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, until I tried to imagine myself in the shoes of those who receive frequent harassment, and I'm not sure I would be able to ignore at the same level they are expected to.

Also, I'm not sure you are arguing whether a cause of the issue is identity being coupled to your internet presence, but I'm not sure we can go back to the internet of the early 2000's or late 90's, so we need to deal with the world as it exists now instead of thinking appeal to tradition will solve issues we have today.

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 conflating criminal harassment and "trolling" has become in vogue would teach us a lot about how power is used in the modern age.

> 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.

More phones should just come with whitelist support. Where calls will automatically go to voice mail if it isn't on your list. I have this on my phone due to lots of wrong numbers and it works great.

Details puhlease.

Android I'm fairly sure has some relevant things built in. On my Motorola I can set a do not disturb time overnight where only alarms and calls from selected people will come through (and some other options and combinations). This is android 7 settings > sound > do not disturb.

There seem to be a lot of apps for whitelisting generally.

I'm late to the party, sorry. But I use an Android app called Extreme Call Blocker. Nothing gets through that I don't explicitly allow to get through. And in the case of unknown/anonymous callers, they don't even get my voicemail: There's a setting to pick up the phone and immediately hang up for whichever callers you want. It's basically the equivalent of just not feeding the trolls. It only costs a couple of bucks, but it's easily the best five bucks (or whatever) I've ever spent for an app.

iOS 10 doesn't seem offer a built-in Contacts whitelist feature, but iOS does expose an API allowing third-party applications to filter-out incoming calls and messages: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207099 - someone could easily write an app that would use your Contacts as a whitelist, assuming one doesn't already exist.

For iOS, i leave DND mode on full time. Contacts that are Favorited are serve as the whitelist, are not screened by DND. Any second call in 3 minutes will override DND instead of being directed to voicemail.

For iOS, I'm currently checking out Hiya Caller ID and Block by Hiya https://appsto.re/us/cXg16.i

I've had it installed for about an hour now and indeed have not received a single spam call. Experiment at your own discretion.

I have a contact on my phone named "Spam" which currently has about 25 numbers associated with it. I have it set to "Route to Voicemail" (option in the Google Contacts app).

If that were my business I'd charge $.01 to a credit card per call. A bit harder to hide anonymously then.

Or even charge a one-time $1 to sign up, and then free wake-up calls for the life of the account.

Or don't accept requests from known Tor exit nodes and open proxies. Lists of these do exist, though you'll have to pay.

I agree completely with you. Framing the harassment as "trolling" has been a propagandistic victory for the harassers.

Actual trolling is way less worrying. I don't like it and I certainly wouldn't partake in it, but you can actually ignore it. Harassment, not so.

No, it's been a victory for those peddling the fear articles and soliciting victim bucks.

It's really simple. First you make outrageous claims, then you define everyone who disagrees as a harasser. Find the one tweet or comment that's a bit off color, and pretend that's representative. Or just false flag it.

It's the digital version of how to discredit an opposing view or protest, you just need one person smashing a bus stop or looting a store. Once you have enough fear, it becomes self justifying.

Deciding who's the victim and who the harassers seems quite subjective. Let's say that I hit the beach sidewalk wearing a leather-sack-style thong jockstrap, an 18" Bowie knife, and roller blades. Right out of Wild Boys. But totally legal. And let's say that I attracted a crowd of critics, who felt threatened, and who threatened me. And supporters.

Who would be the victim(s), and who would be the harasser(s)?

When I think of harassment, I think of it as an intentional action. If you did that with the intent to disturb people, I think it would then fall under you being the harasser and others being the victim. But then on the other hand if they intentionally threaten or make you feel threatened, they are harassing as well. My definition based on intent may be incorrect, but I feel as though it makes the argument slightly less subjective.

Well, some of the stuff that people do to make a point about discrimination and harassment is expressly done "with the intent to disturb people". I pulled my example from William Burroughs' Wild Boys. But some of the costumes in gay pride marches come pretty damn close. And hey, it's all good fun. But people need to play safe, avoiding needless risk.

