If You Can't Say Anything Nice, Kill Yourself

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jan/28/not-safe-for-work-techcrunch-arrington

by riklomas • 17 years ago

93 156 17 years ago

guardian.co.uk

invisible• 17 years ago

At least he points out some flaws in the industry and where they can be corrected. Blogging is a new industry (in some ways), and hasn't adjusted completely yet.

Newspapers took quite a long time to adjust, and libel became against criminal and civil law (although "cyberlibel" is around, there is maybe a total of 3 cases?).

time_management21• 17 years ago

Quick comment: people in the future will look back upon 1980-2009 as a barbaric era of unbelievable interpersonal nastiness. The truth about the matter is more complicated. We're not really meaner than people of prior eras-- in fact, we've made a lot of progress as private individuals on racial/gender attitudes, even while social infrastructure has decayed-- but certain crass and mean elements of our society (casual sex, classism, internet harassment, homophobia and racism, so-called "irony", a heartless health insurance system) are being expressed loudly right now.

Although we won't, at bottom, see the economic privations of the 1930s, 2001-2009(?) will be remembered as a difficult decade during which the future of civil society seemed uncertain. The 2000s have seemed like only a so-so decade to us, just as the 1930s appear to have been horrific in retrospect (people starved? no way!) but were still better, materially, than the 1900s and 1910s.

The reason I predict an imminent and rather abrupt end to the "nasty era" is obvious. The people in charge of it have fallen from grace rather decisively, and we have a brilliant, inspiring president whose character is excellent by any standard, and downright heroic in comparison to what we've come to expect, and whose ascension represents a degree of triumph over centuries of racial bigotry.

time_management21• 17 years ago

Can the person who downvoted me please criticize my post with a reply? I thought it was pretty solid.

Feel free to downvote this post as well. Take it all the way to -50 if you care. Just let me know why, ok?

dlytle2• 17 years ago

Probably the last bit talking about how you think Obama is awesome. (I didn't downvote you, btw, just my guess.) Also possibly mentioning casual sex in the same category as bigotry.

It went somewhat over the top, and presented your comment in a light that made it seem very biased and unprofessional. That completely eradicated the point you were trying to make early on.

Professionalism certainly isn't a requirement for posting, but a clear bias will make downvotes a lot more likely.

ii3• 17 years ago

Why? Because you mention casual sex and irony as something similar to racism and homophobia. I hate racism and homophobia while I don't see nothing wrong or "mean" with casual sex and irony.

jerf• 17 years ago

The idea that Bush caused internet incivility is one of the stupidest things I have ever seen attributed to Bush in a long line of stupid accusations.

(I'm not saying they were all stupid, but there sure were a lot of stupid ones.)

The internet was uncivil before Bush, the internet will be uncivil after Bush, and if Obama gives a speech tomorrow directly exhorting people to be more civil on the internet it won't do a damn thing, because the internet takes absolutely none of its tone from the US President.

Drink a little less of the Kool-Aid, OK?

gojomo• 17 years ago

I would never have downvoted it to 0; it wasn't a 'bad' comment needing censure. But, when it briefly reached +3, I just tried to downvote it, and hit upvote by mistake instead. Oops! So take that as a hint as to how arbitrary individual votes are, and why you shouldn't worry too much about them.

Why didn't I want your long grandparent "quick comment" to be a +3 or higher?

At one level, you almost seem to be implying "that nasty Bush and people like him are why Arrington was spit on, and now heroic Obama will fix everything". I think that's a simplistic and unhelpful worldview. (It doesn't even help Obama to treat him like a superhero.)

You vent a laundry list of grievances with the past 30 years. Well, if you want to write hacker-themed analyses of 'casual sex', 'classism', 'internet harassment', 'homophobia', 'racism', 'so-called "irony"', the 'heartless health insurance system', or anything else, more power to you. But using the labels as shorthand slurs about how 'barbaric' our current 'era' is just makes the discussion partisan, impressionistic, and emotional. You're pressing buttons, and such threads degenerate quickly.

Finally, while I was born before your 1980 cutoff when things started to go bad, I imagine most of the participants here have spent their whole lives in what you call "a barbaric era of unbelievable interpersonal nastiness." I can imagine them taking issue with that characterization, now and in the future when "people look back".

jwesley• 17 years ago

This will turn into Kathy Sierra part 2.

blasdel5• 17 years ago

I really don't think so.

While Arrington is even more insufferable than Sierra, he is an expert in the mechanics of trolling. He knows what he's doing: he's judged that the hype-value of publicising his detractors outweighs the foolishness of feeding the trolls, and I think he's probably right.

