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Trolling Will Get Worse Before it Gets Better, Study Says (mashable.com)
If you thought that the internet had a chance of becoming a nicer place at any point in the near future, it might be time to give up hope. From a report: "Harassment, trolls, and an overall tone of griping, distrust, and disgust" will stay the norm on the internet over the next decade, experts told the Pew Research Center in a new report. The Pew Research Center and the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University surveyed about 1,500 technology experts, scholars, corporate practitioners and government leaders in July and August 2016 for the study, and the results are pretty demoralizing. Forty-two percent of respondents thought the internet would stay the same sometimes less-than-pleasant place over the next 10 years, while another 39 percent said they thought the internet would become a more negative environment. Just under 20 percent of experts thought the internet had any chance of getting better over the next decade when it comes to harassment and trolling.
This slashdot news story is clearly a troll.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I suspect the future of trolling is something like this: https://sonichu.com/
Entire wikis created on people, documenting every mistake they ever did on their life, allowing online collaborations between thousands in phishing/harassing. AI and data mining will probably make this much easier as they improve.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
I'd like to see how the left handles being the boogeyman everyone loves to hate.
We have a society that says "selfishness is good" so we get people acting like selfish jerks online, called trolling.
Then we up the ante saying "narcissism is good" - as proven by the politicians we elect (we elected 2 narcissist presidents, for example).
And you think that things will GET BETTER?
No. Things will get worse, and worse and worse and worse until we as a society reject "narcissism is good" and "selfishness is good"
... yeah, didn't think so.
Hell we just gave an internet troll the nuclear codes. Now all the other trolls online have something even greater to aspire to.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
This is what we currently have in Israel, with right wingers doxxing and arranging attacks on leftists. Currently it seems the favored solution is migrating to germany (yes, I know, jews running away to germany, ironic).
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
Trolling Will Get Worse; it Will Never Get Better.
FTFY...
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Trump's trolling will get worse as his popularity ratings continues to slip.
The left knows how to pass legislation (see ObamaCare). The right can't get past "no" (see their aborted healthcare bill).
Solution: Find sites that are moderated so trolls and the merely very uncivil are ejected.
Unfortunately, proper implementation requires identity verification which stifles discussion since few people worth talking to are willing to put their entire life on public record for all eternity.
There's a secondary problem in that most people will end up gravitating to echo chambers, which most often ends up reinforcing ignorance which is kind of the opposite of the Internet's optimal use - sharing information.
I miss the classic usenet trolls. The Archimedes Plutonium guy. Biff. Kibo!
They at least had some class. Modern trolls mostly are an inferior breed.
Social Media is what really ramped this up.
I will never forget in 2009 when a guy I knew years before messaged my wife asking if I was in FB. He wanted me to get on FB. She showed me his profile and it was rife with right wing, nationalistic, xenophobic blather, conspiracties, etc; I was instantly turned off by the whole thing. As the years went by and I have gotten the pressure to join social media(and haven't) I am glad in my decision.
Social Media, whether FB, Twitter or whatever, encourages Troll like behavior and political extremism. You would think that once people aren't anonymous anymore they would temper their "Yea, Cruz' dad killed Kennedy!" tweets, but they don't.
I have access to a FB account, that I jump onto every couple of months or so, just to see whats up, and everytime I get on there I'm disgusted by what I see and read.
I fully realize the irony of posting this as AC but...
Seriously, people, can we all agree not to respond to, and to mod down, all the AC trolls which are out in force on any topic which even remotely touches on politics or culture? I don't care if they are just idiots, paid by the Russians, or just in it for the lulz. I'm over it, and ./ would be a better place if we followed these simple rules.
Logged in users, I'm happy to have a discussion with even if I don't agree. AC trolls though should be shut down, and we have the tools to minimize their visibility. Let's use them.
It's that 'sensitive' people are being triggered. It's really sad to see the the entire civil rights movement so completely taken over by this phony social justice thing and political correctness, which I think were designed by right wingers to sabotage the movement. Thanks Obama!
The basic problem is that we have not realized that Internet's anonymity's lets people say anything they want to.
It is compounded by humanity's innate trust, and the misunderstanding of exactly how full of garbage the internet is.
The existence of valid news sources on the internet make it worse - they give the appearance of validity to the general internet.
To make it even worse, Pravda, the Soviet Union's old ministry of propaganda, changed it's name to RT, and hired a bunch of anonymous posters, making it one of the single most effective propaganda organizations the world has ever seen.
