 Thank you all for coming, and thank you, Ethan, for that blurb. If you'd like to follow along, you can go to regal.org slash talk, the slides are online. And I really appreciate that blurb. And actually, the book is now available on Amazon. I think you can buy it. And there's already been a review, and I'm fascinated by online reviews. And I thought this one was quite interesting. Oh, that's not working. Oh, here we go. In that, this is the first review in the book. Regal knows the subject and sprinkles enough curse words throughout his book to make it NSFW if you were going to read it aloud. I'm not going to be reading it, but I'm going to be talking about it. And the reason this chagrin and amuses me is, well, hopefully that's not the greatest contribution this book to have has, is that I have a lot of curse words in it. But this book very much was inspired by WTF moments, right? What the frack, as they say on Battlestar Galactica, or I might say, what the heck? And of all the moments that really inspired this book, I want to show you a clip of a video that really made me think what the heck is going on here. People tell me this all the time. So I don't know. Is it true? People say I'm ugly. So tell me. Am I? So seeing teens going on YouTube, one of the places where the commenting culture is understood as being the worst, asking YouTube commenters, am I ugly, this just blew my mind and I was like, what the heck is going on? And again, this book, I had a lot of experiences and moments like that, which then inspired me to say, I want to try to figure out if I can understand what's going on. And when I saw this, I used to work with Tim Berners-Lee, the guy that invented the web. I worked at the World Wide Web Consortium. And I don't think that was Tim's intention or our intention, that this was what the web was going to be. But when I began thinking about it a little bit more historically, I ended up surprising myself. Because if I thought back in time, I've been on the web since 93, 94, since it was first created. But when friends and family started talking about the web back in, say, 2000, this is what they were talking about, this site, hot or not. And that's how the web came to popular attention for a lot of people who weren't computer science students like myself. And this was a site where you could upload a picture of yourself and people could click, am I hot or am I not? And so it seems actually the web's really good at this sort of stuff, as are social networks. Perhaps people know that Facebook actually began as a site called FaceMash. Zuckerberg was a student at Harvard. Harvard had dormitories and houses where students live and they had directories there with students' names and pictures called Facebooks. And so he went online, he wrote a scraper, he purrloined the photos of Harvard students, pulled them into a website application called FaceMash, so him and his fellow male geeks could click on whether the women were hot or not. And so it seems both the web and a lot of the social media platforms out there are really well suited to this sort of thing. And in fact, one of YouTube's founders said he created YouTube in part via inspiration of hot or not. Joe Whid Karim said this was the site where it first occurred to him that people would be able to upload content. It was user-generated content. But it was more than that people were just uploading pictures of themselves, it was that other people were able to rate and comment on the content that other people were uploading. So it had the user-generated content and the user's comment upon it. And so I think to understand the web as it exists today, we really do need to understand comment. But that raises the question of what is comment? So it's reactive. I don't know if that'll mute the visual. I can turn it down if you'd like. Yeah, that's it. That's all the sound. So when YouTube extended the period of video clips you could post on YouTube a couple of years ago, they said you could have 10-hour long video clips. And I don't know how many people have made use of 10-hour video clips, but the things that do exist up there are these sound loop clips. And actually I wrote a lot of this book listening to Darth Vader breathing. I found it kind of soothing. And under that YouTube video you find someone leaving the comment, what am I doing with my life? 10 hours of breathing. So comments are reactive. They're in response to something. Though they're not always responsive, right? We know that expression TLTR too long didn't read. So they are reactive, but not necessarily substantively responsive. They're also short. I include plus ones and likes within the purview of comment. Maybe a couple paragraphs, perhaps a couple sentences, no more than a paragraph or two. They're asynchronous. So you might get a response back from someone immediately or an hour or a day. But you might quibble with any of those sort of definitions. There's 140 characters. There's 12 words. And I will admit that my criteria, my attributes are a little bit loosey-goosey. But the essence of what I'm talking about is best captured in a number of tweets from a developer, Shane Luzgan, who had this wonderful Twitter account called avoid comments. And he had about 100 tweets on there just talking about comments are so horrible you're best avoiding them. And he wrote, there's a reason that comments are at the bottom of the internet. I say web for a particular reason that I won't get into. You know, they're terrible. And they deserve to be at the bottom. So when I started this book, I was like, well, we learn, given all these WTF moments, in sifting through the comments. And I think we can learn things about ourselves and about how others seek to exploit our social selves. And so I've read the comments so you don't have to, right? I took an expedition to the bottom of the web. I explored various places. I visited various communities, including Amazon reviewers, mean kids, different commenting communities that live under other people's posts, including free thinkers, scammers, fakers, makers, takers, lots of different sort of places I went to. And so our mission for today is to consider four different questions. I call them the mysteries of comment. Why do people abandon comment platforms? Why are comments often so awful? Can we trust the comments at the bottom of the web? And a reprise of WTF. So let's talk about the migration, the boom and the bust. One of the questions I'd like to ask my students is, we've had lots of different messaging and platform content. Is it over? And I want to engage this topic by way of a story about Trent Resner. Has anyone ever heard of Trent Resner? Maybe half, not everyone, right? But he's the front man of a band I like, Nine Inch Nails, that's known for a very sort of angry, industrial kind of sound. And he stumbled upon Twitter in about 2009 and he was tickled pink to characterize him in a weird way because you can see he's kind of angry looking here. And he said, I went on Twitter and I realized I was able to express myself a little more authentically. I was able to let down the curtain. But he didn't stay for long. He said, I'm leaving because idiots rule. And so what prompted him to so quickly engage and then leave Twitter? And I think his example is demonstrative for a lot of people. And not only have people abandoned various messaging platforms but platforms themselves and websites have experimented with turning comments off or trying to fix comments. And so I've noticed various migrations. We started out in GeoCities, we had MySpace, we had Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, Snapchat. Amongst people who liked to comment on geek news sites, I started out on Slash. Then I followed Dig and I still follow a little bit of Reddit and I probably spent more of my time on Hacker News. So again, why are we sort of always migrating like a massive bison? So I think this is part of the reason why. At its start Twitter felt edgy and intimate. I knew a lot of people when Twitter came on lying that were quite pleased because they had a chance encounter with a celebrity. Someone retweeted them or someone spoke to them on Twitter and they were just, you know, really pleased with the idea. Similarly, celebrities, famous people, this was a space where they could actually lower the curtain, as Trent Reznor said. And so a lot of people were getting something out of this experience when it was relatively small. And in fact, it's not surprising. People like talking about themselves. Communication theorists know that when we are shooting sort of the shit informally, we spend 30 to 40% of our time on gossip