How I Deal with Harassment, Abuse, and Crazies in General

http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2016/04/how-i-deal-with-harassment-abuse-and.html?m=1

by aaronbrethorst • 10 years ago

106 90 10 years ago

jeff-vogel.blogspot.com

pmiller26• 10 years ago

This is a part of why I'm quite selective about what I post online. The major part is that I value my privacy and don't really want random people knowing everything about me. I don't want to be a public figure. I avoid Facebook and Twitter, too, so that really reduces my surface area for this type of attack.

realusername• 10 years ago

Facebook is honestly not that bad on this because your "friends" circle makes it harder for a post to go completely viral. Twitter on the other hand is really dangerous because you can just make a tweet which pisses off some random celebrity and face a huge backlash, this is really scary.

randycupertino• 10 years ago

That's exactly why I'm afraid to tweet. If I tweeted every stupid thought that flit across my mind, then ever became famous or in the public eye, people could dig up every dumb thing I've ever said and broadcast it out of context. No thanks.

SyneRyder• 10 years ago

It depends on the social groups. In some ways Facebook can be worse, because the circle it goes viral in are the people you know in real life and interact with day-to-day. I have seen people make up rumours and publish them on Facebook, with the deliberate intention of hurting and destroying the life of someone they know, just because they felt slighted. Having anonymous crazies from around the world threatening you must be scary - but I can't imagine how it would feel to have friends and the people you turn to for support stop talking to you because of an accusation they read online.

pmiller26• 10 years ago

I've seen something like this happen to someone I know. :(

stcredzero• 10 years ago

This is a part of why I'm quite selective about what I post online. The major part is that I value my privacy and don't really want random people knowing everything about me. I don't want to be a public figure. I avoid Facebook and Twitter, too, so that really reduces my surface area for this type of attack.

From the op:

So complaining about harassment isn't just whining by sheltered nerds. The more visible and outspoken you are online, the higher the chance that a whirlwind will land on the heads of you and those you love. There is no chance of this changing in the foreseeable future. This is serious business. I am scared. Everything I do online is weighed against the risk of harassment.

So the nerds won against the schoolyard bullies. But as a result we created another kind of public space which has bullying mobs. Unthinking bullying mobs that are in denial of their own bullying and label their activities as something noble or socially/intellectually worthy.

Just about every thoughtful person I know feels effectively censored. There are certain group-minds online you can't risk angering, for fear of the consequences. These often exist as binary pairs in opposition which feed off of one another, gaining more members by mutual creation of outrage.

These phenomena need to be recognized by society. An intellectually vibrant society should shun such stultifying phenomena. However, our culturally dominant means of communication are precisely where such phenomena live, and are the places they effectively police. This ability makes them much more insidious than "hate groups" of the civil rights era.

The nerds created the new bullies, and the new bullies now shape and control the new discourse.

intrasight• 10 years ago

I'd like to point out that one's public persona can be different from ones private persona. Lots of public people use that approach, and for good reason.

pmiller26• 10 years ago

I don't know because I haven't met the man, but I hear Zed Shaw is a good example of this that a lot of people here could probably relate to.

technopath2• 10 years ago

Crazies in General

I wonder if, given the social unacceptability of mental illness, it will ever be socially unacceptable to slur mental illness.

ams61102• 10 years ago

I don't see a slur there.

paulddraper• 10 years ago

I agree, though "crazies" is the likely candidate.

jmcgough• 10 years ago

I do.

bpchaps9• 10 years ago

I have bipolar II and definitely see it as a slur.

See, I go into hypomanic states and do things that are what you'd typically see from a "crazy" person. Buzzing my head, getting into bad financial situations, intense obsession, etc. When I do those things, I'm usually aware that what I'm doing isn't 'normal', but since the rationalizations flow pretty thick, the corrections are nearly impossible to act on. Medication helps, but everything I've tried has significant side effects that are almost as bad as the illness itself. Being called crazy, or receiving comments or looks that imply craziness rather than applying basic empathy skills... fucking sucks.

"Hah, what are you, schitzophrenic?" "That guy's nuts" "Why would you do that, are you insane?" "Noise sensitivity? That's fucking weird.." "I'm quitting because people are calling me crazy my back. It's just childish.." "What? Grow a thicker skin!"

