Posts by Stephen Judd
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Oh, another thing Metafilter did was make people pay $5 for membership. It's a token payment, but repeated trolling becomes expensive.
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other than a new army of moderators, what can be done to limit these dicks?
You don't need an army of moderators, just a couple. My fave hangout, Metafilter, has thousands of active users but only three people with mod privilege. But what you do need, based on my observation of successful long-lived forums I have participated in, is some or all of:
-- an explicit policy from the outset. Then people who break it can be referred to the policy for a first offence.
-- an "offtopic" forum and a "meta" forum for rubbish, and discussions about the community respectively. Then when people want somewhere to talk about cats, or to argue about whether another member is out of line, you can point them at those forums. And then you have a way of preventing troll-feeding and thread-derailment.
-- membership. PA has gone one step further by asking people to use their real names, but I think you can go a long way by making people sign up. Once people establish an identity , they have an investment in preserving its reputation.
-- seed the group early on with people who set the tone you want to have; then cultural norms develop and posters become self-policing.
-- make your moderation lighthanded (ie infrequent and forgiving) but visible (ie leave a note saying "this comment was deleted")
-- make your moderators visible benevolent dictators.
-- have a "flag this comment" facility to make abuse easy to report, so that inflammatory material is deleted quickly before people get upset and pile on. -
Anyone who's interested in the US attorney scandal, which seems like this decade's Saturday Night Massacre only worse, should be reading Talking Points Memo, which is doing an amazing job of digging the dirt and joining the dots.
It can be read both inside and outside the USA :)
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I wonder if what we see has something to do with the homogenous world certain people inhabit.
If you mostly hang out in a mileu where nasty people say nasty things, you may start to believe that it is actually normal. And then you are somewhere else, unconscious of how exposed you are, and respond as you normally would, and it emerges that shitcock is not in fact a recognised part of conventional discourse.
I say "people" but it does seem to be mostly men :( Which reminds me that there is a ton of research out there about what happens when internet identities are constructed as female, and it is very gloomy indeed.
Another thing is that although humour is marvellous tool for deserved deflation of the powerful, it is also an excellent way to stomp on members of an outgroup and enforce tribal affiliation, and a brilliant excuse for saying any horrible thing. I am sure that the person behind this will claim that they were just having fun, making a joke, whatever. Gosh, you didn't think I was _serious_, did you? Just like Ann Coulter saying liberals should be hung for treason - ha ha, can't you take a joke? You can't counter such people by saying "that's not funny", because they will say "it is to me!"
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doing some stupid stuff to some prisoners,
Well, when the Iranians do the same to those British sailors, that'll be just fine, won't it? It's only stupid stuff.
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81stcolumn: that'd be a very interesting discussion to have, but I don't think we'd disagree all that much. All I wanted to do was point out that it was very, very odd of Simon to say that people on the left supported Saudia Arabia and its human rights record out of fear or hatred for George Bush.
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Our democratic rights are far less under attack than, for example, those of women in Saudi Arabia, and yet confronted by the dreadful George Bush, we've forgotten our internationalism.
But that's a terrible example. One of the major criticisms of Bush from the Left (and from anyone, I hope) is that he has apparently completely ignored the Saudi role in 9/11 and in funding Al Qaeda and in spreading fundamentalist Islam via Wahhabi schools, and basically giving carte blanche to the Saudis as long as the oil keeps flowing. Who on the left, inflamed by the dreadful George Bush, is on the same side as the house of Saud?
Have I completely misunderstood what you're saying?
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Russell:
It's also important to note that when he killed his mother, Mark Burton didn't suddenly snap. His condition had deteriorated over weeks, he was unmonitored and using drugs, he lived in an unsafe house and then eventually couldn't be located at all, and he acted on very specific paranoid beliefs about a loved one.
The situation now is completely different - apart from anything else, Burton is reported to be taking his meds and committed to rehabilitation, which he wasn't at the time he killed his mother.
Raymond:
Six years later he is in a smilar position.
Depends what you mean by "similar", I guess.
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No worries - let's just call it a robust and frank exchange of views. :)
In answer to your question, I couldn't give a rat's about the background of people in the supermarket. I would be concerned about people with a pattern of offending against children in a situation where there was opportunity to have them alone and unsupervised. That weird guy who collects the trollies? Couldn't care less.
Don't get me wrong - the idea of harm befalling my child is terrible. But you can't make important decisions on fear alone, and in this case I think something really unfair has been done on the basis of uninformed fear. Perhaps I belaboured that point a little too snarkily.
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There's a market for all sorts of things Richard -- does that get every supplier off the hook? I don't think so...