Skincare Posting Through The Pornocalypse

I can’t stop thinking about a tiny detail from yesterday’s big post about the microscopic liberalization of #pornocalypse terms of service over at Tumblr. I’m talking about the woman on Twitter who had a video flagged under the new terms for being sexually explicit, because she was sucking on a fake (dildo) dick. If that’s sexually explicit, than what about this weary woman on Tik-Tok squirting lotion on her own face? Is symbolic cum any less sexually explicit than a symbolic dick, and if so, why? Does it matter that she labels it a skin care post?

The moral of this story is that moderation is very hard, and keeping sexuality out of human communities is impossible. I don’t care how badly the stockholders want it. They can’t have it. Tell ’em to fuck off.

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Death By Snap-Together Dongs

It turns out that the short-lived Lego Universe online space for kids failed in substantial part because of the perceived need to employ a large and expensive crew of human censors to detect and punish virtual penises constructed in that space:

In 2010, LEGO unleashed LEGO Universe, a massive, multiplayer game where builders of all ages could create whatever they wanted on their own digital plots. Well, almost anything: LEGO didn’t want any of the players to endow its online world with penises. After all, it was meant to be a kid-friendly place in which phalluses had no role–even its mini-fig citizens were dickless.

To keep the game penis-free, the company hired a sizable moderation team to scan screenshots of every structure that went up, according to a former developer for the game. Management “wanted a creative building MMO [massively multiplayer online-game] with a promise of zero penises seen,” tweeted Megan Fox, a developer who worked on the project, on Friday. “YOU could build whatever you wanted, but strangers could never see your builds until we’d had the team do a penis sweep on it.”

…

According to Fox, the lack of an automated ‘dong detector’ was costly for LEGO. Fox said the human moderators hired to fight the battle of the bulge were the largest expense associated with the game, which LEGO shuttered in 2012.

These people were willing to let their venture fail rather than relax their paranoia about dick-shaped buildings in their virtual space. Isn’t that amazing?

Civilization, Assholes, And Internet Communities

First, go read Reddit Makes Me Hate Atheists (for a classic example of the braying mob trying to troll a fifteen-year-old girl off the internet by making rape jokes about her). It’s old hat to anybody who frequents internet discussion communities that lack consistent moderation, but it may be eye-opening to many of you because:

Many civilized people abandon communities like this LONG before the discussion falls to such a low level.

My mother was right about some things and wrong about many other things, but she was right about this: Who we are is, at least partially, defined and created by the company we keep. If you participate in a community that allows its tone to be set by a seeming majority of internet fuckwads, you may be a bit of an internet fuckwad yourself. If you didn’t start that way, the culture of fuckwaddery (like any other) is somewhat contagious; and even if your personal immune system is stronger than most, there’s still guilt-by-association to contend with.

There are ways to keep internet discussion communities non-toxic, but they all require substantial human effort. Sometimes it’s a moderation team with endless time, patience, and discretion; sometimes it’s a community moderation scheme backed up by a community with enough shared values in common to give the up-voting and down-voting some coherence. Sometimes (and this was more common in those legendary days of yore before all the assholes got on the internet, just ask any grey-bearded nethead and he’ll tell you, at length) a non-toxic internet discussion just happens, for a few hours or a few days or a few months. But that never lasts. Whatever the means by which non-shitty conversation happens on the internet, there usually comes a time when it stops happening, when the internet fuckwads begin to dominate the discourse, and all the interesting people get driven away.

The only exceptions I’ve seen have involved that “substantial human effort” I mentioned. Autocratic moderation or informal majoritarian censure, it takes work to keep a conversation civil after the fuckwads have begun to accumulate. And once that work begins to fail, as inevitably as Rome did, you’ll soon find that many of the conversational participants who made the conversation worth having are silenced or driven away by the booming echoing fuckwaddery.

I’m never seen a community recover from that.

So, once the conversation descends below a certain level, it may fairly be asked of the remaining participants: if you don’t consider yourself an internet fuckwad, why are you still there?

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Cracking Down On Handcrafted Comment Spam

It’s only fair to let everybody know that I’ve been having to crack down on handcrafted comment spam lately. I think the sex toy sellers are getting desperate for free traffic.

What I’m seeing a lot of (as in, many per day) is short comments, obviously written by a real human, responsive to the post on which they appear, and in all respects the sort of comment that I would normally value (except that, generally, they aren’t very substantive or interesting). And then, in the URL box that gets published with the comment, a long and ugly keyword-stuffed link to a sex toy sales page.

I’m not talking about the obviously-machine-generated stuff (“Hi, I did a Google search and found that most people would agree with you”) or the lazily banal one-word comments (“Hott!”). Those have been with us for years, and I moderate away dozens per day. This new plague consists of longer (but still short) comments that react to the posts in human ways (a recent one was similar to “Wow, it must take a lot of coordination to bring somebody off with your feet like that”), with a link in the URL box in the style of “http://amazing-sex-toys21.com/vibrator-massager-orgasms.html”).

I’ve always gotten a few of these, and I used to moderate them in a way that preserved the comment while refusing to provide the free advertising. I’d edit the comment, strip out the link, pass the comment through moderation, and add the commenter to the “always moderate comments from this source” list. Once or twice a week, it wasn’t too bad. But now, it’s half a dozen times a day, and I haven’t got that kind of time.

I used to think that the spam wars would be lost, if they are, to machine algorithms that got better and better at pretending to be people. And I still worry about that. But I now I also wonder whether the difficult economic times aren’t showing us a glimpse of a distopian future in which infotech is so cheap, and people are so hungry, that handcrafted and human-generated spam begins to make widespread economic sense. If that’s the way it goes, we won’t be winning the spam wars any time soon.