On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 13:23 UTC (Thu) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989)
In reply to: On the sickness of our community by ras
Parent article: On the sickness of our community

> Our editor says he handles this by ignoring it.

(a) Some abuse IS best ignored. It's from somebody having a 'moment'.
(b) Some abuse can be dealt with. Somebody needs to level up as a human being and try being an adult.
(c) Some abuse is insane. No amount of (a) or (b) is going to fix what requires profession medical help.
(d) Some abuse is systematic. Someone is being diabolical in support of a nefarious goal. You may need to lawyer up.

There may be other categories, but the point is that it's a spectrum. (a) puts you in a 'first, do no harm' mode, which minimizes the fees and apologies later. As a default choice, this is hard to argue against.

The sticky wicket is positioning the abuse along the spectrum at the appropriate time. Overall, I submit this is not a solvable problem. The best you can do is think through your responses to each beforehand, and deal with the abuse in context.

+1 for "Turn the other cheek"

Posted Oct 14, 2014 4:04 UTC (Tue) by ThinkRob (guest, #64513) [Link]

Very well put. I'm a big fan of (a), particularly when it comes to online abuse, but I will freely admit that's probably a function of my "online upbringing" consisting principally of BBSs and heavy IRC[1] usage. And as anyone who spent a good deal of time on those can tell you, those mediums had/have a lot of trolling -- to which the "turn the other cheek" response usually works beautifully.

[1] I'm not talking Freenode here either, as folks there are generally civilized. I'm thinking more of some of the, uh, less-well-focused parts of DALnet and EFnet.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 28, 2014 23:21 UTC (Tue) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]

Your ontology doesn't scale; it only deals with abusers as isolated individuals, while the problem with online abuse is that it becomes normalized across whole communities. I think this article gives a more useful perspective: http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/abuse-as-ddos

(Or for a more personal view, the author of that piece has also written recently about why they have quit participating in tech publically: http://juliepagano.com/blog/2014/10/10/life-and-times-of-...)

There's no way for a single individual to usefully defend themselves against DDOS abuse; the only defense is a distributed effort across the community to define cultural norms saying that these things are not okay and to enforce those norms against the jerks who try to stir things up anyway. If you see someone being attacked, don't just abandon them to deal with it themselves; help them out.