Entries tagged “unkindosphere”

Phew! A warm welcome to my regular readers, now that I've had the misfortune of being visited by the worst of the rest of the web's audience. I should have known that writing anything even mildly critical of Apple, or anything that appeared to be a Mac-vs.-Windows post would have brought the idiocy, but even my jaded expectations couldn't anticipate how stupid things got after I mentioned that I didn't like smugness, as typified by an icon.

Some highlights from the rest of the web, in response to the post:

• A nice How-To from Engadget, for people who want to switch out that icon on their Macs running OS X 10.5. Ryan Block also sent me a really nice email about my post, which was not only flattering but made me realize he probably knows exactly what it's like to be in front of a fanboy shitstorm and can see one coming a mile away.
• An amusing take from Fake Steve Jobs, which I particularly appreciated because Dan Lyons was being a mensch after I vented about his dissing of blogs when he was first outed. And I wouldn't want to be perceived as a negative person; Negative people upset me. Of course, his comments probably set the record for the race to the bottom -- this guy called me "Anal" in the very first comment, which usually takes at least four or five comments. I'd have thought this guy was in my junior high school, given how quickly he went to that tired-ass taunt, but since he's almost fifty years old, according to his profile, he probably did not. (Honorable mention to this kid from Brooklyn, who figured I must work in a call center, because I'm Indian. GET IT?!)
• Significantly more satisfying is Chris Owens' response, which includes his own custom icon that does exactly what I'd thought OS X should do -- use a variation of the Boot Camp logo to represent Windows. Consistent, still slightly deprecating (pulls all the color out of the Windows logo, and rotates it so there's a cleverly dismissive negative-space "X", but doesn't actually go for the Calvin-pees-on-your-logo gag) but overall very sensible.
• A couple of actual Windows pundits weighed in, Paul Thurrott and Ed Bott. I said in my post, "I'm just pretty consistent in my assessments of technology", but what I should have said is that I try to do that. Part of the reason is because being a Windows fanboy is as awkward and ugly as being a Mac fanboy is sneering and arrogant. Yuck.
• And then in my own comments, the world's most compelling argument for getting rid of anonymity on the web. There's a couple of dozen "get a life" comments, paired with an equal number of appeals asking me to get a sense of humor. (Hey, I'm the goatse guy! Mr. Lolcat) There are the expected number of people who didn't read the post, accusing me of either being a Mac or Windows partisan (I use both.). From there to Dennis adding a comment that says, in its entirety, "dick", followed by guys masquerading as Steve Jobs (predictable), Steve Ballmer (unsurprising), and Osama Bin Laden (what the fuck?), things get increasingly disturbing.

What I learned is that I have really thick skin -- the personal attacks, even the couple of emails saying I should be the victim of violence for my feelings about icons, didn't really bother me at all. What can I say, I guess I'm just used to stupidity on the Internet. If the traffic from an Engadget post isn't enough to bring the stupid, then that post getting on Digg's homepage will do the trick.

But what I did find disheartening is being reminded just how many people don't even try to think about or rethink their preconceptions. They'd picked teams on this completely meaningless debate ages ago, and are still spending time fighting some war that will never be won. I can be kind of bothered by it, shrug my shoulders, get over it, and move on, and they'll be off to the next thread or the next article looking to restate their same completely unconsidered opinion, in the same words, but maybe just a little bit more shrill. All this despite the fact that the general is not at war. I wish I had contact info for more of them -- I want to understand them at an anthropological level. Was mom's cooking tonight lousy? Did the Xbox get a red ring? Was that Facebook poke just there to mock you? What was it, son, that made you want to click from Digg to Engadget to my blog just to say say "BSOD??! I thought it was teh [sic] Vista spalsh [sic] screen.. But seriuously.. [sic] get a life. Compalining [sic] about this is so anally retentive, so MS."

