The Fungible Audience Fallacy

[maradydd]

Incidents of "Shanley Kane verbally attacks some friend of mine in some way that is obviously counter to her stated goals" keep rolling in at the rate of about one every two weeks. Last time, it was bashing a friend who started slinging C professionally around the time I was born because "her generation" didn't create the workers' utopia (by

Comments

[graydon]

I think her agitating on this topic is likely to reach people who can change it, and (as subsequent posts the other day pointed out) there are lots of simple features twitter could do, no magic required, to make abuse-reporting and/or auto-blocking (subjectively) much better experiences.

People remain socially connected even after they leave jobs, and people observe conversations with their ex-colleagues. Public shaming can motivate change.

[maradydd]

Public shaming can motivate change.

I keep hearing this, but nobody has explained to me yet how public shaming is supposed to motivate people into engineering. Personally, the moments in which I'm drowning in negative emotions are the last ones in which my engineering talent pops up with good ideas; rather, they're the ones where every thought terminates in "I'm useless and nothing I can come up with is any good." I am not at all clear on how this is supposed to help anyone, even leaving behind the fact that when I am in a state like that, the last people I want to help are the ones perpetuating it.

I mean, if the idea is "the public shamings of whichever engineers happen to make themselves convenient targets will continue until someone solves the durability problems in Twitter's replication backend," then okay, but could people at least call it group blackmail instead of trying to dress it up in ribbons and bows?

[graydon]

The mechanism is pretty straightforward: you have a bunch of people inside twitter who already have guilty consciences because they know that their company doesn't spend much energy helping people combat harassment on their service.

They receive a bunch of yelling-at in public (or their friends do) and this resonates with their existing guilt over the matter and they finally raise the issue to their boss and ask for time / a team / a quarter worth of feature-work priority to work on it, optionally pointing to things that People Are Saying About Us In Public to help make their case.

I've done, and seen this done, many times while working in public-facing companies. People yell at mozilla engineers to fix $THING_WE_ARE_ALL_EMBARRASSED_ABOUT all the time too. It works. It's not about finding inspiration for engineering wizardry, it's about agitating outside to cause someone to agitate-more inside and eventually pass it along to someone who signs cheques. Nothing more complex.

[maradydd]

My instinctive reaction to this is pure revulsion so strong that I am deeply grateful that I did not go to work at Mozilla. If Mozilla takes feature demands that are as underspecified and as ignorant of how the technologies involved work as Shanley's are seriously, that says frightening things about management's cognitive model of engineering as a practice, along the lines of the frightening things the policy track at that privacy workshop said about the policy folks' cognitive models of engineering. That doesn't appear to be what you're saying, though; taking your words at face value, you're saying that it's common practice at Mozilla for external gangs to gang up on engineers' personal points of vulnerability and bully them until some engineer can't take the guilt anymore and goes begging for time to work on it so that the contingent stimulation goes away. That sounds like an awesome practice to see modeled in front of me for eight hours a day - I bet that would do fantastic things for my depression, executive function, and

[pozorvlak]

I have a simpler theory: she just doesn't care as much about how her actions jibe with her long-term goals as much as she likes attacking people right now. My sub-theories are that (1) she's a nasty person who really likes attacking people, (2) she hasn't thought much about the long-term effects of her actions. Sub-theory (2) doesn't actually require much negligence or stupidity on her part; social justice has a whole raft of techniques for avoiding thinking about how their tactics impact on their long-term goals, and it must be easy to internalize those. "The tone argument" (or rather, the dismissal thereof) is the obvious such technique; I'd also include the concept of "concern trolling", since I've never seen an accusation of concern trolling that appeared justified to me, but I have seen dozens of accusations that were simply attempts to shut down well-intentioned criticism, often of the form "your tactics are counterproductive in the long-term

[maradydd]

A year ago that would have been pretty much my only theory, and it's certainly the case for most of the vocal SJWs with dayjobs that I've noticed. (Tim Chevalier, for instance, collects "people he has slandered" the way some people collect stamps.) Quitting her job to start an activist e-zine in fact strikes me as doubling down on both "being a nasty person who likes attacking people" and "avoiding thinking about how her tactics impact on her long-term goals." I actually do think she's internalised those avoidance techniques to the point of self-parody, but I also think at least some of that internalisation process was performative. That is to say, I think that without an audience to play to, the psychological rewards of attacking people wouldn't be nearly as compelling or frequent - to get a rush from attacking people, you have to go out and attack them, but when you're also a performer whose performance is attacking people, you get residual egoboo every time a new fan discovers you and lets you know. Now this is her job, and you

[maradydd]

Good grief, is he still banging that drum? I wonder whether he has anything more than bald assertions to base that on yet; the first time I was made aware of it was a thread on Facebook over a year ago, and the person who brought it to my attention did so because they were so startled at how blatant (and effective) a conversation-stopper it was.

Suffice it to say that only my concern for my own privacy and that of quite a few people I care about keeps me from demolishing that argument; I give much more of a shit about that than I do about what a lying ignoramus says about me.

[uke]

Just catching up on LJ now, and wanted to let you know how much I appreciate your writing (and attendant thinking) about this, especially since (a) your viewpoint is very close to mine, and (b) I have not seen anyone else articulate it even 1/10 as well. So thanks!

[weev]

https://twitter.com/rabite/status/494282097088278528

here's my contribution to that particular twitter discussion. but hey, suggesting real solutions isn't as good as spewing all caps walls of text into tweets I guess

[maradydd]

That is a really good idea, and you're right, it doesn't require exposing hashes to users. Hell, people might even learn what a /24 is. Presumably Twitter would whitelist tweets/RTs from people a user actually follows, even if they're coming from a blocked range (e.g., conference wifi).

[weev]

the nice thing about having something other than a button is giving people the ability to pre-emptively block a specific range that hasn't interacted with them yet. this enables Twitter DNSBLs for spam and other forms of abuse, and lets you block crawlers from corporations you find objectionable.

[ext_2788757]

The Motte and Bailey doctrine is such a great analysis of what's going on here, and in many other places in current society. I think each of the world's religions could be regarded as 1 giant bailey with a selection of different mottes inside. They claim as much ground as possible based on a shared identity that is largely meaningless, but that people acknowledge, then retreat to safer ground whenever necessary (usually to fire arrows at each other until they're reminded of the benefits of sharing the communal ground)