Honestly, I don't get all the complaining from harassment.
We live in a digital age where we can control a large amount of our information stream. If we don't like something, we just turn off the stream. It's like left-wing advocates and Fox. They don't like it, so they don't watch it.
If you don't like what people are posting on some service, remove the service, inform people you know that you don't care about what's posted.
Go on living, stop being a hyper-sensitive prick about people saying mean things. They're going to say them whether or not it's on Yik-Yak, 4chan, or Facebook.
But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm missing something. Let me know. I love being wrong, it lets me learn new things.
"But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm missing something. Let me know. I love being wrong, it lets me learn new things"
So, I think the concept of society especially for teenagers in their school-controlled world is very interesting.
You're ostensibly right, "just turn it off", but I think it's more complicated.
So why would someone go to a place voluntarily where they are being attacked?
Maybe, it's an important part of the society there, an important forum that the most respected people are using.
Being a part of your local Yik Yak for teenagers is like going to I/O or WWDC, you're in the nexus of the community.
I think those chats acted that way for many teenagers. The location-binding feature is perfect for the insular school communities to create exclusive popular communities.
And to be as mean as they wanted through them.
Also with regards to harassment, Yik Yak would commonly be a place where people go to discuss real life harassment of others.
So, for those unfortunate few, they weren't going to Yik Yak and seeing harassment, rather, they never went, but their harassers used Yik Yak to discuss, refine, and promote the real life harassment.
I think it's very complicated to try and insert ourselves back into the insular school mentality to try and understand this, but I think it's simple that Yik Yak was/is a popular tool for coordinating real life bullying.
School (I'm speaking of high school and younger) isn't the real world. Many things that are perfectly legal for adults are prohibited in school because they disrupt the mission that the school is trying to accomplish. There's certainly a grey area but things like dress and speech codes are well established and for good reasons. A service like yik-yak has no real benefit in an environment like that. In fact I don't even know why schools allow personal mobile devices at all.
As far as universities go, yes I think "if you don't like it don't go there" is much more realistic. Those students are all adults and by that age have mostly (certainly not completely) outgrown the most petty type of cliquishness and bullying that permeates the junior high and high school social scene.
That's very much not true. College students can be just as petty and cliquish and bullying as high school students.
And saying "Don't go there" isn't really a solution either. While the victim might not be there seeing it, everyone else is. They're still having their reputation damaged by the harassment brought upon them.
Why bend over backwards and cut yourself off from your college community just to cater to jerks? Do you think the mods of HN are "hyper-sensitive pricks" for trying to preserve the quality of discourse here?
People seem to live under this illusion that the internet is somehow completely removed from real life, that the bigotry and hate doesn't count if it's over a computer. "Just close your eyes and pretend it isn't happening. So what if people are calling your house, your employer, your family; stalking you everywhere you go; threatening to kill you on an hourly basis; calling in a SWAT raid. Just ignore it!"
On the contrary, I think it's long past time our society grew up and stopped trying to make excuses for outrageously bad behavior. These aren't harmless pranks. They're part of a culture that normalizes hate to the point that it emboldens people to commit violence, on college campuses and elsewhere.
Thanks for saying this. Threads like this baffle me, make me sad and wonder if its time to just stop visiting this site.
If you don’t mind being bullied, harassed, or threatened, that’s great, but it harms people. Whether you think it should or shouldn’t is irrelevant. Personally I don’t know anyone who has experienced it that wasn’t harmed. YikYak specifically was also horrific for Professors. (& of course, it also had disparate impact on women and people of color). So, either you don’t actually believe it does harm or you don’t care.
Please don’t @ me about free speech or censorship; not only is it irrelevant to startups because they are businesses & not the government, but moderation & boundaries are what make communities endure.
We make choices about what we build & what behavior it will enable. Choosing to permit or even encourage such behavior is not a matter of principles—it’s a choice of who can and cannot participate, which, as YikYak, Secret 4Chan etc show, directly correlates to the viability of the product as a business.
>Please don’t @ me about free speech or censorship; not only is it irrelevant to startups because they are businesses & not the government, but moderation & boundaries are what make communities endure.
"don't @ me" about completely relevant challenges to your opinion that are based on axiomatic political principles is cowardly and foolish. free speech and avoiding censorship are not just legal rights, they are principles that ought to be defended. those who would argue for a world where the de facto standard is censorship because they are capable of a narrow legalistic interpretation of freedoms are hideously short-sighted. if you endorse the erosion of these principles in the venues where you are strong, your enemies will use your exact arguments to erode them where you are weak.
>(& of course, it also had disparate impact on women and people of color)
is there a term for this akin to 'draping oneself in the flag'?
> free speech and avoiding censorship are not just legal rights, they are principles that ought to be defended. those who would argue for a world where the de facto standard is censorship because they are capable of a narrow legalistic interpretation of freedoms are hideously short-sighted. if you endorse the erosion of these principles in the venues where you are strong, your enemies will use your exact arguments to erode them where you are weak.
