If your business model depends on being "well known"/celebrity (37singles, Arrigton, Seth Godin etc), then you have to accept the trappings that come with that. If you're not prepared to accept the bad things, then don't become well known. Simple. Change your business model so it doesn't rely on your personal 'fame'.
Sorry, but it's just a fact of life. If you become 'famous', you attract criticism, crackpots, abuse, death threats, etc etc.
The Lindberghs eventually grew tired of the never-ending spotlight on the family and came to fear for the safety of their then three-year old second son, Jon. Deciding, therefore, to seek seclusion in Europe, the family sailed from New York under a veil of secrecy on board the SS American Importer in the pre-dawn hours of December 22, 1935.
I think the point (related to community) is that the community made bitterness, cheap laughs at others' expense, etc. acceptable. Now the nutjobs are only two standard deviations from the mean, instead of four.
depends on how you define "acceptable". it's hard to publicly punish someone for bad behaviour on a blog but the wave of indignation shows that it's not accepted if someone crosses a line
"I hate how being harsh has become fashionable. Whatever happened to manners?"
on your blog, you follow up by saying --
"I stand behind those words. Acting bitter on the Internet seems to be increasingly gathering the popularity amongst an audience that’s used to being amused and entertained by cheap attacks."
Two points: the first is that you use the word "bitter" to back up an anecdote of someone using "fucking" as an adjective to describe a poor User Interface experience. I disagree with that assessment, as there's nothing that suggests bitterness by using "fucking." It's merely a more extreme descriptor of the user's anger or exasperation, but it doesn't suggest bitterness, which has a distinctly different flavour (if you will excuse the pun).
Secondly, I don't believe anything "happened" to manners. There have always been people, often a vast majority of a given population, who used much coarser language to describe their everyday life and experience. Often this was a class distinction, thus the reference to "swearing like a sailor" etc. I expect that many people posting here were exposed -- in the context of software engineering or computer science -- to colleagues who were either used to communicating in an academic or professional context. Although coarse language is to be expected to some extent, written communication about features, bugs, etc. in a corporate US context tends to avoid direct expletives for various reasons ("lack of professionalism" etc). This isn't the case in parts of the OSS community or parts of Europe. You may have seen this before -- http://www.vidarholen.net/contents/wordcount/ -- the number of fuck/shit/crap uses in the Linux source code. Do you similarly think that the Linux contributors who provided the patches (or indeed Linus himself) need to "grow up?"
Different contexts, different modes of communication.
But the truth why that dude used "fuck" all over the place? It's a very quick and easy expression of dismay or outrage, and it gets cheap laughs. Whether or not that's an adolescent desire I can't say. Yet some of the most serious commentators on, say, international politics heavily use 'fuck' throughout their own communication. Read some interviews with Pulitzer-winning journalist Seymour Hersh, for instance -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Hersh
I think there are two different phenomena going on here. First, you have anonymous jerks making stupid comments and threats all over the web. No surprise there; people are less thoughtful when they don't have to put their identity behind their words. The second phenomena is when someone tries to make a name for themselves by criticizing something or someone popular. Again, no surprise; it's been shown to be an effective way to get attention.
I don't really have a solution for either of these problems, but I think it's important to make the distinction between these two cases.
A trend I think we'll see in the next year: blogs starting to only allow comments that come through Facebook Connect or similar identification services. In my opinion, that would be a change for the better. People actually think about what they say when their name is attached to it.
I don't think so. The nutjob that apparently threatened Arrington did so on his own blog too.
I really dislike the attention this is gathering, mainly because it just furthers the ego of the few people stirring trouble.
You can never sacrifice liberty and personal privacy for pseudo security. Do you really want a system where you have to login to an internet terminal with your SSN and it logs all the actions you do?
One million dollars to the first person who can make Internet users nicer.
- No, stabbing doesn't count. DANCE does.
- Tie everything you do to your personal, real-you identity? Too much, privacy concerns.
- Raise awareness about how being good to others is better? Since the dawn of mankind we've been trying.
- Mark it as an unsolvable problem? Nah, not here.
- Have somekind of "boy scouts of the internet"? Give recognition with badges (achievements for you gaming folks)?
- Setup a website (this is an old idea I had) "the-golden-rule.com", where you post what YOU want others to do to you, and users can do these stuff to people they know, and brag on the website how they did it? And earn good-doer points?
- Slashdot moderation applied to random content? Imagine if you could select a DOM node (like Firebug's inspect) and label it "flamebait", "funny", which is sent to a central server, so your blog software can filter your comments not showing some? Or users can assign opacity to "bad" content? (I actually thought of this when I saw Snipd working)
Whatever it is, I think the solution goes around promoting good content, and downplaying bad. Just like in real life... bad people are cast aside, becoming pariahs. Yes, I am fully aware it'll be hard to determine what's good and what's bad. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
But anyway, it would be cool to see some kind of tool along these lines.
I think part of the problem is that we now spend most of our lives interacting only with people our own age. As a 26-year-old grad student, I spend the vast majority of my social life interacting with people 23-30 years old. We have to find our values anew with each generation, we don't have the presence of older, wiser people to teach us such values as class.
