If I have one piece of advice to give after years of frequenting the most troll-heavy regions of the ninternet, it's this: Never underestimate the proportion of your readership who are housebound or suffering from serious mental or physical illness. In an absolutely frightening proportion of cases, when you find yourself asking the question "Jeez, does this guy ever leave the house?", the answer would make you weep. In an absolutely frightening proportion of cases, when someone makes a comment like "god, why don't you just get a life/get a girlfriend/get a job?", they are making a suggestion that is roughly as unrealistic as ordering their enemy to sprout wings and fly. Why is the internet such a mean place? Because so many of the people writing on it are in more or less constant pain. Why do people take things so seriously on the internet? Because for so many of them, it is their only source of human contact.
Occasioned by this:
"Last October, The Philadelphia Weekly published an article by a woman who wrote of her inability to function after a car accident (She hadn’t had health insurance). Here was one comment by a woman calling herself Rux P.:
"...Get a spine!! I’ve had breast cancer, a mastectomy and chemo. with minor health coverage and survived it... Get a minnie mouse bandage and go to sleep."
Why is the Internet such a cruel playground?
Yes, Taffy, why was "Rux P" so short-tempered and unsympathetic? Perhaps "Rux P" was just having a bit of a bad day that day, what with the severe breast cancer and all.
I'm not saying that we should cut people unlimited amounts of slack - there are some rather juvenile people out there, plus even people who are really having a bad time sometimes have to be censored or shut down on simple utilitarian grounds if they're causing too much trouble. But in general, it's worth wielding the moderator's hammer with a little bit of sympathy for the fact that you're often dealing with some really very unhappy people, and that it's often better to recognise this and have a bit of common humanity rather than taking the Nurse Ratchet approach to anyone you find difficult to deal with.
I appreciate that many readers will find it strange or even hypocritical to hear such sentiments coming from this source, but I do have to point out that this blog was once a lot more popular than it is now, Crooked Timber is still a very popular blog, as was Adequacy.org in its day, and despite the obvious pitfalls and dangers associated with my own dysfunctional personality and style (many of which are the direct result of lack of sleep, awww diddums), none of them ever had anything like the sorts of problems that sites run by the self-appointed gurus of web community moderation are beset with.
While I'd agree with the subtext against a certain style of moderation [1], it's worth pointing out that, as a rough working hypothesis, being interested in, say, snarky views on finance, philosophy and academic politics would seem, cetus paribus to be more closely correlated with 'being able to leave the house and function in society' than an interest in SF.
ReplyDelete[1] Which backfired horribly on Boing Boing a few years back, IIRC.
that's a good point actually.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, there's a lot to be said for GIF Theory (as per Krahulik and Holkins, 2004)
ReplyDeleteSo is it true d2 was jsm on adequacy.org? Genius!
ReplyDeleteProduct of popularity: CT etc. never had and will never have the sort of traffic that boingboing pulls in, and the bigger the bell curve the bigger the tails.
ReplyDeleteAnd I have to admit that several years of encountering IRL people who are deeply and/or professionally interested in finance, politics and economics has made me appreciate how many of them are very, very odd, mentally. (Though admittedly they're normally in reasonable physical health.)
I can unify Ajay's theory and mine by noting that boredom is a form of pain.
ReplyDeleteSo is it true d2 was jsm on adequacy.org?
ReplyDeleteit's a little more complicated than that, but I am no longer completely denying having anything to do with it.
Because for so many of them, it is their only source of human contact.
ReplyDeleteAs if there were something wrong with that.
I see you're intent on alienating the last group of people who would have any interest in your blog.
ReplyDeleteOh, get a life.
ReplyDeleteMaybe the fact that the comments link is only available on the front page of this blog and not on individual entries helps?
ReplyDeleteComment is Free ran a similar piece a while ago (although not using emotive medical examples, I think). What was funny about the CiF piece was that the author railed against anonymity on CiF and the nastiness it seemed to engender, without realising that it was CiF policy to not use real names. (Presumably to avoid newbie women getting harassed, or something.)
ReplyDeleteAnyway, policy or no, the more fundamental problem here is that you can't get rid of anonymity in public comment sections - creepy and unrealistic "Internet driving license" plans notwithstanding. People can, you know, lie about their identity on the internets - without consequences, if they are careful that their IP address doesn't identify themselves or their employer.
Well, of course, you could put your articles behind a paywall. But that would just be silly.
You can to some degree get rid of indistinguishable anonymity, by requiring people to use a handle. I think this has a civilising effect.
ReplyDeletePeople who use their real names can be just as bad as anonymous trolls, if they make a little effort.
ReplyDeleteThey can, but generally they don't - something about having their words exposed to the entire online world does seem to inhibit people from really excessive behaviour. I think the last time I saw a trollfight of concentrated "I know you are but what am I?" nastiness, between two people both using their own names it was on Usenet, most of which was a snug backroom compared to the open plains of the Web.
ReplyDeleteAdmittedly the Internet is, by and large, the place I go when fibro pain is distracting me from doing useful work. Or when my LaTeX is compiling and the server's slow, as I claim on CT when another commenter asks. But I usually falsely blame the latter when people walk by and ask how I'm doing, because I'd rather not talk about the former over and over again over the course of a day.
ReplyDeleteSo even among the non-shut-in regular readership, there's likely to be a substantial number of people with chronic pain and/or illness. There's a hell of a lot of suffering happening everywhere in the world, I think's the takeaway.
Anyway, back to my regularly scheduled miscellaneous lurking and trying to see straight. Have fun trolling us mathematicians :)
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