This part actually shares a lot of similarities with assumption validation for startups. When you're interviewing neutral third parties who could be potential customers to validate the assumptions...
User feedback is an important aspect of any discussion platform but IMO for it to be most useful, it needs to be in the form of questions like "What issues do you have interacting with ___________ community". Then you take that feedback and discuss possible changes / fixes with the people who really understand how the community works (i.e., admins, moderators, high-trust users for that ~group) and have a good understanding of the goals of that particular community and how that change might further / be detrimental to them; this can be an iterative process as well.
This part actually shares a lot of similarities with assumption validation for startups. When you're interviewing neutral third parties who could be potential customers to validate the assumptions in your business model, you don't start by asking, "what do you think of this idea for a product?" That question biases the rest of the discussion. Instead, you ask leading questions about problems, pain points, needs, weaknesses, areas for improvement, etc. to understand how your product can address those. So the focus for ~ should start with the problem then brainstorming a resolution, not vice versa.
Maybe people had different experiences, but ignoring bullies never worked. Even while parents and teachers were telling me it's what I should do, I knew it didn't work.
Maybe people had different experiences, but ignoring bullies never worked. Even while parents and teachers were telling me it's what I should do, I knew it didn't work.
I've always thought the "just ignore them" tactic didn't make sense, even when I was a kid. Online though, it feels like battling an ocean. In theory, I don't really support having monetized...
I've always thought the "just ignore them" tactic didn't make sense, even when I was a kid.
Online though, it feels like battling an ocean. In theory, I don't really support having monetized businesses decide things like this, but pragmatically, it seems to be the only way to go.
There's not really an equivalent to sucker punching your bully then beating them into the ground online though, I don't think anyone's figured out a good way of holding people accountable online...
There's not really an equivalent to sucker punching your bully then beating them into the ground online though, I don't think anyone's figured out a good way of holding people accountable online yet, at least if you want to preserve some of the internet's positive features like anonymity and immateriality.
Actually, there is - it's called a ban. The real kind, not the make a new account with a click and come right back in the door kind that's omnipresent on most services. The big problem with bans...
Actually, there is - it's called a ban. The real kind, not the make a new account with a click and come right back in the door kind that's omnipresent on most services.
The big problem with bans is if you're interested in making money by selling access to people's eyeballs, throwing users off of your platform is counter-productive to that goal, even if those users create outrage regularly. That outrage is one of the most powerful drivers of traffic.
You make sure the annoyingly difficult stuff is felt by the people you want to keep out (assholes, in our case). Most people will join, contribute, and have fun. People cause problems, you...
You make sure the annoyingly difficult stuff is felt by the people you want to keep out (assholes, in our case). Most people will join, contribute, and have fun. People cause problems, you politely suggest to them that they might shape up their behavior, use some forgiveness and common sense. When it goes beyond that you make them stand in the corner (muting for days/weeks). If they still want to be assholes after all that, you don't want them wrecking the party for everyone else, so out they go.
Most people will respond well to this process. We do it in modmail on reddit all the time, all the mod teams.
I'm not really talking about reformable people who just need a nudge into following the rules, I'm talking about people who are just out to flame or troll or whatever.
I'm not really talking about reformable people who just need a nudge into following the rules, I'm talking about people who are just out to flame or troll or whatever.
You ban them with extreme prejudice. They get to find another invite, create a new account. That new account will start with zero power and zero trust, so they have to start over again from...
You ban them with extreme prejudice. They get to find another invite, create a new account. That new account will start with zero power and zero trust, so they have to start over again from scratch. We lock anything that's likely to be abused by assholes behind that trust barrier.
I agree that trust will help, but unless commenting itself is going to be trust-locked there I don't see this as a real solution to trolls, just a way of minimizing their annoyance.
I agree that trust will help, but unless commenting itself is going to be trust-locked there I don't see this as a real solution to trolls, just a way of minimizing their annoyance.
We could allow groups to set trust thresholds for participation. Many do this on reddit (requiring comment and/or link karma over a set amount and/or a minimum account age). It does work. Rather...
