Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say • Hacker News Board

Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

#361

Post by Mendenhall » Sat, Apr 01, 2017, 9:51 AM UTC

dang wrote: post #332

Mendenhall wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are conflating. I simply asked a question. I did not say that is what happened to Leslie. I do notice you avoid the question like the other who responded. That to me is very telling.

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.

Hmm this kind of surprises me, but do what you feel is best. I am not attached to ideology or politics.

The post you responded to was me wanting to find out where respondees would want to draw the line on what is harrassment and what is open discourse online. I think this is extremely on topic, relevent and devoid of ideology.

As far as arguing I dont see it in my posts. I usually make one comment then read responses. I will take your warning to heart but I dont really see my post style changing.

Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

#362

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Apr 01, 2017, 10:08 AM UTC

pdeuchler wrote: post #137

The internet is as it always was, the only difference is more people, and more importantly more people without technological prowess and forum/bbs/irc experience, are accessing it and moving increasingly larger chunks of their life to the internet. As someone who fell in love with the internet when I was young because nobody knew I was young , it constantly surprises me when people put intimate details online and the…

[deleted]

Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

#363

Post by dredmorbius » Sat, Apr 01, 2017, 10:35 AM UTC

problems wrote: post #157

sp332 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty egregious victim-blaming. If someone is getting abused it is the fault of the abuser and no one else.

You're as much a victim here as someone who downloads a tiny executable off a filesharing network and thinks it's the latest movie or game. Or falls for a Nigerian scam. These are accepted facts of the internet. We defend against them. Just as much as publishing your address or information which can be associated to it should be. Precautions are important. You can never rid the world of evil, but you can protect your…

There are people who simply cannot effectively defend themselves.

They don't have the knowledge. They're visually disabled. They've got cognitive decline, for whatever reasons.

And the scams and attacks keep coming.

Generally not trolls, so much, though that can be a thing as well.

I'm not completely against there being some wild corners of the Internet (though you might want to take a look at some of danah boyd's recent writing on 4chan and /b/, and what grew from them, and why, and how), but there's a rather large part of it that really has no business being like that.

People get hurt. Money and life savings are lost.

Not everyone's a street-wise, healthy and hale 24 year old.

Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

#364

Post by dredmorbius » Sat, Apr 01, 2017, 10:42 AM UTC

BeetleB wrote: post #162

Chathamization wrote: post #123

I would be interested in seeing more places try posting limits. It's easy for someone to shoot off hundreds of thoughtless messages, but it takes time and effort to make a single thoughtful post. A minority trying to do the former is going to inundate those doing the latter. And for those (probably most of us) who do a bit of both, it's likely that our less thoughtful and more rapid fire output is going to dwarf our…

>I would be interested in seeing more places try posting limits. This was proposed years ago on Reddit: Limit # of votes/posts per user per day. Never implemented...

I like the concept, though I very strongly suspect it would be gamed.

Creating a system for imposing a cost on persistent identity -- not "real name" identity, but some form of valued persistence -- and then imposing rate-limiting, could be useful.

Reddit does put posting limits on new and unverified accounts, by subreddit. To the point of only one post every 5-10 minutes, if I recall (I've tripped that filter a few times).

Or as I've said a few times: "Who are you?" is the most expensive question in information technology. No matter how you get it wrong, you're screwed.

Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

#365

Post by pja » Sat, Apr 01, 2017, 10:44 AM UTC

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #327

WhitneyLand wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>they cannot reach out into my real life and actually harm me I would be careful with that assumption. The reason you are not hurt is mostly because people don't want to hurt you. The reward is not high enough. I'm not trying to diminish your importance, for all I know you could be facebook employee #17 or have gold bars buried in your yard. But any of the top security guys will tell you safety is a function of an at…

> banking accounts How would they do this? Access to my bank account requires a password I never use for any other service, and a physical non-internet-connected 2FA token I keep on my person.

Using other information they have acquired they would phone the bank’s customer service line, convince them that they were you & gain control of the account. How hard this is depends on the bank. The fact that you have a strong password & two factor authentication is irrelevant.

Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

#366

Post by dredmorbius » Sat, Apr 01, 2017, 10:48 AM UTC

defined wrote: post #125

jumpkickhit wrote: post #56

It think the problem is now too many people are on the internet. Back in the 90's, it was a great place to hang out. In the 2000's, you had fun sites with great user commentary like Fark, Digg, Slashdot, and Reddit. Now everybody and their kid has a cellphone with internet access. Your average person is an asshole, so that's reflected online because of how saturated it all is now.

