People wildly underestimate how dedicated and adept some people are at finding PII given even minute details [1]. The only real way to avoid sharing PII is to stay off the internet entirely.
Even then, pandora's box has already been opened. Your PII is available even if you haven't explicitly chosen to share it [2].
Once it's out (and spoiler alert, it's out), "stepping away from the computer" is no longer an option. The article describes in detail how it transitions from online to real-life harassment: Swatting, stopping by your personal residence, calling your work, calling your friends and family, etc.
Yes, it happens to people of moderate means and very minor celebrity. Yes, you can suffer physical harm or death as a result [3]. Yes, we should also try and solve the swatting problem from the police side as well.
Reminds me of a video [1] posted by Tom Scott from "Things you might not know" youbtube. He and a friend posted a photo of themselves watching the eclipse somewhere in the USA and it is scary how accurately their location was found by Internet sleuths.
I feel bad for the new generation of Twitch/Youtube people who are exposing themselves to the Internet. There are some freaky good stalkers out there.
I am off the grid (no social media, scrubbed basic internet mentions, etc) and with every breach there is more and more PII that I can find online about me which is insane...
Actually, if anyone pays any attention to Chines online space, "human flesh search" has been working for over a decade since the early dawn of the mass adoption of Internet in China.
The moral of the story is that no matter how careful one protect their identity, they always leak more than they thought they are leaking.
I continue every month to be more convinced that the fundamental problem is that any platform where anybody, unsolicited, can for free send messages to anybody else, will forever have the "thundering hordes of assholes"[1] problem once it hits even modest scale. Having to hire people by the hundreds to "moderate" is desperately trying to salvage a fundamentally unworkable system, not a solution, even before we get into the interesting second-order effects such "solutions" can create, and what it does to the moderators themselves psychologically. You can't build a solution based around A: hoping the assholes just don't show up or B: that you will be smarter or more dedicated than the assholes.
I don't necessarily have a perfect solution all lined up, but just correctly identifying the problem is step one. I've mentally noodled with a number of models. But the thing they have in common is that none of them start with a new user being able to fling whatever they want to whomever they want for free.
[1]: I don't actually consider it a failure of the system if you encounter an asshole every so often. That's life. But when you start a video stream and you end up with so many assholes typing asshole comments so quickly that you literally can't even read them before they scroll away, even if you want to, that's a structural problem, not just a social problem.
Is the solution more anonymity, or less? Are reputation systems a good idea in general?
On the one hand you have google/facebook pushing people to reveal their real names on accounts... on the other you have sites similar to this one where you don't have to reveal much, but rely on karma/reputation a bit more.
In the end, it's a matter of dealing with the best and worst of mankind. As sad as it is, bullying didn't start with the internet, and it won't end with it. It sucks to be on the receiving end, and although I, personally, haven't always been the best at dealing with it, people need to learn that skill.
The world, despite best optimistic intentions, is not a kind, fair place to be.
This is HN, the glorified peanut gallery, but seriously, what are your ideas? I'm curious to have a discussion about them and see what others think too.
I agree, and have always thought that most online communities have baked-in expiration dates based on what I think of as asshole entropy. Over time, such platforms will always tend towards more assholes, as asshole behavior triggers more asshole behavior, and drives away non-assholes. The only question is how long does it take to reach that point.
Another way to look at it is, good comments are capable of inspiring more good comments, but low-quality comments always seem to lead to more low-quality comments. So comment quality in general is also subject to entropy in most forums and social networks that I've seen.
Some combination of moderation and lacking appeal to general audiences allows specialized forums like HN to reach a steady state, with probably more assholes than desired and fewer good comments than desired, but at least it's not continually hurtling towards collapse.
Maybe the answer would be that such communities should be restricted in their growth in terms of how many they can manage without the “thundering horde” taking over, rather than how many they can sign up.
The problem is "massive" in the way that Instagram itself is massive, and having a public account opens you up to a massive attack surface (i.e. the global, growing audience of Instagram and the Internet at-large). As in the case with Facebook and Twitter, there's only so much a social network can do without putting real controls on who can create an account and who can participate:
> Like Twitter, Instagram enables the easy setup of endless anonymous accounts: All you need is an email address and you can start posting within minutes. Abusers leverage this functionality to create armies of fake accounts to attack people. But while Twitter now allows users to protect themselves—by muting replies from people who don’t follow you, who you don’t follow, aren’t verified, haven’t confirmed an email address, and more—Instagram has only implemented some of these controls.
