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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.
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.