and researchers have found that this is still the case on Twitter today. And in fact, for a long time, gossip was kind of looked down upon among people who study communications and actually an evolutionary theorist ended up changing that in that Robin Dunbar had asked this question of himself, why is it that primates and humans in particular have such big brains? And he ended up arguing its gossip that actually is the most important thing. And the reason he made that argument is he looked at lots of variables and tried to figure out what correlates with brain size and an animal's environment. And it wasn't what they ate, it wasn't how they moved around. It actually correlated with how much time they spent in groups. Group size, the one measure of social complexity available to me at the time did correlate with neocortex size. So among monkeys, for instance, and chimps, they spend time picking the fleas off of one another's backs, right? And we know that they use this to form alliances and if one monkey is attacked by another monkey, a friend is likely to come in and defend that monkey based on how recently they groomed one another. And Dunbar argued humans do the same sort of thing, but we've grown outside the bounds of picking fleas off of one another's backs instead we talk about one another, we gossip about one another. And one of the key insights here for comments are that there's a certain scale to the number of people whose fleas you can pick off of. Similarly, there's a scale to the number of people you can kind of gossip about. And Dunbar put that number at 150 people. Those are the people that you know fairly well such that not only do I know my friends, but I know the friends of my friends and if the friend of my friend is my enemy, you're my enemy of my friend is my friend. So 150 people is that what he calls a clan. It's that small group of people that you have some sense of what their secondary relationships are like. And at some point, though it won't Facebook, probably have more friends than 150 people, but at some point we will reach that stage in online commenting platforms where you go beyond that scale, where you start asking who brought that guy and you start getting hit by spam and scammers and you realize this place isn't fun anymore. And I think that's what's happened on Twitter and so many other sort of places. And what I call this is intimate serendipity. I think we're looking for a way to express an authentic sense of ourselves because we like to gossip, we like to self-disclose without feeling that we're getting harassed or stalked or getting undue scrutiny. While remaining open to things that will surprise and delight us. When I go on Facebook, for instance, I don't find very much of interest there. Maybe that's my friend's fault. But most of it is what you would expect, kind of various memes and tropes and advertisements that I don't really sort of care for. And what has happened is when you're on a platform, that intimate serendipity turns to what Resner called sludge. When he went on Twitter, he already had a forum on his website, 9inch.nails.com. But there were a group of fans, I don't know if you would call them fans, who would basically harass him and hate on him all the time. And Twitter was a breath of fresh air for him because they had not yet found him. And the thing that chased him off Twitter is the metal contingency had succeeded. And I love to quote Tresner because he's so mean. It depresses me to think my art and life's work can attract this kind of scum, you trolling cowardly pigs, you succeeded. And that was his flounce, he left. But lots of people have disabled comments or stepped away from comments in a less sort of vicious way perhaps. Boing Boing has long struggled with comments. For a little while, they experimented with disinvaling. When I first saw this, I was quite tickled. They basically, if you post a comment that they think is inappropriate, they would remove all the vowels from your words. And the idea was that would make you upset or angry and school you a little bit. It only lasted for a year. And research actually seems to indicate that schooling people and downloading people for inappropriate behavior actually often prompts them to act out even worse. And it's contagious within the community because then people act even jerky and then other people act jerky and it's not necessarily a good thing. But other sites like Washington Post and Gadget and Popular Science have all turned their comments off for periods or forever. And I think this is most ironic because Dave Weiner can be said to be one of the foundational people in the blogging space. And he is at least one of two people who can be said to be the first person to have enabled comments on his blog. Now I'll take this for granted, but there was a time when this was a new sort of thing. And he has a bit of a contentious personality. He gets in controversies. But eventually he just said, I'm turning off the comments. And so I find this very telling that the first head comments on his blog ended up turning it off altogether. And so this is basically how I conceive of that migration. We're all looking for intimate serendipity. We're confronted by the metal sludge and ads, which I'm going to come back to in a little bit. And the sites will try to create filters and fortifications and moderation and metamoderation and all these sort of schemes to deal with the sludge and the spam and the ads. And eventually people will migrate and look in search for something else. So I now think about this Twitter. There was just news in the past week or two that Twitter still hasn't managed to make a profit. And everyone's wondering when that other shoe is going to drop. Are they going to start putting ads in people's Twitter streams? Are they going to start shaping, which is alleged supposedly what you see? Because right now you see everything that your friends post, whereas in Facebook they shape what you see. They're taking money from other people to shape what you see. It's going to have to happen eventually. They're going to have to make a profit if they want to succeed. And then lots of people will probably move on. So let's turn to this question of where does the metal sludge come from? Why are people just so awful online? And I want to introduce this topic by way of a story of Kathy Sierra. Kathy Sierra is an author. She wrote a really number of good books about Java under the O'Reilly publisher. She's a popular blogger. She had a very well-read, widely-read blog, and she's a speaker. She would talk at lots of different conferences. She also did two things that made her a target to alienation. One, the second one, is that she's just a woman. It's not like she did anything there, but that brought an undue amount of alienation and hate upon her. And a long time ago, she said bloggers should be able to delete inappropriate comments from their site. That's all she did, but a lot of horrible things happened. And in 2007, she posted something on her blog saying, I'm scheduled to speak at a conference, but I'm at home, the door's locked, and I'm terrified. And she said, as a public person that lives online, like anyone, she's received her share of snarky comments but it reached a new sort of level. And she basically disappeared from the web for at least five years. And why? Why does this sort of stuff happen? I want to keep it simple because people have been studying this for almost two or three decades now when I talk about the theoretical background. I think there's two sets of theories that explain why people are awful online. The first is good people acting badly. And the second which I'll say a bit more too is that bad people acting out. So if we look at that Kathy Sierra case at the good people acting badly what had prompted the harassment of Kathy Sierra was a blog by the name of Mean Kids. It was set up by Christopher Locke and a couple of his colleagues and you can't read the subtitle here but it says, this is a book he's published, The Bombast Transcripts Rants and Screeds of Rage Boy. So his online pseudonym was Rage Boy and he liked to take people down and he wasn't harassing them, he wasn't hating on them but for instance he had called Kathy Sierra a hopeless dipshit and you could say, well is that appropriate and inappropriate. It wasn't hateful, it wasn't illegal but you had people out there perhaps who were actually decent people if you met them face to face but saying things like this online and in this really weird surreal turn of events Christopher Locke did meet Kathy Sierra face to face in a live segment on CNN to try to work out their