Unmasking Reddit’s Violentacrez, The Biggest Troll on the Web
"One reason Violentacrez continued to occupy such a high-profile position on Reddit was of course his free speech rhetoric. But Violentacrez has historically had a close relationship with Reddit's staff, a fact far less well-known than his controversial behavior."
"For all his unpleasantness, they realized that Violentacrez was an excellent community moderator and could be counted on to keep the administrators abreast of any illegal content he came across."
Wow, it's like Wikipedia's civility vs. established editors dynamic but with more misogyny, homophobia and racism...
-- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/
Tom, you just made my day.
An excellent reminder that as bad as things might be on our projects, they are partially just a reflection of the broader Internet culture (and a reflection of culture in general). Which means (a) it's not totally on us to fix it all, and (b) even as we try to fix it, there are a lot of allies out there fighting the same battles for civility and respect in other venues.
-Pete [[User:Peteforsyth]]
On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 2:41 PM, Tom Morris tom@tommorris.org wrote:
Unmasking Reddit’s Violentacrez, The Biggest Troll on the Web
"One reason Violentacrez continued to occupy such a high-profile position on Reddit was of course his free speech rhetoric. But Violentacrez has historically had a close relationship with Reddit's staff, a fact far less well-known than his controversial behavior."
"For all his unpleasantness, they realized that Violentacrez was an excellent community moderator and could be counted on to keep the administrators abreast of any illegal content he came across."
Wow, it's like Wikipedia's civility vs. established editors dynamic but with more misogyny, homophobia and racism...
-- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
"One reason Violentacrez continued to occupy such a high-profile position on Reddit was of course his free speech rhetoric. But Violentacrez has
historically had a close relationship with Reddit's staff, a fact far less
well-known than his controversial behavior."
"For all his unpleasantness, they realized that Violentacrez was an excellent community moderator and could be counted on to keep the
administrators abreast of any illegal content he came across."
Wow, it's like Wikipedia's civility vs. established editors dynamic but with more misogyny, homophobia and racism...
I had just been reading all the underlying links from the Slate story (http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/10/11/reddit_bans_gawker_links_...). I was wondering when someone would post it here, and I was going to myself if no one else did. The similarities to issues we've had on Wikipedia, albeit ramped up somewhat, are really interesting.
Daniel Case
Speaking of incivility, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Civility_enforce... is still going on...
But we need more than words - we need a video. Maybe some of the influentials on board could get something like this going...
As I just wrote there:
"I'm thinking one good funny video might help educate a lot of people. Have well nown and volunteer wikimedians/pedians READING out loud some of the absurd uncivil stuff that gets posted with appropriate expressions as if actually saying to a person -- and then calmly explain WHY that is harmful to the project and what the project is. In a funny but ''guilty-trippy'' way. The real psychopaths won't care but a number of people may be positively influenced. "
Carol in dc
What I was most struck by was the hypocrisy: in Reddit's vision, freedom of speech includes anonymously posting invasive images of teenagers, but excludes posting the name of a 49-year-old programmer who anonymously posts invasive images of teenagers.
No privacy rights for teenage girls, complete privacy rights for those who invade their privacy. There are most definitely parallels to Wikimedia.
On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 10:41 PM, Tom Morris tom@tommorris.org wrote:
Unmasking Reddit’s Violentacrez, The Biggest Troll on the Web
"One reason Violentacrez continued to occupy such a high-profile position on Reddit was of course his free speech rhetoric. But Violentacrez has historically had a close relationship with Reddit's staff, a fact far less well-known than his controversial behavior."
"For all his unpleasantness, they realized that Violentacrez was an excellent community moderator and could be counted on to keep the administrators abreast of any illegal content he came across."
Wow, it's like Wikipedia's civility vs. established editors dynamic but with more misogyny, homophobia and racism...
-- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
I'm not entirely certain that this has a lot to do with civility....although it does certainly have a lot to do with respect for women. (It also reassures me that my decision to not create a facebook account was wise in more ways than one.)
Nonetheless, one difference that was immediately apparent is the fact that Violentacrez was pretty much at the top of the volunteer heap there: he essentially had control of a large portion of their content, had permissions and accesses even higher than any Wikipedia administrator has, and clearly had direct communication and influence with the staff of Reddit. I can't think of someone who was equally trollish having the same degree of access or influence on any Wikimedia project. Yes, we have lots of loud people and rude people and trolls. But most of them are never granted adminship (and I can think of only one or two who advanced beyond that point in *any* WMF project), and none of them have anywhere near the same degree of control of content.
Risker/Anne
On 13 October 2012 16:55, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:
What I was most struck by was the hypocrisy: in Reddit's vision, freedom of speech includes anonymously posting invasive images of teenagers, but excludes posting the name of a 49-year-old programmer who anonymously posts invasive images of teenagers.
No privacy rights for teenage girls, complete privacy rights for those who invade their privacy. There are most definitely parallels to Wikimedia.
On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 10:41 PM, Tom Morris tom@tommorris.org wrote:
Unmasking Reddit’s Violentacrez, The Biggest Troll on the Web
"One reason Violentacrez continued to occupy such a high-profile position on Reddit was of course his free speech rhetoric. But Violentacrez has historically had a close relationship with Reddit's staff, a fact far less well-known than his controversial behavior."
"For all his unpleasantness, they realized that Violentacrez was an excellent community moderator and could be counted on to keep the administrators abreast of any illegal content he came across."
Wow, it's like Wikipedia's civility vs. established editors dynamic but with more misogyny, homophobia and racism...
-- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
I'm not entirely certain that this has a lot to do with civility....although it does certainly have a lot to do with respect for women. (It also >reassures me that my decision to not create a facebook account was wise in more ways than one.)
+1
Nonetheless, one difference that was immediately apparent is the fact that Violentacrez was pretty much at the top of the volunteer heap >there: he essentially had control of a large portion of their content, had permissions and accesses even higher than any Wikipedia >administrator has, and clearly had direct communication and influence with the staff of Reddit. I can't think of someone who was equally >trollish having the same degree of access or influence on any Wikimedia project. Yes, we have lots of loud people and rude people and >trolls. But most of them are never granted adminship (and I can think of only one or two who advanced beyond that point in *any* WMF >project), and none of them have anywhere near the same degree of control of content.
Risker/Anne
It also strikes me that there was another key difference: Reddit is owned by a large for-profit media conglomerate, giving the staff an even greater incentive to let him be as long as (as the Gawker article reported) he made their jobs much easier. Paradoxically it would seem, being run by a non-profit and having volunteers do almost all the work at Wikipedia that paid staff do at Reddit actually seems to have prevented a problem of this magnitude developing. If this does remind me of any particular Wikipedia scandal, it’s Essjay ... and that issue wasn’t so much about protecting undesirable content as it was an editor who had earned a great deal of community respect turning out to have earned that respect on the basis of greatly overstating his expert credentials (granted, probably something that will never happen at Reddit). Daniel Case