Their stated goals of disrupting the US, breaking the European Union up, and retaking the Ukraine are having an unprecedented success.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
It's as simple as that. Superstition is winning over science. Misinformation is winning over reality. Tribalism is winning over democracy. Anti-vaxers are winning over public health. Climate-deniers, moon-landing-hoaxers, 9/11-hoaxers, chemtrail-loonies, holocaust-deniers and other conspiracy-theorists are winning over history.
All the pillars of civilization: Truth, justice for all, science, democracy, are being attacked at once.
Barbarians have declared open war against Civilization. And they're winning.
You, doubtless, have already made up your mind about how the 'left' would handle it, so that's what you'd see. Pointless exercise.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Well... Originally, the ACA was going to be single-payer and get the US back into the list of first world countries for health care. But it wouldn't pass and they had to do a whole reconciliation effort (well televised and reported) with the republicans basically designed to gut the single-payer and keep the high health care industry profits (yachts for CEOs) intact. If the left would have known how to pass legislation they would have been able to get the original one through and the republicans wouldn't be there crowing about how it was the worst legislation ever and is going to blow up (of course this is because of the hand they had in re-crafting it, but you don't hear them mentioning that).
Unless there is a universal identity source that can have a reputation tied to it, there is no incentive for people to play nice with others.You can get a good sense of how socialable people really are by looking at their anonymous behavior.
Things do seem to be going downhill. Even the AC posts on this site have gotten worse. This suggests a new wave of miscreants. I am curious as to the nature of these miscreants.
Are they simply children coming of age and venting their angst without fear of consequences from their parents or community?
Are they social rejects who eschewed the internet until social media compelled them to choose between engagement and isolation? (I.e., non-nerdy outcasts who are building themselves a home here now that everyone is on the internet.)
Are they idiots who are now present because the technical and social barriers have been lowered?
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
Trolls don't affect me. They post on public or spazzy forums like twitter that I don't take seriously. Trolls are a problem for journalists, so we have to hear about them constantly. They're not a problem for ordinary people.
Entitled normies spilling racist hatred about "white men" and validating each other, outrage-fapping over clickbait, and trying to "educate" each other about hate speech when "hate" is the only thing I see them ever do, create a negative environment that affects me.
It was very interesting to watch Reddit's administrators actively support Russian interference in the US elections through their support of bots, trolls, and repeated Reddit policy violations. It was here on Slashdot, too — but Reddit actively supported it — Slashdot merely tolerated it. And these are forums where we'd expect the audience to be the least tolerant of such behavior—and indeed there was much anger. But not enough to change anything.
From what I remember of the internet 15+ years ago, there was always some level of trolling but the signal:noise ratio was a lot more favorable then.
Some time around 2007-ish everything started to get more accessible to the average person(smartphones?), larger centralized social sites like digg got going and everything kinda rolled slowly downhill. There was a time when facebook was just a "less shitty myspace" and some of the youtube comments were actually readable.
I don't think there's a technically solution to the problem other than quite literally making another internet(with blackjack and hookers).
We need a decentralized network with some built-in barrier to entry, like having the user solve a problem that can't be solved by a bot easily. I remember an old satirical text-based RPG called Kingdom of Loathing that made you take a spelling and grammar test before you could use the chatroom.
Why can't this concept be applied everywhere?
If the left would have known how to pass legislation they would have been able to get the original one through [...]
I wouldn't blame the left for that. It took Obama a long time to figure out that the Republicans were never serious about negotiating anything in good faith on anything.
I'm inclined to believe that trolling is merely the outcome of removing consequences from bad behavior. The Stanford prison experiment showed how power can corrupt individuals and it seems like trolling is the internet equivalent outcome. Sadly, it may come down to needing to develop AI that can police internet forums for us if we want to keep things civil. It's a dangerous solution but it's the only way I foresee things drastically improving without radically overhauling how the internet functions.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Online bullies are the only variety where "just ignore them" actually works. If you don't like the internet, go the fuck outside.
We are likely to keep freedom of speech on the internet. All speech, including hate and abuse. And i'm happy with that.
People need to quit being so sensitive and deal with life and the crap it throws at you.
Mr. I support Hillary Clinton moderate conservative? I don't think so. Republicans not going lock step with Ryan is a GOOD thing, I would rather have a local representative than be only represented by Pelosi and Reid, like the DNC supporters are. Ryan proposed a bill no one liked, just like Obamacare was, and it WASN'T passed, unlike Obamacare. That is the CORRECT way to run things. Its probably beyond your ability to understand.