And these guys miss really obvious stuff. I'd assumed that, as soon as I put a photo of myself looking like a deadly serious member of a boy band on the top of my blog, people would know that I was kind of mocking my self-importance a little bit. Not so. There's lots of comments about "you have a picture of yourself in a pink shirt trying to look all serious on your blog!" I find it comforting to think that at least you, my regular readers, know that I'm making fun of myself.

Now, who should I piss off next?

Five years ago, I got my first death threat for something I wrote on my blog. The same week, some of those readers called my boss and tried to get me fired. A number of others publicly asserted that I supported terrorism. All because they felt that's the appropriate way to respond to one of my blog posts that they didn't like.

It gets worse -- the Wall Street Journal's website chimed in later that week, maligning me by mocking words on my site, despite the fact that they were actually those of a commenter, not my own. Because the WSJ doesn't call its OpinionJournal site a "blog", some thought that carried the full weight and credibility of their print paper, and didn't realize that even a theoretically responsible bastion of journalism could participate in a blogosphere pile-on.

Three years ago, I ended up in the middle of another online fracas; No death threats this time, but perhaps that was because this had to do with my job and not my personal blog or politics. Still, the incident featured numerous threats of violence, against both me and my coworkers, usually in the form of "they ought to be beaten" coupled with an unabashed reveling in the fact that those making the threats were participating in an angry mob.

Conduct Unbecoming

With that context, it's not surprising to me in the least that the New York Times is finally covering the story of how we're dealing with the profoundly unkind place the blogosphere can sometimes be. Now, I should be clear: Though I may have been less certain in the past, I know in retrospect I was never in any real danger from any of these incidents. But it's hard to articulate the visceral, emotional impact of hearing a total stranger, especially an anonymous total stranger, wish you ill. This is true even if your rational mind knows it's likely just an empty threat.

The first incident I was describing was the result of criticisms I made on my site about the community on a political blog. Perhaps appropriately, one of the main points of contention on that site was whether mainstream muslims do enough to disavow and denounce the actions of the radicalized fringe of extremists. Interestingly, as far as I've seen in the half-decade since, there's never been a similar debate about whether to denounce the radical fringe of web communities.

But it's not limited to any one site, and the blame can't be placed on any one community online. When the company I worked for stirred up passions three years ago by changing the license on a software product, many of the responses that were angry took on a strikingly personal tone. Interestingly, the personal nature of the attacks was more vehement because we were a small company whose principals were known and could be addressed personally; People in corresponding positions in faceless multi-billion-dollar corporations, whose actions are theoretically much more far-reaching and potentially nefarious, are shielded from the vitriol by the sheer anonymity of their enterprise. Instead of being rewarded for being approachable, we are punished, whether in a personal or professional context.

There are countless recent examples to pick through, too:

• Sweetney, one of the most popular blogs in the parenting community, was the victim of a site dedicated to disparaging mommybloggers. The incident, which involved some horrible images that were created by modifying photos of innocent children, galvanized the entire parenting blog community for days. Though these parenting sites often have more readers than popular technology/media bloggers, they are less frequently covered in mainstream press. As a result, the dramatic debates that ensued didn't end up with prominent stories in traditional media, and many who have participated in the debates over the past few weeks are unaware of the incident.

• Even American Idol contestants have faced this issue: Chris Sligh, a former contestant in the current season, got death threats on his blog after posts that some perceived as slights against the show. "He attributes his toning down the jokes in recent weeks to hate-postings on his blog, telling reporters, 'I think it kind of scared me, quite honestly. I had people who were telling me that they hoped I’d die...'"

• And of course Kathy Sierra's ordeal, which has had such an impact on her life and work that she's reached a crossroads with what to do in her career going forward.

Mend it, don't end it

Now, after those examples, it's important to point out that blogging has changed millions of lives for the better. At the same time, we've been ignoring the cost it exacts on many of its most dedicated practitioners and proponents.

Because, regardless of the circumstance of any of my own anecdotes, what's instructive here is the pattern: Threats, often violent threats, are a common part of public discourse in the blogosphere. Now, they're common in other parts of the web, and on public streets and at shopping malls and schools, as well. But this is the medium that I give a damn about, and it's the medium I want to help as much as I can.

