I know that I am sometimes inadvertently irreverent. I would like to apologize to anyone in a superior capacity, or who has authority over me, or who can hurt me in any way, whom I may have unwittingly offended. In particular, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee, Candidia. After my time in the dungeon, please, allow me back among your loyal minions, with Holden your adopted son. We have been punished enough. To be clear: I do think - no, I know - you are perfect. The fault is all mine.
Honestly, phil, this completely undermines any efforts you've attempted to make to achieve understanding from others or advance your points. I've entered into engagement with this discussion, but if you keep twisting the knife, why should anyone respect your views?
Posted by: MIchelle | January 13, 2008 at 10:42 PM
on the record, i respect phil's views.
Posted by: herecomesanyone | January 13, 2008 at 10:45 PM
The moral physician's scalpel is meant to heal, not hurt. It is for the best. I studied so many years for the work, you cannot begrudge me the pleasures of Our Noble Trade. A physician may be knowledgeable, and quote all kind of arcane text books, and that is tedious, I admit. The real test of the healer's art is whether the physician can heal in a particular patient's case. You work in the arts. Art, according to Horace, holds the mirror up to nature. Including human nature. Surely, there is no harm in that? We are just having fun. Please join the fun in that spirit after all the angst of the last few days. Laughter heals and can restore to us a living sense of community. We are not laughing at anyone, except our own sock puppets who are built and operated for that purpose, as Effigies, or Whipping Boys, to take whatever beating is needed. Grab a mask if you wish, just do please use a live email. Thanks for your good humor and your good will.
Posted by: phil | January 13, 2008 at 10:55 PM
It's for your best, but not for the discussion's best. This is safer and more comfortable for you, and that's about where it ends. It looks a bit cowardly to others. So be it; it's your sandbox.
Posted by: MIchelle | January 13, 2008 at 11:00 PM
Phil, we haven't agreed that a) a cure is needed, that b) you're the one to administer the cure, or that c) satire is the best means to do any healing at this particular moment. I get it, I just don't like it. For you to suggest that this sort of roleplaying would be "fun" right now is really tone-deaf. And disappointing.
Posted by: MIchelle | January 13, 2008 at 11:07 PM
Safer for all, I think. I am glad you at least stayed long enough to appreciate that we do have a genre here, one that we work within. It is ancient, honorable, and shares many roots with the plain style of serious people. (It is important to be earnest, but not always.) Serio ludere is indeed the name of our game. Thank you, for overlooking our silliness in this our sandbox, or Dumpster, here on the margins of the all too serious world of wealth and philanthropic consulting.
Posted by: phil | January 13, 2008 at 11:09 PM
It's hard to overlook the real sense of malice. The energy does not read as a healing energy. The best satirists were elevated by their love of, not contempt for, their fellow humans.
Posted by: MIchelle | January 13, 2008 at 11:15 PM
Michelle, read again, your own comment and remember that art is a mirror. What do you see when you look into it? When art helps us see ourselves differently, then we have a kind of experience that is transformational. (Metanoia in Greek means mindshift and is translated in the Bible as repentance.) Often we don't know we need a cure until after it has been affected. That is what makes my noble trade so bloody difficult and thankless. Pro bono and non-consensual both. All for the good of the body politic, to cure its distempers. I get little out of it; mostly abuse and a Dumpster to call my own. It is a Fool's game. Shake your head and smile, if you can. I think the world of you. You be a serious moralist and I will be your Fool, like your shadow. We can team up and set wrong-doers right wherever we find them in the world of wealth and philanthropy, or on the net. After Holden, who next?
Posted by: phil | January 13, 2008 at 11:22 PM
Yes, Phil, I GET IT. I understand that you poke to elicit a reaction and then I will presumably recoil at the sight of myself in the mirror. You must think we have no other means of self-examination. It is not that I don't get what you're doing -as you say, it's simple and ancient stuff - but that you don't seem to know how to honor sincere efforts. You may see this as a much higher game you're playing, with a payoff in the afterlife. I simply see a lot of lost productivity and progress in the here and now.
Posted by: MIchelle | January 13, 2008 at 11:28 PM
Ah, Michelle, let us dance in the mirror, with our eyes on each other. You said, "malice?" Surely you jest. This fool has little malice, truly. Frustration sometimes, when told to be serious, because his feet move best in dance. But the subject of malice and the Bacchantes was indeed part of an earlier post today. As I explained there satire is a sublimation of that kind of madness, always was. In satire we laugh at a victim with teeth bared like wolves who hunt in a pack, or we laugh with a friend to include the other in community. I mean in it as healing laughter, and in the sincere hope you will consider this Fool a friend. After so much seriousness isn't it ok, to poke a little gentle fun at ourselves?
Posted by: phil | January 13, 2008 at 11:30 PM
You do get it, I can see that now. A cure has been affected? As you say it is simple stuff when it works. I appreciate your good humor and good will.
Posted by: phil | January 13, 2008 at 11:36 PM
Sure. Have a great time.
Posted by: MIchelle | January 13, 2008 at 11:37 PM
Well, here in Dallas, it is grim night, I can tell you that. Goodnight. Fool is off to his straw. Kick me once more for good measure that I might somersault into my bed. All is well from my side. Hope it is for you too.
Posted by: phil | January 13, 2008 at 11:45 PM
Important is as earnest complains .. sheesh, really.
I thought that the rough-and-tumble of that other place, over there, helped people grow an extra half-layer of calluses.
One would think that the serious discussions (earnest, focused and attentive) in the comments section over the last day would enjoy a little contrapuntal tire-la-langue
Posted by: JJ Commoner | January 14, 2008 at 01:07 AM
People are sore, bordering on exhausted. Phil, do your thing as you will; I presume you mean no harm, and yet I presume you're savvy enough to know when what you can claim as innocent might tweak people nonetheless.
Where some folks would opt, in the name of cooling and healing, to make a point of letting things sit, others not so much. Different strokes.
Posted by: Josh Millard | January 14, 2008 at 01:37 AM
"Phil, do your thing as you will; I presume you mean no harm"
Josh you are a much more trusting soul than I.
I simply see a lot of lost productivity and progress in the here and now.
Me too...
Posted by: Kelly Mullen | January 14, 2008 at 02:16 AM
Oh my gosh, yer all a buncha wackos. Seriously! It's like a modern aristocracy.
Posted by: Do NOT want my name to be associated with this site | January 14, 2008 at 07:23 AM
Peals before swine, but I repeat myself.
Really, I thought only the advanced students had stayed for the graduate lecture. You people really are pathetic.
Posted by: Gerry | January 14, 2008 at 07:34 AM
I agree with Phil that the last post he linked to at MetaFilter was a step in the right direction. In the process, I and I'm sure others standing here watching understood why Phil was bending over backwards to be civil and not press important points too starkly. The few other times I looked at MetaTalk discussions, I would see Phil being treated rudely, and graciously holding his ground participating with your ground rules.
By now it should be clear what the rules are here, and Phil is completely within the bounds of fair play to post this satirical piece. If you are bothered by it, then I have to wonder just what you are seeing in the mirror. I guess you don't like it. If you don't like the feel of the satirist's knife, then you best not frequent this part of the net.
Posted by: Gerry | January 14, 2008 at 07:41 AM
Oh my gosh, yer all a buncha wackos. Seriously! It's like a modern aristocracy.
If only we were, then we would have access to the levers of power and would be able to crush the likes of you. Candidia doesn't listen to us, but then we don't listen to her either.
Posted by: Gerry | January 14, 2008 at 07:45 AM
It hurts me more than it does the truant, Josh. When children play dominance games on the playground, and defy their moderators, they have to feel a restraining hand. What cannot be driven in a thick skull must be driven into the truant's behind. Ever has it been thus. As a moderator yourself you might wish to master our noble trade. It keeps things light when they become a bit too serious. It is all in good fun. The point is not the hurt anyone, but to laugh the fool out of folly, while recognizing that we are all Fools and in the end. I make no other claim for myself. The old jokes are still the best. These are thousands of years old. Let me buy you a cup of coffee. I would like to be your friend.
My role here is to improve the morals of those persons of substance in every sense of that term who are control so much of our society. I should probably get back to that Foolish effort. I would welcome any thoughts you have on giving, social organizing, or online community building as we go along. You have a lot to offer here in that respect and I hope you will be back. Thanks.
