Why are videogame communities so consistently toxic?

wrath
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Read your own article.

Those technologies with “last mile” problems—bringing electricity cables or telephone wire to individual homes—appear to spread more slowly.

Technology adoption rates have always been incredibly speedy for the most popular communication media available, because humans. It’s only been slow when it involves physically laying out telephone wire across a country.

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That’s why venture capitalists like to compare the cell phone to the history of the landline, and why they absolutely don’t like to compare it to radio, color television, VCRs, cassette recording tech, when they’re trying to convince people to invest in new tech, because they’re managing expectations in their favor.

Also from your own “data” that you accuse me of ignoring:

It is difficult to conclude categorically from the available data that smart phones are spreading faster than any previous technology.

You also often seem to be conflating “speed with which a particular consumer product reaches market saturation” with “frequency of new classes of new consumer products”.

Now, most of your articles making this venture capitalist argument are near ten years old. If it’s frequency you’re talking about, that must mean we’ve had a couple of major technology consumer products on the scale of the smart phone since they came out. (Not iterations, of course, but brand new classes of consumer products that are as popular.)

I’m not saying smartphones and social media aren’t having profound and novel effects on society. But the idea that earlier communications revolutions that also profoundly shook the social order weren’t adopted as quickly is bogus.

You are free to otherwise freak out about the effects of social media.

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Proof of this very thing…13 seasons of the best reality competition ever on TV. And not once was there ever anything close to toxicity.

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Now, I admit that i have skipped a lot of sidetracks whilst skimming this discussion, but one thing I find missing is the way that online gaming communities more resemble sports fan clubs than they do sporting teams. I am more reminded of football hooligans and ultras than I am of trash-talking players on the field. I think this is because the line between audience and participant is blurred in video gaming.

Think of the last sportsball thingy you watched live, how the fans would hurl invectives at opposing players, at the referees, and even at their own team for every little error, for every perceived moment of slacking off. It’s all of the emotional investment, but with no physical exertion, so the energy and the excitement gets released as insults.

I feel video games, with that same lack of physical outlet for your frustration, fuels the same response. The same chance to blow steam off in what is thought to be a sandbox. It’s not the only factor, of course, but one I thought had been neglected until now.

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Small vignette to illustrate one of your points:

My grandfather, born in 1895, was a manual laborer his whole life, at a time when one could raise a family in an (admittedly very small) house on those wages. His job was to dig ditches for Ma Bell, to bury lines.

Other than putting up cell phone towers or satellites, both of which require skilled labor, getting cell phone coverage in an area does not require the time-consuming, back-breaking work that built the landline phone system.

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This I find a very useful point. Suppose you lived in a happy society where 5% of people were loudmouth jackasses who hurled toxic crap before thinking. Also suppose you tended to hang around in groups of 20 people. So you’ve got one problem person, everyone knows who the problem is, and everyone is primed at ready to say, “Oh, give it a rest, Steve” a moment’s notice.

Instead you have to hang out in a group of 100,000 people. Now you’ve got 5,000 loudmouth assholes jamming up the communications. No matter how much you’d like to tell them to shut up, and despite the fact that you still outnumber them 19 to 1, a person can’t keep up with 5,000 bullshit statements a day.

Plus, the people making toxic statements are probably competing for attention, and thus one-upping each other in an effort to be the most outrageous. While the people facing down the toxicity are saddled with an ever-greater administrative burden.

It feels like polluting the environment with toxic nonsense is pretty much linear if not more-than-linear, but combating that toxic nonsense scales up really poorly. In the small group example simply distributing the burden to everyone to police toxicity whenever is crosses their own personal annoyance threshold can work. In the large group you need a schedule, which means you need people to make a schedule, and people who adhere to a schedule, and it’s so much easier to just abandon ship.

Where I get stuck is the idea that this is a problem that is especially faced by video games - places that actually have revenue streams they could redirect more of to moderation - and not just as much faced by my little pony fandom or recipe-sharing websites.

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queen-elizabeth-this

It’s much harder work than just randomly scapegoating specific cultural groups, sure, but until we address misogyny (and other forms of bigotry) we will continue to have such things in our society, not matter what the superstructure is. It’s too bad that far too many people are unwilling to have these much harder conversations that get at much deeper and harder to root out systemic problems in our society.

In other words, the superstructure will continue to be toxic around issues like race, sexuality, and gender, as long as the base supports and fosters that toxicity.

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:thinking: and yet, look in your own graph at the difference between Radio and TV, neither of which required a single wire. It’s also worth nothing that “internet” was not meaningfully wireless until… gosh, at least 2012 or so?

Yet again, ignoring one of the central points – these were not peer to peer technologies. Nobody was setting up their own “television stations” and “radio stations”. And group calling on the telephone (outside of weird early rural telephone exchanges) was never truly a feature of the service. Nobody built a personal brand on the telephone like InfoWars did on Twitter, Facebooks, Smartphone app stores, etc etc

So, about that…

Yes.