Every single person I know who has a significant public web presence has been threatened at some point, and nearly every woman in that group has faced an online threat of sexual violence.

The solution requires all of us who care about this medium to first acknowledge the truth of this situation, recognize that this is our community's responsibility, make explicit that this behavior is unacceptable, and enforce consequences for transgressions. In short, we need to encourage accountability.

And here's the challenge -- every significant effort to encourage accountability raises the hackles of the libertarian core of the technology community. Most of these people are apologists for those who resort to violent threats in lieu of reasoned debate. You will find this group falsely describing accountability as censorship, regulation or "political correctness". They will deliberately conflate the issue of accountable speech online with some infringement on the right to free speech, or will misrepresent the effort as a requirement to "only say nice things". And they will disparage those who suggest such measures as feminine or weak, using euphemisms and slurs that reveal their inherent misogyny.

Where we go from here

I'm an imperfect ambassador for this message, and I'll be the first to admit it. I've worked on the effort to create technological solutions, supported those who've spoken up about the issue, and spoken about this concern myself to nearly the point of exhaustion. But I've been ill-tempered and flown off the handle a number of times myself -- I'm sure that, having written this, someone will rush off to document exactly how.

Despite the fact that it's a difficult topic to discuss, and despite the fact that it certainly isn't the sort of conversation that attracts lots of traffic and readership, I think it's important for all of us to try to show leadership in solving the probelm. I will not settle for having the reputation of a medium I care about be compromised by the few antisocial members of our community. I will also try not to allow myself or my peers to stay complacent about the issue, because there is far too much good created by bloggers and blogging communities.

Imagine if every person who got an a telephone line had to dread the day when some anonymous stranger would call them up and threaten them over a conversation they'd had. We certainly wouldn't be carrying mobile phones around with us everywhere we go, and there wouldn't be love songs about people waiting expectantly by the phone. Blogs can, and have provided as many meaningful moments in my life as phone calls ever have; In order to make sure that other people have that potential, too, we need to be active in stopping those who threaten the medium as a whole.

Related links:

• Learning From Experience, the post where I first tried to articulate some of these concerns.
• Winning at what cost? Which revisted those ideas last year.
• Call for a blogger's code of conduct by Tim O'Reilly
• Some links to Mena Trott's discussions of blogging and accountability
• President George H.W. Bush attributes a coarsening of political discourse to the incivil tone of political bloggers.
• The Old Boy's Club is for Losers, which is about the pervasive misogyny of much of the tech industry, which often fuels the incivil tone of discussion in blogs.
• Finally, bringing things somewhat full-circle, a post about a blogosphere attack cycle at Tim O'Reilly's expense. I can't help but think this helped inform Tim's initiative as well.

One of the reasons I admire my friend Mena is that she is remarkably prescient. I think it's worth revisiting these posts that she wrote a year and a half ago.

Her first post was a transcript of a speech she delivered, with the core concept that we should hold ourselves to the same standards in conversation online that we do face-to-face. Some key quotes:

For this reason, many people are afraid of bloggers. Frankly, I'm a blogger and I'm afraid of bloggers...

If we want to bring a new generation to weblogging ... we need to create an environment where people feel welcomed.

And then, her follow-up post:

There are really two points I want to emphasize.

• It's not about being nice—it's about accountability.
• Ultimately, we need to get more people blogging.

I'd posted a bit about the unkindness of our communities online as well. There's more to come, but I think some of the ideas in all of these posts are still relevant.

I've learned some great insights into human nature from spending a lot of time interacting with people on the web. You know how, whenever they interview a serial killer's neighbor on TV, they always say "He seemed so normal!"? Well, online you can tell these people are crazy if you picture the back-story for the things they write.

Let's find an example! Imagine you run a little bed and breakfast. (I don't know the owners of this particular place, but they seem to be fairly well regarded.) Some random guy calls you up, and he says he and his wife have an expired gift certificate for a stay at your place -- is that cool?

