[xf1cf]

> but I've come to accept that the only way to not be bullied or harassed online is to not expose yourself too much online

I've been on the internet for almost 30 years. This is something that we've lost in the last decade of people dying to tie their real identity to everything. The wild west internet was actively hostile and you had to be smart about not only what you said, but who you were associating with.

This form of "internet bullying" has existed since the dawn of the internet. That doesn't make it any more correct and it's only gotten more vicious with age. Especially because finding exploitable weaknesses is extremely easy when people leave themselves exposed on social media, twitter, discord, etc. We haven't solved it because I don't believe there is an actual solution. You get rid of KF and 4chan, another 10 communities pop up and the most popular one survives. You hit the registars, and they find another. Eventually they'll end up on one of the many registrars located outside the US that could not care any less what is hosted there.

The best thing you can do is compartmentalize. The problem is people, for better or worse, tie their entire identity to whatever they do on the internet. This is fraught with danger because it makes you easy to attack. But being easy to attack isn't enough, you have to also have to have shown some weakness they can use as leverage. Near is an unfortunate example of this. KF bullied them mercilessly because they possessed enough exploitable traits to make it profitable. This isn't victim blaming, but unfortunately something we must learn from. Privacy, compartmentalization, and good operational security are the only things that can protect you.

Maybe we can return to the internet of psuedonyms and lies that I remember. It was safer then, because no one trusted anyone implicitly and no one was willing to expose weaknesses that could be exploited.

[pretentious7]

But there's a lot of eccentrics whose life is the internet. To disconnect for them is essentially the same as solitary confinement.

Insofar as privacy, compartmentalization, and good opsec, near did all of that, doesn't help when the mob goes after friends and family.

[farias0]

Did he, though? He was famous for being an incredible hacker, and then he conflated this profile with his furry persona and used it to talk about LGBT stuff. It saddens me so much that things have to be this way, that people can't put themselves out there without being (literally) bullied to death, but being pragmatic he could have separated those two "personalities", especially considering one of those is extremely well known in certain circles.

[0dayz]

I don't entirely agree with this premise.

I do agree on the furry + anime vices stuff that mixing that in with the legendary byuu was silly and wouldn't surprise me if it was unfortunately due to their autism (they they have it in the twitter thread).

However I don't think LGBT + incredible hacker is a huge blunder IF and only IF, you can be assertive about it, which is much easier said than done when:

A: Most people just want to live their lives without none-sense

B: LGBT people are far more likely to be brought up either through parents or environment to feel the need to be introverted about themselves to protect themselves from harm.

But say someone like say Rupaul, even if they get hate, they simply would never take it.

[kbenson]

The problem is that now people dedicate time and effort to "doxing" people so there's no real way to ensure that you're safely anonymous for any extended set of interaction as a persona. Unless you're for some 4chan like system where everyone is anonymous for every message, people will invest in their online personas and will be upset or devastated if they are attacked or destroyed.

The real difference now compared to the past IMO is that as a society we haven't really internalized that will large, possibly global reach and the benefits it may bring come an associated set of dangers. The larger the audience, the larger the possible benefits of your interactions. Linus Torvalds leverages a global audience into a volunteer workforce for what is likely the greatest software engineering product of the human race to date. Another person makes a poor decision or hurtful comment or is just interpreted wrong, and is the zeitgeist of a day or two, but a day or two of almost the whole world's ire. That can have major personal and professional consequences, as we've seen.

Managing a one-on-one interaction and explaining yourself to someone is generally trivial, for mature people. Doing so for a group of 10 is harder, but also possible much of the time. For 100, adequately assuaging them all is unlikely, some will retain reservations you'll likely never know are directly related. It worsens at every level. At the point where thousands or millions of people have negative impressions of you, many will never even see counterfactual evidence to what was initially presented, and your reputation may be tarnished, possibly to a sizeable fractions of the human race, and there's not much you can do about it, because the novel situation that got information about you in front of them initially is extremely unlikely to be repeated.