Do you honestly believe that free speech is less valuable than law enforcement?

How does converting the internet into a police state help combat anonymous harassment? Privacy is a tool to prevent harassment; not the other way around.

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 occasionally attracts harassment etc, but I dont care cause they cannot reach out into my real life and actually harm me.

>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 attacker's motivation and resources.

It's not theoretical either, you can google people who took lots of time building up their protections and then challenged a pen test. We're talking people with good above average safety practices, that got owned within 24hrs. Social media, banking accounts, everything.

> 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.

I guess it's plausible that they could phone my bank and convince them they were me, even though the bank asks several control questions like "what was the amount on your recent bill to Company X?". But assume they've gotten past that, how do they then "gain control of my account"? If they ask for a new 2fa chip or a new debit card, that gets sent to my address by registered letter, so I have to go to the local post office and present photo ID to get it. I don't have any other ways of accessing my account than by internet bank or debit card.

You should not assume an attacker would walk in through the front door like you do. There are more components in the stack, all of which could be a worthy target.

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?

Back in the day, it was standard advice for n00bs.

I don't think the main worry should be about being harmed. Yes, we can all avoid taking it personally and being harmed. We do that by avoiding, by withdrawing, by not engaging. That is the real damage - it is no longer safe to discuss things. People talk about hyper-partisanship but a large part of this is that there are actors who are just in it for the lulz and people that have emotional problems in their lives who use political discussion as a way to exercise their personal anger.

Sure, we can personally stay safe, but public discourse cannot.

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!).

Yes, that can be problematic. But hey, maybe it's misdirection ;)

Who do you think Mirimir is?

I'm sorry but I'm not here to check your opsec for you.

Probably Maximillian Holm. Am I close?

There's an amazing number of people who will disassociate their identities online, but still cross one used name over to an auction or property site, where it's easy to deduce someone's real name v

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.

Yes, I do exactly that. Also, all of my meatspace professional writing is private, so the chances of stylometric outing are minimal. Mirimir is currently my online professional persona, and I generally don't get into arguments using it. There are other personas for that.

"Don't feed the trolls" was a useful thing to say back when the word meant something far more specific than just "someone behaving badly on the Internet."

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/wiki/Three_Billy_Goats_Gruff

Hence the asshole angle.

Adding to that - all the cool kids these days are saying "baiting" instead of "trolling". The concept (and metaphor) hasn't been lost.

Trolling is scraping the bottom, stirring the muck up into a net; not quite analogous to luring/baiting, a much more sporting tactic.

No, that's trawling. Trolling is also called longline fishing, with many baited hooks.

I suspect that when troll refers to dragging anything, it's just a spelling and regional pronunciation variant on trawl.

According to etymonline.com, the etymology of "trawl" is:

1560s, from Dutch tragelen, from Middle Dutch traghelen "to drag," from traghel "dragnet," probably from Latin tragula "dragnet." Related: Trawled; trawling.

Now, "troll" verb:

late 14c., "to go about, stroll," later (early 15c.) "roll from side to side, trundle," probably from Old French troller, a hunting term, "wander, to go in quest of game without purpose" (Modern French trôler), from a Germanic source (compare Old High German trollen "to walk with short steps"), from Proto-Germanic truzlanan.*

It's rather related to "stroll". Nothing in the semantics about fishing.

I suspect that "troll" in longline fishing in fact refers to the long line with many hooks being pulled around; i.e. "trawled".

Ohhhhh... it should be called trawling then! : P

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.

As always with human language, the word ends up meaning whatever a substantial plurality believe it to mean.

(Disclaimer: Not a fisherman)

There is no such thing as a "fishing troller".

I assume you are thinking of a "fishing trawler" which catches fish by trawling.

Trawling: to fish (the sea, an area of sea, etc) using a trawl-net. Trawl(-net): a large bag-shaped net with a wide mouth, used for catching fish at sea.

That said, to troll is also a method of fishing, but involving a baited trailing line rather than a net.