differences which I think was absurd and obscene but some of the social theories apply to all of this, I classify into two groups, we have the media theories and so starting in the 90s people began looking at issues of what is it about online computer mediated communications that prompt this sort of behavior and there are a number of theories that I won't get into too much right now and then we also had various behavioral theories and so some of the ideas are that when we're online we lose some of our inhibitions we lose some of our norms or we don't lose all our norms altogether but we look to a more salient group of people or a community to say this is what's appropriate for me to do or what not to do but there are a series of moral disengagement and I'll say a little bit more about that later and so I'm not going to dig into it, this isn't a literature review but those are some of the social theories that people have offered but there's also more popular theories which I think are really fun this is a comic from one of my favorite online comics, Geek and Poke that's available under Creative Commons license so I could use them in the book, I was happy about but this says the history of social in 1985 being a troll was not as much fun someone with a bag on the head yelling what else? we also had Gollum right the whole story of the lord of the rings is you have this powerful ring that renders you invisible and gives you other sort of powers and even the modest and virtuous hobbits they were the only people that got hold on to it for a little bit a while but eventually even they would be corrupted Gollum was corrupted and even Frodo was corrupted in the end if you remember he's in the volcano Frodo doesn't want to give up the ring Frodo is destroyed but Frodo had actually become corrupted too and we can even go further back than that the story that Plato tells in the Republic about Gaijis started out as an honest shepherd found a ring of invisibility used its power to kill the king bed his wife and take over the kingdom not a very kind statement on where King Gaijis came from but again it speaks to this question of can we be virtuous in the online context when we lack accountability most popularly and most recently this is sometimes referred to as the internet fuck wide theory which is if you take a normal person you add anonymity in an audience they will act awfully so that's the take on why people do awful things if we assume that they're relatively normal people that would probably treat you decently if you met them face to face but there's another set of people that I think are worth considering too and that's bad people acting out to the extent and it's not a clear line that we can say some people are bad or disordered or scary they too are online so the harassment against Cathy Sierra really took up a lot of speed when this guy we've got involved and for a while I long wondered is weave a troll or is he a hater and I maintain the distinction I say a troll's intention is to cause trouble and they might say hateful things but maybe they're being insincere I think a hater is someone who's really trying to demean and diminish and hurt someone and so he got involved and he said Cathy's protests about feeling scared or just you know absurd she thought she could take on the trolls she thought the law laugh out loud culture and the law won and he was in prison for a hacking charge which I won't get into but when he came out the new swastika prison tattoo I'm like okay he's moving from the troll to the hater category in my mind at least he also did something awful but fairly clever on twitter this week did anyone see that just one or two people on twitter now you can you can tweet and pay twitter to make sure it reaches certain demographics and have really good demographic data and so he posted a message that for a couple of pennies he could post out his white supremacist tweets to prominent african-american twitter holders or tweet out sexist things to feminists and stuff like that so that's still kind of trolly but I actually do think he's quite the hater now and there was actually a recent study that was really quite interesting that looked at personality attributes and commenters online just in 2014 and it was based on a survey and they wanted to look at things like narcissism and sadism and a couple of other dark tetrad personality attributes and see if there was any correlation between people's posting frequency and it turns out that there is a bit of a correlation between people who post a lot, people who troll and these personality characteristics and at the most pathological level we have the example of luca roca magnota which is one of those things whenever I read about this because I knew I wanted to mention it in a book at least I would need what's called a unicorn chaser does anyone know what a unicorn chaser is? yes we do some handy actually this entire actually this entire system goes over to cute animals but the unicorn chaser is the image to chase the image from your head that you've just seen that is so horrible that you need to do some brain scrubbing after the fact as I was working on this book I had my supply of unicorn chasers and I have a really cute dog too that helps but this person had been posting videos on youtube for a number of years torturing and killing kittens and eventually he had killed his lover and posted it online and ate the body and he was found out fled canada people didn't know where he was going this whole time he was commenting online he had lots of pseudonyms teasing people thanking his fans and eventually he was found by the police in a german internet cafe reading and posting comments about himself so hopefully none of us will encounter people like this but it's now very easy to do so online and even if you have one psycho out of a hundred online they can really have a disproportionate effect so I think it's these two things it's normal sort of everyday people acting out badly and some very scary people having a disproportionate effect that explains in part why we see such awfulness online but the really important thing in the sierra case in a lot of cases since that is that this notion of troll is sometimes not as useful as it might be when trolls started out before the web on the internet and use net and flame wars happened they were fairly innocuous I mean people might be really mean but they weren't trying to ruin your life chase you out of your home which is what happens now and one of the things about the sierra case that struck me was that when she was talking about out about the harassment she was receiving people were like well don't confuse me with the haters for instance Chris Locke might say yeah I called you a hopeless dipshit but I never said I hope you die and I thought that was unfair to sierra because she's in the middle of what I call a trollplex right this is this vortex of awfulness some people notable people are saying not nice things under their known names they also have the trolls kind of weighing in on what's happening you have the haters who really do want to hurt her and punish her and then you have everyone else sort of cabitzing and weighing in and the issue of free speeches coming up and it's like it has nothing to do with congress in the first amendment this was just us asking questions of is this what we want for our community and is this be condoned or condemned so I don't think the response to say don't feed the trolls is appropriate anymore I think the trolls of the 1990s still sort of exist but we now really do have a culture of laws lolz where you have this whole mix and vortex of awfulness coming from all kinds of quarters but now I want to return back to that question of the ads and that cycle that I put up there a couple of minutes ago and I want to ask that question of can we trust the comments the simple answer no so there's lots of reasons why we have corporate astroturfing samsung is most famous for this you'll find lots of people getting caught up and acting as a sock puppet I put a puppet on my hand and it says I agree with Joseph he's really smart a lot of people do that personally we see CEOs of companies or executives that are companies or employees of companies or government official but I think Samsung had actually done this as a corporate PR policy so this is not all that uncommon we also have state propaganda there was a US Air Force call for proposals where they said we were looking for software to help us manage multiple personas sock puppets so they could go on a foreign website and one person could leave comments in favor of the United States hopefully in the