Posted by: phil | January 14, 2008 at 09:04 AM
I'll assume basic goodwill. It's just not a style of interaction I find useful. Thanks and best wishes.
Posted by: MIchelle | January 14, 2008 at 10:27 AM
By now it should be clear what the rules are here, and Phil is completely within the bounds of fair play to post this satirical piece.
I haven't said otherwise. Fair play includes all those things that stretch to the very threshold of fairness, though; the decision to run the clock down or to draw the foul is unimpeachably fair play, too, regardless of whether it improves the sport.
It's Phil's house. He can do what he likes. I don't think he means to be a jerk; I just don't think he's trying particularly hard to avoid it, either, in the eyes of his new (however unwelcome) neighbors.
As a moderator yourself you might wish to master our noble trade. It keeps things light when they become a bit too serious. It is all in good fun. The point is not the hurt anyone, but to laugh the fool out of folly, while recognizing that we are all Fools and in the end.
Your style is your style, Phil, and I'd be nuts to tell you not to prefer it. What you have found works will for your small crowd strikes me as badly impractical for a large one; what is Serio Ludere in a confined context like biz-as-usual Gifthub tends to be read by a wider and less intimate audience as just a bad play. And you're not performing for a king, so there's no worry of a low jab getting your head cut off; just cries of "cut the bullshit" from the folks who've lost their patience.
I'm not going to ask you not to post what you will in your own place just because you've got visitors, folks from out of town wathcing. I'm suggesting that it's not surprising that they'd feel like you were taking the piss, and that I have a hard time believing you wouldn't be able to see that coming, and so despite my sense that you're not out to cause harm I'm left wondering about your motives a bit anyway.
Mostly, I'm ready to see the whole thing finish running its course. Whether you feel the same, I don't know; whether you think it's fair that laying off the satirical jabs would be the productive move, I don't know. I'm just tired of the whole thing at this point.
Posted by: Josh Millard | January 14, 2008 at 11:43 AM
They (Josh and Michelle) do have a point .. as a generality, we live in a much less philosophical and literary age than when satire was more common. Practicality and pragmatism rule the day, even if it is almost always short-term and reactive, and does not manage to look at the very big picture particularly well. So shall it continue, i suspect.
Please note that I did say 'as a generality" .. i could dig up the many references by bigger and better thinkers than me, and theorists, observers and pundits. But i'm pretty lazy, really.
Posted by: JJ Commoner | January 14, 2008 at 12:46 PM
It's too bad, because it sets a tone that really does preclude the conversation that at least part of Phil wants to have. Satire is an excellent political statement, but a poor way to run a broad, solutions-oriented dialogue. I've seen from postings by Sean Stannard-Stockton, Phil, and others that people like me really do have quite a lot to offer to the discussion on donor relations, the giving relationship, nonprofit operations, ethics, and standards, and what's being said and thought at the recipient level. This site could open up such a channel, but dealing with the satire/explaining the goals of the satire/tolerating the satire/ apologizing for the satire/satirizing the apology of the satire - this is a waste of valuable time and thoughtpower that really could be going elsewhere. The mentorship/teaching argument falls flat, because if your intended students reject the teachings, as Holden did, no education has taken place. So the satirical component remains a recreational activity for those who frequent the site, which is fine, but it does limit the discussion to a very small number of willing participants. If some of them take something from it to the wider world, that's a help.
Posted by: MIchelle | January 14, 2008 at 01:52 PM
I respectfully disagree.
Posted by: Gerry | January 14, 2008 at 02:06 PM
I'm not in the philanthropy world, and I don't have thousands of dollars to throw around. So perhaps you needn't court me, and my opinion carries no weight here. Neither am I a 'classical' satirist or a fan thereof, so I'm not going to critique its execution here.
I do dabble - as a participant - in online communities and communication. I find the machinations of social interactions in various media really interesting. That's the angle my critique is coming from.
Gerry wrote: By now it should be clear what the rules are here, and Phil is completely within the bounds of fair play to post this satirical piece. ... If you don't like the feel of the satirist's knife, then you best not frequent this part of the net.
Within the 'rules'? Sure. Productive? Helpful? Not so much.
From my admittedly limited exposure to GiftHub, it seems to be three things at once: a place for discussing philanthropy, a place for engaging in satire games, a place for Phil to post/vent about stuff in his life.
Separately, each of those aspects is all well and good. However, they have (at least twice) collided in a non-productive conflict. The satire interferes with outsiders joining the philanthropic discussions. Phil satirically (I'd call it passive-aggressively, that's how it seems to me) venting about people not automatically agreeing with him on MeFi also sours those discussions. Saying "Well, that's how we roll" to such conflicts arising from the tripartite nature of GiftHub doesn't help much at all.
And that "pearls before swine" attitude? Yeah, it's really condescending. It's just the sort of thing that the initial person - albeit not very eloquently - said smacks of self-important aristocracy and elitism. Then again, maybe it's multi-layered satire that I'm unable to wrap my common porcine mind around.
Take those observations as you will, I have no desire to argue about them or gaze into metaphorical mirrors.
Posted by: Chris | January 14, 2008 at 02:58 PM
And that "pearls before swine" attitude? Yeah, it's really condescending. It's just the sort of thing that the initial person - albeit not very eloquently - said smacks of self-important aristocracy and elitism. Then again, maybe it's multi-layered satire that I'm unable to wrap my common porcine mind around.
For the record, I posted this first and again because I see a lot of people dismissing the artistic aspects of the satires presented here. They do so in a very uninformed way, and with an assertion of authority that I find distasteful to say the least.
As a fan of Phil's writing and a long term friend, I do indeed take it personally when he is attacked. I'm not going to enter a back and forth with them where I assert it is of value and they assert that it is not.
Again I repeat myself. I respectfully disagree.
Posted by: Gerry | January 14, 2008 at 03:16 PM
All good comments, particularly benefited from your impressions, Chris. You are right, this blog does go in several directions, and they may work against one another. That is something I must consider. In fact I do consider it and know I have room for improvement.
A topic we discuss here often is sermon and satire and how they are either at odds or two ways to accomplish the same thing. I take it that well done they both tend to the same end, that of moral reform.
Michelle, and Josh, I am always open and eager to engage in conversation within the rules of reason. I hope you will agree that my contribution on the MeFi thread was sweetness and light. As to bullying, I found that when I went to MeFi to discuss bullying, I was bullied by some, not all, but several. I found that amusing and so wrote a trifling satire to hold the mirror up to nature. Some may see their face in the mirror, others not, in any case the hope was to delight and instruct, or at least amuse, and to bind us in shared laughter, at ourselves, at me included, since I was among those satirized.
I do look forward to the culture of reason, of friendship, of sweetness and light, to prevail. Perhaps in a perfect world satire like medicine would be unnecessary. As it is in our imperfect world those who seek to cure distempered patients may be permitted to include a little bitter medicine in the honied pill. But to say so is so humorless. I really should give the last word to our resident pedant, Dr. Amrit Chadwallah, our Senior Adjunct in Charge of Hidden Meaning. I am sure he will rise to the occasion at some point.
Thank you all for your earnest efforts to reform what is weak in me and to elevate what is low. My flaws are many. I look forward to doing better in the future with your moral example and ongoing correction to guide me.
Am I doing better? Can you see progress? Or must I be written off in the end as a hopeless case?
Posted by: phil | January 14, 2008 at 04:09 PM
Chris, I meant to ask and did not: What aspect of the blog do you like best? What would you like to see more of and why? That info would be helpful to me. I appreciate your feedback. I would love to make this a place that would attract people with your interests. Thank you.
Posted by: phil | January 14, 2008 at 04:11 PM
Seems to me there are some lessons to be learned here from South Africa's process of Truth and Reconciliation.
In this discussion, the historical record has been more or less set "straight". Unless there's a good reason (i.e. criminal charges) for continuing to probe the givewell crisis and subsequent cyber wars, I'd say it's time to call it "truth" and move on to reconciliation.
Since no amount of conversation will ever overcome some of the irreconcilable differences between the various agents, it seems to me that it is time to decide to disengage.
Maybe if everyone counted to three and yelled "uncle", we'd all be content to call it quittin' time!
