"While studies show that posts on social media that evoke negative emotions, like fear, revulsion or anger, elicit more engagement..."

"... some creators have found that negative comments have also become the most visible ones in recent years. Posts about the most lighthearted topics — whether it’s enjoying coffee with a spouse, pesto recipes or even power washing a home — can be overwhelmed by angry comments that seem to escalate rapidly.... Ms. Afualo has become known for videos that speak out against hateful or mean comments. The videos typically show one such comment, which Ms. Afualo then breaks down, highlighting systemic issues at play and sometimes mocking the poster, topped off with her signature high-pitched cackle. 'My typical response, depending on the severity, is to farm content out of it,' she said. One of her recent videos focused on a user’s comment asking why she had 'no ring' after having been in a relationship for years, to which she responded: 'You’re worried about me having a ring? How about you worry about your suffering — alone.'..."

From "How Creators Are Facing Hateful Comments Head-On/Ignore vitriol, or turn it into content? Creators like Kacie Rose and Drew Afualo share their tips for dealing with a harsh comments section" (NYT).

You have to chose which negative comments to respond to. You'll get more of what you reward, and any response to your haters will encourage them, especially if you look as though you've been angered or saddened. They like the action, but maybe action is what you want to. Afualo's phrase "farm content out of it" is telling. Even if your on-line creation is a content farm, you care about what you are farming. You can decide to grow back-and-forth negativity — trash talking. That may be the tendency of the internet. But don't encourage the weeds to take over your farm. Or is weed farming the most lucrative enterprise?

"Kiwi Farms harvests anguish. It thrives on pain and revels in death. Users of the innocuously named forum prey on the vulnerable and marginalized..."

"... with persistent and twisted harassment campaigns. Despite its penchant for destroying lives, Kiwi Farms has been mostly overlooked by the media for much of the site’s existence. That is partly because of who it attacks, but also because reporters are wary of becoming targets themselves. The users call their victims 'lolcows' because their pain can be milked for laughs. The group made its purpose clear on its Twitter page before it was taken down: 'Gossip and exploitation of mentally handicapped for amusement purposes.'..."

From "The Website That Wants You to Kill Yourself—and Won’t Die/How the trolls on Kiwi Farms hounded people to commit suicide and created the online culture we have today" (Mother Jones).

"The large on-line platforms allow anonymous troll demons to rampage through society with no cost to themselves...."

"They're not even human anymore, in my estimation. They're literally a demonic force...."

Quasi-troll.

Overheard at Meadhouse:

"There are some people who are quasi-trolls." 

"Everyone is a quasi-troll — including you."

"Gardening has been a solace to so many... because it invokes the prospect of some kind of future, however uncertain and unpredictable it may be."

"'When the future seems either very bleak, or people are too depressed to imagine one, gardening gives you a toehold in the future'.... It can also help reconcile us to the inevitability of our demise. At the Barn garden, Tom Stuart-Smith told me that every spring... he goes around the garden with a notebook, to make plans about where to add things in the autumn. 'I think a lot about next year, but I also think, absolutely, about what it’s going to be like when I am dead,' he said. The future promised by a garden may not always be ours to enjoy, but a future there will be, with or without us in it.... Under the current circumstances, I have no great confidence that my mother will ever again travel to London and see this garden of mine. 'Have you room for a honeysuckle?' she wrote to me. I planted one in a sunny spot against the wall, in the hope that the near-invisible trellis of wires that I hammered to the brick will help it stand upright, as if it were doing so on its own."

From "The Therapeutic Power of Gardening/Can anxious minds find solace working with plants? A therapist and her husband, a garden designer, say yes" by Rebecca Mead (The New Yorker).

Have you been gardening during the coronavirus lockdown?

ADDED: "Gardening has been a solace to so many... because it invokes the prospect of some kind of future..." Invokes?! Should be evokes. If The New Yorker is already getting stuff like that wrong, the future looks kind of dismal!

ALSO: From the New Yorker cartoon bank, there's this from May 2019 by Roz Chast:



If the trolls were saying "The world is falling apart, and YOU'RE GARDENING?!?" back in May 2019, imagine what they're saying in 2020.

