Can of worms (late edition)

[hirez]

You'll have noticed I've been banging on about this Kathy Sierra business rather a lot. That's because I think it's all a bit rubbish.

It's a bit rubbish that we understand Internet 'business as usual' requires the user to 'grow some skin'. While I'm not advocating mass Bowlderisation, I think I can comfortably say that the Usenet (and in the old days, the sweatier corners of Cix) is the canonical example of how not to do it. I also believe that 'code of conduct' thing to be Guardianista-handwringy and cringeworthy. The 'free speech' people have entirely missed the point and the thing will get rules-lawyered to bits. The shorter and more useful version is 'Keep a civil tongue in your head'.

You'll note that this (as far as I can tell and there's a poll coming up so you can tell me exactly how wrong and male-oriented my viewpoint may be) is a lot less of a problem on LJ. Not because of the alleged demographic, though that might be part of it, but because Fuckwad removal tools are built right into the system. (Ok, I would really like to see comment disemvowelling, rather than just deletion, but what we've got seems to work.)

And then there's this, which is indicative of more rubbish behaviour. (In short, IRC users with female names are 25 times more likely to get hassle than those with male names. PDF link.)

(There's probably a better way of arranging or phrasing this, but I am by no means an expert on LJ-polls. Please bear with me.)

[Poll #965419]

Comments

[juliann.livejournal.com]

Considering that I have been on the net 15 years and have been harassed less than a handful of times, it seems a lot better than the rest of the universe. I did have one "stalker" (just some young kid who had a crush on me and always turned up at my speaking engagements, the only problem was that he got my pone number and whined at me once or twice until I told him mom) but again I've had much, much worse experiences in life with people who wouldn't have known what to do with a computer if their lives depended on it.

[fluffymormegil.livejournal.com]

Both questions are missing box 4.5 "... actually, I haven't, but some of the shite my friends have had to put up with is bloody obnoxious and worthy of a good kicking."

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Hm. Good point. Feel free to point people at this.

I've not had any problems that I didn't actively cause myself by being drunk and/or obnoxious. However, I've been told of others' experiences and it made me wonder if I'm living in a (male-privileged?) bubble. Hence poll.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

... And thinking about it a bit harder, I'm wary of making the assumption that whoever is subjected to that shite is incapable of handing out a shoeing themselves. Otherwise one falls into the helpless victim/vengeful protector pit.

Although obviously one should point people at the tools and techniques that can be used to uncover the perpetrators.

[fluffymormegil.livejournal.com]

I make no assumption about who should administer the kickings, of course.

[inulro.livejournal.com]

I fit neatly into that category as well.

[spride.livejournal.com]

I think to call it sexism is to ascribe an intentionality and a considered viewpoint to a mindset that is in fact merely infantile. In other words, they're immature tossers (of ages 5 to 95) and they are misogynistic because they're immature and not because they have a mature, considered ideology of misogyny. The forces and checks that make the wankers grow up will, if successful, reduce the misogyny. Sadly the popular mindset is in collusion with the capitalist hegemony (ten points!) in whose interest it is to promote infantilism, so don't expect it to change real soon.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

It's also worth noting that it is really really hard to be completely anonymous on the internet if somebody knows what they are doing. I know of at least one instance where somebody showed up at a harrasser's work and told her to knock it the fuck off.

[eljaydaly.livejournal.com]

I'm reminded of TNH's immortal words: "Don't be a jerk."

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Oh, absolutely. Making Light (http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/) is my usual example of Getting It Right.

[girfan.livejournal.com]

Way back in the olden days (around 1993/4), I used to be on AOL and a bunch of us intrested in goth music decided to meet up in a private chat room thing once a week. But, the way that AOL had it set up was that you had to enter a general chat area first, then type in the private area info.

Every week, without fail, as one entered the general area, immediately you were asked if you were female and if you were, the size of your breasts, how old you were, location, etc. I learned to type quite quickly to get out of there and into the safe space of the private area.

And, going into the MTV-sponsored area was a hoot. It consisted of loads of teens (I think most were boys around 12 and 13) frantically typing in "you suck!" "no, you suck!", "how old are you? are you female? how big are your breasts?", etc, causing the screen to scroll at such a fast pace, it could hurt your brain.

[thepaintedone.livejournal.com]

As an ex-UPGer who has been in the same thread as Phildo that's a big old yes to 'I've had hassle'.

OTOH, I used to be pretty strident in my debating, so there are quite probably people out there who would cite me as thier example of having hassle. One man's meat and all that.

OTOOH, I've never gone out of my way to really f**k with someone, the way Phildo and ilk sometimes do.

Weirdly, my mother recently got involved with an online community for amateur writers, and has been getting very outraged by some people who are being abusive and using fake login ID's to rig polls on which of this weeks short stories is best. She's been asking me to trace IP addresses to hunt down the culprits. I keep trying to tell her that if the forum owners wont do anything (and they wont), her best bet is to just up sticks and find somewhere else. 15 years expereince of this sort of crap says that once a community get polluted it rarely every recovers.

But she has all the fervour of a new campaigner, just like I did all those years ago :o).

[hirez.livejournal.com]

May I recommend Absolute Write? (http://www.absolutewrite.com/) Specifically the forums, and even more specifically the 'Learn writing with Uncle Jim' thread(s). They are all lovely people who don't put up with that sort of malarkey.

[thepaintedone.livejournal.com]

Cheers for that, I'll pass it along.

[sciamachy.livejournal.com]

Never had any real hassle online that I couldn't deal with. While I sympathise with Kathy I do think she's going a bit far in withdrawing completely from public life - it seems like she's letting the bullies win. Kathy has enough friends & supporters that if anyone ever got up and hassled her like that at one of her speaking gigs, they'd find themselves sat on by 5 overweight & flatulent sysadmins fairly quickly.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Quite so: http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2007/Apr/0306.html

Nevertheless, It's still a bit rubbish that it happened at all.