I have the good fortune to be going away on a business trip where I won't have a regular Internet connection (in fact South Africa to work with museums) and therefore will not be able to reengage with this discussion till early February (by which time I hope it's over)!
Posted by: Maureen Ward Doyle | January 14, 2008 at 06:18 PM
Thanks, Maureen, "Truth and Reconciliation" says it well. The Catholic Church these days also calls "confession," the sacrament of reconciliation. May we bind ourselves into communities capable of love, mercy, forgiveness and reason. ("Good humor and good sense.") Hope your trip goes well. I will miss your kindness and your wisdom.
Posted by: phil | January 14, 2008 at 06:33 PM
phil: Chris, I meant to ask and did not: What aspect of the blog do you like best? What would you like to see more of and why? ... I would love to make this a place that would attract people with your interests.
Honestly? There was no part - with the tiny exception of the Otafuku picture entry (because I'm vaguely familiar with the Setsubun anti-demon bean-chucking) - that I liked. But that's okay; as I said before, I'm not in philanthropy and I'm into satire. If it weren't for the head-butting with MeFi, I'm virtually certain I never would have stumbled upon your blog. And I probably won't contribute much once it's over.
As to what you can do to change that... well, not much. Your blog has a relatively narrow theme, and thus a relatively narrow audience. To attract a wider audience, you'd have to change to a wider theme - and you shouldn't have to do that. It's your blog afterall. It's somewhat like today's multitude of highly specialized satellite TV channels vs. the bygone era of The Big Four. The Scif-Fi channel can't realistically expect to draw in the same ratings and diverse audience as pre-satellite NBC, without changing its very nature as the Sci-Fi channel. Nor can the NHL channel realistically expect to attract non-hockey-loving baseball fans, without dropping the hockey.
The one thing I can give as advice would be to seriously dial back the satire, or avoid it completely, when dealing with outsiders with whom you want to engage. I think you and your crew did that in the beginning, but then you withdrew back into it in a moment of frustration. It's not merely a stylistic issue: in my case, the constant near-impenetrable layer of satire and masks and whatnot induces a confusion as to what you people are really trying to say. I imagine it's something like what some autistic people feel when people aren't speaking directly.
Gerry: ... I see a lot of people dismissing the artistic aspects of the satires presented here. They do so in a very uninformed way, and with an assertion of authority that I find distasteful to say the least.
People know, 'get', and like different things. Surely there are things in this world that you don't understand, 'get', or like. Jazz? Death Metal? Polka? Super 'ripe' cheeses so nearly-rotten that their stink make dogs retch? Anime? Furries? Neo-tribalism with its elaborate tattoos and body modifications? I could go on and on.
Your not liking whatever it is you don't like doesn't make you an inherently lesser being than those who like it, be it Norwegian Death Metal, Sardinian maggot cheese, or fan-service-filled harem-type anime series. That "pearls before swine" attitude does exactly that: elevating yourself (and others like you) above those who don't grok the "art" of phil's satire.
Posted by: Chris | January 14, 2008 at 06:55 PM
Your not liking whatever it is you don't like doesn't make you an inherently lesser being than those who like it,
No, but it doesn't make you seem like any less of an idiot. I generally don't comment on works that I don't get or like.
Posted by: Gerry | January 14, 2008 at 07:22 PM
as I said before, I'm not in philanthropy and I'm into satire.
Oops. Word omission: that should be "_not_ into satire".
Posted by: Chris | January 14, 2008 at 07:30 PM
Thank you, Chris, that is genuinely helpful. I may not be able to act on the suggestions, because the satirical is how my sensibility at this point functions. It is how I process things internally, so withholding it leaves me feeling like I have given only part of myself to a discussion.
With the MeFi culture I do experience some of that as bullying, as "winning by intimidation," as ganging up, and piling on, as a culture of "we are ok you are not ok," as a Darwinian pit. I realize that this is my perspective based on my experience, but in any exchange I have had on MeFi a very large fraction of comments directed to me have been overtly, indeed flagrantly insulting. (Of course that may be because I deserve it.) I am wondering, though, do you think that is partly "geek culture," or "hacker" code culture? The reason I ask is that I am trying to place it. The only place I can recall it is from interactions that Dave Winer had online with other programmers. I was appalled at how vicious that could get sometimes, and how persistent and cruel his detractors became. Yet, he hit back with jabs just as hard.
Your using "grok" made me think that maybe the problem is that I am just not handling hard core geek culture right. This may sound stupid of me to ask, but if you come by again and feel like answering, I would genuinely appreciate a tip or pointer. Let's say I go back to the thread on bullying at Mefi.
I assume that within minutes several people there will jump in with insults - to prove they don't bully, and to beat me up for saying they do. What is the right way to handle that? Is it good etiquette there to simply ignore ad hominens or is this a geekish dominance contest where a good sport would fire insult for insult? To me that seems junvenile. But would that be the right thing to do? Or, should I simply ignore the noise of insult and listen for the voices of reason and reply only to those?
My natural mode when bullied is to satirize same. If that is considered unacceptable or unreadable, or insane, what is the best option remaining, in the interests of good group dynamics? Trade insults?
Please treat this as a MeFi Newbie inquiry. It is meant as that. "Call me Clueless." I am. Let me add, given that Language Hat, Stavros, you and Michelle find MeFi a good place to hang out, my experience is clearly distorted. I would like to be on good terms with all, to the extent possible.
I agree that this is a specialty site and may not hold your attention going forward. Still, nice to meet you! And thank you for your suggestions.
By the way, the pearls before swine is not my attitude. I hope you see that. I would be ashamed of myself if I gave that impression. Bottom up, and side to side, and the edges in. We are in this democracy thing together. Civil society is where we work this stuff out together, as hard as that can sometimes be. My experience has been that to get to true friendship we have sometimes to by way of conflict. So I stay with it, as best I can, with diverse civic friendships as the goal. Anyway, thanks, Chris.
Posted by: phil | January 14, 2008 at 07:41 PM
Hey, guys, Gerry and Chris, are you both programmers? Or geeks? Maybe you can both give me a lesson on geek etiquette or preferred communication style.
Chris, if Gerry spoke to me like he just did to you, I would be irked. Does it irk you, or is that just the way a certain subculture works things out?
Is Gerry doing it right, and I am dancing around it too much? Again, "Color me Clueless."
Posted by: phil | January 14, 2008 at 07:45 PM
I am wondering, though, do you think that is partly "geek culture," or "hacker" code culture? The reason I ask is that I am trying to place it. The only place I can recall it is from interactions that Dave Winer had online with other programmers. I was appalled at how vicious that could get sometimes, and how persistent and cruel his detractors became. Yet, he hit back with jabs just as hard.
It's interesting; I don't know Dave, know very little about him really, but have gotten the impression from discussions that he's pretty much a super-smart guy who's also a tremendous asshole.
It may be that the story is better of the extremes are sold hard by the folks I'm talking too, but mostly what I take from that is that it's not a hacker culture thing, it's an asshole culture thing and in this case the folks involved happen to be programmers.
There's the line that computer programmers are devastatingly undersocialized or (in more faddish terms) that they trend Aspie, but my general experience is that they're mostly just fairly normal, baseline folks. You get your assholes and your saints and then everybody else.
(Odd trivia, but he was a mefite back in the day, and a peach then. Before my time on the site, that was; I only found out about that when I did some canvassing of mefi's early days a while back.)
Is piling-on a hacker culture thing? I don't think so. I'd say it's a more general internet culture thing, or forum culture maybe if that's a meaningful subdivision: born out of a mix of varying levels of patience, tolerance, inclusiveness, territorialness.
I assume that within minutes several people there will jump in with insults - to prove they don't bully, and to beat me up for saying they do.
Well, the thing is—and under the circumstances I'm asking you to take my word for something that'd be difficult to test—that's not the neutral expectation, really. It's not that someone walked into Metatalk; it's that you, as a known entity seen as hosting (and loyal to) a crowd recently hostile to the group you were wading in among, were the one who walked in the door.
Your appearances so far have been hopelessly conflated with the context of the recent clash, and by your perceived defense by some folks not particularly interested in changing their minds of Holden's actions, and your perceived discursive intent by some other folks (with some overlap) as being trolling rather than good faith discussion.
