I’d like remind everyone that you are free to curate your internet experience however you please. When your internet experience starts to suck because people are trying to make your life miserable, you are free to deal with that as you see fit.
You are free to withdraw from a space. You are free to ban and block. You are free to call on friends for help. You are free to dig in and argue with every entitled douchebag who comes along trying to win a war of attrition in order to force you out of that space. You are free to be pseudonymous; you are free to use your real name. You are free to publicly disagree with them, even via a blog post if you so choose; or you can privately disagree with them amongst a small tight-knit circle of friends and allies. You can use any number of block-list services like Akismet, RBL, the A+ Block Bot, or even a whitelist-only setup like making your Twitter account Private. You can engage with everyone who thinks the internet is a debate club, or you can ignore those people, or you can block them.
And be damned anyone who says that this is “fascist”.
These people who compare the internet equivalent of screening your phone calls with Nazi Germany are the ones who are in the wrong, and you can even choose to ignore THEM if you so choose, despite their howls of protestation. They are the ones trying to impose upon you the necessity to treat the internet as a debate club, and they are trying to impose upon your time to educate them specifically why their views are incorrect or bigoted or morally risible or utterly laughable.
We human beings only have so much in the metaphorical gas tank to handle only so many interactions and our level of freedom of association unequivocally guarantees that we get to choose which ones we want to have. We may not WANT to have every interaction that we have, but at that moment when we encounter such interactions we get to choose how we react. We get to curate our experience as we please. The internet is an extension of meatspace — it is not its own reality, but it is a subset of reality, populated by real human beings and these human beings’ creations — even including the scripts and forumssome people use to unfairly amplify their voice by spamming or stuffing ballot boxes. And we get to choose how to interact with these other human beings.
What we DON’T get to do is tell others what amounts of bullshit they do or do not trade in order to use a particular service. What we DON’T get to do is levy a penalty for existing in a certain state, or for having certain opinions. Even people who have the most odious opinions in the world get to block people as they see fit. Even the most terrible misogynist, racist, religious ideologue gets to choose whether or not they continue to engage with a particular person.
People complaining about a real-time block list of any sort because it happens to block THEM at some level, well, they think they’re entitled to everyone’s ear. They think they get to say whatever they want to whomever they want and you’re not allowed to stop them. Spammers have that sort of psychology — how dare you preemptively block their very important information about their Louis Vuitton knock-offs? What kind of Stalinesque dictator are you, for disallowing preemptively people screaming about “niggerjewcunts”? Are you on the payroll of Big Science, blocking them from promoting their blog post where they crack the Nostradamus code using a Bible cypher, and use it to prove that time is a hypercube?
The next time someone attacks you for trying to shield yourselves from attack, block them. Or argue with them. Or tell them to go fuck themselves. Or ignore them. Do exactly what you personally deem the most healthy for you. Never take on projects that you know will require more resources than you have available. If you’ve been around a while, you may have enough resources to take on a particularly protracted fight. Or you may have had those resources eroded from years of protracted harassment.
Just remember that what actions you take — for or against particular ideas — have consequences. Every action or inaction has political implications, down to the most seemingly inconsequential. You might, by any particular action — even as innocuous as a single tweet about something you did or enjoyed or something totally otherwise innocuous — prod a hornet’s nest of angry entitled douchebags. Or you might piss off people you thought you were allies with, or you might find out you’re ACTUALLY IN THE WRONG. You might overrun someone else’s resource reserves, and they might as a result disengage with you. They may even want to make that disengagement permanent, and enforce it using the tools available to them by whatever social media service you’re using.
You might find yourself sued for libel, and that libel suit, rarely though it happens, might even be more than a simple SLAPP suit designed to overrun your resources and force you to disengage. Rarer still, such a suit might even be entirely valid! Or it might just be a call to arms to thousands of like-minded folks to try to overrun your resources, though the tell for that sort of situation is that the person simply won’t shut up about this supposed libel suit in public despite a lawyer’s explicit orders. Or it’s an attempt at destroying the credibility of the person making the accusations. You might even be the one reacting to someone else’s actions this way!