I'm sorry, I'm losing interest....

There will never be an internet troll as effective as your own mom. pic.twitter.com/GKIz7RJWOe

— Aaron Levie (@levie) April 9, 2020

ADDED: This tweet highlights 2 things:

1. You mother will always be able to get to you in a way that nobody else can.

2. The worst thing about Twitter is: You need to maintain a constant presence, tweeting frequently. You'll fall out of sight if you don't do that. But your material really isn't all that good, and every time your followers see you again and notice that you exist, they're just getting the next little snippet, and it's unlikely to be consistently sharp enough that they'll feel rewarded. So you will have a constantly nagging problem: I must be seen but don't look at me I'm ugly.

Decisive troll ruling issued.

Here.

"Which post had that comment?" I ask after checking for the comment in last night's café...

... which begins with a photograph of flowers.

The line has become a running joke around here at Meadhouse: "The world is falling apart, and YOU'RE GARDENING?!?"

Where was that if not in the post that shows Meade's garden?

But it wasn't a comment, Meade tells me. In just one day, I'd lost track of the source and imagined we were talking about one of my trolls. And that demonstrates the perfection of this cartoon (in The New Yorker) by the great Roz Chast:



IN THE COMMENTS: Ignorance is Bliss said:

I made an on-topic comment about the garden, noting that any real gardener could tell how bad a gardener Trump is.
Then the zinnia started obsessively attacking me.
I sent you a private email requesting that you rip out all the zinnia, but of course you did not.
Your new weeding policy is a joke...

The NYT's Charlie Warzel takes CarpeDonktum's silly Biden-massaging-Biden video and turns it into something aggressive, chaotic, toxic, and dark.

I'm reading "Meet the Man Behind Trump’s Biden Tweet/A stay-at-home dad in Kansas reveals how the lines have blurred between viral trolling and the business of politics," a NYT article by "Opinion writer at large" Charlie Warzel. That is, the NYT acknowledges and tries to deal with this:

WELCOME BACK JOE! pic.twitter.com/b2NbBSX3sx

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 4, 2019

Warzel got an interview with the "memesmith"* who calls himself Carpe Donktum, who seems like a perfectly nice man, so I felt queasy about the way Warzel undercut him:

Yep, a grainy, edited parody clip of the former vice president... [is] a perfectly unbelievable and dispiriting artifact of our fractured and chaotic political media ecosystem, where politicking is conducted through viral memes and retweets.

Chaotic? Dispiriting? It was brilliantly funny, lightweight, sweet and doesn't seem to take any position on how we ought to feel about Joe Biden. It was absurd — and hardly political at all. I think it's positively healing. Why is Warzel getting so heated up about it?

The entire event is at once silly, trivial, offensive and, thanks to Donald Trump’s Twitter feed, something we’re now begrudgingly made to pay attention to.

Oh, spare me. You're already paying complete attention to Donald Trump’s Twitter feed.  Warzel seems to hate the idea that CarpeDonktum may have "an indirect line to the Oval Office." Yes, isn't it terrible that an ordinary person, somewhere in flyover country, can just say something or show something, and the President might see it and take 10 seconds of his time to acknowledge that it exists and is funny? It's easy to imagine how wonderfully cool the same behavior would be if Obama, while President, had done the same thing with a video that made cute fun of Dick Cheney.

And his elevation — from a Kansas City keyboard warrior to right-wing internet fame as the president’s unofficial meme maker — is a telling example of how the internet has fully blurred the lines between meme posting and business of politics.

MSM wants a strong border between the professional media and social media. They're overwrought about the cacophony of illegitimate voices in the discourse. Their entire way of life is threatened. If only there could be some kind of wall to protect them from the chaos of the invasion of the horde.