Is it fair that you got such a harsh reception? Probably not, exactly. It's muddy territory, as the line between group mores and personal mores is hard to draw precisely -- I've tried to make a point of not giving you shit, as have (as you've acknowledge) several other people, and in general I wish that that was the default, but I have different degrees of emotional response and cynicism and skeptism about interpersonal interactions than other people. I disagree with several Metatalk regulars about when and how much being harsh or being a jerk is really a good idea.
I'm sorry you've gotten such a crappy reception over there. Partly on the principle: I'd rather people not get crappy receptions. But partly because it just makes it maybe harder to convince you that it's not a normal reception, really.
What is the right way to handle that? Is it good etiquette there to simply ignore ad hominens or is this a geekish dominance contest where a good sport would fire insult for insult? To me that seems junvenile. But would that be the right thing to do? Or, should I simply ignore the noise of insult and listen for the voices of reason and reply only to those?
My advice, for Metatalk as well as for anywhere, is absolutely the first. Don't join in the snarkiness, don't trade blows. If someone's mischaracterizing you, explain why it's a mischaracterization and leave it at that. If there's a reason you want to be there despite the stuff you find unpleasant, stick to the reason and then take your leave. My impression is that this is largely what you aimed for over in Metatalk, and I can't fault you for it.
If your personal style rankles anyway, well, that's the danger of having an idiom, I guess. If someone's an asshole about it, they're an asshole about it, and that sucks. Hope that the folks who aren't being assholes will make up the balance and set a good example. Don't bait, don't tweak back.
Posted by: Josh Millard | January 14, 2008 at 09:12 PM
Josh, thanks, much. The link to the D.Winer quote put it in perspective. I figured it was me, actually and the context. I feel like the Rodney Dangerfield of Blogging. Ah well, my dog loves me.
Posted by: phil | January 14, 2008 at 09:27 PM
Spectacles
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Posted by: Pastor Fagioli | January 14, 2008 at 09:29 PM
There are many geek cultures, Phil. The ones I had the privilege of experiencing were more playful, more given to banter, irony, satire, and outright non-sequitor. As one of my college friends once put it: 'Look into yourself, and dig down to the deepest part of your soul. What you're after is right next to that.' And that was before I passed him the bong.
Yes, it is possible for geeks to appear boorish even to other geeks.
Posted by: Stuart | January 14, 2008 at 09:31 PM
It seems to me (at least as far as I know) that nobody besides Phil came into the MetaFilter or MetaTalk space from these parts during any of these exchanges. Phil was doing nothing but trying to heal things (I don't have to look, I know Phil), and he was attacked. That cannot be defended and yet you keep trying to.
Phil, being an asshole is not a programmer or "geek" thing (personally I hate that word, think n-word). I sometimes put things impolitely. Directly I would say. Correctness and precision are critical for systems science as they are in mathematics.
I call 'em as I see 'em. Sometimes I'm wrong and I like to think I'm big enough to say so. I'll take my beatings from the Tutor when I deserve them. By all means use me as an example, so that Candidia cannot.
Posted by: Gerry | January 14, 2008 at 09:32 PM
Go in peace.
Posted by: Pastor Fagioli | January 14, 2008 at 09:38 PM
Pastor Fagioli, I always thought it was "spectacles, testicles, left and right ventricles."
Posted by: Stuart | January 14, 2008 at 09:40 PM
The open heart is a wondrous thing.
Posted by: Pastor Fagioli | January 14, 2008 at 09:48 PM
In daily life, people tend to tweak. They moderate their tweaks with an exchange of verbal and facial inflections, producing an economy of tweaks. Long ago, an accountant class rose which sought to mark down the exchanges in this economy and direct the exchanges towards nobler ends. These were the satirists.
Their scribblings, properly executed and subsequently shared amongst a literate coterie familiar with the inflections of visual and aural tweakdom, or physically staged for the advantage of those less literate, produced an admixture of humor and wisdom. Rare was the scribe who could achieve this end with lasting power. Tradition carried forward the more worthy wits.
What the internet has produced is not a multiplicity of geeks, but - due to a technological limitation which favors text - a surplus of lesser scribes whose visual cues consist of smileys, ;), and whose writing and reading abilities are quite tone-deaf.
Posted by: Highly Cheesy Nachos | January 14, 2008 at 09:52 PM
What do you mean by that? Can you do the monkey dance? Do it! Do the monkey dance!! Wheeee!
Posted by: Horslink | January 14, 2008 at 10:11 PM
No, I'm not a programmer. The only code I can write is extremely basic html. I haven't built my own computer, nor can I opine on the pros and cons of different motherboards or processors... but I'd like to build one someday. I suppose I am a geek in the general sense, though.
I've only been a member of MeFi for a little over a year, but I don't get the sense that it's a "hardcore hacker" community. Geeky, sure. But that isn't to say that all members are geeks. We're probably geekier than a random population sample, but I don't think it's anywhere near 100% geek-saturation.
As to the etiquette/bullying thing, I think there's a couple aspects to (to use your description) your 'cluelessness':
1- Repeatedly suggesting, in the face of answers to the contrary, that there's a community problem when you've been involved in that community for a very short time. It gets people's backs up. It got people's backs up here when the satire was criticized. You were suggesting that there was something dreadfully wrong with the culture as a whole, which seems equivalent to me suggest that you all drop the satire completely - even amongst yourselves.
2- Mistaking snark and occasional foul language for genuine insult and malice. I suppose geeks are prone to snark, maybe that's what you experienced with that programmer. Snark is... hard to describe. Bitchy sarcasm, sometimes purposefully over-the-top. Spiderman's retorts are often snarky. Your "I had been thinking it was more like The Dunciad" retort was snarky. A lot of MeFi members like a good snark, but it takes a certain personality type to effectively detect it and use it for Good.
I don't see what you experienced as bullying. There were a lot of snarky reactions to someone (you) who was seen as variously being willfully obtuse or possibly disingenuous. That sort of thing gets some MeFi members heated up, and slightly more acidic snark starts to flow. When it gets really bad and really personal, it's not condoned. Not by the mods, nor by a lot of sensible members.
Like I mentioned in my comment about raids, with the perspective of having seen real cyber-bullying, what you experienced doesn't come close. It's a bit like complaining to a Hurricane Katrina survivor about how your yard gets a tiny bit flooded by the spring thaw.
As to how to handle it, I think ignoring the noise is often the best course of action, rather than taking it personally. Maybe combined with a bit of what you call "interpretive charity", to extract the core message that's been wrapped up in all the snark. Responding with snark can sometimes diffuse the situation, but that's hit or miss. If you want to get a better sense of the community dynamics, take the suggestion that was offered several times: read and participate in some non-controversial, non-heated, non-GiveWell, non-GiftHub threads in the various sub-sections of MeFi.
And Gerry's "idiot" comment didn't and doesn't irk me. I just brush it off.
Posted by: Chris | January 14, 2008 at 10:16 PM
I remember this odd and fluid fellow from many threads past. A math major, I think. He spoke about the stunning beauty of numbers.
One day a construct revealed itself to him, a form so radiant it reduced him to tears.
Posted by: Alejandro H. Fukit, Visiting Scholar, The Cruikshanks Center For Kiss My Ass | January 14, 2008 at 10:54 PM
What will open unto you? And why? And when?
And then?
Posted by: Alejandro H. Fukit, Visiting Scholar, The Cruikshanks Center For Kiss My Ass | January 14, 2008 at 10:56 PM
We follow...
Posted by: Alejandro H. Fukit, Visiting Scholar, The Cruikshanks Center For Kiss My Ass | January 14, 2008 at 10:57 PM
Phil was doing nothing but trying to heal things (I don't have to look, I know Phil), and he was attacked. That cannot be defended and yet you keep trying to.
Here's the thing: the people who were being jerks to Phil, ad hominem? I don't defend that. The elected to be jerks, to act without, if you will, interpretive charity. They were pissed off and they let it show and they weren't really interested in being open-minded.
What I have defended is the value of the site as a whole (and of Metatalk, rough though it is, as a subsection of that) despite the bad behavior that evidences itself sometimes as it has in this case. It is very much my opinion that it's a good thing that those shitty, uncharitable comments are allowed—it is part of the health and the ecosystem of the site, which is, respectfully, something I think folks who are unfamiliar with Metafilter's culture and history are poorly equipped to appreciate and acknowledge, especially when their introduction has been something as unfriendly as Gifthub's has been in this case.