Instagram had a nicer overall "personality" to it initially because it was centered around the posting of attractive, innocuous photos. But in the end, it's still a platform that allows anyone to disseminate information of any kind (not just comments, but screenshots and images of text memes), so there's no reason to think that as it becomes massively mainstream, it won't have the exact same problems as Facebook and Twitter.
"... Instagram enables easy sign up via just an email address"
Is the "easy sign up" such an important selling point, that anything more complicated drives away users?
I'm wondering how could be possible to avoid hoarding burner accounts just for the sake of trolling, while at the same time not requiring 1Billion people to send in scans of their ID to prove their identity.
Not to mention that even requiring ID for proving identity, one can still troll and harass as long as it's not caught on the fact
Requiring confirmation with an SMS code seems like a reasonable step to tie accounts to a more permanent identifier which can then be used for moderation.
IIRC, virtually every service just requires an email address, including Google, Facebook, and Twitter. I’ve found that Twitter now quickly throttles any dummy accounts I make by requiring a phone number. But obviously, there’s huge downsides to requiring a phone number.
For a primarily phone-based application, this seems pretty weird to me. (It's harder to navigate and participate in compared to say reddit or fb)
I use Instagram, however, the only "harassment" I receive is spam and occasional mentions from p_rn bots. I also keep my profile and I'm not trying to push, sell, or make myself a celebrity.
What I think that may be happening: There are a lot of people who are trying to leverage their message or themselves to a level of celebrity and they don't realize that this is one of the consequences of it (or that they refuse to accept it).
Instagram's harassment problem is like many others and is a problem for young people and women (and especially young women!). I'm a guy in my 30s and post pictures exclusively of landscapes, harassment is obviously not a problem for me. I'm sure my experience would be different if I was currently in high school or if I was a woman who posted pictures of myself.
tl;dr the HN demographic is not the one that gets harassed on almost any platform, but especially IG.
> For a primarily phone-based application, this seems pretty weird to me.
You seem to be pretty out of the loop when it comes to Instagram's primary user group. Many teens/early 20s these days don't even have a computer, a smartphone is all they use. They're definitely accustomed to phone UIs.
> I use Instagram, however, the only "harassment" I receive is spam and occasional mentions from p_rn bots.
Don't generalize from a single datapoint, especially when that datapoint is not a representative sample at all.
> What I think that may be happening: There are a lot of people who are trying to leverage their message or themselves to a level of celebrity and they don't realize that this is one of the consequences of it (or that they refuse to accept it).
This is just straightforward victim blaming without even trying to understand what is actually going on.
I agree, to an extent. When people invite celebrity status, there will always follow trolls. It simply doesn't matter how great you are. And many don't have the stability and coping systems to deal with it.
In saying this, I'm definitely not saying I do... I take a lot of things far more personally than intended, and can only try to not let my instincts drive me when I do. It isn't easy to be on the receiving side of things... that said, I don't think outright censorship is the answer. Couldn't this kid report/block other users on the system giving him grief? Also, for those blocked, probably shouldn't indicate that they've been blocked.
I've always found it funny that on Twitter, when someone blocks you, you can no longer see their public profile and tweets. It'd be far better to allow you to see it, but only the blocked see their own retweets/replies. I don't think the people making decisions always think through their decisions.
The problem with something like this drawing attention and potentially reacting too quickly is the chance to make things worse is far more likely than actually approving anything.
I think social media operators are under-valuing the risk that harassment has to their organizations. Social media companies live and die by the network effect. New social sites sometimes hit a magic threshold point after which they take off like a rocket as "everyone" is on it. Dying social sites drop below that same point, after which it's a "ghost town", and usership falls flat.
There are all kinds of things that can cause that to happen, famously redesigns and changes to moderator actions has done it in the past. But in general having a continuously shitty experience as people harass you is a pretty compelling reason to not use a social site. I cannot help but wonder if enough people will leave to trigger a mass exit or not.