Personally I have always interpreted 'troll' (the noun) in the mythical under-bridge-dweller sense, and 'trolling' in the 'to stroll or saunter' sense. That is, the troll has emerged from his bridge and is now strolling around looking for victims.

Here's an example from 1994 that uses it in the fishing sense: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.scuba/PuZh2Hck_C...

> > The shop told me that Dacor and Scubapro have good reputations for > > stocking spare parts for all their products, no matter how old. > > This does cause their prices to run a little higher.

> (Gosh--this looks like a troll for a flame-war. I couldn't help > but visualize myself standing in a used car lot.)

Here it's pretty clear that it's being used in the sense of someone dropping a lure, a bit of tasty bait.

I'm confused, are we talking about trolls or harassment ?

These terms tend to get conflated, especially in parts of the web where people use their real names.

Yeah. Total OpSec failure, as I see it. I learned that hard on Usenet.

Harassment is arguably a kind of trolling. And trolling is arguably a kind of harassment. But then there's the ideal of free speech.

I always seen it like this: trolling: silly arguments, maybe attacking a person in a thread about their viewpoint (ad hominem) during a thread. While harassment is insulting a person, everywhere regardless of the thread going on, as well as attacks while the person is not participating in a/the discussion.

Yeah, I get that. But what happens is that threads on one site become trolling topics on other sites. So harassment becomes part of the trolling game.

Your first sentence points out the problem. Those people allowed themselves to become the focus of a trolling campaign by putting themselves out there in the first place. It would be fairly easy to avoid that if your identity online was just a name not linked to anything else. If you put your life online it's expected that someone who has nothing better to do and is hidden behind anonymity will make it harder for you.

I prefer it this way to be honest. So many people want more rules to protect them. We have enough, leave the internet alone please. Any rule that someone comes up with is most likely going to be a power grab and make it more difficult for those that know what they're doing.

Most people aren't willing to do the actual act that takes away the meat for trolls: delete and start a new identity without association with the old one.

I changed my IRC identity dozens of times when assholes decided they wanted to make me miserable, the solution is to be the person who walks away without looking back.

We keep thinking the places we congregate and the identities we put out there are the important parts, when really the important parts are the relationships you migrate when someone makes the current location for discussion untenable.

Just pick a new name in a new place, and invite your friends.

This is junk.

'Don't feed the trolls' has nothing to do with harassment, it's about the quality of forums and user content.

But to be honest not sure if you are being meta? This is a bit of a troll statement.

Targeted harassment is only a fraction of all harassment. Some harassment is not easily avoidable, but some of it is easily avoidable.

Well, one can dox "violent harassers".

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 place.

>I've never experienced such harassment myself and used to sing the "ignore" mantra too, until I tried to imagine myself in the shoes of those who receive frequent harassment, and I'm not sure I would be able to ignore at the same level they are expected to.

99.9% of people that complain about being harassed would be well-served by just not using Twitter. Twitter sucks, and has always sucked. It's the epitome of short attention spans and soundbites. Don't use Twitter.

>Also, I'm not sure you are arguing whether a cause of the issue is identity being coupled to your internet presence, but I'm not sure we can go back to the internet of the early 2000's or late 90's, so we need to deal with the world as it exists now instead of thinking appeal to tradition will solve issues we have today.

Nobody is saying we have to go back to the internet of the late 90s. We just need to understand that there aren't more trolls now than there were then. There are more people in general, and when you are anonymous, they don't have anything to harass you with.

> 99.9% of people that complain about being harassed would be well-served by just not using Twitter.

This is a cop-out. You may not need Twitter for your work, but a lot of us do. If I can't use Twitter, I lose an important way to connect to others in my profession (specifically in open source). And I'm an unimportant software developer. What about women in journalism? What about women in entertainment? They need Twitter, and they need it connected to their real-world identity. You might as well tell them "quit walking on the street, or wear a burka, and you won't get harassed or assaulted." It would be the same cop-out. We have police to keep the streets safe. We need Twitter to be safe too.