But I need to be careful arguing with creimer. He will threaten to shoot me and then write a blog about how I am the one bullying him. Yea, that's how bad he is at debating. I trounced him so hard he went to physical threats. I keep repeating what he did and apparently him threating to shoot me has now become me bullying him.
liberals just suck.
Russian propaganda isn't based on anonymous cowards, it's based on real accounts with real reputations. When you datamine the reputation, it comes from endorsements by others in the propagand group. You don't get reputation with ACs.
Those posters don't work for RT BTW, they are under Putin's office, and state media including RT is under another office under Putins office.
"Their stated goals of disrupting the US, breaking the European Union up, and retaking the Ukraine are having an unprecedented success."....
That's not even a fraction of it. Assination attempts on pro-NATO leaders by Russian soldiers given new identities. e.g. Montenegro's PM was nearly killed in February:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/25/montenegro-investigating-russia-alleged-election-coup-plot
Rable rousers (Russian military dressed as civilians, put into Russian speaking areas as fake protesters), this has been a feature in the Baltics recently.
Pure deal making, Russias Vnesheconombank (Putin connected) making 'business' loans that make no business sense and are simply to buy favor. Or Putin connected Oligarchs being liberal with Rubles e.g. see Kushners Vnesheconombank deal, or see Mar a Lago's worthless guest house sold for $95 million to an Oligarch with Putin connections.
Putin does FAR FAR more than simply troll the internet.
As far as I can tell, the only "solution" to trolling is the heavy-handed reddit-style safe-space morality police one where we trade trolls for the massively high and mighty self-righteous. I'll take trolls, actually, thanks.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
In the "old days" (like 1991 or so), the Internet was mostly populated by smart/talented people tied to academics or the computer industry and most discussions seemed to reflect this bias in user population -- well educated, professional, etc.
Now it's much more reflective of the general population, which is all too often stupid, mean and reactive.
How hard can it be to set up an A.I. to dump all the troll posts in a bit bucket?
the pizzaria will troll. There will be a butcher that spins his meat while standing on the counter. There will be a cream-centered caramel candy shaped like Goatse. Aged men will brings bags of lemons in court to drink while prosecuting anyone who copies the image of productivity they own and never understood what in hell a pseudocode diagram or electrical schematic does.
And how will it get worse? Cunning coders will pretend to be editors and talj about it like they dont know what and how: anyone that contradicts their opinion will be censored bya peerage pretending to be just like you; Expansion begins with your broken heart, mind, an soul. Service guaruntees citizenship!
It's already been pointed out that trolls using names tend to be worse than anonymous trolls. Why I'm going to leave as the homework you obviously didn't do before spouting your nonsense. But here is a hint: You could consider what the incentive really is. "Playing nice" in a discussion forum gets you a nice discussion forum, and if that's what you want, then that's your incentive.
Anyway, the rest of your rhetoric is as poorly researched as your premise. Go on, do some quantitative analysis on all the comments since the site's beginnings, classify by anonymity and trollishness, and share some pretty graphs, eh? Sharing is caring.
you idiots are the same that yell Fake News as idiots that give exemptions to public intoxicated individuals as drunkards.
US Code Title 18 section 1343 is Fraud by Wire, Radio, or Televsion and that is what is supposed to be applied, enforcing existing law, not violating 1st Amendment Speach rights.
Treat CNN stories like a typical weather forecaster, a gypsy, National Enquirer, or like Nostradamus, not infringe Free Speach.
The Onion is fake news, of which Trump appeared regularly on there.
There are alot of people being constantly butthurt over opinions, which weren't even remotely intended as trolling. Then there are a bunch of idiots who just can't quit bitching about Trump, mostly totally offtopic. There is the app guy, who actually is a troll, and an idiot with long posts who is trying, but isn't any good at. The problem isn't the trolling, it's the idiots who can't deal with other people, and I don't mean autistic, I mean too dumb and too cowardly to deal with other people, who are the loudest crowd on the internet, because they are in safety. Trolls belong here, idiots don't.
I think that eventually all this will self correct.
Watching monkeys fling poo or being one the monkeys flinging poo is only interesting for so long.
I would not be surprised to see a net decrease in the number of social media posts. I would also not be surprised to see Facebook, Twitter, etc. to all go the way of AOL.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
especially if you try to censor them.
