Perhaps the real progressive questions then might be: “Why/how is it ironically that the most antisocial people seem to organize most readily? And those who seem to have the most genuine social concerns tend to always lack structure?”
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“The trolls are winning”
Even after being fired, Pao still doesn’t get it that Reddit’s problems are 100% self-inflicted.
They decided that they weren’t interested in spending money creating adequate moderation tools and adequate moderation policies. They decided that they weren’t interested in paying for quality moderation. Paying for moderation didn’t fit in with their business model. Now they’re acting shocked, shocked that they have a troll infestation.
One of the most damaging myths in the tech industry is the idea that you can get the benefits of an online internet community without having to pay for it. Now, as the troll infestation is reaching critical mass, they are still having trouble understanding the basic concept that communities need to be maintained and kept up and paid for, just like other kinds of infrastructure.
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Are there actually mythologies about this, or are you being hyperbolic?
Community is not like “other kinds of infrastructure”. Community is organic, spontaneous, and self-organizing. Whereas what people typically refer to as “infrastructure” is artifice. So community is only like other infrastructure if you require an artificial community. It’s like comparing a garden to a forest - a garden costs, but you can have a forest for free.
Facebook certainly handles moderation far better, even if they are flawed. I have yet to see an obnoxious adolescent troll hit a bird watching or hedgehog Facebook group I’m in. Can’t say that for reddit.
Why on earth are you bringing up 4chan? They are among the worst, and what reddit has been becoming which is the problem.
Reddit is a site I use a lot and like. It has flaws, but so do others, and when people who don’t use reddit at all say things about how terrible and completely full of trollies it is… I just don’t know where to start.
90% of my subreddit subscription list consists of niche communities that I would have not other way of communicating with: /r/techtheatre, /r/musicals, /r/baking, etc. etc.
None of them get filled with racist nonsense. Ever. At all. If you go looking for shit like that, you’ll find it, but guess what… it’s on facebook too. it’s on usenet, it’s all over the damned place and guess what else. if a subreddit mod on reddit doesn’t like somethign and deletes it, it’s gone. the admins don’t come back and say “actually it’s not against site policy so we’re going to re-implement it”. And if you don’t like the way a subreddit is run? Guess what. you can go and make your own. and you don’t have to use your real name to do so either!
Reddit might have it’s problems, but it’s far from the only place out there with issues like this, and by no means the worst.
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It’s rather fascinating the consider Ellen Pao’s article along with Hossein Derakhshan’s recent article “The Web We Have to Save”, and also Ian Bogost’s article from May 2014 “What Do We Save When We Save the Internet?”.
It seems like the only ways the web could veer off of its crash course with a cable TV-like walled garden model would be, 1. individuals on the web take personal action against hate and harassment rather than expecting their corporate website owners to do it for them; and/or 2. we move away from global monolithic communities and content sites back into a more distributed and fragmented ecosystem of niche communities.
The cable TV model of heavy censorship and gatekeeping doesn’t sit well with me because it completely undermines what was exciting, innovative, valuable, and radical about the web. Cable TV heavily censors and silences unpopular opinions of many kinds.
But the web isn’t exactly an egalitarian utopia of free speech either. The reality of the web is different.
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this idea pisses me off no end. The reason it persists is that it’s only the anonymous fuckwads that get attention and notice. The rest of those of us on the internet who choose to be anonymous and still act like normal people are invisible because we’re still being “normal”.
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Well negative conformation bias and fun things like that. But yes there are people out there that think because oh I am anonymous they can spout off all kinds of crazy things but quite a lot less of it outside of places like 4chan and reddit.
But these invariably tend to be people with really weak arguments for their point of view, otherwise it would not be so important for them to hide.
I agree that “sunlight is the best disinfectant”. But for it to work, people need to resist letting their buttons be pushed. For people who are skilled at critical thinking and articulating their ideas, it is very easy to run circles around trolls, and make their trolling apparent as the obviously childish waste of time that it is. But instead of creatively refuting them, the civilized, thoughtful internet always wants to retreat to avoidance or policing.
A kid who can’t hold their own against 100 racists on 4chan is going to grow up to be politically insolvent. Smart people need to know how to debate in public.
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Speaking as someone who works in forestry: if you don’t maintain 'em, your forest is going to end up overrun by invasive weed species. It’ll still be a forest, but it’ll be a really shitty one.
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Humans only imagine that it is their forest.
They are actually Digg’s problems – but that team did such a spectacular job everyone moved to Reddit.
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Continuing the discussion from Ellen Pao: “The trolls are winning.“:
Yes, exactly. I want to add to your point that Pao also doesn’t realize her problems are self-inflicted.
I live in Silicon Valley, and am part of the Stanford, start-up, tech, entrepreneur community, and Ellen Pao is not helping women executives. Her lawsuit with Kleiner over “gender discrimination” was watched carefully, and the results are starting to speak for themselves. Her suit was thrown out, she appealed for $2.7M in fees, that was thrown out, and in the end she had to pay $270K fees to Kleiner, generously reduced from $970K.
I think a lot of people are still analyzing what happened, but the mess at Reddit is starting to clear the picture: she is not executive material. Kleiner realized this, and over time limited her role, and she sued thinking this must be her gender rather than her performance.