Or you might be the one finding yourself blocked from someone else’s site or social media network. Or you might find yourself the target of angry stalkers who demand that you must never block or ban them from your spaces, and you must absolutely engage them in debate on their terms and on their time. You might find yourself on the receiving end of demands for your attention from perfect strangers, or an army of sockpuppets from a single person trying to steal the mantle and megaphone of the Vox Populi.
And still, despite their demands, you’re free to curate that experience how you please. You can ban, block, withdraw, ignore, engage, or abstain entirely. You want different rules in a space, and can’t convince the owner of that space to agree because they’re curating their own space differently, then you can create your own damned space. And you enforce your rules in that space however you damn well please.
Welcome to the internet. That’s how this shit works.
I just use 10k Aliases over past 15 years; the very second people start seriously bullying me, I just change my name over and over. It’s really confusing to people, and it works like a charm sometimes =)
I remember playing this one online game where I changed my name 15 times in one day, it was great; people were so confused; they couldn’t tell if it was me or someone impersonating me. Typically I’d get bullied pretty badly if I used a name for more than like 3-4 days, so I learned to alias very well online.
It really saved me a ton of trouble, and if people banned me for the aliases (which happened occassionally) I’d just go somewhere else and never come back (why would I?). I love aliases, disinformation, misinformation about me, and even excessively doxxing myself under like 50-100+ names to confuse the bejesus out of people. Why not? If people are going to be bullies they’ll never be quite sure if it’s me or someone impersonating me. I remember this one online game I played like 14 years ago for a period of a year and a half, and I went through 1.5k aliases, and that was the LOW end of things. Every other game those days was a new alias, sometimes change name in the middle of the game. If people accused me of aliasing I just asked that they banned me because I really didn’t care to just continue to be subjected to bullying by bigots.
RainbowSlushie @1
By “bullying” do you mean “rebutting your comments using facts and logic”?
I think you should stop gaslighting me and following me around. That’s the behavior of a sociopath.
Hear hear! It blows my mind how many people confuse their right to speak with the right to be listened to. One is freedom, the other the definition of tyranny.
Guess it’s time to change your alias again then, eh Rainbow?
Or you’re just an asshole, that’s the easier one.
Inb4 how I’m “oppressing people” by changing aliases frequently to avoid bullying and staying away from places I’m not wanted after being banned or run off.
Well, while you’re at it I can share the best way to use the internet. Join a movement, get like-minded people’s attention, pretend you’re making something to support the movement’s cause, make a Kickstarter project to get funding, pick $159k, do almost jack all but use other people’s IP (Let’s play, wikipedia) and profit.
Rainbow S, changing names repeatedly is also known as sockpuppeting, and many people ban sock puppets on sight. I’ve seen you repeatedly changing names at my place, and it’s a problem.
No, it’s actually known as aliasing, there’s a difference. You should look it up sometime. If I was sockpuppeting why am I clear about who I am and why do I use distinct smilies everyone can recognize and why do I repeatedly dox myself, linking to personal documents? I encourage you to ban me if you have a problem with it. In fact, I highly recommend you ban me.
Yep. You are absolutely right. Indiscriminately and without explanation, even.
You are free to create a zone all your own. You are free to ban and block all those who hurt your feelings with their well-reasoned points. You are free to put your fingers in your virtual ears, cover you virtual eyes, and virtually say “La la la I can’t hear you!!!” when they begin pointing out your inconsistencies. You’re free to convince yourself that those who disagree with you on one point must therefore support everything you stand against. You are free to create a tribal space and act as the tribe master while pretending to be an advocate of skepticism and critical thought. You are free to be dishonest. You are free to distort people’s positions and make sure they cannot respond – at least not on the very platform where the distortion was created.
You are free to ensure that only those who fall straight in line with your particular point of view are heard on your platform, and that any dissent is immediately silenced. You are free to lump all dissenters into a single group and presume that they are all of a single mind. You are free to all these things…
… but you are not free to escape the implications of such cowardly behavior. You are not free to behave like a coward without actually being one.