> We need Twitter to be safe too.

In theory agree keeping things safe seems great, but I struggle with the idea that we can define "safe" in a way that is reasonable and makes sense, and where the punishment is effective and reasonable.

The vast majority of times I have seen claims of harassment, the usual process is that someone makes a controversial statement, then realises the group that objects was larger than they imagined as they receive hundreds and thousands objections, some of which are almost certainly awful. I understand how that can feel like harassment when 10,000 people tweet at you, and in 10,000 tweets half a dozen are guaranteed to sound batshit insane and downright scary, but it isn't harassment to be disagreed with, nor to have ideas that you promote subject to scrutiny.

SM amplifies what that scrutiny looks like massively, but pure numbers don't constitute harassment. Nor does people watching everything you say and commenting on it. And this is where it gets tough, nor does having people say mean things about you, because mean is just so subjective.

Any definition of harassment is really tricky, and a definition of "safe" is even more difficult, and we haven't even got to the punishment part yet.

Ultimately, the idea we can stop people disagreeing, and disagreeing passionately enough to border on troubling, is impossible, and what is needed is a something proactive an individual can do to protect themselves.

And I have no idea what that is!

No it is not the same, it's not the same at all. There's a massive, massive difference between someone on the other side of the world sending a nasty message on Twitter and being harassed in the real world by someone on a dark street at night. These are so completely different that I can't believe that you are so tied up in your views that you forget that. Anyone that would suggest they are the same has clearly not been the recipient of the latter.

People have a right to be safe in the real world. Harassing someone physically or verbally as they're walking down the street for wearing religious clothing or a short skirt is completely unacceptable and makes people not feel safe in their own neighbourhood. It's not possible to anonymise yourself in real life.

That's completely different from having someone send you a nasty message on the internet. Completely different.

Twitter is safe. Nobody can harm you through Twitter. It's simply impossible to harm you through Twitter. What people can do is send you nasty messages through Twitter. You have two solutions:

1. Stop using Twitter, an utterly worthless dis-service that has never produced anything of value, or

2. Get over yourself and grow a thicker skin.

>You may not need Twitter for your work, but a lot of us do.

No, you don't. You think you do, but you don't. The only people that 'need Twitter' are 'social media' people and quite frankly they're the worst part of Twitter.

>If I can't use Twitter, I lose an important way to connect to others in my profession (specifically in open source).

No you don't. Twitter is not a good way to connect to anyone. Nobody can have any sort of technical discussion through Twitter without completely subverting Twitter's model through hacks like multi-tweet messages, self-replying, twitlonger, etc. Twitter has never been, is not and never will be a good platform for discussing anything. Use email, like the adult you claim to be.

>What about women in journalism? What about women in entertainment? They need Twitter, and they need it connected to their real-world identity.

Don't use Twitter. Female journalists have existed for a very long time, much (much) longer than Twitter, and the vast majority of them don't use Twitter. Twitter is a shitty, toxic platform. It's not some sort of official place. It's not a public service. It's not part of our culture. It's a shitty social media site that you should stay away from.

Twitter is not useful to journalists. Twitter is not useful to entertainers (and you'd be a fool to think that hate mail to celebrities didn't exist before twitter. They employed people to filter and reply to their fan/hate mail before, they can employ people to filter and reply to their fan/hate tweets now).

> It's simply impossible to harm you through Twitter.

That's really ignorant. When somebody with epilepsy receives a strobing image that can cause real harm. When somebody who's recovering from PTSD receives some gruesome message that makes them relive whatever awful experience they had, that causes real harm too. Online bullying can push people to suicide. It's no joke.

It's absurd to claim that it's impossible to harm people through Twitter (or any other online conduit) when victims claim they are harmed and there is clear evidence of harm.

> Twitter is not useful to journalists.

Journalists say the opposite: they couldn't have gotten their foot in the door without twitter.

> It's not part of our culture.

Okay, this is just too silly. Twitter is everywhere in our culture. In advertisements. On TV. Songs are written about it. Books. All politicians use it. Businesses use it. Twitter is huge for sports. Activists use it to organize. If Twitter isn't part of our culture, then neither are cars or t-shirts.

