They see me trollin’

They hatin

LOLOLOLOL INTERNETS

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Srsli you guys.

crayoncakes Posted:

jesus christ basically everything in that article is a terrible idea

“let’s crack down on freedom of speech because a 14 year old called me gay guys”

dawg u gay Log in to see images!

male reproductive organmale reproductive organmale reproductive organmale reproductive organmale reproductive organmale reproductive organmale reproductive organmale reproductive organmale reproductive organmale reproductive organmale reproductive organmale reproductive organmale reproductive organmale reproductive organmale reproductive organmale reproductive organ

LET ME SHOW YOU THIS CHART

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#5. Develop Anti-Troll Software

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Imagine a world where you get in a heated argument in a hallway, but before even one sentence can get fully out of your mouth, a robot voice pipes up and tells you to cool it. Well, what sounds like really stupid science-fiction in real life is entirely possible online. Of all the futuristic movies to turn out to be cruelly accurate, who would have thought it’d be Demolition Man?

I’m talking about programs like:

StupidFilter:

This highly experimental piece of software is in beta and will some day be able to recognize comment stupidity the moment it’s posted. They have a demo on their site you can play with.

You plug this code into your comment section and it’s like a strap of tape over the mouth of every teenager who can’t type a sentence without including the word “fail.”

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Robot9000:

This is a program invented by Randall Monroe, the XKCD webcomic guy that requires every post to be unique. If someone types “First!”, no other post can ever consist of just that.

This sounds pointless to anybody who’s never been in a chat room or message board before, but the rest of us know better. Mindless repetition of jokes (or “memes”Log in to see images! is one of the primary tools of bored trolls who want to fill a thread with noise to drown out the signal. For once, many will find themselves using keys other than Ctrl-V.

Audio Preview:

Linguists speculate that no single body of written communication in the history of human language has ever been as collectively very special and horrible as the comments under YouTube videos. After the aforementioned Randall Monroe suggested a feature to force users to hear their comment read aloud before they can post it, YouTube implemented that very thing (though only on an optional basis). Many a YouTuber has sat in dismayed silence after realizing that “lol wut”, when spoken aloud, did not sound as clever a they had first believed.

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Real-Time Voice Censor:

Now we’re in the realm of the real Demolition Man-type solutions. Want to know how bad Microsoft wants to control the trolls on Xbox Live? They’ve patented a real-time voice censoring program. Yeah. You curse into your headset and it bleeps it in real time. How does it know the difference between “The male reproductive organ crows at midnight” and “My male reproductive organ grows at midnight”? With technology. Don’t question it.

Of course, widespread use of this stuff will just kick off the same “DRM vs. pirates” arms race we see any time they try to control human behavior with software. The humans always win.

Also, the technology has to get a whole lot smarter before we can even try. Playing with the StupidFilter demo I linked earlier taught me that it doesn’t find any stupidity in the sentence, “lol, wut your mom farts lolcats.”

There are better ways. For instance, you can…

#3. Unify the Culture

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Experts agree that the Internet has the magical power to turn normal people into ****wads simply by granting them anonymity and an audience. But there’s another cause that gets overlooked. Specifically, that a comment screen abhors a vacuum and will quickly fill it with bumholes.

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It works like this: Everybody is an bumhole in some cirgreat timesstances, and a nice guy in others. You go to Mardi Gras and scream for a lady to show you her mammary glands, but you don’t do the same when sitting at the dinner table with Grandma on Sunday. As this article put it: “The largest determinant of behavior is the perceived social environment.” But often on the Internet, there is no social environment.

To again use our own site as an example, the Cracked forums are consistently less angry and/or insulting than the article comments. Why? Because when you show up on the forums, you find yourself in an existing community, looking at a long list of threads and posts that establish the culture. Just a few minutes of reading gives you a sense of what is and is not acceptable.