We could allow groups to set trust thresholds for participation. Many do this on reddit (requiring comment and/or link karma over a set amount and/or a minimum account age). It does work. Rather than auto-removing those comments like we're forced to do on reddit, though, here they could start out tagged in some way so that people can choose to hide them instead. I'm sure we can come up plenty of hare-brained ways to put the trust metric to good use.
If it's easy to make an account (which is ought to be), it's easy to make another. Easy to change your IP Easy to get another My point is that the loss of an online account on most platforms isn't...
account
If it's easy to make an account (which is ought to be), it's easy to make another.
IP
Easy to change your IP
email
Easy to get another
My point is that the loss of an online account on most platforms isn't a big deal, you can just make another, unless the sign up process is annoying, which negatively impacts the platform as a whole.
Ignoring the trolls helps keep the problem from getting worse, but it does not, and never was meant to, solve it. This going back to Usenet and BBSes. Administrators have always needed to step up...
Ignoring the trolls helps keep the problem from getting worse, but it does not, and never was meant to, solve it. This going back to Usenet and BBSes.
Administrators have always needed to step up and quash systemic or widespread abuse, and systems on which they failed to do so have always ended up overrun by abuse, with positive contributors fleeing, if the admins neglected or refused that role.
I answered a Verge piece aabout a month ago on this particular trope, referencing contemporaneous guides from the 1990s, unlike Verge's arguments-by-assertion.
I think this article is arrant bullshit because the author doesn't mention the nuclear option every user can exercise. They can simply refuse to use corporate-owned social media. We managed to use...
I think this article is arrant bullshit because the author doesn't mention the nuclear option every user can exercise. They can simply refuse to use corporate-owned social media.
We managed to use the internet and the Web before MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, etc. came along. We can learn how to manage without them again. We can, and we should.
In many cases, if you want to participate in society, you cannot. This follows in the long tradition of former luxuries or hobbies becoming necessities. Families share content and pictures,...
In many cases, if you want to participate in society, you cannot. This follows in the long tradition of former luxuries or hobbies becoming necessities.
Families share content and pictures, groups, or candidates, or politicians, or businesses, organize or reach out only through Facebook or Twitter. Websites host comments, or logins, through Facebook. Authors only post Twitter or Facebook contacts, rather than email. Or, God forfend, a postal address.
I'm quite aware af this as I've no FB or Twitter and encounter these obstacles several times per week. The costs are acceptable to me, but they are high.
I'm also aware of these obstacles, and I am likewise aware that all of these obstacles are artificial. I suspect you've read Max Weber and are familiar with the concept of methodological...
Families share content and pictures, groups, or candidates, or politicians, or businesses, organize or reach out only thrrough Facebook or Twitter. Websites host comments, or logins, through Facebook. Authors only post Twitter or Facebook contacts, rather than email. Or, God forfend, a postal address.
I'm quite aware af this as I've no FB or Twitter and encounter these obstacles several times per week. The costs are acceptable to me, but they are high.
I'm also aware of these obstacles, and I am likewise aware that all of these obstacles are artificial. I suspect you've read Max Weber and are familiar with the concept of methodological individualism, so the following should make sense to you:
Individuals chose to use corporate-owned social media for everything.
Individuals chose to not provide alternative means of contact/participation via the open internet.
Individuals can likewise choose to stop using corporate-owned social media and return to the open internet.
Admittedly, peer pressure and celebrity influence come into play, but just as these forces helped drive people into walled gardens, they can also inspire people to tear down the walls.
It won't be easy, and there won't be a mass exodus, but it can be done, and the cost will decrease as more people do so. New people join Mastodon instances daily, often leaving Twitter behind, so the situation isn't hopeless.
Thank you. I had a similar reaction reading this article, and lately when I read the rest of these ' woe to the internet ' posts that are all the rage in the press lately. Nobody's worked on...
Thank you. I had a similar reaction reading this article, and lately when I read the rest of these ' woe to the internet ' posts that are all the rage in the press lately.
Nobody's worked on building self-governance into their platforms. I'm not talking about mindless bots, silly hacks, and feeble artificial-stupid detection systems - we're at least a decade from any of that bearing real fruit. I'm talking about real human powered governance. Is it any surprise that without it, we end up in this mess? Why are we ready to give up on the internet when almost no one has tried to solve this problem? Everyone sees it as insurmountable - it's not. Honestly, it doesn't even need to be hard.
