The most recent episode of This American Life (<a href="http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/545/if-you-dont-have-anything-nice-to-say-say-it-in-all-caps" rel="nofollow">http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/545/i...</a>) has Jezebel writer Lindy West reach out and talk to one of her trolls who created a page celebrating her father's death and claiming she was a disappointment to him. He sent her an apology after realizing there was an actual person on the other end of his trolling and they actually have a remarkably civil conversation about the incident. It's highly worth listening to.
Scary to think that the venn diagram of young gamers and future programmers is pretty substantial.<p>The ratio of men/women in college was pretty abysmal. This may not be the exact cause, but it certainly doesn't help the cause. Truly is a shame that so much talent is driven to other fields due to lack of basic social skills.
Anonymous free speech can sure bring out some ugly things in people. Freedoms, though, often cut both ways, protecting important and significant behaviors but also sometimes allowing sad and pathetic ones.<p>I think it would be delicious punishment if the author of each of those tweets were forced to read them out loud, in front of their mothers, sisters, wives, friends, bosses, coworkers, and children. If someone's willing to send messages like that to a real life person, they should see how people in real life react to their hate spew.
This is disgusting. It's also disappointing how little most games (CoD, for example) have done to cut back on back behavior. I've seen players on some games just spew hate and nasty taunts in games with no repercussions. At most, they get banned from servers that care to moderate. Often there's not even a mechanism for reporting other players globally. The lack of oversight allows a culture of trolling and nastiness to thrive.<p>Twitter could also do more to proactively prevent troll accounts and monitor tweets without waiting for someone to report it. I'd be a little more sympathetic to startup-stage Twitter figuring it out, but they're to the point where I'd expect something better.<p>Those who raise the "free speech" argument fail to realize that these are private companies. Companies like EA and Twitter are well within their rights to limit what is broadcast on their servers and networks. You can say what you like (within some reasonable constraints), but that doesn't give you the right to have it amplified through someone else's work.
For those who don't normally have "showdead" turned on, it's worth doing so for this article. A) I'm grateful that HN's more active moderation is taking out some of the trash. And B) it's worth noting the details of the sort of awfulness that's getting moderated here. This isn't just a gamer problem.
It would be entirely possible for Twitter to create various community driven feedback mechanisms, they just don't want to.<p>Plenty of online communities have various moderation systems, including HN that hugely reduce the potential for abuse, trolling and bullying - and most don't require your real identity.
I personally don't like the woman, but while scrolling down the list, the contrast between these people and the people i know online and in real life is so stark that i can only wonder:<p>Who are these people and where do they come from?
This post appears to have been flagged incorrectly. I'm sure we've been using a bunch of words that would raise a flag, when in reality we're just talking about the content and important but sensitive issues.<p>Could some fix that? Remove the flag?
The entire internet is full of this. Every comment section every forum its just absolute anywhere and everywhere someone can post text. Anyone who makes any statement on the internet will receive hate, the more famous you are the more you receive.
I hate to be that guy, but when you see the twitter account, you only have some reports of tweets like this, that's not how the situation is going to be improved. I agree it's outrageous to see people like this, but their twitter account is effectively completely useless to promote their message, I have to scroll down ~100 tweet to have something useful about video games. Their twitter account is effectively doing some publicity to this kind of message by posting only this kind of content.