This is at least one area where I think the new secular, educated culture has regressed from the old, traditional one. Interaction between people of different ages is natural, and I think healthy. It may prevent the sort of inbred cultural environment where perspective is lost, such as was demonstrated by the spitter in that assaulted Arrington.
"This spontaneous reaction was in response to a blog that attempted to be humorous by using the word 'fucking' multiple times in reference to Adobe’s UIs which were perceived as lacking a native look and feel."
There's a sliding scale between being the type of idiot child who thinks that anything at all, no matter how obnoxious, is funny, and being a boring goody-two-shoes who can't take even the slightest joke.
Mr. Cangiano seems to self-identify pretty strongly in the latter camp if he finds that site offensive in some way. "Attempted to be humourous"? Geeze, sounds like Cangiano wouldn't know humour if it was chewing his leg off.
IMO the far ends of both side of the scale - lack of judgement, and lack of humour - are equally problematic. Faced with a choice, I'd probably chose the former, since I fear restriction of speech far more than I fear being offended.
I also note that Cangiano's evident lack of any humour at all would probably be a pretty good reason in itself for people to want to play jokes on him. Sometimes these problems are self-created. Some of the most stable, respectable, mature people I know would find it hard to resist taking a self-important bore down a peg or two, given the chance.
How dare you? I'll defend my humour till the death. :-)
On the contrary, I can certainly appreciate humour, including augmented forms in which swearwords are used for effect. I love jokes and humour in general, and I indulge in humour myself, in one form or another, most of the time. You place me in the awkward position of having to claim my own qualities, but most people who know me consider me a hilarious person. I also find no basis in your assumption about my self-importance (my humour is often self-deprecating) or my attracting undesired jokes. I don't believe in fact, that I get hassled more than most other prolific bloggers.
Your own comment made me laugh for its gross misrepresentation of who I am. And I wonder how much this is due to you reading too much into my post, without knowing me, and how much I accidentally came across as a uptight person with my "serious" post.
PS: The Adobe UI blog is hilarious, but I feel it's cheapened by trying too hard. I think it would have much more comedic value if it took the sarcastic "Dear Richard" (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/4344890/Virgin-...) approach, but that's just me. This wasn't the focal point of my article of course, but rather a, perhaps weak, incipit.
Oops. Seems I erred a bit there - I was trying to make a general point but dirtied it up by applying it to you personally, and in error, obviously.
In my defense, I did say "if he finds that site offensive in some way". Re-reading your blog post, you don't mention the word offensive - I had assumed so, since you singled out that site as "nasty", but obviously not. Yeah, it is kind of boorish and try-hard, I agree! I guess my hair trigger impulse to attack anyone who finds "offense" in swear words misfired pretty badly in this case :/
Anyway, sorry about that. Oh, and by the way, I think any Ruby programmer worth their salt has heard of you, so quit with the "virtually unknown" false modesty .. ; )
This reminds me of the spider in Bruce Sterling's novel Distractions which crawled the net for people saying bad things about its owner. When they had crossed its threshold their names got posted on an enemies list website, which was read by nutcase supporters, who then tended to go out and try to assassinate the listees.
Well said, yet completely wrong. People are thinking this stuff, so why should they not say it? The internet is different from real life - everyone with an opinion lands here, and can give their honest opinion. Let them give it, for those of us who grew up in the old polite days, this may be strange, but it's the new world! We are entering a time of REAL freedom of speech, and now that you are confronted with it, do not run away.
Look at YouTube comments, that's how the world really is like. You want to regulate this away? You think you actually can? Welcome to the new world, it's not worse, it's just different. Insulting people is the rock 'n' roll of 2009, if you can't deal with it, well, there's a cable plugged into your wall that you can simply pull out.
Times are changing, folks. Profanity, insults have become way cheaper, because anonymity also has. Arrington may complain, and all the people in this little community of ours make shake their heads and nod sorrowly and agree that something has to be done, but do you realise exactly how small your community is? You are reaching nobody, and nobody can hear your voice.
What we have is a herd of elephants thundering down a slope, heading towards a world of extremely democratic and free speech, and a bunch of rabbits form a council on the side and decide that they choose that the elephants should all start walking the other way.
Pointless, I say! Change sometimes goes your way, but sometimes change goes the way you don't like. This time it is that way, and very frankly, all these beard stroking and discussion about this will have little effect.
So, we can't just all grow up, because the internet is young. It will stay young, so if you want a place where everyone is grown up and civil, build a gate and hide behind the walls.
And don't forget to tap hard on the walls when the rock 'n' roll music of the neighbours gets too loud.
Look at YouTube comments, that's how the world really is like.
I think the better way of putting it is "Look at the Internet; that's how the world really is like." YouTube is not the world. Many people never comment on YouTube. (For the record, look at the comments on classical music. They're cultured and sophisticated an learned. Piano virtuosos comment on amateur videos giving tips. Isn't that incredible? My favorite pianist comments on videos on YouTube. That's marvelous.)