US most of this stuff is happening outside of our borders so you never really quite know at least officially China and Russia are well known as having thousands if not tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people that maintain the censorship institutions and leave fake comments in support of Putin or whoever it might be people in Thailand who comment in favor of the monarchy are actually a uniformed unit of the military and we didn't see much news of this but in South Korea during their 2012 elections there was a big crisis and controversy associated with people manipulating tweets and during that election that's just the name of the Chinese group of people who do this sort of thing we got one for posting a comment the equivalent of 50 cents so it was the whole idea of having paid government paid commenters similarly if you go back to that commercial space and you're thinking oh I'm reading a review of a product should I buy it online if you look at the research people are estimating about 10 to 30 percent of the commercial reviews like Yelp or Amazon or whatever it might be are fake and research has been very clever about how they went about this estimate which I can talk about more if people are interested but it's really not that hard to find so for instance if you go on Craigslist the title which is cut off here says looking for people to write Amazon reviews pay us $1 per review but each review takes less than one minute you could go into Craigslist right now type review into the service box and you would find ads like this I give props to Amazon because they've taken a lot of these pressures and brought it within their sort of system and so on Amazon there's something known as Vine reviews is anyone a Vine reviewer I'm curious it's something like if you were in the top 500 reviewers on Amazon they will start sending you free products and there is an obligation that you review 75, 80 it's changed over time percent of the products you receive and I think that's a good thing because actually when I ask people do you know what a Vine review is and it means they got it for free but at least if you do know you are as the FTC in the United States requires at least disclosing the fact that this was a freebie or a subsidized product that you got to review but you still end up with weirdness like this person reviewing a book called System Identification a Frequency Domain Approach and the review says if you're into math you'll love this book that's it so this is one of the sources of sort of the worst reviews on Amazon I'm actually hoping to have my book get Vine reviews on Amazon I think we've started the process because I'm really curious what will happen and the response to a lot of this is if we say we really can't trust the reviews from anonymous strangers out there what can we do in its stead and companies have offered us a wonderful solution they say the social graph will save us and by this they mean instead of relying upon the reviews and comments of strangers wouldn't you prefer to rely upon the recommendations of your friends and this sounds like a great idea at first but I think it too is dangerous and I think this is exemplified by this sponsored story if you don't know and I share a lot of the examples in the book there's this really interesting culture on Amazon where there's farcical products or real products where people go crazy in the reviews writing funny reviews George Takei, Mr. Sulu he's a top Amazon reviewer because he writes a lot of these farcical reviews so for instance we have a 55 gallon drum of sex lube George Takei wrote a review of it in which he said it was great and he sprays it on revelers in the Gay Pride Parade in San Francisco and this kid Nick Bergus and he was in Amazon and he said I'll share this on Facebook for my friends to laugh at and he said 55 gallon drum of lube on Amazon for Valentine's Day and for every day and for the rest of your life little did he know that his friends would start seeing his face appear in these ads on Facebook for this product on Amazon and this happened to a lot of people on Amazon actually there was a class suit action against Amazon in which they paid out to various people and eventually they stopped this particular program but they continued to do this sort of other thing and Google Plus does this sort of thing and Twitter might be moving to this sort of thing and so that's why I spoke about when I talked about this graph we're all looking for a place where we can be true to ourselves we can be authentic, we can express ourselves without fear of being scammed and spammed and hit with the sludge but eventually we're pushed to move and in fact even if we lived in a world in which no one would ever hate on you troll you, scam you as they say Craigslist folks do the platforms themselves I think will chase away their users Resner himself said a lot of the problems that the social networks are facing are because they just care about having the most people they can have Clay Scherke has this rule of something like a comment system can be big cheap or good pick two out of three you can't have all of these things but they do want all of these things and the way that they try to get this is they have lots of people online and then they sell access to you as a user of their platform so Yelp has come under a great deal of attack for this though they have so far won in the courts so for example there were a number of reports of how you're a merchant you're sitting in your restaurant you get a call from Yelp and they say would you like to advertise with Yelp you say no thank you and they say well if you advertise with Yelp we'd make sure a good review was promptly displayed on your page and when people were on your competitors pages for your place and when people search for that kind of restaurant they would find you and you still say no thank you I'm doing very well next day you have a horrible review on your Yelp page written by a Yelp employee people said this is extortion this is blackmail it went to the courts the court said and I can dig into this more if people want but they said no it's not extortion so this leads me to conclude that the social graph is actually not going to save us but make shills of us all that's what I'm worried about and so here we have another geek and poke comic called monetize your social graph hi this is my friend Steve how much five bucks in fact there was a Burger King app did anyone ever use that Burger King Facebook app you would get if you unfriended ten of your friends on Facebook you'd get a free Burger King burger and they got a lot of press out of it they only had set so much money for the campaign and when Facebook heard about it they said you're abusing our APIs and they said well we don't care too much because we're approaching our budget for our campaign anyway but still got them a lot of attention and I think that's where we're potentially headed so to wrap this out wrap this up I want to focus back on that question of these WTF moments right just so many questions when you venture to the bottom of the web this is one of my favorite pictures does anyone know the story of this picture of this monkey it's so interesting I'm going to digress for a moment because it's such a fascinating question this was a monkey that took a picture of itself the guy left his camera out in the jungle and a monkey came along smiled and took a picture of itself lots of people started spreading the picture online Wikipedia hosted it and the photographer said you're violating my copyright that's my picture Wikipedia said no these don't have copyright in their pictures and they actually prevailed so you can find this picture on Wikipedia so some of the things that perplexed me that prompt these WTF moments at the bottom of the web why the heck do people post first in the comments like there's lots of weird things TLDR first WTF by like why here's an ad that went viral a couple of years ago it's for a carbon monoxide detector and a woman was on this Canadian houseware site and she bought it and she left a review and she said this thing saved my son's life four out of five stars and people were like what the heck and so again I think there's really interesting reasons as to why this sort of happens in particular it has to do with shared expectations and commonalities of what we expect from rating systems and do we overload rating systems stupefying systems and this comic there's someone saying oh I read something really horrible happened like there was an earthquake or a hurricane and the other person said yeah it's awful I liked it immediately so very often