We ask people behave like adults in the real world. We can ask the same thing from them online. It really is that simple in the end.
Unfortunately, most journalists have no idea how the internet and the web actually works. Many of them, unless they bother to actually do any research before writing their "Oh shit the internet is...
Thank you. I had a similar reaction reading this article, and lately when I read the rest of these ' woe to the internet ' posts that are all the rage in the press lately.
Unfortunately, most journalists have no idea how the internet and the web actually works. Many of them, unless they bother to actually do any research before writing their "Oh shit the internet is fucked" pieces, probably think Facebook is the Internet the same way many people used to think AOL was the internet back around the turn of the century.
Incidentally, I can't believe I actually used that phrase. I'm getting old, dammit.
One could argue that such knowledge is unnecessary because they're journalists, and not software developers or system administrators, but such an argument betrays a certain "a place for everybody, everybody in their place, no deviation permitted" worldview that not only demands rigid specialization and division of labor, but reeks of totalitarian capitalism. That way lies dystopia.
Is it any surprise that without it, we end up in this mess? Why are we ready to give up on the internet when almost no one has tried to solve this problem? Everyone sees it as insurmountable - it's not. Honestly, it doesn't even need to be hard.
No, it isn't that hard. If anything, it might be a solved problem whose solution goes ignored and unimplemented because too many techies have no sense of history (history being a humanities field rather than a STEM discipline) and thus tend to easily fall prey to not invented here (NIH) thinking.
MIT ran into the asshole problem back in 1992, and came up with a policy called stopit that proved effective. It involves telling people that objectionable posts are out of character for them, so their account might be compromised and they must change their password before logging in again. It reduced trolling and harassment by allowing problematic individuals to save face while putting them on notice that their behavior would not be tolerated.
We ask people behave like adults in the real world. We can ask the same thing from them online. It really is that simple in the end.
This is pretty much what MIT's "stopit" policy is all about.
This works fine for individuals with a reputation to uphold, who care what other people think about them. It doesn't work with anonymous bad actors whose goal is to sow dissent and spam a specific...
MIT ran into the asshole problem back in 1992, and came up with a policy called stopit that proved effective. It involves telling people that objectionable posts are out of character for them, so their account might be compromised and they must change their password before logging in again. It reduced trolling and harassment by allowing problematic individuals to save face while putting them on notice that their behavior would not be tolerated.
This works fine for individuals with a reputation to uphold, who care what other people think about them. It doesn't work with anonymous bad actors whose goal is to sow dissent and spam a specific message even if, or especially if, they know it is false/wrong. The normal people are rarely actually driving things, it's botnets and paid shills, often in the employ of foreign governments posting these days.
A policy based on shaming people assumes they care about their reputation in the first place.
I think this is more of a guilt-based policy, but you're right. It's a good start, but not sufficient. However, notifying the user and locking the account pending a password change was only the...
A policy based on shaming people assumes they care about their reputation in the first place.
I think this is more of a guilt-based policy, but you're right. It's a good start, but not sufficient. However, notifying the user and locking the account pending a password change was only the first step at MIT. If the abuse continued, they reserved other options.
Likewise, notify-and-lock should not be used on bots and paid shills. Bots and shills should be banned on sight.
There's another aspect I think we might look at for the bots and shills: blowback. If we publically humiliate and expose bots/shills/similar networks when they are found to be attacking the site,...
There's another aspect I think we might look at for the bots and shills: blowback.
If we publically humiliate and expose bots/shills/similar networks when they are found to be attacking the site, it serves to both make people aware of the incident, and expose who is behind it and what their agendas are. People will be unhappy with the manipulation and dishonesty, which will generate a negative reputation hit for the instigators of the attack. That's potentially capable of causing real damage to the attackers, which may help disincentivize future attacks.
You know, I've never even considered the face-saving aspect before. That... might be a critically important aspect of a working long-term solution. Thank you for bringing that up. When we get...
You know, I've never even considered the face-saving aspect before. That... might be a critically important aspect of a working long-term solution. Thank you for bringing that up. When we get around to building warnings / strikes / whatever form it takes here, saving face might help incentivize people to work with the system instead of trying to find ways around it.
