Today's topic for discussion is:

Today's idiocracy smackdown (nsfw), brought to you by And I Am Not Lying.

posted at: 17:58 | permanent link to this entry

Of Online Communities and Assembly

[I posted the following on a discussion thread involving the use of multiply-sourced logins to evade community moderation, and might be cross-posted elsewhere. Cleaned and Corrected, this version should be the first part of several.] Online Forums are assemblies The "trolls with {fake} alternate logins" problem is really one of defending three of the most critical freedoms we have in this country: speech, press, and "peacable" assembly. Online forums, as long as they've existed, have removed the requirement of geography--and to a lesser extent, time--from these assemblies. As internet access has spread, forum access has gone along, forming clusters of assembly between disparate people around the globe. Regardless of basis, wherever assemblies are found, there is usually honest discussion; where there is discussion, thought and consensus will eventually follow. Out of these assemblies, societies and cultures form. For the past 30+ years, these new assemblies have been established without regard to geography, and the benefits of these assemblies are being applied likewise. Trolls vs. Assembly So, how do trolls and "alts" factor? The utility assemblies produce, as measured in knowledge, reason, satisfaction, among other effects, drives an equally large market for interfering with such assemblies. Depending on the natures of the antagonists and their target assembly, This is the same market that has produced, throughout history, innovations such as reporter killings, press seizures, false accusations of assembly members, "opt-out" spyware, speech hecklers (e.g. Code Pink), sharia's rules against images of Mohammed, "anarchist" plants in peaceful demonstrations, party "whips", fire-hosing of marchers, election rigging, "targeted marketing", egging/pieing of speakers, and forum trolls. While the examples I've mentioned come from a diverse set of people and cultures, their goal is topologically the same: to interfere with legitimate assembly, via different means. Where the cronies in the Ministry of Information control a publication's content, the "speech hecklers" minimize the useful podium time for speakers, and the muslim rage mobs set embassies alight as a warning to cartoon-publishing nations, the online troll seeks to disrupt the natural flow of conversation through visual and/or logical pollution. It's a matter of educated guesswork as to what motivates a troll; it can be paid with tangibles and/or credibility by an interested party (a 'shill', as I call them), or gratified for filling some psychiatric desire. While the nature of an interrupted discussion can be an indicator, it's a vague indicator at best, making pattern analysis necessary to estimate a troll's motivation. Troll Control Regardless of motivation, the troll seeks to interfere with assembly, and should be rightly despised for doing so. However, such unamericans exist, and control of such unamericans is a measure of forum robustness. In an online community, the strongest tools for "troll control" are active server-side effects (e.g., alt-linking, comment/thread/user tagging, anonymous posting), and passive user-side (e.g., ignore a user, trusted party lists, block/allow images from x, nesting) effects. Each additional capability makes a job that much more difficult for trolls.

posted at: 17:03 | permanent link to this entry