But in the comments under an article (or YouTube video, or blog post), it’s a clean slate. If just one dude comes in and submits “LOL WHAT A FAT ****” as the first post, he’s set the tone for everybody and it will only go downhill from there. That’s why modular post situations, where each conversation is completely isolated from the rest, make for some of the ****tiest posting. A man sees an empty room and says, “Well, nobody here, guess I can flip out my dong.”

So how do you fix that?

Universal Moderation Policy:

Something like this has been proposed by some prominent bloggers calling for a blogger Code of Conduct.

Some kind of guidelines for what is and is not acceptable in the comments would be drawn up, and everybody who agrees can adopt it. Those sites would be marked with some kind of symbol or badge, just as copyright and Creative Commons symbols indicate at a glance how intellectual property can be used.

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In a world where those badges are common and commonly recognized, even looking at an empty comment box would let the poster know what’s acceptable there.

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Not the actual badge

Obviously a Lemonparty spammer won’t see a badge and think, “Oh, you mean you don’t want me to act like a douchebag? I do apologize, kind sir!”

But huge chunks of the population will modify their irritating behavior if you make it clear it’s unacceptable (theater chains that reminded patrons to turn off their cell phones—and kicked out people who didn’t—saw immediate results). For some people, they just need a sign in that empty room saying, “NON-male reproductive organ EXPOSURE ZONE” to keep their pants zipped. Give it to them.

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And if that doesn’t work…

#1. Pbum Some Kind of Law or Something Ending Anonymous Internet Use

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And here we go. If all else fails—and I suspect it will—this will happen, eventually. And it will simply be the death of what most of us know as the World Wide Web. But of course this is silly, alarmist thinking, right? How can you ever regulate the wild-wild-west Internet?

Well, they’ve already started doing it in Korea. Everybody gets a 13-digit PIN and you’ve got to enter it any time you want to leave a comment somewhere. They enforce it site by site, via a government agency (the Korean version of the FCC). They’ve started from the top down, forcing every site with more than 200,000 visitors to require the PIN, and they’re going to expand it to every site with 100,000 or more.

There’s a similar movement in Brazil and years ago they tried to do it in France. And don’t forget that American lawmakers are pushing for the same.

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And no, there is nothing about the Internet that would keep them from making such tracking universal. All they need is a redesign of the protocols, which is why the US military is doing exactly that. Once they’ve got their secure, transparent network in place, it’s just a matter of forcing its adoption.

If Web 2.0 was about social networking, Web 3.0 will be about the death of anonymity. You say nobody wants that, but there are three very important and powerful somebodies who do:

1. Copyright holders who want to be able to track pirates;

2. Law enforcement agencies who want to track child predators (don’t forget the Oprah moms demanding the same) and to hunt down hackers;

3. Online advertisers who want to make billions off that 92% of housewives and adults who don’t use social networking for fear of being called a ****whale in public.

Yes, it turns out there’s a reason the Wild West didn’t stay wild. The gunslingers loved it, but the other 99% of the world wanted laws and security and highways. And they were the ones with the money.

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To get legislative momentum for this, all it’ll take is some highly publicized deaths. You know, like that girl that committed suicide a year ago after a MySpace prank. Or Choi Jin-sil, the 40 year old entertainer from Korea who killed herself after relentless online harbumment. Or Kathy Sierra, a popular blogger who canceled public appearances after getting death threats in her comments (and we’re talking about the kind that come with people posting her home address). And don’t forget this horrifying article in the New York Times chronicling the kids who very smoothly transitioned from online trolling to doing real-world harm without blinking an eye.

Next we’ll get experts explaining that it’s not just that anonymity makes offenders harder to catch, but in fact actually causes the bad behavior. Like this article does (“They are not the first to be grotesquely transformed by a new technology that offers easy availability and anonymity to its users”Log in to see images!.

Or this research paper that says due to that interpersonal disconnect, some people are unable to recognize anything that happens on a computer screen as having real-life consequences.

Now we’ve elevated anonymity itself to a public safety threat. We’d better do something about it! With laws!

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And, behind every politician trying to kill anonymity “to protect our children,” there will be an ocean of Time-Warner stockholders applauding the effort, dreaming of a future where every P2P downloader gets a knock on the door from the cops minutes later.