Well, before Facebook there was geocities. Before the web generally there was aol. We've always been largely dependent on corporation or the goodwill of individuals (bbs) or universities (Archie,...
Well, before Facebook there was geocities. Before the web generally there was aol. We've always been largely dependent on corporation or the goodwill of individuals (bbs) or universities (Archie, Usenet, etc).
Not to mention the Globe, Angelfire, and Tripod. I remember them -- and that tradition of building little websites on a free public-access host lives on at NeoCities. That's a good thing; it gives...
Well, before Facebook there was geocities.
Not to mention the Globe, Angelfire, and Tripod. I remember them -- and that tradition of building little websites on a free public-access host lives on at NeoCities. That's a good thing; it gives people a place where they can experiment and learn without too much risk.
Before the web generally there was aol.
Or CompuServe, or Prodigy. But there were also dial-up BBSes that individuals would run on their PCs and let random strangers access.
We've always been largely dependent on corporation or the goodwill of individuals (bbs) or universities (Archie, Usenet, etc).
That's true, and that's mainly because self-hosting is hard. Even in the absence of artificial obstacles -- like last-mile providers getting in your face if you self-host on a residential connection -- self-hosting is still hard because you've got to be a system administrator (or know one willing to work for free beer) to do it.
The YUNOHOST Linux distribution is a step in the right direction, but it's still rough, and you've still got to install it.
IMO, the ideal would be a game console powered by OpenBSD that -- in addition to playing AAA and indie games, movies, and other media -- walks you through selecting and registering a domain, and automatically sets up ad-blocking DNS, shell accounts for each user accessible via SSH, a web server with per-user directories, email, microblogging using Mastodon or Pleroma, IRC, instant messaging using XMPP, and NextCloud. It should update semi-annually, following the OpenBSD release cycle, and retail for no more than $999.95 USD.
The hard part would be ensuring that such self-hosting game consoles don't get pwned, but using OpenBSD as the OS should be a decent start.
Essentially, what you're describing is the concept of the 'small business server' that was so popular in the 90s, merged with the concepts of the home theater computer and video game consoles. A...
Essentially, what you're describing is the concept of the 'small business server' that was so popular in the 90s, merged with the concepts of the home theater computer and video game consoles. A little box you simply plug in that takes away most of the work of setting up your own infrastructure - except this one's powered by open, honest software and hardware, built to safeguard and not to spy.
Large data storage and graphics processing power are the real expenses. The rest could be done for under $100 per box as that stuff is easy on the hardware.
Pretty much, except it's actually a general purpose computer for your living room that's pre-configured to do all kinds of useful shit. If you want to hack on it, though, it comes with a 256-page...
Pretty much, except it's actually a general purpose computer for your living room that's pre-configured to do all kinds of useful shit. If you want to hack on it, though, it comes with a 256-page manual that's actually a manga in which an old cat teaches a litter of kittens the basics of Unix using a BSD variant called Mewnix. =^.^=
You're right that's an option, but why should we have to? I like social media (in theory) and I don't want to quit. The responsibility shouldn't be on ordinary users, the tech companies should get...
You're right that's an option, but why should we have to? I like social media (in theory) and I don't want to quit. The responsibility shouldn't be on ordinary users, the tech companies should get their shit together.
For anyone whose experience has become a net negative due to toxic behavior I'd absolutely support you in your decision to quit. But a lot of us would rather stick around and keep pressuring corporations to get better than throw in the towel, at least for now.
The difference between you and me is that you're still loyal. You're willing to use your voice. I'm not loyal to anybody but myself, and I am willing to exit rather than tolerate an unsatisfactory...
The difference between you and me is that you're still loyal. You're willing to use your voice. I'm not loyal to anybody but myself, and I am willing to exit rather than tolerate an unsatisfactory situation.
I think the difference is our satisfaction with the situation. I'd quit too if it felt like it had become untenable, (which is why I'm weaning myself off Reddit), but I still have a net positive...
I think the difference is our satisfaction with the situation. I'd quit too if it felt like it had become untenable, (which is why I'm weaning myself off Reddit), but I still have a net positive experience on Facebook and Instagram so I'm willing to stick around for now. Trust me, it's not brand loyalty, I just haven't personally hit a tipping point yet.