“It’s definitely an organic process,” CarpeDonktum told me over the phone shortly after Mr. Trump tweeted his video. “[White House director of social media] Dan Scavino follows me on Twitter, but there’s no formal relationship there between me and the president. If there’s something I want to make sure [Scavino] sees, I’ll wait for him to post a tweet and try to be the first to reply, linking to what I want to show.” He said that he doesn’t get paid for any of his videos (other than his Patreon crowdfunding account and occasional YouTube ad revenue) and has no relationships to outside politicians....

It's a simple process, and CarpeDonktum nicely shared a tip.

[CarpeDonktum] tailors [videos] to an older generation of internet users. The elaborate memes feature footage from old Looney Tunes cartoons or depict Mr. Trump as a cowboy from an old John Wayne-style Western, slapping a man with a CNN or MSNBC logo across its head. “It’s boomer humor,” he said of his style of videos. “I’m not a boomer. But that brand of humor is most easily shareable by lots of people. So, I stay away from real violence, or overly sexualized stuff so it appeals to the largest amount of people.”

"Boomer humor" — by a younger guy who sees its value. Gee, thanks. I hear him saying that he wants something more sweet and silly, but Warzel wants to use him to show that everything's spinning out of control.

The videos share extremely well among an aging Trump supporter contingent who are prolific and aggressive posters of misinformation and hyperpartisan content on platforms like Facebook.

There's no misinformation or hyperpartisan content in that Biden video. I wonder how old Warzel is. Based on his photograph, he's Gen X or millennial. But he doesn't share CarpeDonktum's affection for the aging Boomers, at least those of us who don't accept instruction from mainstream media. Our laughter at a silly meme feels "aggressive" to him — "chaotic" and "dispiriting."

“Sean Hannity is going to play the video tonight,” [CarpeDonktum] told me... “Some kids that are 18 can retweet it and so can some grandma in Wisconsin. It’s slightly edgy but universal.”

See? CarpeDonktum thinks he's having fun and reaching everybody.

Though his videos are dressed up using cartoons or slapstick humor, all of them center on the incendiary, offensive and hyperpartisan themes of Mr. Trump’s politics (the wall, anti-media sentiment, making fun of Hillary Clinton and other Democrats). 

The Biden one doesn't. Warzel seems to be injecting his own political emotion without regard to the substance. Ironically, this is what professional journalism shouldn't do. And it just seems really mean to get an interview with what seems to be a perfectly civil good guy who's being nice and funny and sharing his tips and to call what he does merely dress-up. Dressed-up what? Suddenly a video has a surface —which might be cute and funny — and a core — which in CarpeDonktum's case is "incendiary, offensive and hyperpartisan." But the Biden video isn't incendiary, offensive and hyperpartisan. It's retweetable by some grandma in Wisconsin!

And CarpeDonktum, who described himself as “an entertainer” who “wants to make people laugh,” is not above engaging in all-caps Trumpian politics (which includes angrily tweeting at liberal politicians).

What's the evidence of his "angrily tweeting"? The NYT puts a link on those words and it goes to a search of his Twitter feed for the word "fuck"! Turns out CarpeDonktum sometimes says things like "Respectfully, you don't know what the Fuck you are talking about." To someone who did something that risked violence to another person he said, "What the fuck is wrong with you?" And he'll even say "Fuck you." Who would he say that to? Look:

John,
When faced with the reality that the people of the United States might elect a president that would not be under your thumb, you threw a temper tantrum that resulted in acts of treason.

You betrayed your country and its people.

Fuck You John https://t.co/etbuNM6TjE

— Carpe Donktum🔹 (@CarpeDonktum) March 20, 2019

Back to Warzel's hit piece:

[CarpeDonktum's] desire not to reveal his name suggests that he’s aware that those outside Trumpland find his content toxic.

Pseudonymity is a complex topic, but Warzel chooses the interpretation that says what he wants: CarpeDonktum knows his memes are regarded as "toxic." Another way to put this is: CarpeDonktum is afraid Trump haters might try to destroy his family's life.

“I’m not shy about this stuff but I don’t advertise it,” he said. “If I were to go to a party I wouldn’t introduce myself as the ‘Trump meme guy from Twitter.’”

And that's in Kansas.

