Trent Reznor Quits Web 2.0, Offers Cutting Advice To Haters

http://forum.nin.com/bb/read.php?9,731489

by vaksel • 17 years ago

109 79 17 years ago

forum.nin.com

calvin• 17 years ago

My favorite line: "...the [social media] experiment seems to have yielded a result. Idiots rule."

pg• 17 years ago

I think that's just the result of version 1.

tdavis2• 17 years ago

We're on a version way past 1... that has been the result for many years now. The second person on the Internet was probably a troll.

johnyzee• 17 years ago

Idiots rule our countries. Why would online be any different?

(Not being snide - wherever you look, politicians seem to unfailingly be raping and making a mockery of the democratic system. I may be slightly more cynical than usual as we discussed Berlusconi at lunch today, though).

Does anyone have good real-world examples of the the kind of communities we would like to see online? I'd like to hope that degeneration into idiocracy as communities grow is not some kind of natural law.

jnorthrop• 17 years ago

Here is a good one: http://news.ycombinator.com

pmorici2• 17 years ago

I've always thought the degradation into idiocracy happened when people felt like they were anonymous which often times is correlated to the size of the community.

froo4• 17 years ago

Does anyone have good real-world examples of the the kind of communities we would like to see online?

Well, I'll give a fairly decent example.

I occasionally played tabletop wargames in the past locally and we have a statewide forum dedicated to it.

http://www.westgamer.com

I've seen disagreements before on the forum, but have never seen anything that would constitute trolling or abusive behaviour. I think this stems from the fact that everyone pretty much knows everyone outside of the forums and so idiotic behaviour can have real-world consequences (eg, not being able to set up games with others)

There is little to no anonymity on those forums and so everyone is quite civil. I suspect that if you make people responsible for their actions that they end up being quite responsible on the forums.

That's not to say there hasn't been the occasional piece of drama, it's just normally localised and doesn't make its way to the forums for everyone to read.

snorkel2• 17 years ago

It's not that social media has failed but rather Trent is realizing that his audience contains many antisocial malcontents and now he's recoiling in horror.

roc• 17 years ago

On the unfiltered internet -every- audience gets quickly dominated by antisocial malcontents.

So there's no way to infer from their presence whether they're a representative sample. I mean, people troll and spew racial slurs on -home improvement sites-. I don't think that means Whirlpool and Bob Villa themselves attract the dregs.

c00p3r• 17 years ago

That is good, because it is so easy to sell to them.

iamelgringo• 17 years ago

One thought after reading this: Troll filtering is a big, wide open market.

DTrejo• 17 years ago

And there are plenty of places to train your algorithm

randallsquared• 17 years ago

...but lots of disagreement as to exactly which ones are the trolls.

swombat• 17 years ago

http://www.socialmod.com/

misuba• 17 years ago

They're solving a different problem. There's a whole class of trolling that's impossible to identify out of context.

anigbrowl2• 17 years ago

I've been thinking about this for a while. What it needs is shareable trust networks, so you can see ratings weighted by the votes of those who you particularly approve of or despise. Attempts at objective moderation just end up creating echo chambers and/or popularity contests.

I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this thread is too small to contain...but I am making notes to write it up in some useful form.

dejb• 17 years ago

> I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this thread is too small to contain

This isn't going to be like Fermat's theorem all over again is it?

Seriously though I agree that you need a system that copes with the fact that different people have different tastes. Not a generic 'good' vs 'bad/spam'.

tome• 17 years ago

Yes, I've wondered about something like that for a while, myself:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467574

whughes3• 17 years ago

Then you'll run the risk of creating echo subchambers in a community, where people who share similar opinions form trust groups and block competing opinions out. Even if you rely on outside connections (friends and such), you'll still be more likely to network with people you agree with.

AndrewO• 17 years ago

Reading it, I couldn't help but think: I wonder what happened to Utu[1]. The site, http://savingtheinternetwithhate.com/ appears to be dead. Kinda sad.

(BTW, this is not meant to be flamebait either way about Zed Shaw. I thought it was an interesting project and it came to mind reading this.)

[1](http://www.zedshaw.com/essays/ragel_state_charts.html)

gojomo• 17 years ago

This is one reason Facebook is so valuable. It's designed from the start to have a strong 1:1 linking with real names, and shows all of your public actions to your real-life peer group. It's approaching internet scale. It could lock up this market -- at least among forums wanting real-name participation.

ghshephard• 17 years ago

Is anybody surprised that, with 600K+ followers, many of whom are already self-selected as "edgy" or "alternate" that some small percentage of them wouldn't be absolutely manical raving lunatics?