I beg to disagree with the story's writer. We can help stop trolls by calling them out and, in so much as we can, banning and blocking them. One reason I'm still fond of Google+, is I control who...
I beg to disagree with the story's writer. We can help stop trolls by calling them out and, in so much as we can, banning and blocking them. One reason I'm still fond of Google+, is I control who can write on my pages. I can zap the bad comments and, if someone insists on trolling, I can kick them out and never see them again.
"When it comes to online comments and discourse and what you can do to limit their toxicity, you only have a certain amount of power. The real leverage lies with the tech companies."
"When it comes to online comments and discourse and what you can do to limit their toxicity, you only have a certain amount of power. The real leverage lies with the tech companies."
I talked a bit about this here, but I would argue that Tildes is the thing we can do to combat trolling / hate on the internet.
This part actually shares a lot of similarities with assumption validation for startups. When you're interviewing neutral third parties who could be potential customers to validate the assumptions in your business model, you don't start by asking, "what do you think of this idea for a product?" That question biases the rest of the discussion. Instead, you ask leading questions about problems, pain points, needs, weaknesses, areas for improvement, etc. to understand how your product can address those. So the focus for ~ should start with the problem then brainstorming a resolution, not vice versa.
Maybe people had different experiences, but ignoring bullies never worked. Even while parents and teachers were telling me it's what I should do, I knew it didn't work.
I've always thought the "just ignore them" tactic didn't make sense, even when I was a kid.
Online though, it feels like battling an ocean. In theory, I don't really support having monetized businesses decide things like this, but pragmatically, it seems to be the only way to go.
There's not really an equivalent to sucker punching your bully then beating them into the ground online though, I don't think anyone's figured out a good way of holding people accountable online yet, at least if you want to preserve some of the internet's positive features like anonymity and immateriality.
Actually, there is - it's called a ban. The real kind, not the make a new account with a click and come right back in the door kind that's omnipresent on most services.
The big problem with bans is if you're interested in making money by selling access to people's eyeballs, throwing users off of your platform is counter-productive to that goal, even if those users create outrage regularly. That outrage is one of the most powerful drivers of traffic.
How do you effectively ban people without making your service annoyingly difficult to use?
You make sure the annoyingly difficult stuff is felt by the people you want to keep out (assholes, in our case). Most people will join, contribute, and have fun. People cause problems, you politely suggest to them that they might shape up their behavior, use some forgiveness and common sense. When it goes beyond that you make them stand in the corner (muting for days/weeks). If they still want to be assholes after all that, you don't want them wrecking the party for everyone else, so out they go.
Most people will respond well to this process. We do it in modmail on reddit all the time, all the mod teams.
I'm not really talking about reformable people who just need a nudge into following the rules, I'm talking about people who are just out to flame or troll or whatever.
You ban them with extreme prejudice. They get to find another invite, create a new account. That new account will start with zero power and zero trust, so they have to start over again from scratch. We lock anything that's likely to be abused by assholes behind that trust barrier.
I agree that trust will help, but unless commenting itself is going to be trust-locked there I don't see this as a real solution to trolls, just a way of minimizing their annoyance.
We could allow groups to set trust thresholds for participation. Many do this on reddit (requiring comment and/or link karma over a set amount and/or a minimum account age). It does work. Rather than auto-removing those comments like we're forced to do on reddit, though, here they could start out tagged in some way so that people can choose to hide them instead. I'm sure we can come up plenty of hare-brained ways to put the trust metric to good use.
If it's easy to make an account (which is ought to be), it's easy to make another.
Easy to change your IP
Easy to get another
My point is that the loss of an online account on most platforms isn't a big deal, you can just make another, unless the sign up process is annoying, which negatively impacts the platform as a whole.
Ignoring the trolls helps keep the problem from getting worse, but it does not, and never was meant to, solve it. This going back to Usenet and BBSes.
Administrators have always needed to step up and quash systemic or widespread abuse, and systems on which they failed to do so have always ended up overrun by abuse, with positive contributors fleeing, if the admins neglected or refused that role.