Sure, there’ll still be untamed corners of the web in the future, just as there are still some cowboys around. But in that future, 10 or 20 years from now, us holdouts will all just be sad, deluded men in ridiculous hats.

tl;dr, but I saw ROBOT9000

Someone’s extremely bumhurt, aren’t they?

Well, here’s My Ideas of Why These Ideas Will Never Work

5. Develop Anti-Troll Software

Ok, I agree that most troll posts consist of a bunch of very special nonsense, which the StupidFilter may block. But what if the StupidFilter started blocking posts that were not made by a troll? This could potentially cause problems.

Robot9000? Please, give me a break. Yes, it can block repetitive posts, but trolls will just start posting more diverse memes, thus rendering Robot9000 useless.

Audio Preview? Simple, just turn off the speakers, and troll away!

Real-Time Voice Sensor? Trolls will find ways past that. Trust me, they will.

4. Start a Posse of Moderators, and Arm Them

Great, you’re giving a bunch of people you’ve never even met in real life power that can potentially destroy entire sites? Some of those people could develop “itchy trigger-fingers” and start banning people that disagree with their ideals. It is a common problem with most sites, and giving these people moderation tools is like giving a psycho a loaded .357 magnum and leaving him in the middle of Times Square.

The “Tools”:

Disenvoweling

This will never work, because I think that people who read posts with the vowels missing from the words will still have a clear(ish) idea of what the troll is trying to say. Also, about the bit that says “it will make the troll look very special”, most trolls already look very special when they make posts. This tool is a piece of Log in to see images!.

Karma

Oh goodie, you’re suggesting we use a system of self-moderation that’s already being used by most sites. Brilliant idea, except there’s one flaw: Trolls could potentially coordinate their Karma votes on one particular user, bringing that user’s Karma score so low that it would hit the center of the Earth.

3. Unify the Culture

That’s the thing: you can’t unify internet culture. Some people will instinctively react to a troll post, calling him a ****wad and saying that he is very special. Sure, you can try all you want to make everyone conform to a basic standard. But, in the end, some people will be trolls, and some people will be regular joes who will react to troll posts.

Oh, and about your “Universal Blogger Code of Conduct”: most people will not even glance at it.

2. Up the Stakes for Membership

...ok, I can’t really say anything bad about this idea.

1. Pbum Some Kind of Law or Something Ending Anonymous Internet Use

Can you say “invasion of privacy”? After reading the article, I do think that this idea will help catch online predators, pirates, and hackers. But, here’s the part that ****ed me off:

Online advertisers who want to make billions off that 92% of housewives and adults who don’t use social networking for fear of being called a ****whale in public.

That’s a true invasion of privacy. I really do not think that personal information should be involuntarily given to businesses.

Also, here’s a scenario that the author never really thought of:

Let’s say that there are two little boys: Tommy and Billy. Under a new law that describes what the author meant by “ending anonymous internet use”, Tommy and Billy are both bumigned universal ID’s, complete with pbumwords. Tommy is making analyzed and constructive criticism on some videos that Billy uploaded onto YouTube. Billy is furious at Tommy. Billy then learns Tommy’s universal ID and pbumword, and decides to ruin Tommy’s reputation. He then goes to forums under Tommy’s name, and decides to insult various people, thus causing everyone in their town to hate (or at least think lesser of) him. I know this does not sound serious at first, but keep reading.

Now, let’s say that Billy (still under Tommy’s name) decides to have some fun, and post a fake bomb threat at some local bureaucratic office. After a while, the local police would discover the post, and dispatch a SWAT team. Guess who takes the blame on this one? After the SWAT team arrives in front of Tommy’s house and arrests Tommy, Billy is just sitting on his bum, taking no blame whatsoever, reading comics.

The point of the story is that if internet anonymity is ended, someone could potentially steal someone else’s online identity, and ruin that person’s reputation, or worse…

And those are my reasons on why Mr. Wong’s ideas will never work.