Trent could probably solve some of this with technology and create a self-policing environment, in which a core group of half-sane fans could administrate/police/censor to the betterment of all - There's a reason why Wikipedia's NPOV cabal and anti-vandalism bots make it a better place.

Likewise with keeping the community small (and hopefully self selected to be at least semi-lucid) ala the HN approach is also good.

Big, uncontrolled, and lunatic is a recipe for all sorts of wackiness and cruft.

absconditus• 17 years ago

Anonymity seems to play a larger role than the size of the group. Join any moderately active IRC channel and you are sure to see someone acting up eventually. A channel that I frequent with fewer than 50 people has a regular troll that bugs the channel almost daily and occasional racists.

sketerpot2• 17 years ago

Can you ban or killfile him? With such a small population, the IRC channel could probably get away with blocking the whole IP address range that he could possibly occupy. You shouldn't have to put up with jackasses like that.

Seriously, bans work. I know at least one forum which has kept trolls away for years with the mighty ban-hammer, and maintained consistent quality of posts by making chronic idiocy a ban-worthy offense.

adrianwaj5• 17 years ago

Quite right, and that's got a lot to do with NIN's style of music. You wouldn't expect Lionel Ritchie to experience the same thing if he emulated Reznor online. He'd probably get some middle-aged air-heads but no suicidal mischief-makers.

froo4• 17 years ago

You wouldn't expect Lionel Ritchie to experience the same thing if he emulated Reznor online.

Well, having been on the receiving end of something I thought I'd share my experience. There are raving lunatic fans all around the place, regardless of what genre the artists are in.

During the campaign to get Rick Astley voted as Best Act Ever for last years MTV Europe Music Awards, I started receiving large volumes of hate mail from one or two of Astley's fans (I've never seen anything quite like it before or since... and I've seen some pretty angry emails).

I was also getting some quite vitriolic comments posted about me by these same fans on many blogs around the web (Thanks Google Alerts!)... these fans, I found out, just happened to be women in their mid 40's who have a "thing" for Astley.

Having spoken to several people close to Astley (I can't say who) they have mentioned who these people are and that they were "loonies" and could effectively be ignored.

So, I imagine Reznor would get more than his fair share and I feel for him, I really do (I experienced about 3 weeks of it, and that was 3 weeks too much) - raving lunatic fans are everywhere.

Anyway, back to the story at hand, I think Trent talking about verified forum profiles is great, but I think that you could take it one step further.

Some sort of centralised system for verified identities online with a simple API that people could plug into their forums/comment systems on blogs.

Only want verified people to comment on your blog - easy, same with forums? - easy

I think when you start removing the anonymous posting aspect of parts of the web, it becomes civil. That's why I never post anywhere anonymously, I self regulate and I find I don't troll - unfortunately I expect there is a significant contingent online that don't have the same self control and do cause problems for others.

I think right now is that we're seeing a tipping point from when trolling was an accepted fact of the web the experience that new users are experiencing as how to act given it's becoming more widespread, and those people are simply emulating that.

It's a problem that is just snowballing.

</rant>

antidaily• 17 years ago

Yeah. He seems destined to be murdered by a "fan". Yikes, no wonder he's tuning out.

adbachman• 17 years ago

> Trent could probably solve some of this with technology

From the post:

In a closed environment like nin.com a lot of this can be moderated away, or code can be implemented to make it more difficult for troublemakers to persist. It's tedious and feels like wasted energy doing that shit, but some people exist to ruin it for others - and they are the ones who have nothing better to do with their time.

They've done the tech thing, but it's an arms race. I think the point of the "experiment" comment in the third to last paragraph is that the problem doesn't want to be fixed. The coping effort is doing more harm than good, idiots rule.

rw• 17 years ago

Great piece. As far as social networking goes, this stood out:

> Anyway, we're in a world where the mainstream social networks want any and all people to boost user numbers for the big selloff and are not concerned with the quality of experience.

rms• 17 years ago

Funny, I just saw him play tonight. He always puts on a good show. He's from Pittsburgh and we got a particularly good setlist.

http://twitter.com/trent_reznor/status/2049368290 probably sums up Trent's feelings in a tweet.

mishmash4• 17 years ago

Anonymity isn't the problem. The problem is that Trent's mind still cares enough about what other people think of him that it is consumed by the act of surveying his status and trying to please the please-able.