You're a rational small business owner, so you apologetically offer a negative response: "I'm sorry, sir -- we can't honor a certificate that's expired. Thanks very much for calling, and I hope you'll join us sometime." This sort of thing happens all the time, so you don't think much of it.

But the guy calls back. "But we're coming during the off-season! Doesn't that mean you can honor our certificate?" "Sorry, the expiration date is really what we try to go by... and we don't really tend to have an off-season, things are busy all the time. But again, thanks for your enthusiasm."

There's another call a few hours later, and caller ID shows the same number. You're tending to your actual customers, so you ignore the call and let it go to voice mail.

The next day, the guy's wife calls. "Okay, what about one night? The certificate's for two nights, why not just give us one?" Understandably, you're getting a little annoyed. "Ma'am, this isn't a negotiation. We have a standard policy that we follow so we can be fair to all our guests. I'm sorry you weren't able to get here before your certificate expired." She starts shouting, so you excuse yourself and hang up the phone.

A few more calls from the number, and now you're letting them all go to voice mail. There's something on one of them about "What if it's in the middle of the week?" but it's incoherent.

Some time passes. You think the whole thing has blown over. Maybe those cheap bastards actually went somewhere that they had to pay for and had a good time. So you're cruising around the internet, seeing what the buzz is about your little business. And you stumble across a review:

We were given a gift certificate for two nights that we were unable to use within the one year time period. The proprietors were unwilling to accommodate us, even for one night in the middle of the week during the off season. They avoided our phone calls, did not return phone calls, hung up on my wife, and yelled at my wife. This is the most unprofessional "business" I have ever encountered. This discourteous treatment cannot be justified.

As a public service, I offer you my analysis. This quote is how you can tell this guy is a sociopath. Not that he merely went online and vented to random strangers about his greediness. No, rather, that he was willing to concede his own willful ignorance (or illiteracy?) while complaining. The web is littered with these chuckleheads who point out their own sociopathic behavior while complaining about others.

WandM_alum, you ill-tempered bastard, I salute you! You have somehow reached the same age as me without tempering your sense of entitlement one bit since you were a 3 year old throwing tantrums. And I must disagree with your conclusion: This discourteous treatment can absolutely be justified. Because your ass is crazy.

• So maybe Gracenote (formerly CDDB) isn't evil after all? I love anything that challenges the conventional wisdom, especially when someone's gotten a bad rap. Good reporting, Eliot Van Buskirk! I'd been accepting the received wisdom about this company for years, apparently unfairly. Do we have a tech equivalent term for "urban legend"?

• There's pubic hair dye now. So you've got that going for you. One color is called "Brown Betty", which I thought was a type of baked good.

• Microsoft and Yahoo endorse Google's sitemaps format for describing your website. I love when there's this kind of informal collaboration, as in the underrated nofollow initiative, as well as my long-time favorite robots.txt.

• That Sitemaps.org site should probably have a sitemap at some point.

• S.R. Sidarth in the Washington Post: "I am macaca".

Allen's actions that day stood out because they were not representative of how I was treated while traveling around the state. Everywhere I went, though I was identifiably working on behalf of Allen's opponent, people treated me with dignity, respect and kindness. I cannot recall one event where food was served and I was not invited to join in the meal. In southwest Virginia, hospitality toward me was at a high point.

I don't mean to belabor the macaca point, and the story is much more nuanced than it seems, but I hope all the slobbering politicians, regardless of political persuasion, take away a simple lesson from this: If you fuck with Indians in America, you will lose control of both houses of Congress.

• George H.W. Bush thinks one of the causes of political incivility is bloggers. He's right.

• I'm going to be on Cranky Geeks again. Seems to me the show's gotten a lot better since their blog switched to Movable Type. And I get to talk about the Wii and Vox, two of my favorite toys! Hooray.

• In case you missed it, you should watch the "I got a brown Zune" movie at the end of my last post. It's the finest film you'll see all year, or your money back. You'll also find yourself saying to yourself, "I got a brown Zune!" over and over.