> Nobody can harm you through Twitter.

Milesrout (real name X, location Y) is molesting children and sapping our precious bodily fluids! He has corrupted the police so they won't stop him. Unless someone takes action we're doomed.

I agree with your general arguments, but it is incorrect to say that harassing people on the internet cannot endanger your life.

Your example is arguably a bug in human society.

But there's no doubt that the Internet increases the risk, given the massive scale, relative anonymity, cultural differences, and so on.

Hannu Rajaniemi imagines an intriguing solution in the Quantum Thief. In Martian society, aka the Oubliette, individuals cryptographically regulate who knows, and who can remember, what about each other. So everyone is fundamentally anonymous to everyone else, except for whatever they choose to share with another, or a group.

I can imagine something like Facebook or Twitter doing that, even using GnuPG.

> 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.

Can't you use a POB and special business number?

It's not "victim blaming". It's just what's so. With the Internet, every obnoxious jerk on the planet can come after you, if you attract enough attention.

No, here in Australia, director's information must be place of residence; although there is a process for suppression or replacement based on personal safety needs, for most that'd be closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. What's more, the information is still in the database, it's just masked in standard extracts; the data is one weak password away from exfiltration.

I believe it is most certainly victim blaming. The existence of terrible people may well induce one to recommend countermeasures, but the phrasing "stupid enough to put their personal details out there" is first-class (and thoroughly obnoxious) assignment of responsibility for bad behaviour to the victim of that behaviour. It's the same logical construction as blaming rape victims for their clothing.

As for "attract enough attention", the bar for that has been lowered in recent times to "one tweet".

These are not happy times to be a private citizen communicating online in anything but the most closed fora.

OK, but as director of whatever, perhaps one shouldn't be tweeting controversially. And if one is tweeting controversially, perhaps as part of one's job, then one ought to practice good OpSec.

This isn't a new issue: http://www.learnliberty.org/blog/anonymity-and-doxing-in-the...

You've conflated "controversial" with "attracting harassment", which I perceive as pretty much in line with your earlier defence of victim blaming. This is something I reject outright as simply another angle chilling the speech of the victims of online harassment, instead of attenuating the bullies.

I'm responsible for my own OpSec, but we both know that public registries have their own vulnerabilities. Again, I think I detect a misattribution of responsibility. Nevertheless that was a single example, not the entirety of the means by which personal information can be gleaned by the unscrupulous.

My counter-position is that it is essential for we who have influence over systems design and policy to avoid unintended negative social consequences in the services we build.

If you want walled gardens, by all means build walled gardens. But don't imagine that you can prevent people from using other services. And talking about you.

Yeah I don't really understand why people want to be anonymous on the internet - and if you don't want people to have your personal information against you, then you do want to be anonymous - but hate the idea that anyone else is anonymous.

Huh? You don't understand why people want anonymity? Or at least, pseudonymity?

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.

No, I don't understand why people want anonymity while also demanding that people can't anonymously send them messages on a public platform the entire point of which is the sending of messages.

People want to be anonymous, but don't want just anyone to be able to send them messages. Okay, so who can send you messages? Who can post things you can see? What is your solution to this?

I guess I misinterpreted your comment as well.

It is victim-blaming and it's shitty to say that people shouldn't use services like twitter to protect themselves from harassment while omitting that people shouldn't be assholes online in the first place.

Yes, of course, "people shouldn't be assholes online".

But there are at least two problems. One is subjectivity. As in "terrorist" vs "freedom fighter". The other is that there are lots of assholes out there. Billions of them. It's like spam. You just gotta filter it out.

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.

You've gone into flamewar and incivility in this thread. That's an abuse of HN and not allowed here. Other people broke the site guidelines too, but that's no reason to respond in kind and certainly not to keep perpetuating a tedious spat. We ban accounts that do these things, so please fix this. Specifically, please eliminate name-calling and incivility from your comments and if you can't post thoughtfully, don't post until you can.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

If you get harassed by an asshole at the bar every time you go, you pick a new bar.