we're overloading comments and rating systems with just too much information I often see lots of people on Amazon reviews complaining about the fact that they ordered the product but they mistakenly ordered the wrong product I sent it back I got the refund and it's like well it's your fault that you ordered the wrong product they did everything they could possibly do why are you giving the product two out of five stars or a lot of people are very pissed off when they get a Kindle version of the book that is misinformed because Kindle's translation system wasn't very good for a while and they give the book one out of five stars it's like no the book is really good it's just Amazon messed up the Kindle my other favorite example of that you go to the doctor and they say where is your paying one out of ten does five mean in the middle or does it mean like failing like I would do to my student you got a 50% who knows I think so much of what we see online is people making interesting but silly mistakes so here we have the actor who plays Dwight on the office he told his assistant I will accept $12,000 to plug their shitty food thanks you forgot to put the D in front of the tweet tweet we also have biases there's a very famous blog that says I fucking love science and she had lots of followers though apparently a lot of people did not know that it was a woman that ran the blog when she created a Twitter presence she did have her picture profile and dozens of people were like oh my god it's a babe and so I think because of the shortness of tweets and publicity and a lot of other attributes we see this sort of behavior and we also have excuses I keep a running list of people that says I was hacked because there's dozens of cases of people saying they were hacked we had the famous case of Anthony Wiener who forgot to send who forgot to prepend a D on his tweet when he took a crotch shot and sent it to a woman across the country and when people were like what's going on he said originally he said people pressed him on it he said well maybe it's a picture of me but it was taken out of context I don't know what appropriate context his crotch shot would have been in but he said people get hacked all the time it happens and so like what is going on and I think if we go back to those original attributes of comment that I outlined at the start I think it explains a lot of these phenomena so comment is reactive and so I think that leads a lot of people to post knee jerk sort of responses they're short so they lend themselves the confusion and they're asynchronous and so often you'll see more confusion and pylons so I think for instance the fact that Justine Sacco was a pretty famous case where she tweeted something awful before she got on a plane going to Africa it said something like going to Africa hope I don't get AIDS oh wait I'm white ironically pointing out the privilege of herself other people thought that was horrible and racist the storm started brewing on Twitter and the fact that she was on her plane and disconnected and that the storm was kind of rising and people started calling for her to get fired Twitter just blew up on this issue and one of the hashtags was has she landed yet and just thousands and thousands of tweets and people were like someone has to get to the airport and take her picture so you can see her face when she turns on her phone and somebody went to the airport because of the asynchronous nature of the communication she was out of touch and when she landed she just saw hundreds of messages saying you horrible awful woman and from her friends saying oh my god what happened and from her employer saying you're fired but most importantly I think a lot of this stuff that happens is because it's hypotextual and by that I mean naturally comment and the web is naturally hypotextual it's more than just text it has links right you can connect from one thing to another thing and that's the wonderful thing about the web but I think it's hypotextual in that it is sometimes undertextual so email responses there's a reply header tweets often are in the context of another tweet that you can find out though often it's difficult but the wonderful contextuality of all these comments and the fact that they circulate so promiscuously often means that those links are broken and we have all kinds of misunderstandings another case was the NRA posted something after the morning of one of the many shootings unfortunately we've had in the United States and they said good morning shooters how is everyone and people were just like how could you say that and the NRA had to say the person who managed their social media account wasn't aware of the shooting that happened last night and I think that's an example of the hypotextual framing of so much comment that's out there so we've arrived at the end of our expedition our journey to the bottom of the web and what have we possibly learned so how can we avoid the awfulness of the web I don't think these are easy questions all of them require a bit of work but I think we're the most useful ways of understanding comment platforms is by way of the metaphor of a garden Coates who was here a couple of years ago and talked about commenting systems he likened a comment system as a garden you just can't take an abandoned law out in the corner and call it a free speech libertarian paradise and expect wonderful things to happen you have to spend resources and people and time and attention maybe codes of conduct and institute various norms such that you have a good comment platform and good comments to encourage in your comment garden what examples should and should not be followed I don't think we should set up spaces where people are intentionally snarky or at least when we do that we shouldn't be surprised when horrible things happen I don't talk about feedback today but I think a really nice example of a comment culture out there is what's called beta readers and the fan fiction community they give feedback and comment on one another's work and better reading just like software development is something that's feature complete but you put it out there because it probably has bugs a beta reader is someone who reads something that is written but it's rough, it's green and they give you feedback and they have actually a really strong culture and dozens of really useful guides about how to give feedback to one another and what dangers are revealed beneath the silt when you start panning the silt I think there's a lot of manipulation out there and so by reading the comments at the bottom of the web I've come to the conclusion that comment is only as comment terrible as we let it be so thank you for your attention and I look forward to your comments high five I wanted to get into the first post and I'm there and I feel very good about it and good about myself first in passing I just want to note that I do think some of these problems can be solved by more sensitive technology it's fairly clear that if Facebook is able to do facial recognition identification Twitter should be able to sense that this is a dick pic and warn you that you should probably have a direct message in front of it rather than sending it off this seems like something that we can simply solve with technology more seriously I'm curious you seem to be talking about perhaps the least likely to have constructive conversation from them so at the best reviews of books Yelp reviews at the worst comments that quickly descend into trolling and such there are other people looking at comments with enormous aspiration associated with them so for instance we've seen in the news industry newspapers trying to figure out is there a possible way that their comments can sort of serve as a form for deliberation debate of the issues that are sort of being brought up within them and thus far this seems to be extremely difficult to pull off is this a false hope is this a space in which it's possible for something like the Coral Project which is now investing millions of dollars in trying to figure out could you solve newspaper comments and having taken this deep spelunking expedition to the bottom of the web is that a hopeless task or do they have the possibility of turning newspaper comments online into a worthwhile space okay so I'll talk about newspapers and I'll also talk about better systems so I'm going to begin with the better systems because Facebook I had read that when they started their system of trying to report abuses for instance pornography one of the things they found is once they added that button that says you can object to the thing that a person posted because it's obscene