This is a good point. You know Sturgeon's Law? Something along the lines of "90% of science fiction is crap, because 90% of everything is crap?" Well, if you more or less agree with that, there is just so much more of everything that there is so much more crap. Another commenter expressed this as a signal-to-noise ratio problem. It is that, but it is also that O(N) is bad news for very large values of N.

Surgeon's Law is poorly behaved at Web Scale:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1yzvh3/refutat...

Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

#367

Post by hamstergene » Sat, Apr 01, 2017, 10:51 AM UTC

aantix wrote: post #104

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…

Oh man, have you ever tried to have a political discussion on Facebook? Even citing sources, trying to be diligent... And then, the only response you get is... "that's not right!". And that response is somehow given equal weighting? I actually wish Facebook, the place where a majority of Internet discussion probably occurs, WOULD institute a dislike button and suppress those comments that get down voted too much (lik…

Political discussions with general public have always been like that, in every country and every age. It's not Facebook's problem, that's just how people are.

Any topic that indiscriminately concerns almost any person (e.g. politics, religion, weight loss and bodybuilding, how to parent and educate children, cooking, healing common pains/sicknesses), when discussed with random people, is automatically doomed to turn into a mess of uninformed opinions, misinformation, trivial logical slips and ordinary quarrel.

Tech/science discussions are usually constructive because they imply harsh entrance filter on education and intelligence, because most of those who upvote "that is not right!" can not join a public discussion of pharmacokinetics of a certain organic molecule no matter how welcome they are. When filters are absent, you get what you have described.

The real problem is that over 95% of people do not even value being constructive, checking facts, citing sources, etc. That is not a technical problem, you can't solve it by tweaking voting buttons.

Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

#368

Post by dschiptsov » Sat, Apr 01, 2017, 10:55 AM UTC

It is called mainstream or wast majority or slightly below average IQ (think of Trump supporters).

Mainstream ruins everything, including itself (by ruining it's habitat). It the biological law.

Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

#369

Post by tomjen3 » Sat, Apr 01, 2017, 10:59 AM UTC

M_Grey wrote: post #126

pervycreeper wrote: post #26

If we define "troll" as anyone who posts inflammatory, bad faith, needlessly aggressive, insulting, false, or otherwise unproductive content, then the entire class of authors of the genre of news article decrying trolling and harassment are themselves trolls. >Of course, this is already happening, just out of sight of most of us Why would they consider that to be such a big problem, if it's not bothering those who ar…

>The technology community must pick between enabling universal surveillance and censorship, or protecting the privacy of the vulnerable, including those who hold minority opinions and express themselves in ways that could be deemed "unpleasant". They chose a long time ago. A lot of the issues that are slowly coming to the surface for most people (police/surveillance state, endless war driven by military-industrial co…

I don't believe it is a choice made once, but a series of choices. When Drupal threw out one of their leaders, because he was into BDSM, they made exactly the choice you suggest we don't. It was not made by some mysterious “other”, it was not made by “them”, it was a choice made by a few named people.

It's a choice we all make every day, is the sum of those choices that make the world we live in. If you want to change the world we live in, act accordingly and convince others to act accordingly.

Re: Trolls are winning the internet, technologists say

#370

Post by dredmorbius » Sat, Apr 01, 2017, 11:07 AM UTC

geofft wrote: post #6

Mendenhall wrote: post #4

What I see is some people dont like foolish words on a screen so they want to clamp down on open discourse to control dialogue because in their opinion its fruitless or mean or whatever they feel. Some silly troll spamming idiotic statements is not nearly the threat that controlling dialogue on the net and deciding what is trolling and what isnt. Socrates would be labeled a troll these days if he was on social media.

My screen is of a fixed size; my days are of a fixed length. If you want to put foolish words on your screen more power to you, but if they're on my screen or taking my time, that impedes me doing whatever I want to do with my screen or my time. That is, the more dialogue that I'm uninterested in that I lack tools to filter, the more my dialogue is being controlled by DoS. That is the fundamental paradox of open disc…

Very much this, and the realisation that attention is finite and very highly rivalrous is one that needs a great deal of amplification.

I'm finding Herbert Simon and Alvin Toffler's Future Shock to be pretty fascinating reading in this context, both from the early 1970s. Toffler cites significant earlier work.

I'm also starting to wonder what the long-term effects of high-level information overload are. Toffler's giving me considerable pause on that account.