That CarpeDonktum’s online musings or personal life should be picked apart is controversial in its own right. 

What? Who's picking apart his personal life? Is Warzel engaging in NYT musing about whether he should pick apart CarpeDonktum’s personal life?

At first glance, it feels silly, maybe even wrong, to elevate him. 

Elevate him? You sound like you want to destroy him.

He’s not a politician. He’s a Reddit user wielding far-right “Dad humor.” He’s not a public figure, save a few Infowars appearances and Persicope live stream videos where he films himself talking while he makes lunch for his children.

Ugh! Don't even mention the children! And look at the next thing he says:

But at a time when our politics is programmed by what’s viral on Twitter, CarpeDonktum appears — stupefyingly as it might seem — to have something approaching power in MAGAland. It appears he senses it, too.

Did Warzel contemplate the ideation that a crazy Trump hater might get from that?

“All of the memes and stuff like that.” he said. “That’s the future of political advertising. The 30 second spots on TV aren’t the way to market anymore. The stuff online that people dismiss as memes — that’s the way to motivate people,” he added. “It’s the viral political marketing of the future.”

In theory, his story is a perfect realization of the utopian understanding of the utopian promise of the internet: a truly democratic system of communication where anyone, anywhere can create things and get them seen by important people — even the president!

Yes, that's the story I see here, but that's not how the article ends. There are 2 more sentences:

But in keeping with our current political moment, that utopian vision is used for vapid, divisive ends. The reality, as we should all know by now, is darker and a whole lot dumber.

Gone are the days when the NYT could tell us there's something "we should all know by now" and we would scurry to get up to speed with what all the right people think. Warzel decries what is "divisive," but he jumped off from a completely non-divisive video and — after speaking to a nice man in Kansas — went as "dark" as he could. Ridiculous!
___________________________________

* I think "memesmith" is the NYT's word. I'm still trying to adjust to the use of the word "meme" to refer to individual items — videos or graphics — that are merely intended to be shared frequently. I accept that the word grew out of the original Richard Dawkins idea (from "The Selfish Gene" (1976)):

We need a name for the new replicator, a noun which conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme... It should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream’. Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches.

It became something that didn't require imitation and copying with variations, if they acquired virality — if people really did share it compulsively. Now, the word applies to any damn thing someone makes with the hope that it will inspire massive sharing and even if it fails. So the Russians threw together thousands of dumb graphics and we're told they made 3,000 memes. Where was the virality?

Well, ultimately there was a kind virality, as Trump resisters used them in their misguided, ridiculous effort to oust the President America elected, but mostly we've heard only references to the "memes," and we're not looking at these stupid things. The only one I remember seeing is Jesus arm-wrestling with Satan. I don't think the actual graphics were compulsively shared, so they were not viral, and I don't like calling them "memes."

But if these items are to be called "memes" at the point of their creation and before any virality is achieved, I accept the word "memesmith." The ending "-smith" refers to someone, like a blacksmith, who manufactures something.

"But as John Stuart Mill argued, those who have never 'thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently … do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess.' "

"It seems natural to conclude that the social role of philosophers is to help people think things through by confronting them with counterarguments to their current views. But since there’s no way to do that in a non-philosophical context without coming off as an arsehole, there’s no way for a philosopher to be a good citizen without having the courage to look like a bad one. Which brings us, with inexorable familiarity, to the figure of Socrates, who injected philosophical reason into the Athenian body politic and got sentenced to death for his troubles. 'The modes of trolling are many,' writes Rachel Barney in her wonderful mock-Aristotelian treatise, 'On Trolling.' Characteristic techniques include treating small problems as if they were large ones, disputing what everyone knows to be true, criticizing what everyone knows to be admirable and masking hostility with claims of friendship. If that sounds like the kind of thing Socrates got up to, this is no accident—for like Socrates, the troll claims 'that he is a gadfly and beneficial, and without him to "stir up" the thread it would become dull and unintelligent.' The difference, says Barney, is that while Socrates may have annoyed people, that was never his goal; he simply wanted to convince his fellow Athenians that they lacked wisdom and needed to care for their souls. The troll, by contrast, intentionally aims to generate 'confusion and strife among a community who really agree,' whether for amusement or for profit or for partisan gain. Socrates was a philosopher, in other words; the troll is just an arsehole. Yet there is surely a sense in which Socrates was trying to generate confusion and strife among Athenians (and hence, from a certain perspective, to 'corrupt the youth')...."