or something like that they started getting deluged with people reporting things and they'd go and look and it was a Christmas picture it was not obscene and the reason they were getting all these photos reported as being obscene when they weren't was because people didn't like themselves in the photo and they didn't have any other mechanism to say I don't like myself in this picture other than to say this is obscene take it down and so they had to get smarter about the system and maybe you need to say well we need to create a system whereby someone can say I don't like myself in this picture but does Facebook want to be in the middle of that and so they architected such that the message would go from the person who was in the picture to the person who posted the picture and they would play with the AB test the ways that the communication could be facilitated to make sure something nicely happens and it was a learning experience and I think they have made progress but this speaks to the fact that it is a learning progress and if there's any sort of incentive in such a system for someone to sort of get around it or abuse it it will happen so it's a, Judith Doniff has a really nice book about user interface design she has a number of neat proposals she's worked with in her work here at MIT about how we could design better systems and I think we should continue experimenting and playing with it but I don't think there's necessarily an easy solution once you scale above the 150 or whatever the magic number is for the online context in the news context again people have been experimenting there's lots of different systems out there the most popular system seems to be right now that you have a different off to the side commenting place where you allow people to talk and you take the best comments and maybe you promote them to the front page under the newspaper article that's nice in that it gives you some reflection on that particular posting but it's not necessarily a robust conversation again I think we have to apply what we've learned in terms of one of my favorite examples is Metafilter I think they're a really good comment culture and they do a couple of things they started out trying to construct a good comment culture they had human moderators and they charged a $5 fee up front and it's not where they make most of their money in fact they make most of their money from Google AdSense but just that $5 their fee did a couple of things one it prevented people from doing drive by comments and because they have to register and pay the money and maybe it also caused a cognitive dissonance which is I've paid $5 to belong to this community maybe I shouldn't be a jerk I want to stay and hang around so I think there's a lot of room for technological and psychological experimentation to create these spaces but it's not an easy job and I haven't seen anything yet that makes me think oh this is completely solved and for instance one of the things Tony Heesey Kosa said it's imitable to create in the community to see a post like on the New York Times it says 5,000 comments posted take part in the conversation it just isn't going to happen at that scale and so I think if we want these sort of things to happen and one of the reasons I think Reddit is successful is that it allows you to have very specific conversations and very specific subreddits so it means that you have the same platform and technologies in larger cultural norms but you can actually find a community that's very specific and that has a decent scale to it and that's just the social psychology of groups so just before we go on to other questions which we will in half a second I just want to mention the Judith Donoth book is called The Social Machine it is another fine publication of the MIT Press and you should run out and get both books immediately Chris Peterson to have you talk a little more about the dichotomy or good versus bad people bad people acting out good people I don't remember what the acting badly bad framing like who's deciding who's bad is it the people who are doing the sensitivity sense of themselves is it someone else judging whether they're good and who that person is and what they're bringing to bear because it seems like that you're talking a lot about how comments are in some respects not just comments but other forms these tools are overloaded with a lot of these meetings and I'm wondering if the good versus bad framing is carrying a lot of the discussion of like and the decisions of what is good and what is bad in conflict in these spaces yeah it's a great question and it's a very fuzzy sort of boundary and I don't make the distinction these people are clearly good and these people are clearly bad rather I make the distinction to say that most of the research up to very recently assumed that these were good people acting badly under these computer mediated circumstances but I think we should now start tending to the fact that there are also people maybe they're a fraction of a percent really are very dangerous people very disordered people and they can have a disproportionate effect on what happens and so I would never want to say well this person is good and this person is bad Lindy West is a comedian I think and a couple of weeks ago she posted and gave a couple of great talks about how she met one of her fiercest trolls and she had this amazing conversation it was also on this American Life and I would really recommend listening to it and this guy just to hurt her her father had recently passed away this guy created a Twitter account in her father's name and just would tweet these awful things that she'd see in her father's name and in her father's face and it really affected her the Twitter bio was father of two great kids and one idiot and tweeting directly to her and so you say well is that guy good or is that guy bad and I'm not trying to set up that distinction per se because when she spoke to him he said I'm really sorry that's probably one of the most awful things I've ever done I was in a bad space she's a heavy woman and he said I was resentful of the fact that you seemed happy and successful and accepting of your body and I just spilled it all out on you and so again I'm not a psychologist and I can't say exactly which one of those categories he would be in it sounds like he's a good person acting badly but I make that other distinction just to say that there are people who are very scary and damaging and they can have a huge effect Sarah? I have a lot of things I'm thinking about one is that my current book project is on gender-based attacks against women online and you mentioned a couple stories here and then you've got Weave with the Swastika and so I guess I'm thinking about trolling and both sending and receiving from the community across groups and I just wondered what you came across doing your work around that around differences by gender or race Yeah so most to quote Whitney Phillips who also has a new book out from MIT Press about trolls specifically I quoted her in my book saying that among the troll community she studies it was a sausage fest to use her words because predominantly men though not always I was quite surprised to learn that in the UK they were talking about having a woman author be on the five pound note and to remove Darwin and the people behind that campaign received a whole lot of vitriol and actually one of those trollers who were saying awful horrible things was a woman so it's not unusual but very often it is men attacking women and it's actually become enshrined as a type of culture like the type of hate speech you see very, very formulaic so would you like me to say anything more specific than it is mostly guys though not completely No I guess since you were at the bottom, when you were looking at that stuff did you personally know those patterns in the comments and the things that you were looking at about the types of people targeted, the nature of the comments, whether you're mentioning formulaic so are they comments about people's bodies or sexual behavior or those sort of things So Susan Herring did some great work controlling in the 1990s I'm not sure if you're familiar with her work and this was even before the contemporary really nasty hateful kind of stuff and she was wondering why is it that men flame and women thank those were the words that she used and she thought that maybe men and women have different notions of politeness and when she would ask them do you think it's important to be a polite online both men and women equally said yes and is something she called like a free libertarian sort of philosophical axis which