It takes 5 seconds to make a new account and send the info to the few people you want to bring along.

By the time the troll figures out who you are again, they've usually stopped caring.

Repeat as required.

On one hand you could blame the victims for making themselves available targets and tell them to hide. On the other you could blame the perpetrators looking for targets and try to stop them. The former abdicates societal responsibility for the problem and the latter seeks justice. With more of society now online we should be thinking towards the latter rather than cowering in fear?

Firstly, don't extrapolate and call everyone that's had something rude said to them on the internet a 'victim' just because a very few people have been on the receiving end of genuine harassment.

Secondly, nobody is 'telling them to hide'. You can filter out your twitter replies, you can just not read that material. You can read it and say 'wow there are a few nasty people on the internet'. That's up to you. You can also, yes, remove yourself from toxic, shitty sites like Twitter. But what you shouldn't do is read all the nasty shit and then go 'hey this shit is nasty'. Like, yeah, of course it is. What do you expect? That everyone likes you? Stop hitting yourself.

TotalBiscuit, a minor YouTube celebrity, has said a few times that he's disabled YouTube comments not because he wants to isolate himself from criticism or because he is so offended and thinks those people should be banned from the internet, but because he had a morbid obsession with reading through all the comments even though he knew some things in there would make him feel hurt. He had a problem (he couldn't stop himself from reading things he knew he'd not like) and so he found a solution: disable the comments on YouTube, and only interact with people on a subreddit that he has people he trusts moderate. That's not 'cowering in fear', it's being an adult and solving problems. He's doing basically the same thing celebrities have been doing with fanmail for centuries: getting someone to filter it out for him.

I'm sure many people could get someone to do the same thing with their Twitter replies, and I'm sure many people do. That's your choice, that's their choice. It's not 'abdicating social responsibility', it's not hiding, it's being pragmatic and creating a practical solution to a problem. It doesn't restrict the actions or freedom of others, it doesn't get people arrested or banned from Twitter, it stops you from seeing things you don't like. It's like installing AdBlock instead of legislating that internet ads should not contain pornography because your kids use the computer.

How do you propose to 'try to stop them' anyway? I definitely think that real sources of real personal information, like whois records, need an overhaul. It needs to be possible to register a domain, register a company, etc. in a way that still involves your identity (so that people can dispute copyright, Government can collect taxes, you can be arrested if you're hosting child pornography, etc.) without letting any random person on the internet type in a shell command and getting my home address. And it shouldn't just be 'the Government can access it and nobody else can', that's a shitty solution (although probably better than the current one).

Ignoring that (which is a real problem, unlike 'OMG I got a nasty message on twitter telling me to kill myself, whatever shall I do? Shall I just ignore it, like an adult? No, I'm going to throw a tantrum about it despite being a 26-year-old professional journalist'), what do you propose that 'we' as 'society' should 'do' about the 'problem' of people sending rude messages on Twitter?

The problem as I see it is social and solved through policing as we do with other anti-social behaviour.

All of the best online communities I've been part of have had strong moderation including here on HN. So that's one example of how people can take social responsibility at the level of the platform holder. Twitter is a great example of inadequate time and money spent on that problem.

Where things are complicated right now is in the legal sphere where we have a global entity but many fractured jurisdictions. This prevents the problem being tackled at the right level causing it to persist. This isn't even an issue unique to online harassment.

Mollifying and modifying behaviour as an individual is an admission to being in hostile territory. I'd rather we acted together to bring justice and freedom instead.

> short attention spans and soundbites. Don't use Twitter.

It does what it says on the tin-- "Twit", right there in the name.

>The internet doesn't magically make social, political, religious, and ideological rifts magically disappear, it just seemed like it did because nobody could associate users with their backgrounds.

But one could argue that our modern "Social Media Internet" gives exactly that impression. Whether it's Google, Facebook, Twitter or whatnot: People are being funneled into "ideological bubbles" based on their preferences and being surrounded just by people who share their views.