• I really liked the Jay-Z ad for HP until I'd read the Slate piece about the campaign:

Though they were just as expensive to create as the TV ads, HP opted not to buy television time for these spots. According to Roman, this was the plan from the outset. HP decided that Web ads have become radically more effective of late, and thus that it's worth it to spend money on high production values.

I feel so manipulated! Eh, fuck it. I like the ads anyway. Three dimensional stadium rendering!

Ned Lamont was undoubtedly helped by his supporters' web efforts in his defeat of Joe Lieberman in yesterday's primary. Lieberman's team was especially incompetent for having a $15 hosting plan that couldn't keep up with his web traffic, and then unfairly blaming the downtime on malicious users who were presumably Lamont supporters.

But. What's frustrating is that the enthusiasm of a tiny group of Lamont's supporters also acted as another demonstration of the ugliness of a mob mentality online. Jon Friedman had a recent MarketWatch story which wasn't about the Lamont/Lieberman race, but articulated the challenge quite eloquently:

Critics can showcase their opinions, too -- within reason. And this is where it gets tricky for a critic, especially, bloggers. Plenty of bloggers have opinions and no reluctance about voicing them, which is fine. A big benefit of the Internet is it allows individuals to feel empowered.

But I contend that too many bloggers hurt themselves. They come across as loudmouths looking for an argument or a way to exploit the relative celebrity of their subjects. It's kind of pathetic when writers can't find something original to say and have to resort to criticizing someone else just to be heard.

Lanny Davis picked up the same idea, but he had the misfortune to be a direct target of the vitriol. From the Wall Street Journal's opinion page:

[T]he issue is not just emotional outbursts by these usually anonymous bloggers. A friend of mine just returned from Connecticut, where he had spoken on several occasions on behalf of Joe Lieberman. He happens to be a liberal antiwar Democrat, just as I am. He is also a lawyer. He told me that within a day of a Lamont event--where he asked the candidate some critical questions--some of his clients were blitzed with emails attacking him and threatening boycotts of their products if they did not drop him as their attorney. He has actually decided not to return to Connecticut for the primary today; he is fearful for his physical safety.

This illustrates two of the worst traits of a lot of the blogs I follow. First, many of us are far too willing to criticize those who are actually largely in agreement with us. It's as if the opponent isn't the person who disagrees with me 100%, but rather the person who agrees with me 99%.

The second, and even more egregious, problem is that everyone who wades into trying to communicate on a broad scale with the blogosphere will face one of these large-scale vitriolic attacks at some point. It may be a small percentage of the total number of people who read an item, but it's hard to describe how unpleasant it can be to get hundreds of angry or threatening messages, even if they only represent a small part of your total audience.

The cost of these sorts of attacks is that people won't distinguish a few bad actors from bloggers and online communities in general. Instead, they'll say, "Those bloggers are crazy!" and retreat from engaging the medium entirely. It'll be years until they come back and try again. I'd urge any community that wants to influence or inspire a movement to consider what techniques it wants to use for policing its most extremist members, as well as what tactics it wants to use for encouraging the accountability that makes for more productive conversations.

Other posts on this topic, which I'm semi-obsessed with:

• Learning From Experience, from two years ago.
• An Unkind Community from later that year
• YHBT HAND 2.0, which stands for "You Have Been Trolled, Have a Nice Day", and was about an oddly undeserved pile-on where tech bloggers flamed O'Reilly about trying to protect the name "Web 2.0" for its conference.

So, we've seen this behavior in tech blogs, and in politics, so perhaps we'll see these kinds of group beatdowns coming to music blogs, knitting blogs, and food blogs, instead of the minor flamewars that they've had so far. Then I can add it to The Blog Cycle.

One of the things I've learned of late is that, despite being a wonderful, generous community of truly warm-hearted people, sometimes the blog world likes nothing more than a good old-fashioned pile-on.