From "On Being an Arsehole: A defense" by Jonny Thakkar (The Point).

"Fiction that isn’t an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money."

That's Rule 2, my favorite of Jonathan Franzen's "10 Rules for the Novelist" — an excerpt from his new collection of essays "The End of the End of the Earth," which is one of the books I'm reading these days.

For some reason, I always read Jonathan Franzen's essays, but I have never read one of his novels. The main novelist I've read in the last year is Haruki Murakami. I've read 4 of his novels this year (plus a short story collection). Franzen's Rule 2 sounds very much like what Murakami does, something I like.

Anyway, Franzen's "10 Rules" — published at lithub, linked above — has been "gleefully trolled on Twitter" according to The Guardian. None of the trolling is good enough to quote, but obviously, one idea is to produce your own list, but since you're on Twitter, you won't have enough room to write a list of 10. And most of what passes for trolling is writers showing they're hostile to (i.e., envious of) Jonathan Franzen.

Most of the "trolls" (i.e., irritated, envious writers) don't really get the spirit of the 10 rules, which I presume are inspired by the famous "10 Rule of Writing" by Elmore Leonard. The titles are not identical. Leonard has "of" where Franzen has "for." That slight difference makes it slightly less likely that Franzen was directly appropriating Leonard's idea. Oh, no, wait. It's more different. Franzen's title is "10 Rules for the Novelist." That explains the "for" instead of "of." Franzen is offering rules to a type of person. Leonard sees rules arising from and inherent in the activity.

Franzen has spoken positively about Leonard elsewhere, in a lecture "On Autobiographical Fiction" ("Farther Away: Essays" (pp. 129-130)).

The point at which fiction seems to become easy for a writer... is usually the point at which it’s no longer necessary to read that writer. There’s a truism, at least in the United States, that every person has one novel in him. In other words, one autobiographical novel. For people who write more than one, the truism can probably be amended to say: every person has one easy-to-write novel in him, one ready-made meaningful narrative. I’m obviously not talking here about writers of entertainments, not P. G. Wodehouse or Elmore Leonard, the pleasure of whose books is not diminished by their similarity to one another; we read them, indeed, for the reliable comforts of their familiar worlds. I’m talking about more complicated work, and it’s a prejudice of mine that literature cannot be a mere performance: that unless the writer is personally at risk—unless the book has been, in some way, for the writer, an adventure into the unknown; unless the writer has set himself or herself a personal problem not easily solved; unless the finished book represents the surmounting of some great resistance—it’s not worth reading. Or, for the writer, in my opinion, worth writing.

Ah, you see: There's the idea in Franzen's Rule 2. Right next to the name Elmore Leonard. I'm 99.9% sure that Franzen's "10 Rules" is his variation on Elmore Leonard. It even tracks Leonard's combining big rules and small rules. Franzen's Rule 2 is a big rule, but he also has a small rule, Rule 3: "Never use the word then as a conjunction—we have and for this purpose...." Leonard's smallest rule is #6, "Never use the words 'suddenly' or 'all hell broke loose.'" A big Leonard rule is #10, "Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip."

I've written about Leonard's rules before. Here's my "Suddenly, 10 things."

"'We Negroes' robocall is an attempt to 'weaponize race' in Florida campaign, Gillum warns."

WaPo reports:

"Well hello there,” the call begins as the sounds of drums and monkeys can be heard in the background, according to the New York Times. “I is Andrew Gillum."

"We Negroes . . . done made mud huts while white folk waste a bunch of time making their home out of wood an stone."

The speaker goes on to say he'll pass a law letting African Americans evade arrest “if the Negro know fo' sho he didn't do nothin'."