It's out of our control and we do the best that we can to avoid the problems we have, so being called "crazy" is just another slap in the face. It effects our daily lives, our job prospects and, well, every aspect in our life. It's similar to issues of race, regligion, etc, but since it's an enormous aspect of our thought process, it's just.. different, so the social stigmas are almost incomparable. Not to mention that it has a near identical stigma to a homeless person screaming on a train. It fucking sucks.

packetized• 10 years ago

Not as long as you have shows like "Big Bang Theory".

trhway2• 10 years ago

not only he slurs here, he just stereotypes some group of people this way from the start. It is kind of divisive and an efficient way to initiate combativeness. (Not that i let go waste any good chance to stereotype and to get divisive/combative myself, yet i don't whine about harassment toward me after that. You reap what you sow.)

justinpombrio• 10 years ago

I would describe very few mentally ill people as crazy.

lacantina4• 10 years ago

I would describe all people described as crazy as mentally ill, unless we're talking about "gay doesn't mean homosexual, it just means dumb", which is also bad.

ams61102• 10 years ago

When I release a game or write something visible to the whole world, even a tiny something (Warning: Twitter counts!), I am acting as a public figure. A teeny tiny one, but a public figure nonetheless. Public figures have always received hate mail, abuse, threats, and messages from the unhinged, and they always will. Alas, the internet makes them much easier to deliver.

Very true. Years ago I sent a "letter to the editor" to the local newspaper. Nothing too controversial, just an opinion about some local politics. I received several unsigned letter in the mail over the following days, no return address, etc. and that was just from a small town community.

pmiller26• 10 years ago

...opinion about some local politics. ... small town community.

Well, right there is actually the reason. The smaller the pond you're in, the smaller the fish you need to be to make waves. If everybody knows who you are, you can bet a couple people are going to speak up.

Chris20486• 10 years ago

You don't explicitly say this but, were these nasty or threatening letters?

Animats• 10 years ago

From the article: "Whenever I write about a topic that upsets me, I calm myself by illustrating it with royalty-free, reassuring stock photos."

The pictures in the article are so irrelevant that they're annoying.

jeffsco• 10 years ago

(You noticed. It is a form of humor fwiw.)

mirimir6• 10 years ago

There's a simple solution: Don't use real names online. That eliminates meatspace threats, if done properly. And then compartmentalize. For risky stuff, create new personas. In worst case, just burn them down.

pmiller26• 10 years ago

There's a simple solution: Don't use real names online.

Tell that to Facebook.

jholman5• 10 years ago

There's a simple solution: don't use Facebook.

mirimir6• 10 years ago

There are work-arounds. Not easy, mind you, but doable. Mostly only scammers will bother.

tomjen3• 10 years ago

Not much of a problem, just let your name be Mustafa Jones. It's a never going to fall for their real name policy.

tajen• 10 years ago

When you have a company, your name and contact is on every commerce registry document.

mirimir6• 10 years ago

DPR had a company, with none of that stuff. If he hadn't been so careless, he still would.

skybrian2• 10 years ago

That's good advice. But it's not a sure thing because most people will make mistakes. Or maybe their friends will.

mirimir6• 10 years ago

Your sets of online friends and meatspace friends must not overlap.

tlrobinson2• 10 years ago

Most people are terrible at OPSEC. If your online persona is used long enough and garners enough attention your real identity will almost certainly become known (extreme example: Ross Ubricht).

This is compounded by the fact that people tend to say things they wouldn't otherwise say if they knew they weren't anonymous.

The other issue is it's harder to capitalize on the reputation of online personas in the real world, if you care about that sort of thing.

If you don't care about reputation online or offline then just generating new identities on a regular basis could work well.

mirimir6• 10 years ago

Ross Ubricht

He initially used his real name for a StackExchange account, which was later linked to DPR and SR.

But you're right about downsides. If you want online personas and real world identity to be unlinked, you can't capitalize in ways that link them. But you can still capitalize in parallel. In the real world, I have no interest in privacy etc. Here, I don't draw on my real world reputation. It is sad, though, that I don't get to meet online friends, attend meetings, etc. So it goes.

UVB-76• 10 years ago

The other issue is it's harder to capitalize on the reputation of online personas in the real world, if you care about that sort of thing.

That's the trade-off, and it's why I don't sympathize too much with people who go online to get publicity, then complain about the negative attention that comes along with it.

grey413• 10 years ago

That's not how public figures work. Influential public figures are influential largely because they are credible. Credibility requires history. Anonymity precludes history.

Take Jeff for example. Jeff has a history. Jeff is a credible game developer with an impressive development history. He's a known factor in the creative community. He's got credibility out the wazoo. As such, we give his words extra weight because of that. In an alternate universe where this article was written by internet-man-of-mystery Bleff Blogel, we probably wouldn't be having this discussion, because he would have no history to back up his points. It just wouldn't have the same impact.

thaumasiotes2• 10 years ago

Anonymity precludes history. Pseudonymity doesn't.

lsc• 10 years ago

Personally? meatspace threats aren't the problem for me. Which is important, because I think that in a lot of contexts, your "real name" conveys a lot of credibility. I mean, sure, _why could write a technical book and have it be accepted without a real name, but I'm not nearly that good. I also, uh, I really like bragging about the technical book in real life, so compartmentalization would remove some of the reward I get. It would probably make me a less irritating person, too, but hey, I'm talking about me here.