Although I agree with your general sentiment, I think you're being a bit bullish. It's important to understand what, exactly, we mean by "free speech". John Stewart Mill's On Liberty is the starting point for any such discussion.
In the essay, he discusses "freedom of thought" in this very famous paragraph:
But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
The idea of freedom of speech isn't simply that "anything goes." In fact, the Supreme Court has upheld this position many (many) times: see Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire for the canonical example. Preventing shitposting on 4chan or on Yik Yak is not (I repeat: NOT) an infringement of free speech. There are no veritable opinions there. There is nothing that deserves the invokation of Mill's freedom of thought. In other words, there is nothing of value.
Note that this distinction contrasts with something like Bill O'Reilly's The Factor or your annoyingly conservative grandfather, whom you may disagree with, but who also might have some insight.
But there are some things which we've resolved: we know that Nazis had it wrong, we know that racism is immoral, we know that we landed on the Moon. So not giving a platform to anti-Semites, racists, or flat-Earthers is not an infringement of free thought, as Mill described it.
Popular speech doesn't need to be protected. It is never in any danger of being censored, almost by definition.
The only purpose of freedom of speech and thought is to protect unpopular, evil, and straight up false speech.
That's fine if you use your platform to exclude those that you don't like.
But we aren't talking about that. We are talking about platforms that explicitly ALLOW this shitposting, and yet other people who don't own the platform are trying to stop it.
Sure, fine, businesses can do whatever they want with their own platform. So how about we allow that? Those that want to censor can censor, and those that don't can not do so.
And it turns out that there seems to be a huge demand for a platform that doesn't censor and allows people to post anonymously. (yik yak only died because it went away from what made it good).
So how about those procensorship people just leave it be and let those of us who disagree with them go to our own platform?
> The only purpose of freedom of speech and thought is to protect unpopular, evil, and straight up false speech.
This is patently false. Did you even read the paragraph I quoted? I'm not sure if I even need to get into details here. There are hundreds of historical examples where non-hateful, and non-evil speech was censored. But you're being incredibly disingenuous by lumping in "unpopular" with "evil" -- the two are not even remotely the same.
You're trying to put an equal sign between, e.g., Communism (unpopular) and an anonymous post doxxing a rape victim on social media (evil). Give me a break.
> So how about those procensorship people just leave it be and let those of us who disagree with them go to our own platform?
hypothetical: I've just told all your neighbors that you've got a criminal conviction for raping 8 year old children. It's just words, what's the harm?
If we live in a culture where people understand the concept of "people on the internet could be lying", especially with regards to specific, highly serious, allegations against specific people, then someone posting something like that about me wouldn't be a big deal, because nobody would believe them.
There certainly could be "harm", but I'd argue that on average, the harm would have a very low chance of mattering, and I'd rather live in an open society.
The more people are able to talk, the more they are able to get to the actual truth of the matter.
> If we live in a culture where people understand the concept of "people on the internet could be lying", especially with regards to specific, highly serious, allegations against specific people, then someone posting something like that about me wouldn't be a big deal, because nobody would believe them.
We don't live in that culture. We live in a culture where paediatricians are attacked because a group of people was too fucking stupid to know the difference between paediatrician and paedophile.
To be clear: I support free speech and oppose censorship by government. I don't know how or why one would want to enforce these principles on businesses--let alone how it would not run contrary to the most basic principles of private property & capitalism.
I said don't @ me because I've been in this conversation before & recognize there's little point in arguing when we are clearly defining the concept of free speech very differently.
Maybe I'm missing something, but weren't the majority of targets of harassment on YikYak as I described? Is it not ok to recognize this? Why? If we don't, it won't change.
Its ok that we disagree obviously, but I can't help but note that we are doing so on a privately owned platform that moderates its comments. Maybe you would, but I certainly wouldn't be here otherwise. Which maybe you'd also prefer:)
I believe you are wrong in assuming this blasée attitude is the right one or obvious one for everyone.
In a way you are overestimating the maturity of teenagers and young adults. In another way I think you are overestimating your own (and anyone's) ability to handle personal offense on a topic that you are sensitive about from a person that you know and it is close to you (you don't know who is, but you know you know the person, that's the point of hyper local).
The article touchs on that. One thing is a person saying things you don't like on TV directed to the masses. Another thing is a person far from you and who you don't know saying bad things directly to you and your friends. And yet another thing is someone you know and it is close to you saying bad things directly to you and your friends. This last one is much harder to act like you don't care.
But, ultimately, it is not about being right or wrong, it is about exercising empathy. Understanding that people react differently to situations and we have to consider that if we care for them. Doesnt matter if we personally would react so much better than them or not.
The problem from Koster's perspective is that when the target of harrassment/abuse/etc. turns off the source feed the feed still goes into the target's community. The communications analogy is not hanging up the telephone. The harrasement/abuse/etc. is delivered in public. Even if the target does not see it, the target's community does.
Perhaps an analogy is that one afternoon all of the target's neighbors opened their mailbox to find a flier falsely asserting that the target was a child molester. Most of the intended effect stems from the target's neighbors reading the flier. It doesn't matter much if the target read it. And in conversations with neighbors, "no I did not read it" does not make it better...and the fact that there are conversations with neighbors means that not reading the flier is not a way of avoiding the harassment/abuse/etc.