Insulting people is the rock 'n' roll of 2009, if you can't deal with it, well, there's a cable plugged into your wall that you can simply pull out.
Kind of a bizarre way of putting it. Isn't the idea that if you can't deal with insults, you just make a community with fewer insults? Freedom and all? Freedom from insults is also a potential solution.
You are reaching nobody, and nobody can hear your voice.
Right now, my professor is having a discussion about the suicide on Justin.TV, a YCombinator company. So here's one classroom that's been affected by something that I read on Hacker News.
What we have is a herd of elephants thundering down a slope, heading towards a world of extremely democratic and free speech, and a bunch of rabbits form a council on the side and decide that they choose that the elephants should all start walking the other way.
Wow. Not at all. If you think trolls are as powerful as elephants you've got to take another look at the world around you. If 4chan is considered powerful, then Google has to be looked at too. I'll take a million trolls to a company that's making a lot of people billionaires and is doing some social good with their work, too. I think the billionaires have a bit of elephant in them too.
This time it is that way, and very frankly, all these beard stroking and discussion about this will have little effect.
It's that way until somebody reading this decides to fix the problem. The cool thing about the Internet is that one person can change it all. And Hacker News is an incubator: it's a place for smart people to talk about things.
It will stay young, so if you want a place where everyone is grown up and civil, build a gate and hide behind the walls.
It's already old. The most-visited sites online are sites like CNN and Fox: the ancient bogies of the media. They won't last forever, but the sites that replace them will not be the Gawkers. The replacements will be just as civil and just as everyman-friendly.
And don't forget to tap hard on the walls when the rock 'n' roll music of the neighbours gets too loud.
Online it's more, "If the music gets too loud you can always create an alternate universe where you dictate all the rules."
You don't get what I mean. YouTube is representative of the general internet, and by extension, the general attitude of people. The cool thing about the internet is that one person cannot change it all. Everyones voice is equal. Nobody can change it.
CNN and Fox are not civil and friendly. They are heavily filtered - they don't allow their readers to say anything.
And please stop patting your back that this community is so smart. It's just a bunch of HTML makers who want to become rich by joining Paul Grahams incubator. Slashdot has people with real indepth knowledge about topics commenting, here it's just a bunch of opinions from people without deep knowledge.
The entire premise behind this community means that it's not smart - it's a bunch of college kids with ideas gathering here. There's a lot of talk, a lot of ideals and little real knowledge and experience.
So stop patting yourself on the back - go to usenet, you'll see real smarts. The comments here are really not that smart.
The problem is that when your measuring yard is reddit, even this place seems smart by comparison. What other sites do you visit that you use to measure this place by? Do you have an appropriate yardstick?
You don't get what I mean. YouTube is representative of the general internet, and by extension, the general attitude of people.
You don't get what I mean. There is no general Internet. There is only the Internet. Youtube is no more indicative of the entire Internet than MetaFilter is. The places I frequent look much more like Metafilter, in fact.
CNN and Fox are not civil and friendly. They are heavily filtered - they don't allow their readers to say anything.
That's what I mean by civil. They're popular because they don't let external sources muck themselves up. And it's working for them.
And please stop patting your back that this community is so smart. It's just a bunch of HTML makers who want to become rich by joining Paul Grahams incubator. Slashdot has people with real indepth knowledge about topics commenting, here it's just a bunch of opinions from people without deep knowledge.
The one Slashdot article that stuck in my mind was the article where CmdrTaco called the iPod lame upon its announcement. I don't frequent the site because the articles that don't interest me, but the few times I've read the site it seems like the people are no smarter than people anywhere. The Slashdot people merely have more time to kill.
"Smart" isn't the right word, though the people here certainly are smart. "Mature." That's the word I want. A bunch of people with ideas who don't steamroller over each other.
The entire premise behind this community means that it's not smart - it's a bunch of college kids with ideas gathering here. There's a lot of talk, a lot of ideals and little real knowledge and experience.
Ideals are what matter. They always are. The people that move the world forward are very rarely the people who've spent 20 years doing generic work, it's the people who think they can do everything, then do. Hacker News has got some old and experienced people, and it helps temper the community out.
So stop patting yourself on the back - go to usenet, you'll see real smarts. The comments here are really not that smart.
Usenet? I've been there a few times. 99% of it is spam. What's more, it's ugly spam. I've never seen a Usenet interface I like. And I'm one of those people who thinks that a part of intelligence means flocking to something that feels good to use. Pretty sites attract people who care about pretty, and I care about pretty.
The problem is that when your measuring yard is reddit, even this place seems smart by comparison. What other sites do you visit that you use to measure this place by? Do you have an appropriate yardstick?
I measure everything against everything. I don't compare HN to Reddit: I don't care much for Reddit. I compare it to Tumblr, SomethingAwful, Metafilter, Slashdot. I compare it to the blogs I read. There's not much more I can compare it to.
The community didn't harass him, a few nutcases did... depending on your threshold for what constitutes harassment.