That’s why deplatforming is such an incredibly powerful tool. And IT WORKS!

https://twitter.com/witchofpeace/status/1170945244185210881

See above ↑. We can argue with individual Milo supporters all day long – at extreme personal cost to our emotional well being as humans, I might add – and it won’t make one damn bit of difference compared to kicking Milo’s dumb ass off every platform. (Substitute Alex Jones, etc to taste.)

Now where I do agree with you, is mobilizing outrage so that platforms are regularly deplatforming this kind of hate, and that it is normal and morally expected to deplatform hate. That is absolutely important. It’s less “let me educate this random person by arguing with them at length in public” and more “let me stir up a ton of outrage about why that kind of hate is even allowed on the platform in the first place”.

And videogame communities should be leading in this area, but… they aren’t.

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What’s your point? My point was that wireless tech tends to be adopted faster than things like the telephone. (I’m sure you know that the internet mainly used pre-existing telephone wires for its start)

If that’s your central point, then you shouldn’t waste everybody’s time bringing in charts or arguments that are not about peer-to-peer technologies. But your arguments so far haven’t been about peer-to-peer technology, ultimately. A lot of the stuff you’re worried about is because toxic stuff is being broadcast, and then developing mass audiences from online word-of-mouth. Radio, television, mass-market books also had word-of-mouth networks that made or broke the popularity of the content.

You’re constantly goalpost-moving because you want to complain about the scary broadcast effect of Infowars, without comparing it to the scary broadcast effects of older tech like early radio and tv.

Did you talk to any historians before you wrote this?

Radio was a free-for-all, with nerdy randoms, stations could be started up by anyone smart enough to transmit them for broadcasting, then it was incrementally regulated in a way that benefited corporate players, the commercial stations took over and absorbed the work of mass non-commercial operators, which eventually led to NBC being broken up for anti-trust reasons.

It’s pretty comparable to the history of people who just read early websites, the people who created content, and the current FaceBook-ization/social-media-ization of the internet.

On the telephone, no. But you’re comparing their broadcasting activities on those platforms as if they’re only peer-to-peer. Alex Jones didn’t text-message everyone individual conversations. His model was undeniably closer to radio and tv than it was to the telephone.

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The point is that the older technology was incapable of doing peer to peer. We have no choice but to compare it to the older means of communication because that’s all they had. What other mythological imaginary old tech are we going to compare it to?

Yes, I’ve read the Tim Wu book. But radio required very specialized, rare & expensive equipment and a bunch of power. Even today, look at the cost of setting up a radio broadcast that goes any significant distance beyond “your yard”:

A transmitter, antenna, and associated equipment usually cost between $4,500 and $12,000.

Imagine how much that cost in, say, 1930. And something more complex, like a television broadcast? Let’s see…

So you’re saying those things … setting up a personal radio station in 1940, setting up a personal tv station in 1950 … are comparable to a random person walking into a mobile store today, plopping a few hundred bucks down on today’s (very, VERY capable) smartphone and a monthly cell contract – which immediately enables them to broadcast 24/7 to millions of people all over the world by pushing a few on-screen buttons?

When I said

Nobody was setting up their own “television stations” and “radio stations”

You interpreted it as “literally nobody”. But what I obviously meant was

Statistically speaking, nobody was setting up their own “television stations” and “radio stations”

Yes, there were a tiny teeny TIIINY number of people indeed setting up their own radio broadcast and TV broadcast infrastructures, with great difficulty and high cost. That’s… kinda my whole point?

So yeah, once you broaden the ease of broadcasting by six orders of magnitude, when literally any human can set up a broadcast… well, then you tend to have more Milos and Joneses out there, don’t you? And what’s your solution? Have a few thousand randos argue with them incessantly until they voluntarily say “oh gee, my bad” and agree to stop?

I mean, what if every human was suddenly connected to every other human 24/7, not just peer to peer but also broadcast?

Turns out that kinda fucking sucks … at least in the near term, until society, laws, and government adapt to this new, annoying – and historically unprecedented – reality.

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That’s your new point, that you meant all along?

(I wonder what your next one will be, that you meant all along?)

You’re still actually arguing about broadcast dangers, though. Your example, Milo, makes his own case that peer-to-peer isn’t a way to build a profitable personal brand.

That sounds amazing. It really makes me want to invest in the company that guarantees millions of views just by pushing a few on-screen buttons.

Obviously people spewing racism and dangerous conspiracy theories need be regulated off of broadcasting platforms. That’s the same as what should have happened (more quickly) to Alex Jones when he was building his personal brand as a radio host, broadcasting on radio.

(People used to write letters (a long-standing peer-to-peer technology) to try to de-platform broadcast stars they didn’t agree with, individually or in mass campaigns. These efforts were also seen as generally ineffective on the whole, but sometimes worked, for good or ill.)

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Not quite; he should build it on his own servers and not be artificially amplified by the infrastructure of existing commercial services. I’m pretty sure the infowars website is still out there and thriving, not like I’m gonna check or anything, but I bet it is.

What Milo is bitching about is a thing of absolute purest distilled beauty: he got deplatformed and it worked. Now if he’d been smarter, he would have driven people toward his independent website and his brand, but Milo … isn’t smart.

