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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.
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
Trolling Will Get Worse; it Will Never Get Better.
FTFY...
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Yup. Basically, "we asked a bunch of people to predict the future, and there was a significant degree of pessimism, although there was also a plurality of optimists."
What meaning are we supposed to gather from this? It's not even a well-characterized sample—it's just "we asked a bunch of people with strong opinions." This is not news—it's noise.
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 really like the increased content, but ugh..the people that came with it.
But that's what you get. If you've ever had a job that deals with the general public, you quickly realize how fscked in the head 90% of the public is.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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.
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
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.
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.
Yes, I remember those days, but it is not 90% of the population. The truth is that probably 90% of the trolls are gutless little 12-19 year old boys who get beat up at school every day and trolling makes them feel powerful the only way they know how. Trolling will always exist because there will always be assholes and sociopaths, but it's rampant nature right now is indicative of deep social problems in our society, and it will drop off dramatically if we address those problems.
That or we can just go for universal ID and eliminate online anonymity. I hope this day never comes, but it is a solid fact that the risk/reward for being an asshole or worse online goes way down when the cops, or just some random guy might show up at your front door and make your life difficult.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
Jokes on you. The trolls are letting you troll them to troll you so they can troll you more while they wait for their script to finish.
You're talking about Eternal September. The Internet was a lot smaller back then, and had a lot less idiocy for sure, however I'm not so sure about "nicer". USENET was infamous for "flame wars". But the difference was that, back then, the flamewars were generally between intelligent academics, and were very nasty arguments between people but with actual reason and intelligence. Whereas today, you just need to read the comments below and mass-media news article (esp. anything political), or YouTube comments, and you'll see stuff that makes you wonder if those people ever even finished 6th grade or if they just got "social promotions" to graduate high school while being functionally illiterate.
I have to disagree about dealing with the general public. I've had to do that a little, but not that much, but I did have a grocery-bagging job in high school back when they still had such jobs. Most people were fine; a few were jerks, more than a few were thoughtless, but overall they weren't horrible, certainly not 90%. However, that's based on a pretty limited interaction, in public. The thing that's different about the internet is that people can be anonymous or semi-anonymous keyboard warriors, and aren't personally accountable for their comments. Just look at some of the outright hateful, mean-spirited, and even downright racist or genocidal comments after a political news article, especially from the Trump supporters. People don't generally act that nastily in public, because if they did say such things, they'd very likely get punched. (And I'm not sure they'd even be prosecuted for assault, as I'm pretty sure courts and prosecutors take into account verbal incitement.) But behind a keyboard, some fat-ass POS can spew white supremacist drivel on a public message board anonymously without much fear of repercussions. So likely, many of the people you walk past in public really *are* "fscked in the head" much worse than you realize, but they're keeping it under wraps while they're in public. The Internet lets them show that side of themselves.
And I don't see how that's likely to improve any time soon. Many (most?) people are nasty, vile, despicable creatures underneath, and the only way to hide that, the way we did in the pre-Internet days, is to severely curtail the forms of expression they have available to them, which means eliminating comment boards (as many sites have already done), or requiring people to post their real name, basically eliminating anonymity. Even that only has so much effect, because people can be anywhere, not local to those they offend.
Face it; the Internet's power is democratization, letting anyone and everyone have great power of global, inexpensive communication is going to have both positive and negative effects.