// this site nolonger? last 10/04. //
About this site: Creative ways to manage online communities and user-generated content.
written by? it *is* T.Coates. very good, clear writing here.
You can ban user names easily, but it's far from easy to ban real-life people. All they have to do is sign up for a free e-mail account, and re-register on your site.
ah. this was my thought when reading Dibbell's My Tiny Life.
Many trolling users will maintain several concurrent accounts, which they will use to support the position of their prime identity - making all online battles seem larger and more significant than they actually are and obfuscating the fact that it's just one troublemaker working quite hard to spoil the experience for all the others. These alternative user names are often known as "Sock-puppets" for vaguely obvious reasons. I've seen people using these multiple user names to create identities that are almost identical to other user's self-representations (a duplicated character in the username - or sometimes just a space after their name, depending on the software) and then using that identity to suggest that their alternative usernames, "might have a point - maybe it's best not to wind them up any more."
wow, who (why!) goes to this trouble? what is the motivation!?
Solution: a technique we've been using on Barbelith recently to deal with a particularly thorough and unpleasant troll-attack. A user is marked as tagged ...When they next login, a cookie is placed upon the browser that they use. From then on, any other user-name that logs in via that machine will immediately and automatically be tagged in turn. If that latter user then moves to a different computer and logs in, that computer too will have a cookie on it that marks it as being 'used by trolling users' - and any subsequent logins on that computer by different user names will result in those user names also being tagged. conversation in
>>comments => 'conversation with an avowed slashdot troll' -huh!
20721 said: let me just say that, as a slashdot troll, i have a firewall which allows me to dynamically modify my o/s fingerprint, a highly adaptive cookie manager/poisoner that can decode many cookies in realtime...
please allow me to introduce myself.
i wandered onto this article through a link on k5 huh which I just marked, kuro5shin.
abusive users are generally much more capable people than you seem to give them credit for.
you yourself describe your role as 'abusive user'!? what is the satisfaction? ah, read on...bold below.
Tom Coates said: With regards to 20271 - I have no doubt that your troll status is secure and strong! All I would say is that I suspect you're a member of a relatively small and particularly technically skilled elite among trolls and - as such - not really the main subject of my posting on this site. see he is the author.
20721 said: "small and skilled": isn't that a perfect description of the population you're labelling as "trolls"? i believe you have misunderstood my point. my point was, if you embark down a road of engaging the enemy with security based on obscurity on the hopes that the enemy is dumber than you, you will lose- badly. well designed solutions, as a starter, are ones which you yourself cannot think of a way to break. this should be the starting bar.
Tom Coates said: Nope - i don't think I'm talking about a small group of highly skilled individuals when I'm talking about trolls. That there are technically skilled individuals operating as trolls is self-evident but - on the whole - they're massively outweighed by that class of people that "one might want to exclude from an online community" based on whatever particular criteria that an individual community decided were appropraite.
20721 said: i believe that it takes a certain amount of hubris to assume that the people you want to exclude are, by their nature, not as smart as you. you may be right about the people you're trying to exclude; i defer to your judgement, i'm not a member of the communities you are; but where i come from, the best & the brightest are the ones being cast out. they're cast out from communities by the following chain of events: 1) secretive backhanded moderation tactic by the admins is discovered2) someone alerts the community3) the most technically apt in the community are able to reproduce the backhanded moderation tactic and verify its existence4) these people call foul and are labelled "trolls" for doing so, leading to the institution of more of 1) (repeat). this is how i started down the road i'm on. i was one of the many people who discovered that the people at slashdot were secretly moderating the users' comments, and one day they moderated the same comment 800 times - and then they lied about it, and said anyone who told the truth about it was a "troll". hence i became what they called me. see: Wicked (the book). and cf Iago.
what i am trying to impress on you is that when you talk about creating a false code of conduct and secretly screwing users, you are engaging in duplicitious behavior. at this point, the truly objective observer must ask: who's being more abusive - the lying administrator, or the banned user? treating people with respect tends to minimize the creation of a hostile populace. that's all i'm trying to say here. treat people with respect. be honest with them. don't try to solve a social problem with a technical solution - don't try to secretly tag their browsers and "infect" their computers, don't emulate the god damned RIAA (?) for crissakes - be honest, be mature, be a good person. if you need to take disciplinary measures in an online community, make them public, make them based on public policy, and make them effective.
