as they are guarded by several armed body guards.

I guess I misinterpreted your comment as well.