is that the women she spoke to seemed more concerned about maintaining the face of the people they were talking about and the men had this various libertarian free speech can't let anyone censor you you have to like fight back and slam and dominate the other sort of people so she found that personality difference and I think that's actually been enshrined in the internet culture at large and I think we're now starting to step back from that to say look if you create a forum where you allow anything to go with this idea of libertarian free speech rules awful things are going to manifest unfortunately great let's go to the bottom of the table there have you looked at any differences in cultures and different countries since work differently yeah I've had that question a couple of times I think it's a great question but I haven't I would like to it's an open question Matt Carroll I worked at the Boston Globe for a long time and they had a I'm willing to leave this comment experiment where they had a free site and a paywall site with the same stories of both sites and on the free site the comments would be a lot more comments first of all and they tended to be shorter much more materialic and they someone always ended up blaming Obama by the end of the comment stream whereas on the paid side the comments were much more longer much more thoughtful and it seemed to be more of a genuine conversation going on and so that was an example of where someone's paying some money so I guess they think very differently about it I'm just wondering what other activities whatever make a good comment besides just putting something on the paywall yeah well I think requiring some sort of hurdle to get in be it pay or something else I think having a particular leadership and culture started at the start where you say these are the sort of things you want to encourage and these are the sort of things you want to discourage so when I studied Wikipedia I thought the Wikipedia founders Jimmy Wales in particular did that well in that community had a couple of norms which became policy that said this is the sort of space that we want to create and it's not perfect but I think that was important and then there's the technology do you make it easy to moderate and manage the community there's always room for improving upon that and then there's also social mechanisms like moderation, metamoderation but my caveat with that is those things can always be gamed and abused so there's like a whole pen out, uh, penapole, whatever that word would be Penelope Penelope, thank you of techniques you have to do and it's not easy I teach a course on online communities and we dig into all this stuff throughout the whole of the semester because there's no you stick it out there and you're ready to go if you do that bad things are probably going to happen so right now what you need to mention that's late then bizarre to this sort of thing I'm retired yet for the last two months I've had people congratulating me on my work anniversary I have to go back and look at my late profile to see what it is they're congratulating me for I have people, um, endorsing me for skills which I'd like to imagine I have but I know they have no objective way of actually knowing that um, so I mean it seems I mean, it's positive but it's almost you know, so positive it's phoning and has anybody actually looked at that? I mean this is also deeply tied to the social graph you know, so it's supposed to be you know, fixed by using the social graph instead it seems to be this sort of sort of false vanity right, I don't know if you've ever taught students who then go on to graduate and are on LinkedIn but I get many many messages every day from all these students and their friends saying LinkedIn connect connect connect so I haven't studied LinkedIn specifically I was interested, there's a chapter in there where I talk about what I call quantification and I think a big part of this comment world is the fact that now everything is quantified and rated right, so everyone gets stars and beyond LinkedIn there have actually been lots of websites that will for instance take your cloud rating and cloud is a measure of your social influence, do you have a Wikipedia bio how many Twitter followers do you have, how many times you retweeted and they take this all the social intelligence and give you a number and there are sites out there that allow you to rate your colleagues and your peers and just this push towards quantification in fact at one point there were sites that would set up dating among successful people and you know they'd had be certain they had to earn certain income and could only enter the dating pool if their cloud number was a sufficient number so I am concerned about the quantification of everything that happens online and the rating and ranking of everything online but I haven't looked at LinkedIn that much though I agree that they're very promiscuous with sending you opportunities to connect I'm always unsubscribing and I'm still getting the emails yeah please Andrew so this is a great talk to be paired with our talk this evening about the library space it's going to be Daniel T. Citron yeah great book and the un-advertised gamer game speaker is that here tonight that's tonight by the end building for room 331 yeah and what he said the question I had was I don't know if this is answering but with Gaijes the argument is that if you're invisible, if you're un-accountable you will do selfish bad things but there are tons of people online in the majority who aren't folk so how do you account for people if they're anonymous if they're un-accountable who still behave well who want to build a civil community so there are both people who are identifiable and act horrible and there are people who are unidentifiable and act horrible so for a play-toe then one would have to say well there's a particular threshold so maybe it's 20% of the people that would act horrible when given the power of invisibility and I'm actually very interested in threshold models like people have studied when will a group of people who are protesting turn into a mob and there are these very narrow margins where you could say you always have 20% of the people will always cooperate or be peaceful and other people are going to try to cause trouble and the other 60% will kind of go with what they see happening around them and so what I suspect is in any particular community you have that sort of threshold model and if you happen to have one of those people who always act poorly or antisocially and other people start taking their cue you can have a community go very bad very quickly where a very similar community that just has very small difference on the margins could actually be much more robust and pro-social so I think the question of why do some communities turn rotten so horribly even though they seem kind of similar at the start relates to these threshold models of collective behavior we'll go here and then do your next so you talked some about corporate and military talk puppeting I know I've seen on Tumblr for instance like sometimes Tumblr users who are members of a minority group will get anonymous comments like well I'm also a black woman and those anonymous commenters will forget to click the send this anonymously and it's like a white dude who's just saying I'm a black woman and I disagree with you so do you have any information or know of any research on that sort of so not from a corporate or military interest but just general populace and how often that's happening in that section? I don't have any quantifiable numbers I do know that has happened and I talk a lot about the social justice wars in the various communities I study and that is fairly common and people are embarrassed when their real identities are released but I don't have any figures on the particular numbers one of the things I do talk about by way of historical analogy is Galileo and he's often thought to have been persecuted by the church for believing in a sun-centered universe but in fact he had had good relations with the pope got along very well with the church and the pope actually said well I really want to hear about this book you write where you give both the heliocentric and the geocentric model of the universe a fair shake and what he did is he created a sock puppet where he created a geocentric simpleton actually named simpleton and had him mouth the literal words of the pope and that's what pissed the pope off which then called the hammer to fall down in Galileo and people have been sock puppeting for a very long time including for strategic purposes where you don't