But the good news is, you’re also free to psychologically evade the implications of your behavior! And the more careful you are to make sure that only the voices of those on your side ever reach your attention, the less likely you are to ever have to come to grips with what you’ve become.
No one can stop you. So enjoy the freedoms you have, everyone!
Also, if I’m allegedly sockpuppeting, in addition to excessively doxx’ing myself every other post, why do I continue to use the same link to my blog in every Alias I come up with? If I’m socking, none of those things should be occuring.
I’ll give people here a hint, but it has something to do with people being assholes and then acting like I’m ‘oppressing them’ when they ban me and I leave and never come back. If people here want to repeat the pattern, they’re more than welcome to do so.
“Aliasing” is only distinct from sockpuppeting if you keep some part of the name to establish continuity. As it stands with you, people have to a) guess by speech patterns and b) confirm by looking at the comment URL by hovering over your name to see your links to your blog, which stays the same no matter what apparently. So you DO actually want some continuity. You just like throwing up chaff to break discourse.
And that’s fine, too, like my post says, except there are specific consequences that come from that. First, you’ll never establish yourself as a voice worth trusting. Second, you’ll always hit my first-post moderation wall because you’re morphing enough to get caught as a “new” entity. Third, you’re giving people the mistaken impression that your opinion is coming from more than one person, which falsely bolsters your opinion’s popularity. That’s abusive of general discourse, and frowned upon in lots of places. It may get you curated out of that place, even.
Something that might also get you curated from a place is having a fixation and shitting up unrelated posts about that fixation incessantly. Nokkelanimimerkki really really wants everyone to know that he dislikes Anita Sarkeesian, and thinks that the people who gave her money were shafted and that she didn’t REALLY buy or play any of those games, and that their Kickstarter money was wasted. Never mind that she’s delivered on all her promises so far, and has expanded the scope of her project far beyond what she’d originally asked for.
If I curate you from this blog, Nokkelanimimerkki, rest assured your opinions will continue to exist and people will continue to bring them to us. Maybe even in an appropriate context!
Um, it’s not that I do want continuity, it’s kind of that doxxing myself every other post: http://imgur.com/a/54IaN#0
Using very distinct smilles and language that are heavily unique, and putting a link to the same blog every time over my name, is pretty easily indicative of who I am to anyone who wants to take the smallest effort to verify it. I don’t do this to confuse people for no reason: I do it to provide cover and confusion to avoid bullying. What you’re describing has nothing to do with why I alias or have aliased, online, many times now.
Like I said, I really, badly, do not care if you or everyone on this board bans me, in the slightest.
Also, as far as trusting people, the minute someone bullies me, I don’t care if they trust me, because I sure as hell am not going to trust them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sockpuppet_(Internet)
Rainbow Slushie, you are sockpuppeting, despite your claims otherwise. Your actions fall into the definition of it. What you claim to be “aliasing” doesn’t really have any nontrivial differences than sockpuppeting.
Actually it does, huge differences as I just explained. Should you care to use logic and reason at any point in time, you’re more than welcome to engage the previous posts I’ve made explaining why it’s an alias.
RainbowSlushie, Jason’s post at #13 covers pretty much what I would have said, but there is one thing that I would like to. Only the site moderator can tell if your different pseudonyms belong to the same person. The rest of the users cannot, and having the same blog url doesn’t really do much to help your cause.
There is no cause, you’re just an asshole, you and others here; I’ve already explained in plain english why this isn’t only not sockpuppeting, it’s not even remotely socking. If I’m banned don’t forget the part where I “oppress” you, by not coming back ever again.
Is there someplace I can go pay for such hysterical performances? Because this thread is art!
This will be my last post, as I have homework to do.
When I say “your cause,” it’s really just shorthand to “the claim that you are making.” Sorry if that was unclear. The claim that you are making is that you are not sockpuppeting.
Your actions cause all of the same problems and confusion that sockpuppeting does. That’s the problem. You are intentionally spreading disinformation through obscuring your identity. That’s the problem. The fact that you use the same blog url on all of your many pseudonyms is really a minor (read: negligible) thing. You are sockpuppeting.