In a large, ungated community, there will always be unrestrained assholes. We have some them over at Metafilter. Some of them like it in Metatalk, particularly. Some of them are assholes as a matter of course. Some of them are actually pretty nuanced, generous thinkers when they aren't prompted (however justly or not) into asshole mode.
It's pretty damned complicated; it can't really be reduced to "defend assholism or condemn it" at that scale, as much as I generally personally condemn assholism.
For Phil's question, in that thread: is there a culture of bullying? I'd say no. People tend to call each other on anything resembling bullying -- again, the value of fairly open, straightforward, confrontational discourse over there. There are some bullies, they have their peak moments and then they shut up for a while; if they really get out of line, they may well get themselves banned, temporarily or permanently. They're not cultured, and they're not approved of; it's just that neither do we clamp down on them dictatorially, preferring to let the community mostly sort it out in conversation whenever possible.
I've only been a member of MeFi for a little over a year, but I don't get the sense that it's a "hardcore hacker" community. Geeky, sure. But that isn't to say that all members are geeks. We're probably geekier than a random population sample, but I don't think it's anywhere near 100% geek-saturation.
Indeed, and it's become more varied and less geek-centric over the years. In the first couple of years, it was pretty heavily blogger/programmer/internet types -- not exclusively, but that was a major part of the userbase. Over time it's become much more general, to the unquestionable benefit of the site. Not because geeks are bad, but because a variety of viewpoints and philosophies and life experiences are good.
Like I mentioned in my comment about raids, with the perspective of having seen real cyber-bullying, what you experienced doesn't come close. It's a bit like complaining to a Hurricane Katrina survivor about how your yard gets a tiny bit flooded by the spring thaw.
It's hard to know how to emphasize this. It may strike you as ugly that folks continue to make this point, but there really is a stunning question of scale here between some hostile snark in an already-complicated social situation, and the kind of frightening, terrible shit that true nuts pull off. As a random peek: in a thread on the subject today, there's this comment from hincandenza on the subject of what unfettered "internet mob justice" looks like.
Posted by: Josh Millard | January 14, 2008 at 11:05 PM
The rimples of snark, pressed by the iron of truly terrible shit.
Posted by: Hankies Creased Neatly | January 14, 2008 at 11:23 PM
Josh, what comes through loudest and clearest, particularly in this last comment is that you have more or less thrown up your hands at moderating anything short of harassment or outright criminality that goes on at MetaTalk. I hear you, on-line communities can develop pathologies, and particular individuals can be one person wrecking balls, but let's not lose sight of the fact that it nearly did come to these more serious levels in this case. As Phil said, how much closer to the edge can we get without falling over?
Phil and quite a number of people I really respect were members of the Omidyar.net online community before it was closed down. There were some individuals, one in particular that I could name but I won't, who could destroy thread after thread with his pedantic sophistry and if you called him on it you became his public enemy number 1. This person didn't violate any public norms, but their behavior destroyed possibilities for the whole community. Omidyar network even had rating tools that were supposed to help the community regulate itself. (Of course, they didn't really listen to the community when we described the limitations of their model.)
It is clear to me that Phil understands this better than you give him credit for in this conversation, and he already tried to draw you out on the topic of how a site owner or moderator might deal with problematic users. It is also clear, at least to me, that he has been far more skillful at managing his community (albeit a much smaller one, I must admit) that has been demonstrated by MetaFilter mods. A much more productive discussion could be had if there were less defensiveness about it. We know the problems are hard.
The loonies who come out around here can be irreverent and even rude, but they can also be subtle and funny if you get the joke. Feel free to ignore them if you don't get it, I'm not sure I get it half the time.
Posted by: Gerry | January 15, 2008 at 05:06 AM
And Gerry's "idiot" comment didn't and doesn't irk me. I just brush it off.
In other words, if you had not called his attention to the matter, he would have pretended he had not been deeply insulted. If I had made this attack when he had all his homeys arrayed behind him, he might have been a lot bolder. I also worded my attack so he could interpret himself to be the target or not. Had he risen in response as a target, I would have the choice to escalate or just drop it.
In the end it is a really childish sort of one-upmanship and it isn't very interesting or fun. I am capable of arguing an idiot into silence, but it isn't really an effective way of being online. The noise and snark just fills the channel and it becomes useless.
I really do feel for the MetaFites who want to defend the quality of interaction at their site, but I think you have to admit that you are powerless to stop it. I claim that the dynamics of this site and its resident crowd are actually much more capable and effective at defending the quality of interaction at the site than any other open site I have encountered. You may not like or understand it, but to quote something that has come up here recently, don't tear down a fence until you know why someone put it there.
This incident was a surprise to all of us, nobody around here (I'm speculating, but it is a pretty good one) expected anyone to actually do something as stupid as approaching someone who they project to be something they are not. In the past the only thing that has ever caused Phil to invoke moderation is someone who kept coming back with the same script to the point of boredom and unintelligability.
Posted by: Gerry | January 15, 2008 at 05:24 AM
Phil, you say comment feeds are coming soon? Are you sure you want that?
Posted by: Gerry | January 15, 2008 at 06:04 AM
Chris,
Thank you for the care and attention with which you are parsing the issues. I particularly take the point about sample size. My sample of MeFi discourse is obviously limited to those interactions in which I have participated or read. The snark factor was pretty high, and yes it tended to draw my attention since I was the object of it. But that is not what concerns me. Snark is no big thing. If that was all we were talking about the discussion would have moved on a long time ago.
Holden was exposed for his misdeeds. That process may have had more mob characteristics than it should, but he was the guilty party. The process ran its course and the Board at Givewell soberly meted justice.
Here, though, things here got out of hand, and an innocent person was subjected to intimidation via email by a MeFi member. Now, this is not so easy for me to discuss. It happened here. I jumped on it. The person responsible apologized. Apologies accepted all around. Case closed. I am not going to produce the note and cause the apologizer any problems. But a culture that breeds ugliness like that needs to be examined.
Another example. I will not tie it out to a link, because there is no sense causing more energy around pain. But at the height of this dustup I went to Mefi and read something to this effect, "Are they intimidated by us? Well, they should be. We have hackers here who are capable of . The harms mentioned are illegal. The person making that remark was never chastised for it. Now was it a threat? Directed at me? Actually, I read around on that person's posts, and concluded that it was not a threat. It was a remark by someone who knows the MeFi culture well about that culture. Do you know of instances where MeFi member hackers have taken down a site? If so, how did the community react? Was it tacitly condoned?
So, listen: In one or two days I had two specific instances of winning by intimidation that threated to spill over into real life harms and perhaps outright illegality. I saw no correction from mavens or mods. Now, my friends, that sucks. That is just plain downright wrong. And it is dangerous. A culture that tolerates without comment the threat, overt or veiled, of real world harms will come to grief. Those who love, own, or moderate such a community should build systems to handle these worst case scenarios. Are there, as you seem to suggest, or have there been worse instances? All the more reason to look for systemic fixes. "You think that was bad, look how we intimidated, threatened, bullied and insulted other people....Look at the sites our folks have taken down... the investigations we have done.... the ruin we have caused..... We do worse all the time. Get over it." Surely, that is not what you mean to suggest.
Thanks, Chris, this is, to me about the best two way give and take on the core issues in which I have participated on this subject. If we can keep the emotion moderate maybe we can get this wrapped up and move on. I have now about said all I have to say on the subject, other than taking into account whatever thoughtful responses it may evoke.
Posted by: phil | January 15, 2008 at 09:17 AM
"Are they intimidated by us? Well, they should be. We have hackers here who are capable of . The harms mentioned are illegal.
As just about the only public member of the peanut gallery around here, and knowing the on-line identities of just a few others, I am certain that the irony of such threats are not lost on any of us. I and hopefully the rest have the sense not to engage in a public or private war of threats and intimidation even though we know well the ins and outs of the technology necessary to do so.
Posted by: Gerry | January 15, 2008 at 09:38 AM
Phil, one of the currencies of noble sparring among techies is the depth of your knowledge and understanding. On the other hand, as with every pursuit, those who talk about their accomplishments are a different set than those who actually do amazing things.
I'm not going to pick on Chris any further, I admit I may have jumped on him more as the latest target. User interface design isn't very high on the status hierarchy, but you know how deeply I respect the best. As a practitioner in administration of large systems, we have attitudes about the developers who don't know the systems cost of the code they write, and yet we are lower on the hierarchy, go figure. Mostly the rivalry isn't a bad thing, but bottom line is we know the difference between lightweights and the people who know. That goes for our appreciation for arts and letters as well.
Posted by: Gerry | January 15, 2008 at 09:47 AM
Josh, what comes through loudest and clearest, particularly in this last comment is that you have more or less thrown up your hands at moderating anything short of harassment or outright criminality that goes on at MetaTalk.
You mean what you hear loudest? What details stands out clearest to you as you view the situation from your perspective?
We haven't thrown our hands up in despair at the idea of moderating the less-than-criminal. I just don't share the same priorities and thresholds as you do as far as what forms of moderation are justified/required/accepted. The social and cultural differences here are huge, and I think it's a little too easy to mark up the results of that as failure rather than lack of understanding.
Can I ask, to get a clearer picture of your take on this, what you would have seen as the proper specific administrative steps?
"Are they intimidated by us? Well, they should be. We have hackers here who are capable of"
You're driving a car; some friends are riding with you. Confusion at an intersection: someone cuts you off, and you nearly collide. He pulls to a stop and you roll down your windows, both a little rattled. You discuss the near collision, maybe the right-of-way.
And at some point, as the driver of the other car says the should really get their dodgy mirror replaced, your friend in the rear left seat leans his head forward and yells, "yeah, you better replace it!"
You look at the other driver, the other driver looks at you. You roll your eyes, shrug, and finish up your conversation.
We've got different sets of cues and expectations and acclimations. If I could go back now, I might try to specifically express my eye-roll reaction to the comment you mention; I read it for myself and shrugged it off, but for someone from outside who suspects more threat than talk, I can see how it would be less of a shruggo situation.
And of course we're operating in a medium where a knowing roll of the eyes isn't possible, and that can be easy to forget. Someone mentioned emoticons; even those crude signifiers are generally shunned at metafilter, as at a lot of other places, for being a lousy replacement for conversational cues; hoping, instead, that the choice of words and the rhythm of conversation and the shared culture will be enough to convey some of those subtleties. We'd rather get by on a nod and a hope and a lack, I suppose, than beat each other down with a floods of :) and :/ and >:( in every exchange.
Sometimes that fails. With visitors, that may fail more often, which is something I'll try to keep closer to mind next time something like this comes up.
...
Do you know of instances where MeFi member hackers have taken down a site? If so, how did the community react? Was it tacitly condoned?
I'm pretty sure it was tacitly eye-rolled at, Phil; see above. It's blustery bullshit. Not that smart people with applicable skills couldn't do mischief, but there isn't any history of mefi going after a site -- except for the occasional (generally benign) security exploit of mefi itself. If anybody did go on the attack on another site's infrastructure, what we'd see is pretty round condemnation. It's aberrant, antisocial behavior that goes beyond our general tolerance for the snarkier side of comments on the site.
When Chris or I or others have put forth the "it could be worse" argument, we're not saying "Metafilter let you off light" -- we're saying that "Metafilter isn't the bugaboo you're looking for". In some corners of the internet, griefing is a competitive sport; it's weird, deeply fucked up stuff, and one of the things I like about mefi is that it doesn't go for that stuff. Most communities don't. How directly they'll bother to address/rebuke/explicitly condemn bluster about things they don't do from people they don't expect to do them depends a lot on the culture of the site, and again, if I'd seen that you saw it as a serious advance rather than the loudmouth friend in the back seat doing his thing, I would have said something.
Posted by: Josh Millard | January 15, 2008 at 10:09 AM
OK, "net rage" probably should be made part of the American lexicon, like "road rage." I think we might do better with fictional case studies, to depotentiate the impression that I myself have a beef. I emphatically do not. I am proud that we have played this out under net rules. Josh, you have stayed with it, as have I, though lots of this has been un-fun. We are playing by rules we both understand and accept, that we keep talking until we reach shared understandings. Love that. That is what keeps me blogging. Yes, styles differ. Personalities differ, communities have different mores. And generally as in this case, we work it all out among ourselves. This story has a nice arc and not a bad ending. But the larger issues raised have not be laid to rest and probably will not be absent case law, litigation, and legislation. How we act as these tempests in a teapot happen may have an influence on how that regulatory environment evolves. We are probably one high profile case short of some ugly new laws. This deal back and forth among us all here is just friends talking. But it has raised issues that maybe we need to discuss in more general terms. So, I am going to create a fictional Case Study. Maybe it will help us converge on shared understandings, not of this or that kerfuffle, but of the underlying legal and social dynamics. If we are really lucky maybe Jeff Trexler, a member of MeFi who also comments here, and a JD in nonprofit law, will chime in. We could have a rousing good discussion. Let's shift, if you will, to the Case Study, which is fictional.
Posted by: phil | January 15, 2008 at 11:37 AM
"Metafilter isn't the bugaboo you're looking for"
That is no doubt true. You guys do generally seem like reasonable people. We aren't defenseless or naive either. Phil is not a techie, so he doesn't quite get just how much techie talent lurks in his support.
Posted by: Gerry | January 15, 2008 at 11:41 AM
I think we might do better with fictional case studies, to depotentiate the impression that I myself have a beef. I emphatically do not.
I'm cool with that. I don't really want to keep bringing it back to Mefi and Gifthub, and I'll make an effort to let that stuff fall by the wayside for the purpose of the case study.
Gerry, I feel like we've been arguing our respective sides, in that sense, and while I've found the converstation valuable I'm thinking that if the goal is to drop the specifics, we're probably both going to have to nod and say "fair enough" on that front.
So: fair enough. We may disagree on some of the details, but I think we're pretty much on the same track and going in the same direction.
Posted by: Josh Millard | January 15, 2008 at 11:51 AM
Agreed.
Posted by: Gerry | January 15, 2008 at 11:57 AM
A lot of stuff has been said since I went to bed, I'll try to cover the more salient responses that I have.
phil: But a culture that breeds ugliness like that [email incident] needs to be examined.
It was a weird and crappy move by whoever it was that did it. Here's the thing as I see it though. That person did it off-site, and didn't announce his/her intentions of doing in the MetaTalk thread. It's not like there was a thunderous "I'm going to send this nasty email, should I?" "OMG, yeah! Do it! Do it!" exchange. So I have a hard time seeing how it's MeFi's culture that breed it or condoned it. Suppose that one of your members, without any notification, took it upon him/herself to go harass people on MeFi. Would GiftHub's culture, or your moderation, be at fault for that? Suppose said theoretical GiftHub regular robbed a bank, went on a serial killing spree, or molested children without first discussing the pros/cons of those crimes here. Would you feel responsible, or that the culture you've cultivated contributed to that? I wouldn't see you or this site as responsible, either criminally, civilly, or morally.
phil: Do you know of instances where MeFi member hackers have taken down a site? If so, how did the community react? Was it tacitly condoned?
Personally, nope. Only been a member for a year, etc. I'd have a hard time imagining it happening or being condoned if it did. I do know that, on occasion, revenge/intimidation type questions pop up on AskMetafilter. Stuff like "how do I get even with this person I don't like (in real life or online)?" These questions are pretty routinely met with antagonism from regulars, and the mods delete them. Stuff like that isn't condoned.
phil: ...winning by intimidation that threated to spill over into real life harms and perhaps outright illegality. I saw no correction from mavens or mods. Now, my friends, that sucks. That is just plain downright wrong. And it is dangerous.
I agree with you that such things are wrong, and if I saw someone plotting such actions, I'd offer whatever 'correction' I could. Of course, that's all contingent on my being online at the time that it's done.
That being said, off the top of my head, I don't recall reading anything that tripped my "Holy shit, that's going too far" alarm.
phil: Are there, as you seem to suggest, or have there been worse instances? All the more reason to look for systemic fixes. "You think that was bad, look how we intimidated, threatened, bullied and insulted other people....Look at the sites our folks have taken down... the investigations we have done.... the ruin we have caused..... We do worse all the time. Get over it." Surely, that is not what you mean to suggest.