He's not going to get taken hook, line, and sinker like Kathy Sierra did. She managed to prove her attackers correct (at least regarding her incompetence) in her reaction to them. That is the real lesson of the Kathy Sierra debacle, and why it is one of the most epic trolls of all time.

BigZaphod• 17 years ago

Is there a reliable summary somewhere of what all happened in the Kathy Sierra incident? I mostly ignored it at the time, but now I'm curious as to how that all went down and what went wrong.

pixcavator3• 17 years ago

I liked this especially: "If you've got something to say online, say it in your own name or fuck off."

lacker• 17 years ago

So is "Pixcavator" your last name, or is it P. Ixcavator?

unalone11• 17 years ago

Mr. Acker, that was hardly called for. Sincerely, U. Nal One.

simonk• 17 years ago

Not his name; but, his profile makes it easy enough to find his name. So not a anonymous comment.

pixcavator3• 17 years ago

It’s an old handle. If I was to sign up today, I’d probably use my real name. I put info and links in my profile, as a compromise. -- Peter Saveliev

tdavis6• 17 years ago

I thought the point of online anonymity was that it allows people to be judged based on what they say and do, not by their name, nationality, certifications, or whatever.

Saying everybody should use their own names means you not only want to judge the opinions and actions of individuals, but you also want to judge them on a personal level, which should be irrelevant to... everything.

Before last year I never used my real name anywhere online, nor did I use a handle which contained any part of said name. I wrote no differently than I do now and still hold the same opinions I did previously. Who I am doesn't matter; it never should, here or anywhere else.

yters20• 17 years ago

Instead of tying a person to a handle, explicitly, each person should be restricted to a single handle in a community. If they misbehave in that community, the handle is punished. But, the person's actual identity is not affected.

Of course, restricting the number of handles per person is pretty difficult without some kind of record of their real identity. But, there's a puzzle to solve!

ntoshev• 17 years ago

The name is supposed to be an easy predictor of quality. There is a cognitive cost to read all these comments, you know. That's why you look at current karma of the comment and see if you recognize the nickname.

tomsaffell• 17 years ago

I use my full name as my handle for a simple reason: I want a single identity across the Internet and the physical world. I want to be able to meet people (at conferences, coffee houses, etc) and have whatever opinion they have formed of my online persona apply immediately to me in person. I want to be one person.

pixcavator3• 17 years ago

> I thought the point of online anonymity was that it allows people to be judged based on what they say and do, not by their name, nationality, certifications, or whatever.

I agree, in general, and you provided a nice argument in support of your position. Sometimes, however, you can’t help but express a strong opinion and nothing else, as I did above. Then your post shouldn’t be anonymous. Another example is when you give advice, such as in "Ask HN". Then the reader would certainly like to know your background.

Tangurena• 17 years ago

I ran for election last year. I plan to run again in 4 years. I can't post in my real name. While many internet posters tend to follow Gabriel's G.I.F.T., I'm not interested in doing so.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/

DanielBMarkham• 17 years ago

Problem is: ugly sells

froo• 17 years ago

I think this is the marketing strategy of 4chan and most horror movies.

yters20• 17 years ago

Yeah, that is really unfortunate. We care more about shock than aesthetics. It'd be nice to figure out how to combine the two in a way where beauty fixes the ugly.

old-gregg• 17 years ago

I am curious to see how American Internet is different from other countries in this regard. I have long had the suspicion that our love for hatred online and South Park episodes comes as a psychological defense against insane levels of in-your-face politeness, fake plastic smiles and excessive "political correctness" dominating our offline lives. Even our everyday language is affected by this: people don't die or get fired, they pass away and being let go. George Carlin said it best: soon we'll be calling a rape victim "an unwilling sperm recipient".

Perhaps the cure for online rudeness is being less hypocritical offline.

yters20• 17 years ago

PC is also counter to our roots. Originally, we were all about bucking conformism.

andreyf• 17 years ago

Not that this matters, but my experience agrees with your hypothesis - I try to go out of my way to avoid bullshitting people to spare their feelings in person, and I usually feel no need to attack them online.

yters20• 17 years ago

PC and passive aggressiveness build on each other. PC builds pent up aggression, which people take out on others who are open and not PC. Now you have another emotionally repressed PC person looking for a target to release on.

Goronmon• 17 years ago

I find many people are against "fake politeness" just to have a reason to act like jerk when they know they can get away with it. Contrary to your opinion, there are plenty of people out there who are genuinely nice.