In the spirit of the original blog, you are perfectly free to continue behaving as your please. You are free to claim that sockpuppeting is really aliasing over a trivial difference, just like pedophiles/MRA’s are free to claim that they are really “ephebophiles” or whatever. And just like you are free to do those things, people are free to criticize your actions and your opinions. Freedom of speech != freedom from criticism.
The person who happily spreads disinformation and intentionally causes confusion on message boards is calling the people who want consistency assholes? Oh please.
Um, actually no it’s not, for the major reasons I just explained, but you’re free to keep asserting that it’s still magically something it’s not only not, but not even remotely socking.
Continue the bullying, this is enjoyable.
Let me ask you a question, I posted in this thread in /r/socialism under the name “AlicetheWytch” and was bullied under that name, as you can plainly see, by the transphobes there in that thread, extensively.
Was changing my name “oppressing” them? Am I missing something here? Was I ‘bullying’ them by changing my name after they bullied me?
http://www.reddit.com/r/socialism/comments/1kxtv5/faces_of_transphobia_the_chelsea_manning/
As you can clearly see, I was harassed and bullied by transphobic bigots. Was I “bullying” or “oppressing” them by changing my name several times in that sub, and then and refusing to go into /r/socialism altogether after that topic?
http://www.reddit.com/r/socialism/comments/1kxtv5/faces_of_transphobia_the_chelsea_manning/
Omfg, my name in that thread was AlicetheWytch and I was bullied extensively by tranphobic bigots, for hours on end, as is obvious to anyone who goes in it. But I changed my name in other related sub-reddits and kept posting, I was so deceptive!! I was oppressing the people bullying me by sockpuppeting!!
You people are a fucking joke, please ban me. Now. I demand it.
I don’t get it… you’re an atheist, right? Why exactly did you just preemptively climb up onto a cross just because people are suggesting that maybe, MAYBE, nick-shifting in a way that is not readily apparent might actually screw up a conversation? Why did you decide we’re all just as bad as bigots and transphobes because we’ve suggested that there are actual consequences for acting the way you do? Who here said anything about your trans status?
Just because you’re free to nick shift whenever you want, doesn’t mean it has no repercussions. You have your own identity that not everyone can see as a contiguous pattern of identity, causing all the problems of sockpuppeting without any of the intent. Whatever you want to call it, it’s disruptive to conversation generally, and absolutely could get you curated from the space.
Aliasing is something completely different from what you describe, honestly, and you can see it in practice at Pharyngula, with people adding subtitles to their nicknames such that regulars can fairly easily identify the person. At absolute best, you’re straddling the line between aliasing and sockpuppeting. At worst, you’re sockpuppeting. Sorry if that makes you think you need to climb up on a cross.
Editor: [snip copypasta of @22 in full]
Let me ask you a question, I posted in this thread in /r/socialism under the name “AlicetheWytch” and was bullied under that name, as you can plainly see, by the transphobes there in that thread, extensively.
Was changing my name “oppressing” them? Am I missing something here? Was I ‘bullying’ them by changing my name after they bullied me?
http://www.reddit.com/r/socialism/comments/1kxtv5/faces_of_transphobia_the_chelsea_manning/
As you can clearly see, I was harassed and bullied by transphobic bigots. Was I “bullying” or “oppressing” them by changing my name several times in that sub, and then and refusing to go into /r/socialism altogether after that topic
Pictures taken for reference in the future.
RainbowSlushie^.^ also appears to be bringing an argument that happened in another space to this thread, because the first person to use the words “bully” or “oppress” in this thread was RainbowSlushie^.^
Jason didn’t use either word in the OP. One person challenged RainbowSlushie^.^’s usage of the word “bully”, nobody else has accused RainbowSlushie^.^ of being a bully or oppressing anybody by nymshifting.
So, RainbowSlushie^.^ has derailed this thread and made it all about RainbowSlushie^.^ i.e. disrupted the discourse. All while maintaining a consistent nym on this thread. Looks like it’s not just the nymshifting that’s a problem with RainbowSlushie^.^’s style of “engagement” on the internet. I definitely tend to curate people who come through the gate in combative mode out of my surroundings, online and off.