Derp, go look at who voted on the bill. Tell me how many republicans voted for it.
This past election is all the proof I need.
~Less think, more do
I imagine it will continue to get worse.
Currently it seems the favored solution is migrating to germany (yes, I know, jews running away to germany, ironic).
Maybe, maybe not.
Germany really seems to be a good example of the saying about how sometimes you need to burn something down to create something much better. Nazi Germany obviously was a horrible place in many ways, especially for certain people. Modern Germany seems to be one of the best nations in the world to live in. But it also seems to show the sad truism that the only way to normally make a change for the better like that is through a lot of violence and destruction.
...and that's not fake irony, either.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Derp, go look at who voted on the bill. Tell me how many republicans voted for it.
Look at what went into the final ACA bill: 200+ amendments that were sponsored or cosponsored by Republicans. Since the Democrats had the votes to carry the bill, the Republicans sat on the sidelines while eating cake. The making of the final bill was a bipartisan affair.
Derp, go look at who voted on the bill. Tell me how many republicans voted for it.
As I recall, none. Your point?
Companies want to know who everyone is, so they can monetize them. The government wants to know, so they can control them.
This makes people want to have Anonymous Coward as an option.
AC - lets people be Trolls.
A middle ground has to be found. One where we know who you are, so threats can be dealt with. But not get spammed by everyone who wants to use your opinions for marketing sake.
Post where he tells everyone he works for the government.
Then some discussion turned to Obamacare, and in order to make a point you SUDDENLY have been working at a small business for years so you can tell everyone how great it has been for your small business.
Post2
You literally change your story in order to make your fake points. And when people point out you are lying you threaten to shoot them and then cry that they are the ones bullying you. Me making fun of you for lying is not bullying. You threatening to shoot me IS assault with a deadly weapon. You trying to make money off of threatening people is disgusting.
Didn't APK get banned by pimping his website multiple times in every story like this guy is?
Maybe he is APK come back.
Not sure what point the AC was trying to make, sounded like the were attacking "the left". But trolls tend to lean pretty far right politically in the US as well, though some aren't old enough to care much about politics yet.
I think some of the factors that lead a person to find trolling entertaining and a good use of their time likely contributes to them also finding far right politics appealing. Ie, they hate regular people (which as adults they see as standard supporters of Democrats and Republicans) and they hate hipsters and activists (which as adults they see as liberals/leftists/SJWs) and more likely have trouble dating and maybe issues with women in general, so what better way to troll those people as as an adult than align yourself with the far right politically?
Germany would be a nice place if it weren't for all of the censorship.
Before deleting your account, fill it with spaces, tabs, numbers, or some irrelevant information. Because, you know, those profiles are never *really* deleted.
Im not a troll, I'm a concerned ogre that just wants to do its part in speeding up the processing. I'm making the world better by making it worse first.
This is top-secret FBI shit, I could get in deep trouble for even knowing about it but this is a risk I'm willing to take. My typing has alreasy tipped off the NSA and they've dispatched their best men to stop me. They're kicking the door down as I type this.
1: Don't make yourself a target.
2: Don't respond, even if you have a fantastic comeback. Ignore.
3: If on a moderated platform, report.
It's been a good run Slashdot but they got me. I've taken two gunshots to the back. It will be ruled a suicide.
No, I disagree, and quite strongly. 90% of the public are actually reasonable, approachable people. You may not agree with their views on some things but at least you can understand those views.
Only 10% of the public are terrible people. The issue is, terrible people are unremittingly terrible their whole lives. They never quit with their negativity, criminality, shit disturbing, economic dysfunction, ignorant-and-proud-of-it, or whatever their issues are.
That's all it takes to disturb and disrupt society, is that 10%. And their behavior is so prominent and consumes so much of your time that you wind up thinking most people are like that. Or you have perspective but still hate dealing with the 10% so much you reject all public facing jobs.
I'm looking at that page and thinking "What am I supposed to be looking at here"?
My mistake was clicking the link without reading the full post of that Anonymous Coward.
I.e. Without reading the "rather than being irrelevant pro-leftist political submissions. A submission like this shitty one is nowhere to be found." bit.
Apparently the AC above doesn't realize that the "Troll" issue is not just an integral part of Slashdot - it's a fucking moderation category.
But I guess when all you have is a hate hard-on for "leftists" to get you through the day, all you see are leftist conspiracies.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens