Twitter’s Got a New Harassment Problem: Periscope

Periscope is a ton of fun to use, and I've had some wonderful experiences. The problem here is that it will be the first time a lot of people do livestreaming. Coming in and seeing these obscene comments is unsettling and certainly makes it harder to do the next stream. Think of those who might already be targeted for harassment, of voices that might be underrepresented, and make the tool more welcoming for them. This will not make the app unusable for others, rather it makes it a better experience for everyone.

>This will not make the app unusable for others, rather it makes it a better experience for everyone.

has it happened yet to chatroulette? or this time this app is different?

The logic is a bit mystifying, in the same article you have

"When you hop into Periscope, you see streams from all around the world. From an engagement perspective, this is fantastic."

right next to

"There where only about 12 viewers of this stream, meaning a quarter of users watching were there to do harm."

On what planet of 6 billion people, is having two-billionths of the population tune in where most of them are weirdos be fantastic engagement?

If (when?) that app dies, assuming you can anthropomorphize something with that little traction "alive", two billionths of the world population are going to be really sad. The trolls will likely move on to pester the non-app users, so us 5999999986 unimportant people are going to have to put up with trolling where we hang out. Oh well.

I can imagine lasting societal value to an app that acts as little more than a honeypot for trolls.

Peter Nickeas is a very well known field journalist, formerly (perhaps still?) working for the Chicago Trib. His beat is gang violence. He basically hangs around in the south side livetweeting incidents.

Periscope "clicked" for me when I saw how he used it: basically doing live TV news broadcasts from crime scenes. Wow. Very, very cool. But about 2 minutes into watching his first one, next click for me: comments on this thing should be disabled by default.

You want to see harassment, look at racist bullshit hitting the screen as a reporter documents a south side murder scene.

Periscope can't possibly keep this default. You have to assume they're going to get around to fixing it.

4) Have an AUP and actually ban violators

5) Support shared blocklists