Thus many people assume they are on the "right side" because everybody in their Internet-social circles thinks exactly like them. That's why many people act so surprised/outraged if they happen to come across somebody from another "social media echo chamber" with completely opposing views.

"People are being funneled into "ideological bubbles""

I'm not as convinced they are being funneled. I remember back in high school, my friends and I would sit around in a circle, in meat space.

"War is wrong"

And we would go around the circle: "yup", "absolutely", etc

"Some other liberal talking point"

yup, of course, so true....

I feel they are self selecting. Look at the election, when liberals were 3x more likely to unfriend people. [1] And I think they have been self selecting since before the internet. Also there is a geographic component. Rural areas vote red, urban vote blue. We have had geographic filter bubbles for decades.

1. http://fortune.com/2016/12/19/social-media-election/

Keep in mind that in the meat space people consciously chose to socialize with alike people, that's why you called them "friends" and why only "liberal talking points" were discussed.

On social media, this happens on a less conscious level because with every choice you make some algorithm slowly "personalizes" everything you get to see a little bit more, thus it increases surfacing things/people that you are more likely to agree with while pretty much "hiding" anything/anybody that you wouldn't like/agree with. This is a slow process and it's mostly hidden from the user, as such most people are not even aware of being funneled in different "circles" in such a way, so they think their personalized social media reality represents the reality of everybody as a whole.

The big difference to geographic filter bubbles being that those still leave you aware of there being an "other side to the story", case in point: You know there are red states and there are blue states. On social media that other side gets blended out in such a way that it might just as well not exist at all because it won't be surfaced to you unless you make a conscious effort looking for it.

"Keep in mind that in the meat space people consciously chose to socialize with alike people"

"some algorithm slowly "personalizes" everything you get to see a little bit more"

You're right, I wish I would have wrote: they are not exclusively being funneled. That being said, they are still friending alike people, and not liking stuff which is diverse. I realize I am sort of victim blaming here :(

Basically I have seen a lot of: "the internet causes x", where x existed before. I just wanted to make the point that this is an evolution of a previous phenomenon.

Not blaming the Internet here, rather social media. Pre-social media this didn't really exist in such a crass way. 20 years ago it was kind of a novel thing to "meet" another human online. Most people didn't really care about the other person's political beliefs or whatnot, it was already enough to have found somebody else who was also on this weird Internet thing and shared the enthusiasm for it.

I remember thinking back then: This is the thing! This is what's gonna unite humanity across all kinds of borders as people can't be discriminated against based on superficial attributes like age, skin color or political beliefs. After all, back then we didn't have "social media profiles" and most people still cared about their privacy so barely anybody blast out their personal details for the whole world to see, sadly that didn't become a reality.

Instead, it feels like we are in the exact opposite place, what a sad turn of events.

> Rural areas vote red, urban vote blue.

Don't let the electoral map fool you, there are very few places that skew overwhelmingly to one side. Many places may have a majority favoring one major political party, but the minority isn't that small. I live in the northeast, which is reliable electoral votes for democrats but there's not shortage of republicans around.

The only thing that has changed is the ability to demand opinion segragation and discussion protection, without beeing called out as undemocratic hyper-critter.

I remember reading "The Filter Bubble" about 6 years ago or so and thinking it was the dumbest thing since purple ketchup. Fast forward to the past 24 months and the concept has become more real than the internet itself...

Well, for a lot of the world, Facebook is synonymous with the internet as an idea. In India, FB has negotiated with a lot of mobile carriers to exempt themselves from being counted towards data usage. This means that some double digit percentage of the world thinks that FB is the internet. How can you expect people to not be in a filter bubble when their idea of the net is FB and FB only?

Just in case anyone wants to see the numbers on this, I can't find a better collation.

https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-id...