It is unclear how many people heard the call.

WaPo is amplifying the call, and it seems likely that everyone who might vote in Florida will at least read the text of the call. I've long been skeptical of exaggerated racist incidents — like the recent case of the man that urinated on a little girl and called her the N-word. I didn't blog that when it came out, because I didn't want to amplify a lie, which is what it turned out to be.

A spokesman for the GOP candidate for governor (Ron DeSantis) said:  "This is absolutely appalling and disgusting — and hopefully whoever is behind this has to answer for this despicable action. Our campaign has and will continue to focus solely on the issues that Floridians care about and uniting our state as we continue to build on our success."

The robocall seems designed to keep alive the accusation that DeSantis displayed racism when he said "The last thing we need to do is to monkey this up by trying to embrace a socialist agenda with huge tax increases and bankrupting the state. That is not going to work. That’s not going to be good for Florida."

The word "monkey" — even used as a verb — was portrayed as intentionally stimulating racial feelings against the black candidate Gillum. The new robo call "begins as the sounds of... monkeys can be heard in the background."

It was Gillum supporters who made the "monkey this up" quote go viral, so I assume they think that accusations that the other candidate is racist helps Gillum's cause, and the new robocall leans in the same direction. But maybe you think DeSantis has more to gain from that robocall, because people really are racist and will be moved to vote against Gillum. I think it's more likely that the racist interpretation of "monkey up" and the follow-on robocall will edge people toward showing that they are not racist, which they can do by voting for Gillum. I don't have a way to know the mind of the Florida voter, but I suspect that the words after "monkey this up" — "by trying to embrace a socialist agenda with huge tax increases and bankrupting the state"—  are what have the most power to move the voters, and the racism charges are a wonderful distraction.

So who made the robocall?

A disclaimer at the end of the robo-call says it was produced by the Road to Power, a white supremacist and anti-Semitic group based in Idaho. The Southern Poverty Law Center has noted a recent rise in robo-calls across the country, describing them as a “new, high-tech, computer-delivered brand of hate,” according to the Times.

The Road to Power is also the group behind the most unsubtle attempt to turn the killing of Mollie Tibbetts in Iowa into anti-immigration policy and a 2018 campaign talking point....

According to the Des Moines Register, the man producing the robo-calls is named Scott Rhodes, of Sandpoint, Idaho. He has been linked to similar campaigns in California, Alexandria, Va., and Charlottesville. Rhodes could not immediately be reached for comment.

If you were making a false-flag robocall, it would be clever to end it with the assertion that it was produced by the Road to Power. I don't know why the Washington Post calls that a "disclaimer." It's a claimer, not a disclaimer, but I don't know if it's true. At least WaPo tried to reach Rhodes, but if you asked him if he made these robocalls, what would he say, and how would you know if he was lying?

You know, there's a lot of fakery out there, a lot of chaos-making and trollery. We need to handle it well, and yet what's happening — instead of us all learning good skepticism — is seizing upon whatever pops out and leveraging it for your own political cause. That is, roiling emotion and adding to the confusion.

"The most-viewed YouTube video of all time, Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s 'Despacito,' disappeared from YouTube today after being defaced by hackers."

"The video’s image was altered and replaced with a masked gang holding guns (from Netflix show Casa de Papel), and the description was changed by hackers calling themselves Prosox and Kuroi’sh."

The Verge reports.

This is the best example of good trolling I have ever seen.

"Not to jump to any conclusions, but doesn't a quick look of the background in the shooter's YouTube video make you think of the background in Obama's official portrait?"

Here, by Oh Yea. Scroll up to see the still image of the YouTube self-murderer. And here's Obama's official portrait.

ADDED: I've written about the concept of good trolls before, most notably a month and a half ago, in "Who are the good trolls?" Here are the results of the poll I did back there:



ALSO: The last option on that poll actually read — in the originally poll you see at the link — "A good troll knows how to take the bait Althouse serves and whip it into a delightful new concoction."

"Sanctions also were imposed on individuals known as 'trolls' and Russian organizations that supported them in connection with the election interference."