There’s no guarantee, of course, but to your “look at the history, it’s exactly the same” examples … in the past, until you built a radio broadcast station, or a TV broadcast station, or at the very least hit up a Kinko’s copy shop every so often, you’ll have by definition zero audience.

In the post-smartphone world, everyone gets a shot at talking to everyone now, no infrastructure investment required. Other than a phone, which you probably needed anyway to function as an adult in society these days. And hey, more controversy = more clicks = more views = more engagement = more ad sales = more platform revenue, right? :money_mouth_face:

It’s funny, well not funny, but strange I guess, that Alex Jones was in that Through A Scanner Darkly movie as a “harmless wacko”. Turns out they’re all harmless until they get free tickets on platforms that algorithmically amplify their hate for clicks.

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Oh and

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https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/8/29/20839601/milo-cernovich-loomer-alex-jones-cnn-olivery-darcy-recode-media-peter-kafka

Totally off topic, but that link gave me a real laugh (though it’s a lot less funny now that I know the “kafka” part is because the author’s name is Peter Kafka)

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“I think the way people use ‘cancel culture’ is this shorthand way of dismissing whatever accusations are against them,” says the Times ’ Taylor Lorenz. “My general take on it is that it’s very toxic but also necessary. We are in the correction phase right now and everyone is indiscriminately calling each other out, and that’s because we’re working to set new standards and norms as a society.

…

Whatever you call it—public shaming, call-out culture, or cancelation—what’s happening now is in no way a new phenomenon. The Dixie Chicks were canceled during the Iraq War for simply saying they were ashamed of George W. Bush. The Hollywood blacklist is another obvious example of cancelation before the term existed.

But what is new is the scale of it all. This isn’t just happening to public figures; it’s happening everywhere that social media exists, and you no longer have to be powerful, or even notable, to get canceled. And sometimes the offense was committed when the guilty party was just a kid.

Sounds to me like everyone has smartphones and 24/7 access to each other via massive social networks. Which is a new thing in history, hence the social turmoil.

These kids, everything they’ve ever done will be instantly indexed and searchable, forever. They will be the first generation of humans where this has ever been possible.

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Sort of. For most of human history we lived entirely in small communities where everyone knew us from when we were little and knew about every important event of our lives and judged us constantly. These communities created pecking orders and you could very well spend your entire life being socially punished for something you did as a kid. On top of that, because there were no cameras, social status was a substitute for truth, so the person who was being bullied was as likely (or more likely) to be the one who got punished for the bullying.

Those dynamics were different, but I don’t really believe this is the first time ordinary people have been subject to being “cancelled”. In fact, it’s happened over and over in many forms. Not the least of which is that we used to kill each other a lot more over social sleights.

That said, the idea that social media will allow everyone in the world to surveil and judge each other in a way previously only possible in small towns is, indeed, horrifying. I’m not a fan of small town dynamics.

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That’s the new and historically unprecedented part. That plus unlimited, instantly searchable memory of all past actions at all times.

“The ubiquity of smart phones means that everybody’s statements are permanently recorded—sometimes on video,” says Robby Soave, an editor at Reason and the author of Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump. “Every living person has done or said things they regret, that they would not like to revisit, and wish would just go aaway. But now, the evidence doesn’t just go away. It exists forever. Primarily, this is a problem for kids and teenagers, or people who used to be kids—i.e., everyone!—and are now being held accountable for unwise statements that should have remained in the past.”

I was going to make a joke that everyone should be canceled, because I kinda … do actually believe that … but the article did it for me!

As for how long this particular moment will last, who knows, but as Meghan Daum told me, “I hope cancel culture keeps expanding and more and more people get canceled, because then eventually everyone will get canceled and it will mean nothing and we’ll just have a reset. Cancel culture is inevitably a self-canceling proposition.”

And they’re right, too. Reset is coming, hence social turmoil of the likes we haven’t seen since the 1960s.

Videogame communities predicted the future here, for better or worse. We just weren’t paying attention.

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Family sitting next to me at Illium café in Troy, NY is so disconnected from one another. Not much talking. Father and two daughters have their own phones out. Mom doesn’t have one or chooses to leave it put away. She stares out the window, sad and alone in the company of her closest family. Dad looks up every so often to announce some obscure piece of info he found online. Twice he goes on about a large fish that was caught. No one replies. I am saddened by the use of technology for interaction in exchange for not interacting. This has never happened before and I doubt we have scratched the surface of the social impact of this new experience. Mom has her phone out now.

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C’MON.

Alienated family breakfasts is a trope older than any human living today.

People reading the newspaper at breakfast and ignoring each other used to be the standard way of representing a “normal” breakfast.

Pretending alienation is an absolute new concept is not likely to help people understand “alienation accompanied by phone”.

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Yeah, I know, that one was weak. Honestly I just liked the pictures. I mean come on Mark Frauenfelder was observing the same thing! :wink:

https://twitter.com/Frauenfelder/status/1173097394453377024

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