Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stems from psychological issues

The only thing that works with bullies, is ignoring them.

Trying to find reasons, psychological reasons, childhood traumas or gender identity issues, seems to be a way to focus on the behaviour and drama, instead of moving on.

>I noticed something: most of the irritation came from a handful of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's not always easy to do.

This is what killed Usenet,[1] which 40 years ago offered much of the virtues of Reddit in decentralized form. The network's design has several flaws, most importantly no way for any central authority to completely delete posts (admins in moderated groups can only approve posts), since back in the late 1970s Usenet's designers expected that everyone with the werewithal to participate online would meet a minimum standard of behavior. Usenet has always had a spam problem, but as usage of the network declined as the rest of the Internet grew, spam's relative proportion of the overall traffic grew.

That said, there are server- and client-side anti-spam tools of varying effectiveness. A related but bigger problem for Usenet is people of the type this post discusses, those with actual mental illness; think "50 year olds with undiagnosed autism". Usenet is such a niche network nowadays that there has to be meaningful motivation to participate, and if the motivation is not a sincere interest in the subject it's, in my experience, going to be people with very troubled personal lives which their online behavior reflects. Again, as overall traffic declined, their relative contribution and visibility grew. This, not spam, is what has mostly killed Usenet.

[1] I am talking about traditional non-binary Usenet here

No they don't. Are they supposed to? Yes. But, at least in the US, things just don't go as smoothly as they should with regards to this because our healthcare system is incomprehensibly worthless.

It could be easy to argue that society may be better off without those folks having rights.

Flagged as mental - - loose free speech - blocked from posting on networks, email capabilities removed via isps, library and cell phone companies. - Flagged so can not purchase firearms - soldiers may now be sent to watch over you in your place or residence/work - things you have said in the past and things you know can be studied - search history, alexa/assistant stuff - you can not hide what you know. - You could wait for a jury trial but never be able to see your accuser, it's a bot written by a very good professor/doctor - a jury of your 'peers' would be people who have never been red-flagged as problematic social media posters. - civil trials would be auto-lost because the bot would know you are bad. - would it be cruel punishment to be cut off from all things digital? no dating, friends, family, food orders, rides..

It seems you can slay the bill of rights pretty quickly simply using a digital footprint.

I read a submarine article today pushing for the expansion of background checks for rights that did not include a bunch of 'other side info' that should be discussed.. it can be easy for something to be right and be used for the wrong reasons or in the wrong way.

I've also seen news where 'they' are asking social media companies to hand over info to try to prevent offline violence as one solution to things -

at what scale does this become weaponized mass destruction? a thousand people? ten thousand?

Of course people will lose their right to vote, maybe parenting rights and all sorts of others.

All from a twitter rant.

This is actually where we are right now I guess.

The goldwater rule mentioned in the article may need to be codified into national law to prevent these kinds of things from running amok.