i acknowledge freely that there exists no limit to the vulgarity of what can be entered into anonymous discourse on the internet, every politically incorrect viewpoint on earth from anti-semitism to racism of every stripe, jumping unexpectedly into a spirited discussion about lawn care or function pointers. i know this. i know also that law enforcement on the internet is almost completely unresponsive except when defending the interests of highly profitable corporations, stacking the odds against site administrators even more and making the job one of the most thankless & frustrating imaginable.
but at heart, i am a liberal, and i believe that in order to stake out the moral high ground, you have to be honest and forthright in your affairs, ESPECIALLY when you are dealing with those that anger you the most. in virginia today the men who gunned down 14 people are getting to stand trial, parade around in suits, grill the people they shot at and their families, and basically enjoying a due process that they do not deserve under any moral code imaginable.and i defend their right to that process. i believe in that right because i believe that we cannot ever trust in our own infallability of judgement of others. in short i believe that the people who must be treated with the most public, forthright, and open methods of censure are those who offend us the most.
i believe that secret punishments inevitably lead to abuse and combativeness, that they lead to an arms race against people of equal intelligence and unlimited free time. anyway i could say more and dump off links to historical examples, but i think we've both highlighted our viewpoints clearly (and in my case with excessive verbosity as well).
thanks for the thought-provoking discussion, for your courtesy, for your sympathy, and your taste. aw.
Doug Gibson said:
Wouldn't it be interesting if 20721 was really Tom Coates. I mean, the whole discussion didn't REALLY get interesting until 20721 came into it...
Tom Coates said:
I'm afraid I'm quite dull.
wait there's more! Jamie McCarthy from slashdot! apparently said: "20721" is trolling you all. He has scripts that generate hundreds of accounts, sure -- and we nuke them all after he runs them. I'm not going into detail about how I know this because (1) it's boring and (2) I've no desire to explain to the trolls how we're shutting them down. What I will say is that our system of having users metamoderate other users' moderations is an excellent self-correcting scheme. I skimmed the rest of this discussion and I guess Slashdot is being slammed for not being "open" enough. All I can say is to read the FAQ (for one), and to point out that there is no other system that has worked half as well. When other websites get to a tenth the size of Slashdot, they are drowned in trolls, and attention-seekers in general. Slashdot has many parts of its moderation and submission systems invisible to the general public, this is true. And that is a large part of why it hasn't turned into a navel-gazing clique. On sites that make "openness" into a fetish, half the discussion ends up being about the site itself, and the site gets dominated by a handful of people with too much time on their hands. Maybe the question is not "how can Slashdot refuse to let every user see every inch of its database," but instead: "why do sites that pride themselves on openness always seem vulnerable to attention-starved social engineers?" huh: social engineers-.
Tom Coates said: Jamie - thanks for your input.
nyaya said: "20721" justifies their behavior by saying it is to promote public disclosure of enforcement policies, but I think he/she might still be trolling if they were made public and used that way. 20721, what would Slash have to do to convince you to stop being a troll? Having watchdogs for governing bodies is useful, having anti-social personalities ruining good communities isn’t.
20721 said: a lot of people to answer, i'll try my best to get to you all:
nyaya: you haven't caught the irony yet. a "troll" on slashdot is anyone who disagrees with the administration - it's the name they call us. therefore if the administration & i ceased to disagree, they would stop calling me that name, and i would cease to be one. to answer your question more explicitly, those of us who resist have through the years made only one request: that the slashdot administration be honest about the influence it exerts over the moderation system. specifically, because admins have unlimited moderation points, we'd like to see a visible marker every time an admin moderation is made. otherwise who's to say what agenda they're pushing? this "freedom of information act" is necessary because they have historically mass-moderated certain topics in secret - research the mass-moderation scandal if you are so inclined.
romulus: i have NO PROBLEM with closed web communities. i am a member of a few. my problem specifically is with communities that claim to be one thing (user moderated) but are secretly another.
Mike: "I have difficulty with the concept that human beings have any inherent rights at all". wow. i'm gonna take jefferson over you on that one.
jamie: i realize it must be "frusterating" not to be able to moderate me down on this forum (and then pretend the users did it!), but there's no need to hurl insults. i'm not going into detail about what i've got because (1) it's boring and (2) i've no desire to explain to the admins how we're defeating their system. this guy is great.
honestly i wish you'd stop being so defensive and combative about your work and just let people see editor moderation, but it's been three years now that you've spent secretly raping the moderation system so admittedly you've got your work to protect, and i can respect that. great!
[finally:] i am not tom coates, and tom coates is not dull! in my opinion anyone who proposes trying to secretly poison the browsers of users the admins don't like is a VERY interesting person.
whew.
No comments:
Post a Comment