necessarily sock puppet just to say I agree with Joseph but maybe you say Joseph is an idiot and among the paranoid people online that's called a false flag operation where you make something appear that's not really happened that then you can have other people pile on and attack slightly more contemporary than the Galileo example there is some work that's been done looking at Qatari comment farms that have been responding to human rights complaints in Bahrain so Bahrain had a particularly bloody crackdown on their quarter of the era of spring and for two or three years there if you have the temerity to say someone needs to hold Bahrain a US ally responsible for human rights abuses you would get just these torrents of I'm a young female medical student in Bahrain what do you know about my country you should shut up and talk about the problems in your own nation which is a very effective way of actually getting someone to back off human rights critique except for the fact that it's a comment farm three countries over trying to figure out essentially how to manufacture a way to silence dissent within it so there's a little bit of work done on that and ways in which Twitter comment farms particularly around Russia right now are being used as a way of countering dissent in Russia they can be quite sophisticated they can say we want one of your personas to make a anti Putin argument but we want the six other personas to make the argument against similarly in the book I show an example where most of the things you find on Craigslist are quite crude will write reviews for you but one of the specifications I need people to write reviews for me and they were very specific they were like you have to use decent language you have to post your posts over a long time spread out like don't send all your reviews at the same time there has to be a mix between three and five stars and so some people are quite sophisticated about creating all this fakery out there and you just can't assume that the fake reviews are the zero stars of the five stars people are getting very sophisticated about it you want to talk I notice you mentioned two types of comment the first is instrumental like those in Amazon Craigslist and the second type is just commentary in the news articles I wonder how do you think the difference are they following the same sort of dynamics do your theory apply to those two categories in the same way or slightly different people write comments out of different motivations some people write on that Amazon just want other people to see wow this guy is great he contributes to the whole community and tell each other I think you're right people have different motives and I think there are different effects in the book actually each one of the chapters is divided up into how comments can inform how comments can help us how comments can alienate us some of the things I didn't talk about today is how comments can shape us how am I ugly videos and other aspects of our interactions with online media and comments so and how comments befuddle us I think it's a good question people have different motives and they have different effects and it's worth considering each one of those Willa? I really like the two main things that you pointed out at the end of how we can change this for the internet to suck less in general of hey cultivate a good community and as the social aspect and the individual responsibility of approaching things as a beta reader however those things are really hard and they take a really long time and there's an awful lot of assumption of people taking personal accountability which simply is not going to happen at least for a long time and so I wonder if you've also come across any if you have logged anywhere communities that things have gone well how does the League of Legends or the online play and how they've dealt with the tribunal and all this other stuff in order to have people who had a bad day or are notoriously bad people how they deal with that by putting in place a justice system have you logged other examples of systems which help people get to those both the society base the social base and the individual accountability so you're right I am making a difficult argument once I was talking about this book to someone they're like well what's the easy tech solution and I refer to Donna's book and I said there's a lot of really good books ideas in there but I'm a teacher because and I have students in my classes on online communities and communication at digital age because I actually think education is an important part of what we need to do and there's no easy fix similarly when I talked about Wikipedia I was like there's no wiki dust that you can spread and automatically your corporate communications are amazing it's a collaboration I think League of Legends is another really nice example we spend a day on my online communities class talking about that particular system and for those people that don't know they have a very mechanized system very random where you play people you don't necessarily know and if you act poorly people will sort of tag you and say that person acted poorly you get enough of those there's some sort of secret threshold and then you go into the tribunal system where your peers are recruited and typically these people don't know one another and they make a decision and they can ban you or put a sanction upon you so so when I talk about systems that I think work well I actually talk about League of Legends and I talk about Metafilter but very often I talk about small scale communities and Reddit as another big example because it allows them to go small scale but most of the stuff that works out there I think manage because it works at the small scale so League of Legends again they have the small scale hack they say you're going to take 16 of your peers show them the evidence and make a decision please my name is Ron Newman I occasionally manage an online community it's not the one I'm really going to bring up you mentioned Reddit Reddit seems like I like Reddit I like the little piece of Reddit I play around in but my impression is that Reddit is a reservoir for some of the worst stuff on the web as well do you want to say anything about that so there's awful stuff on Reddit no doubt there is lots of news when someone by the name of Violent Acres who was called one of the worst trolls on the web about the various subreddits he created about up skirt videos and down blouse videos and all this other sort of creepy stuff which feels like a world away from the little Boston Reddit that I was participating in so it is this really big amazing space I can find lots of nice little communities in which to exist in but if you create that forum is your correspondingly going to have bad spaces too I think and then the community and the owners of Reddit have to say this is stuff that we are no longer want to see here and again I think Reddit started with this anarchistic free speech kind of ethos and that was their concern at the start but I think they got enough heat that they said we're actually going to crack down on this with respect to Gamergate a lot of the harassment and organization was happening at 4chan the guy behind 4chan was starting to get a lot of heat on this and he cracked down on it and they all went to 8chan and so again there's no easy solution and we can kind of chase the haters and the misogynists around the web but hopefully we can chase them to places that people aren't going to randomly sort of stumble upon that's my opinion fortunately since they double every time we can just preemptively block 32chan 60 more times great it's actually you know the quality is still very weak do we have a final question for Joseph please I wonder what is your definition of a comment and like when you say you want to go to the bottom of the web I guess I'm thinking there's also comments at the top of the web and on the side for annotations and so I'm thinking about what the scope of that is whether for instance a tweet about an article is a comment of that on that article or is it only the stuff on the bottom of the page and sort of what's the scope of so at the start I noted how I think comment is reactive so it's in response to something it's short it's asynchronous and the reason I talk about the bottom of the web is because I think that speaks to the essence it's the things in the margins it's the things in the bottoms it's the stuff we don't typically pay attention to and are counseled to avoid that's what I wanted to look at so I want to thank Joseph for being with us and we'd have a round of applause for Professor Riegel