I answered a Verge piece aabout a month ago on this particular trope, referencing contemporaneous guides from the 1990s, unlike Verge's arguments-by-assertion.
https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/1b1jHJo4ASb
I think this article is arrant bullshit because the author doesn't mention the nuclear option every user can exercise. They can simply refuse to use corporate-owned social media.
We managed to use the internet and the Web before MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, etc. came along. We can learn how to manage without them again. We can, and we should.
In many cases, if you want to participate in society, you cannot. This follows in the long tradition of former luxuries or hobbies becoming necessities.
Families share content and pictures, groups, or candidates, or politicians, or businesses, organize or reach out only through Facebook or Twitter. Websites host comments, or logins, through Facebook. Authors only post Twitter or Facebook contacts, rather than email. Or, God forfend, a postal address.
I'm quite aware af this as I've no FB or Twitter and encounter these obstacles several times per week. The costs are acceptable to me, but they are high.
I'm also aware of these obstacles, and I am likewise aware that all of these obstacles are artificial. I suspect you've read Max Weber and are familiar with the concept of methodological individualism, so the following should make sense to you:
Admittedly, peer pressure and celebrity influence come into play, but just as these forces helped drive people into walled gardens, they can also inspire people to tear down the walls.
It won't be easy, and there won't be a mass exodus, but it can be done, and the cost will decrease as more people do so. New people join Mastodon instances daily, often leaving Twitter behind, so the situation isn't hopeless.
Thank you. I had a similar reaction reading this article, and lately when I read the rest of these ' woe to the internet ' posts that are all the rage in the press lately.
Nobody's worked on building self-governance into their platforms. I'm not talking about mindless bots, silly hacks, and feeble artificial-stupid detection systems - we're at least a decade from any of that bearing real fruit. I'm talking about real human powered governance. Is it any surprise that without it, we end up in this mess? Why are we ready to give up on the internet when almost no one has tried to solve this problem? Everyone sees it as insurmountable - it's not. Honestly, it doesn't even need to be hard.
We ask people behave like adults in the real world. We can ask the same thing from them online. It really is that simple in the end.
Unfortunately, most journalists have no idea how the internet and the web actually works. Many of them, unless they bother to actually do any research before writing their "Oh shit the internet is fucked" pieces, probably think Facebook is the Internet the same way many people used to think AOL was the internet back around the turn of the century.
Incidentally, I can't believe I actually used that phrase. I'm getting old, dammit.
One could argue that such knowledge is unnecessary because they're journalists, and not software developers or system administrators, but such an argument betrays a certain "a place for everybody, everybody in their place, no deviation permitted" worldview that not only demands rigid specialization and division of labor, but reeks of totalitarian capitalism. That way lies dystopia.
No, it isn't that hard. If anything, it might be a solved problem whose solution goes ignored and unimplemented because too many techies have no sense of history (history being a humanities field rather than a STEM discipline) and thus tend to easily fall prey to not invented here (NIH) thinking.
MIT ran into the asshole problem back in 1992, and came up with a policy called stopit that proved effective. It involves telling people that objectionable posts are out of character for them, so their account might be compromised and they must change their password before logging in again. It reduced trolling and harassment by allowing problematic individuals to save face while putting them on notice that their behavior would not be tolerated.
This is pretty much what MIT's "stopit" policy is all about.
This works fine for individuals with a reputation to uphold, who care what other people think about them. It doesn't work with anonymous bad actors whose goal is to sow dissent and spam a specific message even if, or especially if, they know it is false/wrong. The normal people are rarely actually driving things, it's botnets and paid shills, often in the employ of foreign governments posting these days.
A policy based on shaming people assumes they care about their reputation in the first place.
I think this is more of a guilt-based policy, but you're right. It's a good start, but not sufficient. However, notifying the user and locking the account pending a password change was only the first step at MIT. If the abuse continued, they reserved other options.
Likewise, notify-and-lock should not be used on bots and paid shills. Bots and shills should be banned on sight.
There's another aspect I think we might look at for the bots and shills: blowback.
If we publically humiliate and expose bots/shills/similar networks when they are found to be attacking the site, it serves to both make people aware of the incident, and expose who is behind it and what their agendas are. People will be unhappy with the manipulation and dishonesty, which will generate a negative reputation hit for the instigators of the attack. That's potentially capable of causing real damage to the attackers, which may help disincentivize future attacks.