That's a dead end.

Instead, I suggest that at least on a personal level, we should let go and try to realize that nothing* really matters online.

As you begin to welcome anonymity, a certain type of apathy appears. You may even surprise yourself that you don't actually care that some troll just told you to "an hero" or whatever else it is they're bringing.

Although we're not funded yet, my startup is working on bringing the ideas of anonymity (along with privacy/security) to the mainstream.

We believe, that for many, many use cases, identity simply doesn't matter.

*mostly ;)

adrianwaj5• 17 years ago

I'd stand by my identity consistently if it meant revealing the identities of others.

calambrac• 17 years ago

There are many kinds of trolls. Most can easily be ignored, but there are many that can't. Two that spring to mind are the persistent attention takers (switching or maintaining multiple identities as necessary) that amount to a DOS attack, and those who are able to look like signal for a long time before it becomes clear they're just trolls.

In other words, not caring what trolls say is necessary but not sufficient.

greengirl5122• 17 years ago

I don't know...the impression I got was that what really got under his skin wasn't so much the attacks on him as it was the attacks on people he cared about-like his fiancee and the guy who needs the heart transplant that he was trying to help. It's easier to let anonymous attacks slide if they are just directed against you, but it's different when people start directing their venom at other people because you care about them.

ScottWhigham3• 17 years ago

Am I the only one that gets a little pissy thinking that this is nothing but pure content thievery? There was a sum total TWO paragraphs of OC there - the rest was a re-post of Trent's entire post. A link would have sufficed. A couple of quotes would've been fine but the whole post? That's content theft as far as I'm concerned.

mapleoin• 17 years ago

there's the link to the original post at the beginning. I found reading the whole post on stereogum's site more relaxing however.

bartl2• 17 years ago

> A link would have sufficed.

Maybe it was self protection against edits or deletion for the original post.

ScottWhigham3• 17 years ago

And maybe I need the source code to Windows just in case they change something that I didn't want them to change.

snorkel2• 17 years ago

Although Trent Reznor is not some poor blogger needing ad revenue and so he probably wouldn't mind his missives being rebroadcast verbatim.

ScottWhigham3• 17 years ago

I don't see how that matters. Theft is theft, isn't it? The flip side could be that, since Trent Reznor is an important name, he could feel the need to stand up for all the little guys who get their content stolen yet can't afford to do anything about it.

tlrobinson• 17 years ago

After witnessing his minor meltdown on Twitter the other day I thought to myself celebrities will really need to learn to ignore the trolls. I'm sure Trent will be just the first of many Twitter celebrities to go through this.

timmaah• 17 years ago

I think the majority of celebrities that are established celebrities, will realize they don't need the bs and just stop (like reznor is doing).

It stops being fun for them and it comes down to business. If they are not getting enough out of it to put up with the crap, they will stop or pawn it off on PR people to do it for them.

Same reason Obama and the likes don't watch cable news.

trapper• 17 years ago

Interestingly, the only troll-less social places on the internet are those who are started by, and frequented by a "guru" who everyone respects. I visit a handful of such places for different subject areas and they are completely different than the majority of the internet.

whughes3• 17 years ago

There's an important distinction between a guru and an idol, though. Reznor doesn't seem to fulfill that description; a too-distant figure can turn the respect into something like worship, with the accompanying zealotry.

bartl2• 17 years ago

It's a shame that he quits, as he is one of those few people who could make it work. When he quits, it's almost like "game over" for the medium.

mlLK2• 17 years ago

Given Trent's recent sentiments on Web2.0 I took it upon myself to transcribe his feelings to you by rewriting the chorus for his first smash hit, Head Like A Hole from the album Pretty Hate Machine.

   web two point oh
   black as your soul
   he'd rather die than give trolls control

[orig] http://www.lyricsfreak.com/n/nine+inch+nails/head+like+a+hol...

greengirl5122• 17 years ago

Awesome!

maukdaddy• 17 years ago

Wow that's really good. You should spend the rest of today finishing the entire song =)

mlLK2• 17 years ago

I dunno about the rest of the day, but by all means, you should feel free take the lyrical reigns of parody too and finish some other verse. . .there's a little Weird Al in all of us. :D

Trent Reznor Quits Web 2.0, Offers Cutting Advice To Haters

Related Stories