I was thinking of a potential solution to this (and many other problems) - filter lists. Instead of putting the onus on the company/social network to police the users, all the content they post and potentially (well, definitely) angering significant parts of the population (e.g. either the democrats, the republicans, or both!), they could just add opt-in "filter lists" that would be curated by (groups of) users. A few would be enabled by default (e.g. gore, NSFW, etc), others you could discover simply by searching for specific keywords (e.g. "filter all neo-nazis" or "filter all anti-fa") (like browser add-ons) or by ranking them by popularity, and whatever filters you have enabled, the webpage would also show you how many users/posts/comments are hidden by your filters. That way, noone could accuse any organisation of censorship, the lists could be shared between websites (reducing the effort and enabling smaller companies to function), and the only real responsibility of the companies would be to keep illegal content off the site (or something that break all online etiquette, e.g. doxxing).
Twitter has had (unofficial, via third-party services) user created blocklists for awhile now, but still feel like something only used by power users. And the complaints/anger over censorship still exist — IIRC, Wil Wheaton (the uber-Twitter power user) was hounded off of Twitter and Mastodon because of his promotion of a controversial user’s blacklist:
With the popularity of non-real-name Instagram pages and "finstagrams" it seems strange that Facebook has not implemented a checkbox for "seriously, this is not my main account, please stop linking it to my main account or phone number or facebook account or suggesting it to ANYONE I might know in real life". But, then again, it is Facebook we're talking about.
"seriously, this is not my main account, please stop linking it to my main account or phone number or facebook account or suggesting it to ANYONE I might know in real life"
Their T&Cs prohibit having more than one account, so they would never implement this feature no matter how much sense it makes.
A better system is needed to allow for verified accounts, without requiring the kind of info that would allow hackers and bad actors to access your real email, address, phone number, etc. Dual authentication is a start but for now, it requires putting even more info out there (I didn't share a phone number on any site until I had to for authentication purposes).
Real names don't stop harassment, whether on the WELL in the 90s or YouTube in the 2010s.
They do however harm the most vulnerable in society, either excluding them from platforms or making it easy for their harassers to find and target them.
Anonymity is at worst neutral for harassment. Removing it doesn't do what people hope.
I dont understandy, Why doesn't instagram just come up with some negativity filter/heuristic? Once someone reports being harassed to instagram, they can activate the filter and block all messages/tagging with negative content in it, for any and all messages directed towards the target.
Instagram is part of one of the world’s largest tech companies, which makes most of its money by having people freely use and live on its service. Considering its user base is in the hundreds of millions, this makes it a company worth covering by news organizations.
Your comment is as inane and oblivious as me telling you to stop whining about The Atlantic, because it’s free and if you don’t like what you see you should just log off.
Given than HN is a discussion board frequented by people who generally see the Internet as a fundamental aspect of “real life”, it seems ironic to argue that people should solve their social media problems by just logging off. It’s feels akin to telling someone who is forced to live with throttled capped Internet bandwidth to “go outside and read a book” or “just go to the movie theater”.
Presumably, the people who are most unhappy about Instagram harassment are people who use the social network to make connections and friendships that they can’t make otherwise — there is no line between their social network relationships and “real life” relationships, especially as the former so often becomes the latter. That Instagram is so massively popular, and even an engine for economic activity, is a sign that it’s not something that people can simply log off from. Imagine telling a developer to just “log off” and get a “real” job if Microsoft were to kill every Github repo that didn’t agree to abide by new draconian licensing and terms of service.
Precisely. It's not as if you are Buzz Aldrin, trying to walk away again and again and continuing to be harassed by a moon landing conspiracy theorist. The 1's and 0's are easily silenced.
[+] [-] wgerard|7 years ago|reply
People wildly underestimate how dedicated and adept some people are at finding PII given even minute details [1]. The only real way to avoid sharing PII is to stay off the internet entirely.
Even then, pandora's box has already been opened. Your PII is available even if you haven't explicitly chosen to share it [2].
Once it's out (and spoiler alert, it's out), "stepping away from the computer" is no longer an option. The article describes in detail how it transitions from online to real-life harassment: Swatting, stopping by your personal residence, calling your work, calling your friends and family, etc.
Yes, it happens to people of moderate means and very minor celebrity. Yes, you can suffer physical harm or death as a result [3]. Yes, we should also try and solve the swatting problem from the police side as well.
