On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 16:46 UTC (Thu) by jackb (guest, #41909)
Parent article: On the sickness of our community

The Kathy Sierra post was surprisingly insightful in that she identified the actual culprits (sociopaths) and how they are skilled at mobilizing well-intentioned mobs for their own purposes.

This is the entire history of human society, basically.

A good starting point toward to a better community is to recognize that the problem starts and ends with sociopaths, and that sociopaths come in all races and genders, and resist the temptation to get deflected into pointless conversations about those subjects which only draws attention away from where it should be.

It's not an easy problem to solve, however. Historically, standing up to sociopaths was not a successful strategy for passing on genes so natural selection has given us a deep aversion to doing so.

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On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 10, 2014 5:41 UTC (Fri) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link] (2 responses)

Threats on Internet are often carried out by persons who would never do them in face-to-face situations as they fear retaliation. On Internet they assume that their anonymity cannot be exposed so they proceed with threats.

However, those people typically are not that careful at protecting their anonymity and quick search by IP or email reveals a lot. So some activists have found that by spending little efforts they can find the haters real names etc. Then they just publishing all they found. In most cases this alone is enough to silence the attacks. It also helps to state that all collected information can be used, say, for police investigation of threats.

If one consistently do that with any attacks early on, it will stop the future hatred.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 10, 2014 9:21 UTC (Fri) by palmer_eldritch (guest, #95160) [Link] (1 responses)

Or the haters will start caring about protecting their anonymity. It doesn't mean it shouldn't be done though.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 10, 2014 9:38 UTC (Fri) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link]

From a practical experience that I am aware of haters are not that smart to consistently use anonymizing tools. In fact often they assume that a web mail account under a pseudonym without anything like Tor etc. is good enough.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 16, 2014 13:53 UTC (Thu) by ksandstr (guest, #60862) [Link] (1 responses)

>The Kathy Sierra post was surprisingly insightful in that she identified the actual culprits (sociopaths) and how they are skilled at mobilizing well-intentioned mobs for their own purposes.

A problem with Kathy Sierra's post is that it persists with scapegoating Andrew "weev" Auernheimer without providing any primary evidence whatsoever. Indeed along the same narrative we have quite a few articles (e.g. in the New York Times) calling him basically anything and everything on account of the media zeitgeist having been on his back since the non-hack that made a public fool out of Apple and AT&T.

To contrast we have this <URL:https://weev.livejournal.com/409913.html> straight from the horse's mouth. Yet no-one seems to care that the whipping-boy du jour has anything to say for himself, like a medieval witch trial where the accused's complaint is regarded only as further evidence against them. Instead there are claims of sociopathy to seemingly pre-empt anything he might have to say: "he's clearly just manipulating you! you're an useful fool, a willing sockpuppet!"; and appeals to grave subjective terror for which no criminal investigation has occurred, no arrests have been made, no charges pressed, and certainly no convictions passed. Certainly if the police were systematically incapable and/or in cahoots with "trolls"... but this outcome also results when there's no crime at all, such as when it is merely an obsession by a prominent blogger.

This certainly seems like an instance of the bizarre American victim-venerating culture which, perversely enough, genuinely victimizes those whom the prominent victim-roles wish to destroy. These are hit-pieces and nothing more.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 16, 2014 14:13 UTC (Thu) by jackb (guest, #41909) [Link]

I don't know whether weev is or is not a sociopath, or even if Kathy Sierra is or is not a sociopath.

I'm encouraged by the fact that the public discussion is moving in a more productive direction.

Once we generally realize that to solve solve societal problems we need tools to detect and avoid sociopaths, that mere realization is a significant improvement.