That's not exactly what I meant to suggest, no. Those examples I alluded to were _not_ examples related to MeFi, they are examples from a collection of other popular websites. Those people do pride themselves on ruin and havoc. Those people do have thunderous "OMG Yes! Do it! Do it! Hack the bitch!" exchanges and wallow in the results.
I alluded to such things because, with all due respect, your framing your experiences as being the target of bullying and raiding seems like an overreaction in light of such things. The interactions with you could've been nicer or more cordial, etc, but they weren't _that_ bad, and it seems you think they were.
Let me give you a more concrete example of the behaviour of the people on those sites. A tiny bit of myself hopes that it's all a farce, but I've been led to believe by a few people more familiar with the story than I that it's real. This isn't even a particularly egregious example, and was considered by those people on those sites to be a Grand Ol' Time:
A young teenager somewhere in the US killed himself after being bullied in school and having his iPod stolen. Friends of his set up a memorial MySpace page. Somehow the news story and the memorial page was brought to the attention of members of one of these unnamed sites. They considered the kid's suicide hilarious, and the kid himself a bit of a wimp. So, they hacked into the MySpace account and vandalized it. Others left mocking/harassing comments on it and other memorial online guestbooks. Some people tracked down the kid's parents and made crank calls and recorded the audio to share with their fellows. Others found his grave and took mocking pictures of it (putting an iPod on it in lieu of flowers). Someone called in a phone-in TV show posing as the kid, and faking on-air suicide with a gunshot sound clip. Video of the TV show was recorded and shared "for the lulz". The kid and his picture have become a meme that people toss around and make photoshop jokes out of.
I hope you'll see what I mean now, even if you don't agree with my position.
Gerry: In other words, if you had not called his attention to the matter, he would have pretended he had not been deeply insulted. If I had made this attack when he had all his homeys arrayed behind him, he might have been a lot bolder.
English is my mother-tongue. I don't need someone else to translate what I meant to say into "other words". I'm not insulted by some stranger on a site that I don't frequent calling me an idiot. I do take offense to half-baked attempts at armchair psychology from someone who only knows me via a handful of blog comments, attempting to guess at my inner mental states or what I'm "pretending" to be or not, though. Hypothesizing about what I would or wouldn't do under hypothetical situations falls under that umbrella as well. I don't need my "homeys" "getting mah back" to be bold.
Posted by: Chris | January 15, 2008 at 01:09 PM
Chris, thanks, for your usual thoughtful response. Perhaps we can move from the specifics of the GF/MeFi interactions to some hypotheticals that can clarify the general rules, or our understanding of what the general rules, laws, regulations, and procedures should be as the net evolves. I posted such a fictional case study.
Posted by: phil | January 15, 2008 at 02:52 PM
And so it continues until someone gets bored or escalates. Phil, you have seen the empty exchanges that go on for pages and days without end. Chris pretends that it is beneath him to respond, which as you know is itself a rhetorical move. To take the high tone of moderation. I see your moderation and raise you a satire.
Posted by: Gerry | January 15, 2008 at 03:15 PM
And so it continues until someone gets bored or escalates. Phil, you have seen the empty exchanges that go on for pages and days without end. Chris pretends that it is beneath him to respond, which as you know is itself a rhetorical move.
I'm not insulted, nor am I pretending it's beneath to respond. As you've seen, I have responded.
However, I am coming away with the general impression that - in this particular case - you're acting a bit like a douche. Mainly from the latest exchanges where you insist that I'm being duplicitous. But that's fine. You walk away thinking I'm an idiot and/or a lightweight, I walk away thinking you've acted like a douche. We shall, in all likelihood, never meet again, so it's a big "whatever" in the strongest possible sense.
While this is going to be the last time that my mouse cursor hovers over the 'Post' button here, I do find one thing a bit puzzling. When someone on MetaTalk was tilting at windmills and ascribing weird interpretations to stuff Phil had written, I stood up for him and suggested that the person knock it off. Here, however, no such return of the favour from him. Thanks, Phil.
Posted by: Chris | January 15, 2008 at 04:47 PM
Canonical link on geek communication:
http://www.mit.edu/~jcb/tact.html
Possibly useful in the context of online "communities" in general.
Posted by: Michael J. | January 15, 2008 at 04:53 PM
Gerry, Chris has a point. We are really trying to not make this a heated exchange. Chris has been staying with the conversation and offering lots of thoughtful comments. Please give him some space. What is that thing we all learned in an earlier conversation, from the Dalai Lama? HIZZLE. Hear, See, Love. People need to be heard before they feel seen, and seen before they feel loved. Please help me make sure that the Hizzle principle prevails. Thanks, Gerry.
Chris, please stay with the conversation if you can. Your contriubtions are much appreciated and serve to bring light to the darkness. Thank you.
Posted by: phil | January 15, 2008 at 04:53 PM
A gated-by-pay community must have a different legal status than an open public square, no?
A gated-by-pay community might inspire in subscribers a sense of membership - possibly even a communal identity - which they might project actively to others in public squares outside the gates. Example: "I am a gated-by-pay-ite."
Frequent commentors at public square sites do not often project a communal identity tied to that public square when offsite. Example: "I comment actively at Daily Kos." versus "I am a Kosnik." They may be referred to more often by others, pejoratively, as "a Kosnik" or "The Kosniki." Do Daily Kos subscribers who pay the $4 mo (to experience the site ad-free) identify offsite more frequently as "a Kosnik" than those who suffer the ads but have only provided a working email address?
"Subscriber" versus "member." A distinction with a difference?
--
Since the early days of message boards the ratio of lurkers to commenters has been very high. It still is.
Lurkers: The great majority
-- Commenters: The lesser minority
|
-- Active commenters: A tiny minority
The tiny minority has the capacity to move a greater minority drawn from the lesser minority and the great majority. In the best cases, this is called: _______. In the worst, _______.
The tiny minority
maywill never know who they've "deployed," how many and how. They may rejoice or cringe, depending on the results and their individual moral code.As for transparency:
-- The World At Large
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| -<- Gated-by-pay internal email channel
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| |
| | Lurkers: The great majority
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| | -- Commenters: The lesser minority
| | |
| | -- Active commenters: A tiny minority
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| |
| ->- Individual email channels developed outside
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-- The World At Large
By offering an internal email channel to its subscribers, a gated-by-pay site may actually be facilitating a diminished transparency to its reading public - along with constructive social-networking and conflict-managing functions intra-site. (For example, as a last resort, exchanges between subscribers might be accessed legally by site administrators investigating foul play on- or off-site.)
External private email networking is also facilitated by the gated-by-pay internal email channel: subscribers need share their private email identity only with other subscribers with whom they choose to extend a relationship.
Posted by: Alejandro H. Fukit, Visiting Scholar, The Cruikshanks Center For Kiss My Ass | January 15, 2008 at 05:03 PM
Bert Lahr had some pertinent things to say early on in the original Karnofsky thread:
[..]
[..]
You can find the comments in context here and here. The links bring you to the correct page in a multi-page thread, but from there you must scroll down to see Bert's comments (Typepad STILL hasn't fixed the comment-permalink function that would allow direct linking.)
Posted by: Alejandro H. Fukit, Visiting Scholar, The Cruikshanks Center For Kiss My Ass | January 15, 2008 at 05:05 PM
That should be:
The tiny minority
maywill never know who they've "deployed,"...Posted by: Alejandro H. Fukit, Visiting Scholar, The Cruikshanks Center For Kiss My Ass | January 15, 2008 at 05:11 PM
Alejandro, you seem light years ahead of me in your thinking. I suspect you must have thought about this for years or months in many contexts other than the immediate one here.
I am digesting what you say about on site email, pay or free sites, and membership versus just commenting. The most profound question you raise to me is about "identity" and liability/responsibility. A corporation is a "leviathan" (as Hobbes called the Commonwealth), made up of many human elements within a legal framework. The word "we" in a corporate setting can mean "we the company," the position we take as a company, and for that a company is taken to be responsible. That corporate we is spoken officially by officers, the public relations dept, the firm's legal people, and others with delegated authority. On the other hand, an employee on the front steps having a cigarette might talk the corporate "we" and literally be blowing smoke.