Editor: [snip copypasta of @26 in full]
Ok, so I actually was accused of being a bully and oppressing people by Aliasing, repeatedly, by several people here. I will avoid this board from now on.
Editor: [snip copypasta of @22 in full]
Editor: [snip copypasta of @25 in full]
If that makes your internet experience better, yes, do that.
Final post for the rest of my life for Slymepit or FTB-and I already got banned on Slymepit months ago, on my first post, for posting a genocidal matriarchial rant. I got banned from Slymepit for posting under the name Marianne, a genocidal rant called Red Queen that was actually mostly serious. /waves to Slymepit and FTB, don’t worry, the door won’t hit me on the way out, I know you don’t care, no need to emphasize it; it’s already been done plenty enough in this thread.
Goodbye assholes. I’ll make extra sure to “Oppress” you all by never coming here again and not even thinking about this board on top of it, every chance I can get to dissociate it. I know you’re the victim of my sockpuppeting even though it’s actually not sockpuppeting and is aliasing used to avoid bullies, so I’ll make sure to oppress you jokes further by creating a new alias that has nothing to do with this one the next place I go, ok?
Editor: [snip copypasta of @22 in full]
Editor: [snip copypasta of @25 in full]
Well that escalated quickly.
What is this I don’t even
Wasn’t Eucliwood the only person to be banned at the pit? This thread is sufficiently surreal to believe this is a new incarnation…
“You might find yourself sued for libel, and that libel suit, rarely though it happens, might even be more than a simple SLAPP suit designed to overrun your resources and force you to disengage. Rarer still, such a suit might even be entirely valid! Or it might just be a call to arms to thousands of like-minded folks to try to overrun your resources, though the tell for that sort of situation is that the person simply won’t shut up about this supposed libel suit in public despite a lawyer’s explicit orders. Or it’s an attempt at destroying the credibility of the person making the accusations. You might even be the one reacting to someone else’s actions this way!”
Subtle way to try change opinions on a matter of liability of an accusation. Go yellow press, you’re free to accuse anybody about anything over the interweb and remember, if you make an accusation, be sure to accuse the target of your accusation again for destroying your credibility, if one dares to CHALLENGE you. =)
Oolon: no, I have fairly good reason to believe RainbowSlushie (and all her other nyms) is not Eucliwood. Eucliwood is at least so kind as to include “Eu” in all her morphs.
Nokkelanimimerkki: Well at least you’re on topic now.
I didn’t say a damn thing about whether or not you’re liable for libel. However, I can think of at least one time when the skeptical community thought SLAPP suits were anathema to discourse on the internet: Simon Singh.
I find RainbowSlushie’s cut-n-paste of the same comments over and over again, forcing others to page down past redundant content, to be a fine example of passive-agressive disruptive tactics. Such redundant content is snipworthy, IMO.
Absolutely agreed, and I already planned on doing exactly that, though I was waiting til I was back on my laptop and had a full interface to do so.
In other words, now that I’m home, I should stop procrastinating and get on that.
Apologies for the redundant egg-sucking lesson, Jason 🙂
Nah. Until I do a thing, you can’t know I planned on it. I appreciate the suggestions, as you’re part of my actual audience. If I disagree with any, I’ll let you know. 🙂
“Nokkelanimimerkki: Well at least you’re on topic now.”
My first reply was a pun intended. I don’t know if you ever got a message for my reply on another blog topic concerning Anita Sarkeesian and I thought you have soderated it. (Commented 29th August)
“I didn’t say a damn thing about whether or not you’re liable for libel. However, I can think of at least one time when the skeptical community thought SLAPP suits were anathema to discourse on the internet: Simon Singh.”
I admit. my bad. I should have googled SLAPP. I thought you misspelled slap with caps. Well, I’m European so US/CAN acronyms are a “bit” unknown to me and I’m used to read texts where you open the acronyms whenever you use them for the first time (in parenthesis).