Honest question: how would you reconcile privacy-centric communities like Reddit and definitely-not-privacy-centric communities like Facebook? They both have the same patterns of information bubbles generally feed content in similar ways (broadly speaking) and they both have strong troll subgroups. If anything, Facebook might have a lower overall incidence of trolling because you run the risk of having your profile picture on the evening news.

it's not about quantity of trolls, it's about the effect of trolls. No one cares if you're a troll on reddit, because there's no personal investment. You're just an account. There's an upper bound on the damage that can be inflicted on you. That is not the case with Facebook. Reddit doesn't have to do anything about trolls except give people a downvote button.

Fair point. It is worth noting that they occasionally stalk users and try to de-anonymize them though this is a fairly "niche" practice.

That would be harassment, no?

Does Facebook actually have less trolling? I don't know how anyone could quantify it but subjectively there seems to be a lot. It's easy to create fake accounts, and some people just don't care.

In an absolute sense I imagine they probably have more, given that they have something like 1.5 billion users. I think the type of trolling might be more mild in general though, back when I used it regularly it was mostly just 20 page political debates hinging on gross misunderstandings by both parties...

Obviously this is just my experience though.

Enough so that the retiring US Attorney for Chicago specifically called it out for the city's murder problem.

https://archive.fo/203tP

Criminal street gang members threatening and dissing each other doesn't qualify as trolling. If we're calling that trolling now then the term has lost all meaning. And that retiring US Attorney didn't cite any evidence of one social media system being worse than the others.

"Trolling: A person who posts inflammatory or otherwise unwanted material on an electronic forum, especially anonymously."

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/trolling

"Troll: One who posts a deliberately provocative message to a newsgroup or message board with the intention of causing maximum disruption and argument."

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=troll&defid=...

Provoking gangland warfare to the tune of http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-open-le...

There's been an absolute epidemic within this thread of people attempting to redefine trolling in such a way as to minimise either the problem or the source article. It's beyond stupid, beyond credible, and beyond sustaining any credibility of those doing it.

Ya trollin' me, bra?

For some reason, most of what I'd posted to the above comment (quotes from the letter) don't appear to have made it through. Sigh.

Reddit's attempting to bridge this gap already by addin a Facebook-like profile where you can build an identity or following based on your screen name.

>the internet is as it always was

I remember buying computer parts via e-mail. Occasionally they arrived before I sent money. Think the odds are fairly low of that happening now.

Sadly, I guess a lot of it is no more complicated than road rage. Being kind, empathetic, a good citizen is negatively correlated with emotional proximity.

Add tons of people? Less emotional proximity = trolls. Add thousands of miles of distance? No public will to help child war refugees in Syria, and so on.

Such of large percentage of the nastiness would never happen face to face or with a neighbor.

Take, for example the referee of the KY game who got his business trolled as well as death threats. I don't think he did anything to "feed" the trolls however he may be irreparably damaged by such people. I don't think you can ignore them and hope they just go away when your business is threatened as well as your life.

Back when I first started using USENET (late 1980s) it seemed like most people used their real names. Maybe that was just the newsgroups I read.

I didn't really notices the pervasive pseudonyms until web forums and chatrooms started taking off.

Not true. It depended a lot which newsgroups you frequented. There were some where pseudonyms were common and conduct was civilized. There were some where flaming trolls roamed freely.

Generally things get worse - ask your parents. Crime is on an all time high - just ask Sessions. It always was getting worse ask people from the antique. I someone asked me these days the getting worse is getting worse.

Keep in mind that username policies were often specified by the institutions people were connecting through, largely major research universities.

So that may not have indicated personal choice.

(My own early / Usenet handles were ... pseudonyms.)

What about reddit or 4chan, tho? Everyone's anonymous there, and it ain't like the brightest proof for your example. They're mostly the sewer of the Web.

That's why people go there. Nobody's forcing you to.

I've been on the internet since the 80s even, so your line of thinking resonates with me.

But what's different now is that a troll actually got elected president, this shows how we've come from trolls being toothless. It's probably always been the case that perception makes reality, but never before has a pseudonymous forum such as the internet held so much sway on perception.

Wasn't "Celebrity Apprentice" rather trollish?