1: https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/4chan-shia-labeouf-secret-l...
2: Equifax
3: https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/30/us/kansas-swatting-death-affi...
[+] [-] reggieband|7 years ago|reply
I feel bad for the new generation of Twitch/Youtube people who are exposing themselves to the Internet. There are some freaky good stalkers out there.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGqEBvlmFAQ
[+] [-] erikpukinskis|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] e9|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justicezyx|7 years ago|reply
The moral of the story is that no matter how careful one protect their identity, they always leak more than they thought they are leaking.
[+] [-] paxys|7 years ago|reply
That doesn't always work either. A lot of PII shared completely offline finds its way to the internet, and third party hacks make it accessible.
[+] [-] simonebrunozzi|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] megaman8|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jerf|7 years ago|reply
I don't necessarily have a perfect solution all lined up, but just correctly identifying the problem is step one. I've mentally noodled with a number of models. But the thing they have in common is that none of them start with a new user being able to fling whatever they want to whomever they want for free.
[1]: I don't actually consider it a failure of the system if you encounter an asshole every so often. That's life. But when you start a video stream and you end up with so many assholes typing asshole comments so quickly that you literally can't even read them before they scroll away, even if you want to, that's a structural problem, not just a social problem.
[+] [-] tracker1|7 years ago|reply
On the one hand you have google/facebook pushing people to reveal their real names on accounts... on the other you have sites similar to this one where you don't have to reveal much, but rely on karma/reputation a bit more.
In the end, it's a matter of dealing with the best and worst of mankind. As sad as it is, bullying didn't start with the internet, and it won't end with it. It sucks to be on the receiving end, and although I, personally, haven't always been the best at dealing with it, people need to learn that skill.
The world, despite best optimistic intentions, is not a kind, fair place to be.
[+] [-] noobermin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mwfunk|7 years ago|reply
Another way to look at it is, good comments are capable of inspiring more good comments, but low-quality comments always seem to lead to more low-quality comments. So comment quality in general is also subject to entropy in most forums and social networks that I've seen.
Some combination of moderation and lacking appeal to general audiences allows specialized forums like HN to reach a steady state, with probably more assholes than desired and fewer good comments than desired, but at least it's not continually hurtling towards collapse.
[+] [-] bcOpus|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] erjjones|7 years ago|reply
The "metaverse" . Where you can be what you want people to see w/o others knowing what you are. #highfidelity
[+] [-] danso|7 years ago|reply
> Like Twitter, Instagram enables the easy setup of endless anonymous accounts: All you need is an email address and you can start posting within minutes. Abusers leverage this functionality to create armies of fake accounts to attack people. But while Twitter now allows users to protect themselves—by muting replies from people who don’t follow you, who you don’t follow, aren’t verified, haven’t confirmed an email address, and more—Instagram has only implemented some of these controls.
Instagram had a nicer overall "personality" to it initially because it was centered around the posting of attractive, innocuous photos. But in the end, it's still a platform that allows anyone to disseminate information of any kind (not just comments, but screenshots and images of text memes), so there's no reason to think that as it becomes massively mainstream, it won't have the exact same problems as Facebook and Twitter.
edit: fixed grammar
[+] [-] marcodave|7 years ago|reply
Is the "easy sign up" such an important selling point, that anything more complicated drives away users?
I'm wondering how could be possible to avoid hoarding burner accounts just for the sake of trolling, while at the same time not requiring 1Billion people to send in scans of their ID to prove their identity.
Not to mention that even requiring ID for proving identity, one can still troll and harass as long as it's not caught on the fact
[+] [-] bearcobra|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danso|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monksy|7 years ago|reply
I use Instagram, however, the only "harassment" I receive is spam and occasional mentions from p_rn bots. I also keep my profile and I'm not trying to push, sell, or make myself a celebrity.
What I think that may be happening: There are a lot of people who are trying to leverage their message or themselves to a level of celebrity and they don't realize that this is one of the consequences of it (or that they refuse to accept it).
[+] [-] jonknee|7 years ago|reply
tl;dr the HN demographic is not the one that gets harassed on almost any platform, but especially IG.
[+] [-] Sharlin|7 years ago|reply
You seem to be pretty out of the loop when it comes to Instagram's primary user group. Many teens/early 20s these days don't even have a computer, a smartphone is all they use. They're definitely accustomed to phone UIs.