The article is pretty specific. First of all, it talks about school kids who you can't really tell to "be rational about it". Secondly, if you turn off your phone but people still organize multimedia mass-harassment behind your back, "turning off your phone" doesn't change shit.
A third point is that "turn off your phone" is incredibly dismissive. A person shouldn't have to live without the Internet due to the actions of one, two, or twenty individuals.
But they don't have to be a part of Yik Yak, etc. If you walk into a bar and people insult you, don't go to that bar. You also ought not be demanding that the bar be shut down either. Go somewhere else.
How do you turn off real life though? These online streams aren't limited to existing just online. They spill over into the real world.
Why do you think bomb threats shouldn't be taken seriously? What about death threats? What about threats to do you bodily harm? When they start to harass you in the real world, where do you draw the line? At what point do you stop taking things seriously?
And before you brush all this off as "Of course that shouldn't be allowed" that's literally what is being discussed here, and you completely missed it.
Sure. I'm sure that people are saying all sorts of bad things about Mirimir. And about my other personas. And about my meatspace identity. But I don't go out of my way to read that stuff. Any more than I go out of my way to read media that seems stupid.
However, I do get the concern about anonymous online mobs. If you're targeted heavily online, it's possible that someone will act out violently. Like that guy who shot up Comet Ping Pong over “Pizza Gate.”
People generally don't seem to handle online anonymity very well. But that's just how it is. Online anonymity is too important for many reasons to be killed over harassment. The key is to provide it anonymously, and make sure that it can't be taken down.
My thoughts exactly. I don't like the idea of a culture where it's ok to think "you're saying things I don't like, so you should be banned from saying it completely". its unhealthy and causes more harm the more it's permitted.
If consenting adults were the users, I'd agree with you.
But, in my town, this Yik Yak was used by high school, and some older middle school, students to trashtalk each other, both in particular and in general.
In my view it would be a good thing if parents of teens stopped footing the bill for the addictive devices that deliver services like Yik Yak and Instagram for that matter. For one thing, they'd save a bundle. For another, we as a community would have less cybersafety to worry about.
Good riddance to yik yak and the fratboy w##kers that created it.
You're missing a huge component. I used to play games where people would threaten me all the time. But they were Russians or Danes who lived halfway around the world that didn't even know my real name. Even if they were telling the truth it didn't matter at all.
It seems very different if they know your name. And where you live. And are physically around you all the time. It's not exactly easy to "turn off" that the person sitting in the same room as you has a decent chance of being the same person posting about how they are going to rape and/or murder you.
qmarchi says it's not harassment and that it's trivial to ignore. Here's a chance for them to test their methods and to prove those methods work.
Or, if releasing their name and address for a 3 day experiment is too scary maybe they can accept that they've got it wrong, and that harassment is real and causes harm.
I agree that online harassment can be a serious problem. I mean, consider Ross Ulbricht ;)
But seriously, it's best to stay anonymous in contentious environments. You have a professional online presence, for sure. But you keep that clean. Everything else using your real name ought to remain private. That's how I play, anyway.
(I can just imagine if someone was walking round campus with noise cancelling headphones and got assaulted, I'm sure you'd be the first to blame them for not being aware of their surroundings)
>Go on living, stop being a hyper-sensitive prick about people saying mean things. They're going to bully whether or not it's at home, school or work.
Go ahead and tell that to the growing number of people with depression or other mental anxieties that they're being "hyper-sensitive pricks", I'll wait. I'm sure they will appreciate your advice. This is just as stupid as telling a depressed person to "just think happy thoughts". You're out of touch.
some people don't want to live in a world where that sort of aggressive behaviour goes unchecked. whether it affects you or not personally, it's still a negative effect that we can look to minimize.
"bullying" takes on many forms, and while I tend to think that just words alone may not necessarily cause harm, I've seen it escalate to physical violence enough that it makes me want to nip it in the bud earlier rather than later.
Considering it's almost word-for-word the OP with s/harassment/bullying/, it's probably fair to say the GP is making a point about this "just don't listen" line we keep hearing w.r.t online harassment.
The issue is that you're punishing the victim. You're telling the victim of harassment that they're no longer able to participate in the community, despite them not having done anything wrong. And while you might not be interested in participating in things like twitter or YikYak, or even here on HN, others are. And it's really not fair to say, "You got harassed, now you don't get to participate. You have to go sit away from everyone else."
We live in a digital age where we can control a large amount of our information stream. If we don't like something, we just turn off the stream. It's like left-wing advocates and Fox. They don't like it, so they don't watch it.
If you don't like what people are posting on some service, remove the service, inform people you know that you don't care about what's posted.
Go on living, stop being a hyper-sensitive prick about people saying mean things. They're going to say them whether or not it's on Yik-Yak, 4chan, or Facebook.
But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm missing something. Let me know. I love being wrong, it lets me learn new things.