Plus, there is a difference between disagreeing with someone and spitting in their face or threatening physical violence. In the context of this article, I don't think the idea is that we need to avoiding offending people at all costs. It's that we tend to reward the "hate" to the exclusion of other forms of opinion and that we are quick to judge people at a superficial level based solely on what someone else heard from some blog they stumbled upon.

So basically, this isn't about political correctness at all, and looking through the article, I'm not sure how you thought it was in the first place.

iron_ball• 17 years ago

Interesting question, but it's complicated by the fact that an even more polite society, Japan, is said to have an even more polite internet. More anonymity, more group bonding, more political deference, when your theory would predict the exact opposite.

ahoyhere14• 17 years ago

Except for the anonymous super free-for-all sites, like that one where you can write over images and video. I recall reading an article about a lady celebrity there who was trying to identify people smearing her online, to sue them. (Hadn't succeeded at time of writing.)

LogicHoleFlaw• 17 years ago

I'm not sure that this is entirely the case. 2chan has been quite disruptive to the culture. Its enforced anonymity and subsequent freedom from personal societal retaliation is a very new phenomenon there.

shiranaihito• 17 years ago

Japanese people actively avoid conflict, which is certainly part of why they're always so polite.

It's an awesomely safe place, but they've got a high suicide rate and the occasional repressed salaryman on a killing spree.

Tichy• 17 years ago

"You simply can't have a system which rewards nastiness over niceness..."

I don't think the internet is to blame, it is simply in the human nature. People bond by agreeing to hate some other people together. It is not the only way to bond, but it is a very common way.

ardit33• 17 years ago

I have to say the Hacker News in general is a much positive place, where you got real good and honest feedback, from semi-anon users (some are known, many are not). And usually the topics are intellectually stimulating.

But I have to say that a lot of nastiness can come from people that are frustrated with the current coverage in the tech media, where a lot of good technologies/projects/inovative startups are being ignored, and few people are taking the limelight. I even know about Julia Allison , but really what has she done? Except for being a great self promoter? What about Loc Le Meur startup, which is really nothing inovating. Why so few people are taking the limelight, while really good things are getting ignored? The ratio of noise to signal in the blogosphere/tech startup media is really high.

I guess a lot of people express this kind of frustration against these self-promoters, and not media itself.

It is like being annoyed at Britney Spears when the front page of CNN has a story about Britney Spears, while medicare reform is somewhere in the bottom.

Really, people should be frustrated at CNN, by ignoring it.

That's why I like HN, as it is a breath of fresh air, comparing to other sites.

(ps. we still have some shameless self promoters here, with github being one of them. We get it, git is awesome, but here are a lot of other technologies that get ignored, (HG one of them. Disproportionate coverage of something, in expense to something else just as useful, is just noise and doesn't help the community).

misuba• 17 years ago

We could, of course, start accounting for the fact that communication skills are as important as engineering skills when it comes to making a successful business... thereby taking responsibility for our own perceived problems and eliminating the frustration.

yters20• 17 years ago

But the people who devote themselves more to communication and promotion than engineering seem to have a disproportionate leg up.

ph0rque• 17 years ago

Sounds like an opportunity for another media startup to promote ignored projects.

we still have some shameless self promoters here

So promote HG: post articles about it, etc. The good stuff will rise to the top.

cellis• 17 years ago

What is hg? Please excuse my naivete if i should know that acronym as well.

spolsky• 17 years ago

mercurial (distributed version control)

tlrobinson• 17 years ago

"I even know about Julia Allison , but really what has she done? Except for being a great self promoter?"

She's the Paris Hilton of the tech world.

tdavis6• 17 years ago

The only thing more annoying than bandwagon hatred is bandwagon altruism. What happened to Arrington sucks, but this sort of shit happens to all sorts of domain-specific personalities and famous people every day. I just don't see what this "call to action" is trying to accomplish.

People aren't going to change, most especially within mediums that provide complete anonymity. The thing, I think, that really surprises people about this is the fact that online trolling has spilled over into real life and has resulted in spitting and death threats. As I see it, the more our online and offline lives merge thanks to the ubiquity of the Internet, the more you're going to see people acting as crazy offline as on.

unalone11• 17 years ago

I think it's an effort by a well-known negative personality to tell people to cut it out. I'm certain most trolls become such after a personality makes them think it's okay. And given the premise that you'll always have stupid people being uninformed, I'd rather have said stupid people not threatening people.

tdavis6• 17 years ago

So cutting out criticism is the way to fix people being spit on? That's like chopping off your head when you've got a headache. The rules slay me even more:

1. So everybody is magically going to stop being anonymous in a medium that heralds anonymity above all else? Okay!

2. So we shouldn't make fun of people we don't know? Right. I make fun of people I do know, and I'm not even one of the "spitters". This one ain't gonna happen.