> I use Instagram, however, the only "harassment" I receive is spam and occasional mentions from p_rn bots.
Don't generalize from a single datapoint, especially when that datapoint is not a representative sample at all.
> What I think that may be happening: There are a lot of people who are trying to leverage their message or themselves to a level of celebrity and they don't realize that this is one of the consequences of it (or that they refuse to accept it).
This is just straightforward victim blaming without even trying to understand what is actually going on.
[+] [-] tracker1|7 years ago|reply
In saying this, I'm definitely not saying I do... I take a lot of things far more personally than intended, and can only try to not let my instincts drive me when I do. It isn't easy to be on the receiving side of things... that said, I don't think outright censorship is the answer. Couldn't this kid report/block other users on the system giving him grief? Also, for those blocked, probably shouldn't indicate that they've been blocked.
I've always found it funny that on Twitter, when someone blocks you, you can no longer see their public profile and tweets. It'd be far better to allow you to see it, but only the blocked see their own retweets/replies. I don't think the people making decisions always think through their decisions.
The problem with something like this drawing attention and potentially reacting too quickly is the chance to make things worse is far more likely than actually approving anything.
[+] [-] Sharlin|7 years ago|reply
Excuse me but what? I thought it was common knowledge that Instagram is one of the worst places on the net when it comes to bullying.
[+] [-] village-idiot|7 years ago|reply
There are all kinds of things that can cause that to happen, famously redesigns and changes to moderator actions has done it in the past. But in general having a continuously shitty experience as people harass you is a pretty compelling reason to not use a social site. I cannot help but wonder if enough people will leave to trigger a mass exit or not.
[+] [-] tomp|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danso|7 years ago|reply
http://wilwheaton.net/2018/08/the-world-is-a-terrible-place-...
https://medium.com/@AmberEnderton/wil-wheaton-has-a-listenin...
[+] [-] pkamb|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gaius|7 years ago|reply
Their T&Cs prohibit having more than one account, so they would never implement this feature no matter how much sense it makes.
[+] [-] moneil971|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Animats|7 years ago|reply
Maybe we need systems where you can either be anonymous and censored, or identified and uncensored. You get to pick.
[+] [-] yarrel|7 years ago|reply
They do however harm the most vulnerable in society, either excluding them from platforms or making it easy for their harassers to find and target them.
Anonymity is at worst neutral for harassment. Removing it doesn't do what people hope.
[+] [-] moogly|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peterwwillis|7 years ago|reply
FTFY
[+] [-] seany|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] megaman8|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] liftbigweights|7 years ago|reply
What's with nytimes, theatlantic and the rest of the media and their endless spam and whining about social media?
If you don't like it, stop using it? Leave HN alone.
HN has a massive nytimes, theatlantic, etc spam problem too. We don't have a way to filter useless clickbait media.
If the "journalist" at theatlantic don't like instagram, go start your own version of "nice" instagram and make billions.
[+] [-] untog|7 years ago|reply
You realise these things appear because HN users submit them, and other HN users upvote them?
[+] [-] tantalor|7 years ago|reply
What's with liftbigweights and their endless spam and whining about interesting, on-topic submissions?
If you don't like it, stop using it? Leave HN alone.
liftbigweights has a massive HN spam problem too. We don't have a way to filter trolls.
If the "user" at liftbigweights don't like HN, go start your own version of "nice" HN and make billions.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[+] [-] danso|7 years ago|reply
Your comment is as inane and oblivious as me telling you to stop whining about The Atlantic, because it’s free and if you don’t like what you see you should just log off.
[+] [-] dickinson99|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danso|7 years ago|reply
Presumably, the people who are most unhappy about Instagram harassment are people who use the social network to make connections and friendships that they can’t make otherwise — there is no line between their social network relationships and “real life” relationships, especially as the former so often becomes the latter. That Instagram is so massively popular, and even an engine for economic activity, is a sign that it’s not something that people can simply log off from. Imagine telling a developer to just “log off” and get a “real” job if Microsoft were to kill every Github repo that didn’t agree to abide by new draconian licensing and terms of service.
[+] [-] wgerard|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] black6|7 years ago|reply