[sciamachy.livejournal.com]

Nah, quite right. Kathy Sierra's a really nice person too - does her best to help people & all that. I once emailed in a bug I'd found in her beatbox app in "Head First Java" that turned out to be a compatibility issue Sun had kindly introduced between Java 1.4 & 1.5 & she kindly emailed me back a solution - and even entered into some discussion of an alternative solution I'd worked out while waiting for her reply, which is jolly good for someone so busy.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

I have had hassle online, but not recently, and mainly in media where I can 'ignore' or 'kick' a person for it (MUDs, talkers, IRC, Usenet), so generally speaking that's been my reaction. Seriously bad behaviour would usually also result in a log of the conversation being sent to the site/group moderators.

I definitely don't hold with the "It's the internet, what can you do?" attitude. There's plenty of ways to quite majorly inconvenience someone who's stalking or being abusive - getting them banned from a talker or newsgroup, or even reporting abusive emails etc to their ISP.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I definitely don't hold with the "It's the internet, what can you do?" attitude.

Absolutely. It seems to me that it's high time that (fatalistic) notion was challenged.

[aoakley.livejournal.com]

I've had no hassle whatsoever since I mailbombed Mixy into oblivion (well, enough that he had to change his email address) about twelve years ago. Oh, the good old days, when you could actually do that kind of thing without your ISP chucking you off (actually, my ISP at the time was Demon, and the supportdroids in question happened to be uk.peoplg.gothic regulars and congratulated me on my sound morals).

Oh, and there was random local script-kiddie nutter off of LJ about three years ago who claimed he could 0wn0rz my PC, but he went away after a) he portscanned me and realised it wasn't running Windows and b) I identified him and listed other members of his household, namely his mum, whom I threatened to expose his activities to. But that was so trivial as to barely fit the description of "hassle".

[reddragdiva]

Oh, well done.

Have you ever seen a picture of him? Roadieing appears to be genetic.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Would that be the mailbombing through some midwestern Uni listserver that just happened to be adminned by Johnny VerBurg, who emailed me going "Do you know this pillock?", or a different one? :)

[aeia.livejournal.com]

Never had much on the internet, but then again I don't go into chat rooms etc.

One thing you missed is the

Iam a bloke..

... and I've pretended to be a girly online ...

Probably not so much now, but back in the days of Micronet, BBS's, CIX etc poeple sometimesdid not believe you were a real female but a bloke prtending to be one. I've heard stories of this happening now, blokes pretending to be famale and striking up an online relationship with poeple. Not sure it happens the other way round so much.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

That's more or less a different set of questions, I think.

I've certainly met people who have adopted male or gender-neutral names so as to avoid the knuckle-draggers.

[oryctolagus.livejournal.com]

I've had a significant amount of hassle online - most of it to do with the band. And mostly because I've been daft enough to take issue with people who've posted things that are a) untrue, b) negative or c) just plain unpleasant. It seems that 'freedom of speech' only extends to the initial critcism - not to what you say in your defence.

I've also lost count of the number of times someone's been quite unpleasant only to have someone else tell me that I should expect abuse because I'm in a band - apparently if I don't want negative, abusive critcism I should give it up. No wonder Kathy has decided to withdraw from public life - it's probably the only real way to avoid it.

I've also been round and knocked on someone's door. Amazing how some people are not nearly so brave to your face as they are behind a screen.

[girfan.livejournal.com]

I've also been round and knocked on someone's door. Amazing how some people are not nearly so brave to your face as they are behind a screen.

An interesting option...as long as they are in the same geographical location as you. I don't think I'll be flying anywhere just to prove a point! ;)

[mr-tom.livejournal.com]

I think I can comfortably say that the Usenet ... is the canonical example of how not to do it

I'm not sure I agree with that. One of the plus sides of the Usenet is its self-policing nature - a newsgroup is a truly public space, whereas a blog is owned by an individual. There's a sort of mob-rule in the former that keeps a moderate standard of behaviour, whereas the latter is like being Cnut.

I used to believe that one should only be allowed onto the http after surviving on nntp for 6 months - twattish behaviour got thrashed out of people pretty quickly on the usenet.

But maybe that's just because I happened to hang around relatively safe corners of the usenet.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Hm. I think a newsgroup is sort of vaguely public. In fact, I think the things are the worst of both worlds. They're public enough that one can do whatever one likes anywhere one cares to, yet not private enough that there are useful technical/social sanctions for behaviour outside of the local norm.

To pretend otherwise is... what the majority of Usenet users do, but it's entirely futile. The malarkey in rec.woodworking is a case in point. Hell, any sort of 'newsgroup invasion' instantly proves that.

See also the entirely insufferable uk.config.

Usenet works when everybody involves understands and has a vested interest in 'the Right Thing'. Bofhnet, for instance. As soon as there are Rules Lawyers, it's doomed.

[reddragdiva]

Wikipedia finds the opposite - there's a common variety of problematic arse who can't get past a robust and forthright Usenet style of discourse and, in due course, finds themselves ejected for a year. Then they come back and do it again. "This is not Usenet and you have to be nice to people. And we're the hardened veteran Usenet arseholes telling you this."

[reddragdiva]

Bah, pooftahs. When the Church of Scientology tries to get you fired and sends real lawyers after you, that's worthy of a flame-warrior response.

[lastaii.livejournal.com]

Funnily enough I've never had any problems on t'internet since I stopped using IRC. Even then, in the darkest of times, pban was your friend...