3. Yes, because a 1:1 ratio of nice to mean things balances out the Universe. This article is stupid; unalone, I like your hair. I mean, I can't see it, but you probably have nice hair. HARMONY!

4. Make your own judgements but trust my judgement on these rules!!

5. End the violence; kill yourself!

nihilocrat• 17 years ago

Nerds are not used to being celebrities.

TooMuchNick2• 17 years ago

This just in: A lot of people in the tech industry have a harder time dealing with criticism (both fair and unfair) than their counterparts in the entertainment industry. When asked for help, Hollywood said "get over it, nerds."

jmtame• 17 years ago

haven't heard many stories about celebrities being spat on lately..

TooMuchNick2• 17 years ago

No, you're right. They've only been stalked, threatened, had pictures taken of them every time they go to the beach, been the butt of jokes on TV every single night, sometimes been assaulted, kidnapped, or shot. But thankfully I can't remember any of them getting some saliva on them lately!

I'm not saying the life of a celebrity is a living hell. I'm just saying there are thousands of people who already deal with the downside of a huge audience, and tech reporters will have to learn how to do the same. That's a pain, we all wish it could be otherwise, but it's not like Michael Arrington has to put up with half the crap that anyone with a hit song or TV show goes through.

giles_bowkett2• 17 years ago

"kill yourself" is hardly a nice thing to say, under any conditions.

natrius2• 17 years ago

Unless you're saying it to someone who is dying of a horrendously painful, incurable disease.

My war on universal quantifiers continues...

yters20• 17 years ago

So you're saying universal quantifiers are never correct?

nandemo• 17 years ago

You might want to check your irony detector.

ahoyhere14• 17 years ago

I wish people would stop thinking this is new just because this time, it's on the internet.

Tales of loss and tragedy inspire more interest than tales of gain and happy occurances. This has always been so.

Anonymity inspires hatred, violence, and depersonalization. Being around other people who are hating, being violent, and depersonalizing others confirms this behavior. Countless -- old, pre-internet -- psychology studies and case studies show this.

It doesn't have to be online.

Intentionally overcoming it is good for everyone. But. It's just the nature of the human beast.

And this Paul Carr dude is trolling - again - with this article, because he knows negativity sells.

And maybe he feels guilty about everyone thinking he's an asshole, but it's A) clearly his own fault and B) a habit he can't kick, because even this article has the same tone to it.

sh1mmer• 17 years ago

Something has been nagging my brain and I was trying to work out what it was. Reading this article jolted it loose.

This whole horrible situation Michael Arrington has found himself in is incredibly similar to Kathy Sierra (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Sierra).

The same comments by reasonable people are being repeated about how unacceptable it is, and yet 2 years on it's happening to a different internet personality, albeit not a woman this time.

Frankly sometimes I feel like I'm a hostage of the people the democratization of web has enabled. Although, I'd still say there is much more good than bad (I'm not Andrew Keen!).

ahoyhere14• 17 years ago

So Arrington gets spat on, and everyone suddenly forgets what a giant, dripping blowhard the man is?

Hello.

Spitting on somebody is totally déclassé, and death threats are never cool, but the man is -- professionally speaking -- a bastard. That is an image he has carefully cultivated.

He may be beloved of his friends & fam, but they're not the ones spitting on him.

ananthrk• 17 years ago

...Let's all of us who consider ourselves human beings and who want the internet to continue as a forum for free and frank debate get together and decide on a few rules of engagement...

This, I believe, is what HN offers me today. Cheers for that! Sometimes opposing viewpoints get downmodded to oblivion, but as I see from recent discussions, people have already started taking notice of this phenomenon [for e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=446176] and have taken it upon themselves to fix it..

geirfreysson• 17 years ago

I counted the occurrences of the words "me", "my", "myself" and "I" in the article with a bash command:

tr -cs 'A-Za-z' '\n' < paul_carr.txt | grep -i -w -c "me\|my\|myself\|i"

Result: 82 out of 1858 words.

That's 4.4%, ca. 1 out of every 23 words.

The author is thereby scientifically proven to be on the very far end of the introspective scale.

anthonyrubin• 17 years ago

What a bunch of senseless drama.

If You Can't Say Anything Nice, Kill Yourself

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