MOD EDIT: If you're on Twitter, follow @blocksunday and report anyone you feel is a troll there. Don't send the account's name but instead send a shortened link to the offending account. If we can get a large amount of people to block these trolls, they will be violating the site's Terms of Service as spammers.
Naw, this isn't ammunition it's an explanation... And more on my thoughts after I read the thing.
Here's my take on online communities especially with social networks. A great guy by the name of
Nick Yee who works for PARC has been doing some groundbreaking research & analysis of gaming, guilds and social interaction. What he has figured is that online gaming of the MMO type is very much like a
skinner box. You initially reward someone quickly, increasing difficulty and period between rewards. If anything, my off the cuff analysis of social networking is that it functions very much like a gaming environment.
There are direct measurable rewards and penalties for behavior, however in a radically open environment the rewards become twisted. A self re-enforcing loop begins when someone is penalized for behavior, this comes in the form of admonishment, account cancellation, etc. But, when you cannot control a medium, and can only broadcast admonishment versus executing a real punishment, the actual process of penalizing behavior is turned on its' head. It becomes rewarding to be admonished, a game of sorts. One of the large things about the internet is watching behavior go wild. In the land of the anonymous the asshole wins.
Phil Zimbardo's The Lucifer Effect details how de-individuation and anonymity combined with a social environment that is conducive to abuse generates things like Abu Ghraib, the Stanford Prison Experiment etc... Although, the internet obviously doesn't involve physical abuse, it's highly conducive to psychological and/or emotional abuse. People in and of themselves aren't sadistic, and generally aren't psychotic. However, allow people to be anonymous or pseudo-anonymous combined with an environment that functionally rewards bad behavior and you have what Trent is seeing. Also, what a lot of us see with trolling. Some of this is good natured, and hilarious at times, the overwhelming majority is bad.
If you were to ask someone "would you say this in person" online, they consistently will say yes. However, you actually stick them in an environment where they can say it, they won't. You're not forced to see the various visual cues, impact of a persons behavior online. All of the social cues that indicate proper behavior in "real life" simply disappear online. Your average person who isn't a racist readily becomes one. Another person who is quiet and reserved becomes violently angry online.
All of this of course is easily confusing and incredibly difficult to parse for the average person. "How can this guy be that much of a fucking asshole?", easy: anonymity. I'm not talking about using a nickname, I'm talking about the medium itself.
Example: there are about a half dozen 'Jarrett Wold's' online. I've put myself out there as a real person, and with the frequency I use my real name and location it separates my ability to be one of the Jarrett Wold's and elevates it to being something unique among the crowd.
If I were to remove my last name and use nicknames such as "jarrett3434rocks" not only do I differentiate my online identity from my 'real world' identity to others, I do so to myself as well. I can be a complete fucking asshole online, then divorce that behavior offline and go give Mom a hug or something.
None of this excuses behavior that anonymity grants, however, it does present a conducive and rewarding situation for bad behavior. You're getting a rise out of people, there's a sense of power of controlling an engagement online. I can tell you as 'SUPERMAN45343' to go fuck yourself, and then in person plead ignorance as to posts being attributed to me.
If you look at all of the accounts that have spent spewing racist and illiterate horseshit at Trent and Mariqueen as well as the rest of the band (except two I think)... You will see that their nicknames are either completely anonymous, used as a descriptive caricatures, or abbreviations of real names. Someone may list their real name in their description, however it's the nickname that counts. It's what you type. You're not going to go "gee that Jarrett L Wold in Minot, North Dakota is such a complete asshole at the age of 28" you're going to type "jarrettwold is a fucktard". It's shorter, associates the nickname with the behavior and is a direct reference to the persona versus the real identity.
There are various available solutions. There's filtering, moderation systems, whitelisting, blacklisting, and communal trust.
Filtering has the downside of using natural language analysis and frequency matching to determine what to filter. It's why everyone still gets spam at some level or another. Viagra spam turns into poetic quatrains of randomness. There can be false flags raised when specific patterns *are* matched.
Moderation Systems
These tend to work well on messageboards, and news sites. Slashdot is a good example of this, however what you will find is that peer moderation rewards individual agreement with the moderator rather than an independent analysis of the content itself. Which has an insularly effect so the entire system ends up being polarized based on common views of many rather than independent views of the few.
Whitelisting/Blacklisting
One of the things about whitelisting and blacklisting is well the black and white nature of it. You are either in or out, it doesn't account for you having one bad day, or crabby ass day versus 300 good ones. Once you're blacklisted you're done. Period. No option for any kind of redemption. It's also relatively arbitrary. Whitelisting is difficult because you're surrounding yourself with people that you approve of initially, and over time can fall out of grace with. You're creating an "in" club. While it's effective, it doesn't allow those stray opinions in.
Communal Trust
This is based on groups forming and deciding on how they treat as friends. This tends to be more effective in that, you can one person or several people that combined use the stacking of the previous solutions to create groups that they like. If you pick one person who is trusted or appreciated by many and tap into their direct group then usually you have a fairly solid extension of them. Nobody likes having a person they hate on their contact list/mailing list/friends 'in real life'. So that is relatively powerful.
Good
EXAMPLE LIST (re: not complete) on irc.nin.com if you followed my list based on communal trust you would have:
jarrettwold-->
ninpolite
papagolash
kinetiknails
maestitia
iantm
definedonly
xvostya
then could also view the inter-relations between all those people on that list
"trust"
"don't trust"
"neutral"
in the trust dept
so it would be like jarrettwold --> ninpolite <----- kinetiknails
maestitia
papagolash
in the don't trust dept it would be
jarrettwold --> angiezherself <---- everyone on this site.
So you run a couple passes you can figure out who is scum of the earth vs who isn't just by analyzing communal trust patterns.
So, there's my long long fucking analysis.
Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 06/13/2009 02:20PM by leo3375.