I like that. :)
You know, I've never even considered the face-saving aspect before. That... might be a critically important aspect of a working long-term solution. Thank you for bringing that up. When we get around to building warnings / strikes / whatever form it takes here, saving face might help incentivize people to work with the system instead of trying to find ways around it.
Well, before Facebook there was geocities. Before the web generally there was aol. We've always been largely dependent on corporation or the goodwill of individuals (bbs) or universities (Archie, Usenet, etc).
Not to mention the Globe, Angelfire, and Tripod. I remember them -- and that tradition of building little websites on a free public-access host lives on at NeoCities. That's a good thing; it gives people a place where they can experiment and learn without too much risk.
Or CompuServe, or Prodigy. But there were also dial-up BBSes that individuals would run on their PCs and let random strangers access.
That's true, and that's mainly because self-hosting is hard. Even in the absence of artificial obstacles -- like last-mile providers getting in your face if you self-host on a residential connection -- self-hosting is still hard because you've got to be a system administrator (or know one willing to work for free beer) to do it.
The YUNOHOST Linux distribution is a step in the right direction, but it's still rough, and you've still got to install it.
IMO, the ideal would be a game console powered by OpenBSD that -- in addition to playing AAA and indie games, movies, and other media -- walks you through selecting and registering a domain, and automatically sets up ad-blocking DNS, shell accounts for each user accessible via SSH, a web server with per-user directories, email, microblogging using Mastodon or Pleroma, IRC, instant messaging using XMPP, and NextCloud. It should update semi-annually, following the OpenBSD release cycle, and retail for no more than $999.95 USD.
The hard part would be ensuring that such self-hosting game consoles don't get pwned, but using OpenBSD as the OS should be a decent start.
Essentially, what you're describing is the concept of the 'small business server' that was so popular in the 90s, merged with the concepts of the home theater computer and video game consoles. A little box you simply plug in that takes away most of the work of setting up your own infrastructure - except this one's powered by open, honest software and hardware, built to safeguard and not to spy.
Large data storage and graphics processing power are the real expenses. The rest could be done for under $100 per box as that stuff is easy on the hardware.
Pretty much, except it's actually a general purpose computer for your living room that's pre-configured to do all kinds of useful shit. If you want to hack on it, though, it comes with a 256-page manual that's actually a manga in which an old cat teaches a litter of kittens the basics of Unix using a BSD variant called Mewnix. =^.^=
Best user manual ever. Certainly beats the stereo-instruction variety (I'm looking at you, IBM).
True story: back in the day I used to buy boxed editions of SuSE Linux for their 400+ page printed manuals.
You're right that's an option, but why should we have to? I like social media (in theory) and I don't want to quit. The responsibility shouldn't be on ordinary users, the tech companies should get their shit together.
For anyone whose experience has become a net negative due to toxic behavior I'd absolutely support you in your decision to quit. But a lot of us would rather stick around and keep pressuring corporations to get better than throw in the towel, at least for now.
The difference between you and me is that you're still loyal. You're willing to use your voice. I'm not loyal to anybody but myself, and I am willing to exit rather than tolerate an unsatisfactory situation.
I think the difference is our satisfaction with the situation. I'd quit too if it felt like it had become untenable, (which is why I'm weaning myself off Reddit), but I still have a net positive experience on Facebook and Instagram so I'm willing to stick around for now. Trust me, it's not brand loyalty, I just haven't personally hit a tipping point yet.
Sorry. I was alluding to Exit, Voice, and Loyalty by Albert O. Hirschman.
I beg to disagree with the story's writer. We can help stop trolls by calling them out and, in so much as we can, banning and blocking them. One reason I'm still fond of Google+, is I control who can write on my pages. I can zap the bad comments and, if someone insists on trolling, I can kick them out and never see them again.
"When it comes to online comments and discourse and what you can do to limit their toxicity, you only have a certain amount of power. The real leverage lies with the tech companies."
Accountability. When you are not associated with your words, you don't have to answer for them.
I just assume everyone I come in contact with is a troll until they prove me wrong. The trollbots are getting pretty good at fooling me, though.