I was referring to another FTB-blogger’s post that has helped to stir up a rift in the atheist community. The rift isn’t caused just by one [of his] post, but many posts from FTB-community. The whole thing is complex and I’m trying to understand both sides (mine and yours).
Yes, I am aware that people distrust PZ even prior to his “hand grenade” post, and therefore are willing to damn the entirety of Freethought Blogs and all thirty blogs hosted here based on PZ being our pope or some such nonsense. I am further aware that libel suits happen regardless of the actual truth value of the claim in question, as I point out with Simon Singh. If you aren’t sure where you stand, you may want to leave it to the courts to decide. In fact, you may want to leave it to the courts to decide entirely. They almost certainly will rule differently than you or I would.
Well written, Jason. This particular whine from the creeps desperate to find anything they can paint as negative and bleat about it is especially laughable. Sadly, it has revealed a significant intellectual vacuity within the atheist community.
I’m still surprised at how much some people are complaining about the blockbot. Do they really have nothing better to do than argue with people who don’t want to interact with them? Do they run after people on the street who are walking away from them?
As for curating one’s internet experience, I’d like mine to be free of threats, personal insults, and the like and this depends on either everyone behaving half-way decently to start with or a moderator putting in a lot of work to protect the space from those who don’t. This is in part due to the idea that it doesn’t matter how you behave on the internet because it’s not “real life” – I hope we can move away from that. Your online behaviour is as much a part of you as what you do offline.
“If you aren’t sure where you stand, you may want to leave it to the courts to decide.”
My initial position is Michael Shermer is innocent. That is why I would have left it to the legal system to decide whether a person is not guilty or guilty, in that order. I don’t say anything more about that matter, because I’m not a judgmental person by nature.
Also I don’t think PZ is your pope, but also I think that some of your bloggers and registered users are a bit too much of a movement person and rely only to rhetorics rather than real evidence. Just see the replies my posts have gotten. I was called science only know what, but I decided not to react to such baits. I know I wasn’t anything the ill words described me as.
You for example made a whole [long] post about thunderf00t being a sociopath (a “subset” of narcissist personality disorder) without realizing that if your claim is true you would become the narcissist’s source. They don’t care where the attention is coming from or whether it is positive or negative. Of course they like the positive attention more, but… That said, yes, in my opinion TF has some qualities I see as DSM-IV-TR symptoms and that’s only my opinion because I’m not a professional on that area. I have to admit I like his logical view on many [other] subjects anyway.
To me both sides should get sales rep to teach them how to sell their cause and whatnot on a public relations course. =)
Just my 0.02€.
Huh. Well that all went five flavors of sideways right quick.
I even thought that Rainbow Slushie started off in what could have been a reasonable manner, but quickly degenerated in response to the responses they got.
However, since I’ve seen this come up in a variety of instances, ranging from fairly serious to minor in nature, I would like to point out that the term sock-puppeting has been frequently used incorrectly. Not to say that the behavior being labeled as sock-puppeting is not a bad behavior in any particular case, or that it isn’t problematic, but simply that it it is being called by a wrong name. It is a distinction with a difference. What Slushie describes is more like morphing, but it lacks the necessary intent of changing nyms to avoid a ban. (At least as described. Whether this person is morphing to avoid a ban would likely be known to blog operators.) What Slushie originally describes sounds more to me like an effort to make oneself safe on the internet that has become perhaps a bit too habitual and extends beyond practical use. Certainly it can be a potentially suspicious annoyance for blog owners and the blog community concerned about their own safe spaces.
I’m still surprised at how much some people are complaining about the blockbot.
The correct response to being added to the blockbot is “Eh…their loss.” And then go do something somewhere else.
Well, that would certainly improve my internet experience 🙂
Went from funny to surreal to boring far too quickly.
That was Richard Carrier, unless this blog had something similar.
Also, how nice that you have that luxury.
“That was Richard Carrier, unless this blog had something similar.”
Thank you very much for correcting me. It’s always nice there are people on the internet taking care nobody is wrong.
“Also, how nice that you have that luxury.”
Why drink and drive when you can puff the magic dragon and fly? Peace, mate.