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Can A Corner of the Internet Be Made Safe From Trolls?
Can entropy be reversed? mused Isaac Asimov in his short-short story The Last Question [princeton.edu]. Less cosmically, folks logged on the Internet probably wonder the same about online trolls. While the term "troll" could refer to any number of abuses, real or imagined, on online or old media forums, the New York Times recently ran a pair of stories (warning: possible paywall) about trolls in the sense of foaming vitriol and/or harrassment perpetrated by mostly anonymous commentators. Quentin Hardy thinks some of it can be traced to the world of gaming, which offered participants a safe space to engage in arguably anti-social behavior [nytimes.com] such as "griefing", the practice of ganging up on a hapless victim for no obvious competitive reason. Hardy quotes entrepreneur Anil Dash, a critic of GamerGate:
“Once a target is identified, it becomes a competition to see who can be the most ruthless, and the ones who feel the most powerless will do the most extreme thing just to get noticed and voted up.”
Had this behavior been confined to the games themselves, it would have attracted little outside attention. Unfortunately, says Hardy, it didn't.
Mike Isaac reports on Imzy, a site started by ex-Redditor Dan McComas last September; it's another attempt to improve on Reddit [nytimes.com], in part by blocking or discouraging trolls, racists and haters. Unlike several other failed Reddit competitors mentioned in the piece, Imzy's approach [imzy.com] is to build membership gradually, having some communities that require invitations to participate, and enforcing rules banning indecent posts or abusive behavior. Imzy encourages "tipping" (paying other users for uploading useful content, or moderating); the site plans to make money by taking a cut of the tips [arstechnica.com]. It sounds promising, but Ning co-founder Gina Bianchini gave Isaac a dose of reality:
“This is a classic situation where someone thinks that the thing that worked in 2006 will work in 2016 if they clean up the design and make it ‘nicer,’” she said. “Over a decade later and there is no Reddit-killer. There’s a reason for that.”