WaPo reports, just now, in "Trump administration sanctions Russian spies, trolls over U.S. election interference, cyber attacks."

Until this post, "vamoosing" was a hapax legomenon in the Althouse archive.

And until this sentence "hapax legomenon" was a hapax legomenon in the Althouse archive.

I'd never used the word "vamoosing" (or "vamoose") in the entire 14-year archive of this blog until I used it in the previous post— which I did mainly for the alliteration with "value," but also because I really like it — it has a moose! — and had simply never thought to use it before.

I learned the term (and the concept) "hapax legomenon" reading Bryan A. Garner's "Nino and Me: My Unusual Friendship with Justice Antonin Scalia":

At the Cruddy Troll Café...

... come on in and slog around.

(And think of going into Amazon via the Althouse Portal. Here's a nice iguana statue for your lawn, a cute Iggy the Iguana Beanie Baby, and a high-quality iguana hand puppet. All 100% inedible.)

"It might be most helpful to compare a social network to a party. The party starts out small, with the hosts and a few of their friends."

"Then word gets out and strangers show up. People take cues from the environment. Mimosas in a sun-dappled atrium suggest one kind of mood; grain alcohol in a moldy basement suggests another. Sometimes, a pattern emerges on its own. Pinterest, a simple photo-sharing site founded by three men, happened to catch on among women aspiring to an urbane life style, and today the front page is often a collage of merino scarves and expensive glassware. In other cases, the gatekeeping seems more premeditated. If you’re fourteen, Snapchat’s user interface is intuitive; if you’re twenty-two, it’s intriguing; if you’re over thirty-five, it’s impenetrable. This encourages old people to self-deport."

From "Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet/How do we fix life online without limiting free speech?" by Andrew Marantz (in The New Yorker).

I went to Pinterest to see if the front page was a collage of merino scarves and expensive glassware, and I couldn't figure out how to get there — it was impenetrable — other than as myself, the person who opened a Pinterest account to collect photos to show my hairstylist. So this is what I see on the front page:



Lots of chopped off hair — and one Jack Kerouac — but no scarves and glasses.

IN THE COMMENTS: Rabel corrects:

Three Jack kerouac's plus Women of the Beat Generation.

AND: Here's Kerouac on the subject of glassware:

What she was doing whoring in Mexico at that age and with that tender cheek and fair aspect God knows. Some awful grief had driven her to it. She drank beyond all bounds. She threw down drinks when it seemed she was about to chuck up the last. She overturned glasses continually, the idea also being to make us spend as much money as possible. Wearing her flimsy housecoat in broad afternoon she frantically danced with Neal and clung about his neck and begged and begged for everything. Neal was so stoned he didn’t know what to start with, girls or mambo.

Who are the good trolls?

The results from yesterday's poll after 505 responses:



Discuss these results any way you like. You can still go back and respond to the poll. I deliberately avoided expressing an opinion in the post or the comments, but you can figure out something of my opinion from the way I composed the answers. I'm particularly interested in thinking about this subject in light of the hand-wringing over Russians trolling the 2016 election. I believe the fear of trolls is dangerous to a culture of freedom of speech, and I'd like to welcome people all over the world to participate in the political debate in America, just as I want Americans to be able to talk to people in other countries about what we think about their politics. We need to build up our vigor, not become more dependent on the government to filter out things that might confuse us.

Who are the good trolls?

You can Google that...



You can do a poll...

Who are the good trolls? Check as many answers as you want.

All trolls are bad.

All trolls are bad once you give an appropriately narrow meaning to the word.

A good troll has a good cause.

A good troll does no damage other than confusing and flummoxing.

A good troll challenges us to maintain skepticism and a good sense of humor.

A good troll trips up the pompous, uptight people who want to control everything.

A good troll reminds us of the value of rebellion and refusing to submit to authority.

A good troll sets traps for the unwary and clears the field of people too dumb to be trusted.

A good troll is Althouse.

A good troll knows how to take the bait Althouse serves and whip it into a delightful new concoction.

 

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