I thought about this looking at the (totally justified) hard time that Cory gave Fast Company over their dumb linking policy. If you look at the conversation, people act as if some lawyer gleefully rubbed his hands together and said, "How do we get this periodical to be an isolated island of unlinked misery on the web?" I'm guessing that's not the case.

Keep in mind, Fast Company is an organization that's smart enough to have a homepage that damn near validates as XHTML. They've had a real, honest-to-god weblog with comments running longer than almost any magazine. They even send Heath (and his amazing transcription skills) to various conferences so that people who can't attend can get a lot of the benefits of attendance for free on the web. In short, they're surprisingly clueful, especially for a mainstream business/general interest magazine. But people are assailing this part of their site's terms of service as if it were a concerted effort to be evil.

For Cory's part, I'm not criticizing his post about this topic at all. Cory's mandates are the openness of information, fighting the tyranny of bad law, and encouraging the free sharing of information. And he's doing what I do a lot, bitching about something that sucks, particularly appropriate as this is his bailiwick. I think I've got pretty good credentials for defending Cory's right to write about whatever he wants. But still, the reaction incited is one that's unproductive at best and unkind at worst.

Since I hate to complain without offering a solution, what I'd like to do is propose a new model for responding to the blogosphere's frequent and characteristic calls to action against Stuff That Sucks. First, read the link. Don't go being a slashdot flameboy. Read the thing that's being linked to. Second, we're good at collectively ferreting out information, so let's find the person responsible. There can't be that many people responsible for a terms of service document at a publishing company, and it's easier to get a revision made if we know who's going to do it.

There's a human benefit to finding out the person responsible, in helping to understand their circumstances and constraints. In almost all of these situations, there's someone who had to compromise for reasons that are totally reasonable. Maybe the guy writing this stuff was tired of fighting with his boss over it, and didn't have hundreds of emails from bloggers who'd back up his position. Maybe the woman who put this in place intended to fix it as soon as she got back from maternity leave, and figured who's gonna read a TOS document that closely anyway? Not all of us are lucky enough to have our licenses fisked by our audience.

So, once you've got information on what's actually happening, know who's responsible, and understood why they might have made this mistake, you've got what you need to make a change. We're bloggers, that means we self-organize pretty well. Be the person who starts the petition or explains how to contact the decision makers and provides a useful, non-confrontational template for how to get in touch with them. Provide a place where everyone concerned about the issue can TrackBack their complains, along with specific suggestions. (I can't take credit for that one, Mena nailed that idea.) And, believe me, people will read that feedback. Especially since it'll be the first Google result for either (1) their company name or (2) their name within a few days.

And then? Follow up. They'll make changes, as quickly as they can, though in most organizations that's not all that fast. Keep in mind, you're adding a task to their list that they didn't anticipate, and they probably already have a day job. My last request, though I suspect it's not likely to be adopted, is that people acknowledge the change when it happens. From personal experience, you can usually find about a ten-to-one ratio of complaints to acknowledgements of an improvement, in the best case. If you are the one on the receiving end and you get one tenth as much kudos as complaints, consider your work a success.

Now, all my blog posts are under a Creative Commons license, but this seems one of those ideas that can definitely be refined and expanded into a specific set of plans for action by the weblog community on almost any issue. So this post is completely public domain, and I hope you guys help direct all the energy of the various weblog communities into positive action more often.

I'd suggest a few things off the bat:

• A PowerPoint plan of action so that executives or non-tech people can see how to use blogs for positive action
• A how-to so that non-profits and other social organizations can leverage blogs for their campaigns
• Some background documentation on the types of results bloggers have had (with everything from Trent Lott to the Star Wars Kid as examples)
• A place to collect personal testimonials from people who've benefitted from blogger-inspired campaigns or who've changed their work or changed their ways due to input from the blogosphere

I'm proud of what we've done in creating so many different weblog communities, and I don't want our legacy to be one of having the positives overshadowed by our frequent, though understandable, tendency to be unkind or uncivil to those we're communicating with.