Reddit points to her performance. Maybe the board asked her to do a difficult task, i.e., reign in the offensive subreddits. Fine. Boards ask CEOs to do the impossible every day. A good CEO says “no”. This is a rookie mistake, boards ask the impossible all the time. And if you do it, and screw up, they deny forcing you to do anything. You’re the CEO, not them.
Even the op-ed hints at the problem: “The trollies are winning”, of course as many people pointed out here, an unregulated, anonymous, free speech platform is going to attract vicious trollies. Nobody, except Pao apparently, expects otherwise.
No doubt Pao is smart, and her analysis of the problem at reddit is spot on, but the is not a CEO. A CEO takes that analysis and builds alternatives, clarifies the drawbacks of each, and rallies the troops down a specific path.
For her to say “I have just endured one of the largest driving trollies attacks in history” is pathetic. She is a whiner and a perpetual victim, exactly why she sued Kleiner. It must be them, not her.
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I’d say that the community is actually like the garden itself. The infrastructure is better compared to stuff like raised bed planters, wheelbarrows, fertilizer, irrigation, etc.
The plants in the garden are organic, to some extent spontanteous and self-organizing, though there are limits to how spontaneous and self-organizing they can be without damaging the structure of the garden. The existence of the garden is dependent on the physical infrastructure, but the physical infrastructure is not sufficient for health of the garden. The garden also needs tending – weeds and invasive species need to be removed; if one species is taking over the space of another species, the gardener has to decide whether it’s better or worse this way and respond accordingly.
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I disagree with this. When a non-trolley A engages with a trolley T, A is probably trying to communicate something (probably to a non-trolley party B) whereas the trolley is…well, trying to communicate in some sense, but not in the same sense as A.
A can make whatever great, fantastic arguments for their point of view they want, but T doesn’t really care. T probably isn’t engaged at the level of trying to prove or disprove A’s thesis. T is probably “doin’ it for the lulz”. T isn’t making the sort of rationalistic argument that can be sensibly “refuted”. In fact, T will very likely intentionally misinterpret any such “creative refutation” knowing that such deliberate misinterpretations will tend to send anyone who’s conversing in good faith right up the wall.
In fact, we don’t even have to assume T is driving trollies for a similar effect. You simply cannot force anyone to engage an argument in good faith if they’re not willing to consider it – consider your own hesitation in admitting the likelihood of Dylann Roof being a terrorist. I’ve run into similar situations with other boingers recently – if someone doesn’t want to honestly entertain your argument, they can simply shut down any discussion by misinterpreting the argument, or refusing to acknowledge some crucial nuance of the argument, or what have you.
Whether T is actually driving trollies or simply refusing to engage an argument in good faith, avoidance and policing seem to me the best policies. If T is driving trollies, rebutting their “arguments” in a principled way will only encourage them to try new ways to get under their interlocutors’ skin. If T is not driving trollies but simply refusing to entertain salient objections to their position, then nothing is added to the discussion by back-and-forth accusations of “deflection” and “ad hominem”. Stepping away and letting moderators deal with the situation is best in either case.
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If 90% of your subreddits don’t have abusive hate mongers, then some better moderating that cools down the abusive hate mongers would have no little to no effect on you, and I see no compelling reason to protect and ignore their abuse. Your slippery slope isn’t a compelling reason to me. That other places also condone and protect abusive behavior isn’t a compelling reason for reddit to do so. I’ve mostly left reddit due to the freakshows that are there spilling into places I once liked so it has little effect on me either, FWIW.
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I wish people would stop pulling this “professional victim” bullshit.
It’s completely possible to argue that someone is factually or morally wrong without casting aspersions on their motives. The latter is cheap, and does nothing to convince anyone who doesn’t already agree. In fact, it tends to alienate the people who disagree, who are presumably the people you’re trying to convince otherwise.
Even if you believe Pao is indeed a “professional victim”, please consider the tactical advantage to be gained by not explicitly claiming so when you rebut her arguments.
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And what if people aren’t willing to have their facebook wall, their twitter mentions, their email, and everything they ever try to do ever taken up by debates on if they’re subhumans who deserve to be killed or not? What if people just… don’t… want to deal with that? Are they not smart, then?
The idea of debate and of “logic” to counter problems doesn’t work. The “debate” is what the trollies want. They outnumber their victims. If each one can take up just 10 minutes of their victims’ time, they victims will never get to rest.
This is without even getting into the problem that people have some kind of moral obligation according to you to act how YOU want them to act, with no regards to their own time or mental well-being. Dealing with abuse can take its toll on people, and not everyone needs to know how to debate in public.
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If 90% of your subreddits don’t have abusive hate mongers,
Not what i said. Go back and try again
OK, let’s go with: Some better moderating that cools down the abusive hate mongers would have no little to no effect on you, and I see no compelling reason to protect and ignore their abuse. Your slippery slope isn’t a compelling reason to me. That other places also condone and protect abusive behavior isn’t a compelling reason for reddit to do so. I’ve mostly left reddit due to the freakshows that are there spilling into places I once liked so it has little effect on me either, FWIW.
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