The part of the article that really struck home for me:

They all have something in common. It never fails to amaze me, but a single mean email or bad review can send them into a spiral. Like, they'll still be obsessing over it days later. I think, "Wow. After all these years, they still won't let this stuff roll off of them?" And then it happens to me.

It's largely an emotional issue... but when I create, and I think when most people create, it is for largely emotional reasons, too.

Of course, it's also, uh, well, I feel kind of embarrassed for admitting that anonymous words can make me feel anything. And it's not like I want to silence thoughtful criticism, even if it's hurtful. (I think there's a line in there somewhere; part of that line is content... how well thought-out is the meanness, and part of it is repetition.)

Suppose someone gets angry at me for what I write. He gets a bunch of friends together and they give my games bad reviews on Steam and iTunes.
This is really mean and genuinely harmful, and there is not a damn thing I can do about it. They will cost me earnings, and I have no recourse. They walked up, punched me in the nose, and strolled away, and I could do nothing.

which isn't something I've personally experienced, but is something I feel some fear of. Probably not as much as a real creator would feel, just because creating, for me, is almost entirely social; my living expenses come from elsewhere.

I mean, yes, I think that there is a place for a nom de plume, especially if you are working in two different areas with two different or conflicting generally accepted social mores, That helps, I think, mostly by setting expectations with your readers; It's not so much that your pen name is especially secret, but that it gives the reader an idea what to expect, and if they don't like the sort of thing you do under one particular name, well, there's a convenient way to avoid it. Ian Banks and Ian M Banks are a particularly not-secret example of this; choose the former if you like literary fiction, the later if you like science fiction, and it's pretty obvious that if you just enjoy the man's writing more than you care about genre, you can pick both.

More commonly, you see writers penning erotica under an assumed name, and then later, after they have made it with regular novels, their real name is revealed, like Anne Rice/ Anne Rampling

But... the point here is that if I'm creating for public consumption, and a big part of the return is the public reputation, then compartmentalizing, sure, can make the loss of one persona less catastrophic, but it's still a pretty big deal, and for a lot of people, changes the equation to the point where it doesn't make sense to have a public persona at all.

CM302• 10 years ago

Yeah, this is how we told to use the internet in the olden days. Don't give out personal information online, don't tell every random person your name or what you look like, realise that no one is who they seem on the internet.

Unfortunately, this means that:

Your credibility might take a hit, since people tend to be suspicious of anonymous or pseudononymous sources.

You might become less famous/popular in general.

kelukelugames3• 10 years ago

I notice newly famous or semi famous people ignore all of Jeff Vogel's rules. They jump in and defend themselves in every argument. Happens often in the Magic community. Guy wins tournament, guy starts writing Magic articles, guy gets upset when criticized, and guy goes crazy.

CM302• 10 years ago

It's sort of like what happens to people who win the lottery; they have less experience as millionaires, so they make a ton of big purchases and questionable spending decisions. People who were born/grew up/made it rich more slowly tend to have more experience managing their finances and hence tend to go broke a lot less quickly/often.

The same thing tends to happen to the newly famous. They think they're invincible, get a quickly overinflated ego, respond poorly to criticism and end up under a ton of psychological pressure as a result. You can see it with people who make it big off talent shows or reality tv.

LyndsySimon• 10 years ago

It's good to see someone seriously talking about taking responsibility for defending themselves.

cpr• 10 years ago

Maybe don't work in the games industry, where the crazy users tend to end up?

Sorry to point that out (I know a lot of HN folks are gamers), but I think it's a valid approach.

I really doubt if Guido has been harrassed or physically threatened because of something in Python 3, for example.

cshenton• 10 years ago

I agree that the games industry has a problem, but I think it's because they're independent developers selling a consumer product. This creates a direct sense of accountability among a large group of end users who know how to get into contact with you.

Maybe it's simply not good business to be a dev who's both acting as the face of a product and writing divisive op-eds. This practice seems unique to the games industry.

known• 10 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullying

YeGoblynQueenne• 10 years ago

I see this article as a sign that we are slowly realising how shit some parts of the internet have become for the people who use them everyday.

There were some recent articles in big news sites about how their comments attract the worse kind of trolling and what they plan to do, or are doing, about it. Maybe a few years from now we'll have found some sort of resolution to all this but currently, we have a problem.

kelukelugames3• 10 years ago

Did this get flagged off the frontpage? looks like it. Sigh.

martincmartin• 10 years ago

No, after 13 hours it just fell off of it organically. If you filter out low scoring posts you can still see it.

kelukelugames3• 10 years ago

There were posts with longer hours and fewer points ahead of it.

Criticism123• 10 years ago

Criticism ≠ Harassment

awinter-py• 10 years ago

Hmm; his public figure point is a little dangerous. Defamation / libel protections are generally less for public figures (you have to prove malice).

How I Deal with Harassment, Abuse, and Crazies in General

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