When a community begins to evolve a team spirit, if you will, as it becomes part of its member identity and they being to speak of themselves as members, and begin to speak as if for the community, I think you are right, things get hazy. The person who is impacted by someone who has come flying the flag if you will of a community, may well hold the community responsible, in their own mind, particularly if moderators from that community are present and do nothing to officially state that those speaking for the community are just blowing smoke.
Generally, I think people who run communities online and off have to be careful about how they allow their facilities and their good name to be deployed by constituents. You get into this whole area of vicarious liability, where you pick up liability not because of what did, but what others did in your name, or subject to your supervision, that you did not stop or correct. The deeper the pockets and the higher the profile the more an entity tends to worry about vicarious liability. Whether online communities have vicarious liability for what is done by members in their name I don't know.
Posted by: phil | January 15, 2008 at 05:32 PM
Yes, Phil, I've about shot my wad. Here's an extra little dribble:
See ya in the monkey house...
Posted by: Alejandro H. Fukit, Visiting Scholar, The Cruikshanks Center For Kiss My Ass | January 15, 2008 at 06:29 PM
Alejandro, "loopus" is an interesting way to say it. Sometimes, though, going direct to those who are heated or have to discuss sensitive issues may be the only way to keep things from escalating, or to remove misunderstandings. Don't you think?
Posted by: phil | January 15, 2008 at 07:10 PM
Agreed, great tool. Having the channels for those purposes is probably essential. Having the will and the discipline to use them primarily for those purposes in a forum that trumpets its "transparency" is another thing altogether.
Like so many things these days, it depends on the individual's sense of honor and honorable action. If one trumpets transparency, then one should have the will to say:
If not, then... whatever. Monkey house, I guess. Shut up about "transparency" already.
Posted by: Alejandro H. Fukit, Visiting Scholar, The Cruikshanks Center For Kiss My Ass | January 15, 2008 at 07:31 PM
False definitions and the failure of honor are two things that trouble my sleep.
Posted by: Alejandro H. Fukit, Visiting Scholar, The Cruikshanks Center For Kiss My Ass | January 15, 2008 at 07:33 PM
Transparency versus tact, or diplomacy, or discretion, or confidentiality, or efficiency may all have to be weighed in a given case. Settling things online when the stakes are high seems not only inefficient but also messy. Who has authority to decide an issue? That too in an important question. Some things maybe need to be addressed in closed rooms or closed loops by those with the authority to reach binding conclusions. It seems that Givewell's Board Meeting with Holden was not posted online. Transparency may have limits.
Audio from the executive session of the meeting, where the Board discussed staff performance, has been removed from the recording on the advice of counsel. The omitted part begins at the 52nd minute. The board believes that the “Statement from the GiveWell Board of Directors” accurately reflects the views discussed and the decisions made during executive session.
Link.
Posted by: phil | January 15, 2008 at 07:46 PM
And at some point, as the driver of the other car says the should really get their dodgy mirror replaced, your friend in the rear left seat leans his head forward and yells, "yeah, you better replace it!"
You look at the other driver, the other driver looks at you. You roll your eyes, shrug, and finish up your conversation.
**** ****
We are probably one high profile case short of some ugly new laws.
Isn't it the case, and notably more so in the States, that one person's eye-roll is another person's "he dissed me, here Sluggo .. reach under the seat, pull it out, BOOM !"
That's what may, or will happen, that was the core of the fear and rush-to-judgment in the Sierra / MeanKids case (which ended up on CNN, not on Judge Judy) .. and the point remains that this type of conversation and the learneing WE ALL can adduce from it is well worth the gnashing of teeth and patience, patience, patience so that the issues are fully vetted and a bunch of smart and concerned people understand each other, get it fully, and can transfer their learning forward into their own tribes.
At least that's how I see it, and I am indeed learning a lot .. not things that I hadn't already seen and thought about, but exploring the nuances is in my opinion extremely useful.
Posted by: Jon Husband | January 15, 2008 at 07:47 PM
Transparency: nod fucking nod, wink fucking wink.
Put a fucking asterisk next to it like BBonds homers.
There, ya see, nothing but bitter snark left in the old cannolo. I think that I shall pause for a while (while acknowledging Jon's ...it is well worth the gnashing of teeth and patience, patience, patience...) Happy days.
Posted by: Alejandro H. Fukit, Visiting Scholar, The Cruikshanks Center For Kiss My Ass | January 15, 2008 at 08:03 PM
Thanks, Jon. As a net veteran with management consulting experience, you see what I have been trying to bring to surface: not an incident, but a system of law, governance, management,rules, policies, procedures, job descriptions. These online communities are getting to be a big business. The kinds of questions about risk that I am raising are perfectly within the normal rage inside a big company fire wall. You want to know what is the risk, who is allowed to take it, what legal says, and how the risk is to be managed, in accordance with what policy, by whom, subject to whose supervision, and what checks and balances. You could see such a system snapping into action at Givewell. Within the online communities, such crisp management systems do not seem often to be in place. Online we seem still to be winging it on the assumption that we have some kind of blanket immunity, since this is all just talk. I don't see that delusion lasting much longer. When people get hurt, some will find grounds to sue, or they get into the papers and on the talk shows, and new laws get made. A decade from now we may look back and wonder how we could all have been so naive as to think that we can just let it roll. "That which is not against the law is legal." That philosophy has gotten a lot of people in trouble over the years. Thanks for the comment, Jon; we should get you on retainer. Half of the alms collected or something. The other half to Trexler as legal counsel? (Just kidding, of course.)
Posted by: phil | January 15, 2008 at 08:06 PM
Gerry, Chris has a point. We are really trying to not make this a heated exchange. Chris has been staying with the conversation and offering lots of thoughtful comments. Please give him some space.
Sorry Phil. I apologize, Chris, for my boorish behavior, I used you for a demonstration that you did not volunteer for. Chris in fact makes the right move in the first place by ignoring it. I didn't actually call him an idiot, although I did refer to it near him. You brought it up, he still brushed it off, and I escalated. At this point, he is right that I can't attribute his motives. Actual idiots will keep this sort of thing up ad infinitum. Sometimes they are just temporary idiots caught up in the heat of a conversation.
Sometimes all that heat actually breaks through to understanding. If neither of the participants is a troll, there is usually a fundamental misunderstanding at the base if it. You can tell the troll, because you can never really pin them down or ever get them to change part of their shtick. They don't ever actually admit a point or logical connection allowing them to restart the rant at any time.
In any exchange there is a mix of idiots and righteous disagreements and the veterans of any forum know how to ignore the noise. Around here the noise is signal too, which is what can put people off base at first, but when you realize that they are mostly friendly spirits, it actually makes you feel safer.
Phil, I'm actually hoping that sometime you will pull me up short with satire. I do deserve a beating for behaving badly. I would happily submit to the Tutor's remedies so that I may never make such an error again. It would also make a fine demonstration of the Tutor's noble trade.
Posted by: Gerry | January 16, 2008 at 06:33 AM
BTW, I would class Joe F. as a troll. A real person, but his on-line persona is a troll.
Posted by: Gerry | January 16, 2008 at 06:36 AM
Isn't it the case, and notably more so in the States, that one person's eye-roll is another person's "he dissed me, here Sluggo .. reach under the seat, pull it out, BOOM !"
Them's fight'n words you #*!& Cannadian.
Really, Jon, if things were that bad, I'd have provoked some hot-head to take me out long ago. Frankly, I'd really like to know if it were that bad, but maybe you're right, it would be a hard lesson to find out suddenly. I've seen some pretty atrocious behavior this way, but it does confirm that most people will stop short of actual harm and damage. I often end up also feeling critical of my own behavior and vow to do better.
Posted by: Gerry | January 16, 2008 at 07:55 AM
Gerry, thanks for the repentance. We have all had our moments over the last few days to feel how hard it is to manage emotion once it is unleashed online.
Posted by: phil | January 16, 2008 at 08:51 AM
You can tell the troll, because you can never really pin them down or ever get them to change part of their shtick. They don't ever actually admit a point or logical connection allowing them to restart the rant at any time.
Succinct.
Posted by: Alejandro H. Fukit, Visiting Scholar, The Cruikshanks Center For Kiss My Ass | January 16, 2008 at 10:53 AM