Slashdot Mirror
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.
Trolling Will Get Worse; it Will Never Get Better.
FTFY...
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
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.
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.
Modern 'trolling' is just abuse. The meaning of the word has changed, to the detriment of subtlety.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
One of my local papers has been publishing articles based on interviews with Trump readers.
My favorite — if you want to call it that — is people believing that Trump will bring back the 1980's manufacturing jobs that require a high school diploma or minimal education. The reality on the ground is that newer factories are automated, requires fewer workers and a college diploma. When John Deere opened a new factory, they got 10,000+ applications for 800 jobs.
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.
The Republican party has been actively promoting ignorance because it gets them votes. It worked right up until Trump got elected.
Now they need to deal with an ignorant and irrational support base that is unpredictable and could turn on them at any time for any reason... though I think it's when they finally cripple the ACA and their voters start actually dying. It could also be when 4 years have passed and their kids haven't gotten black lung yet.
This. I know it's one we've almost certainly lost, like "hacker" meaning anything other than "cracker" or "computer criminal", but "trolling" was a fine distinction of taking a deliberately inflammatory position (whether you actually held it or not) in an attempt to goad others into taking completely unreasonably positions on the other extreme in response, and laughing at the nonsense that ensued.
Degrading and broadening it to a simple "someone who's mean on the Internet" is another little piece of our culture slipping away...
I know, kids on my lawn and all that.
I would argue that Slashdot has gotten less civil due to the same normalization of trolling/hostility as is happening on the web at large. The Libertarian/stupid mentality on Slashdot is no dumber than it is on Breitbart - except that now it has a whole new pool of unthinking trolls to quote from ;-)
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...