[econnors]

> when the site first got a surge of users from hacker news, there was one poster in particular who came to the site, registered a bunch of offensive, racist usernames and proceeded to post and create threads that were just full of dumb slurs. this was definitely a learning experience because i had to act quickly, so i tried a bunch of different methods to get rid of him.

it's sad that people like this exist in the world. what could possibly motivate someone to spend their time doing this?

[nicbou]

I dealt with a similar basket case once.

It seems like parasocial relationships can swing both ways. You know how some fans develop a creepy, obsessive sort of love for creators? Well, the same goes for hatred. They feel slighted by that person that doesn't know them, and they retaliate from behind their keyboard.

[wesleychen]

The thing that really surprised me was that even when he implemented IP blocking, the user used a VPN to continue abusing the site. That's a step beyond "casual" trolling that someone might do to test a site's security (not that this is justifiable behavior) and enters the territory of targeted harassment.

[Kiro]

I don't find it surprising. This happens in every project I run. It's almost a guarantee that when you ban someone they will come back with a new account and when you ban their IP they start using VPNs. It's such a common occurrence and they get more aggressive for every step where they consider it a victory when you manually take action against them. I often need to resort to banning whole IP ranges.

[mhuffman]

Richard Bartle, has this way of dividing up the way what he calls "players" but it works for any social media[1]. One of them is the "killer" with a sub-type of "griefer" which are those whose "... vague aim is to get a big, bad reputation". So, from that perspective, they actually do get something out of it.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_type...

[marcus_holmes]

Griefers. Some people get enjoyment from hurting/annoying others.

First time I bumped into this was in the DAOC MMORPG. Some players were deliberately annoying others, to the point of "wasting" their online time doing stupid shit that annoyed people. It really shocked me.

Thing is, there's lots of griefers in any online game. Which means there's lots of people out there in the real world who would do this if they could get away with it. Anonymity allows them to do this online with very little repercussion, so it shows how many there really are. But now every time I do an interview, or look at a rental, I'm thinking "is this person a griefer? are they going to enjoy making my life a misery?"

[avg_dev]

> I said that's life

> (That's life)

> And as funny as it may seem

> Some people get their kicks

> Stomping on a dream

> But I don't let it, let it get me down

> Cause this fine old world, it keeps spinnin' around

- That’s Life

By Dean Kay and Kelly Gordon. Most famously recorded by Frank Sinatra.

[perilunar]

https://youtu.be/TnlPtaPxXfc?t=36

[citizenpaul]

> what could possibly motivate someone to spend their time doing this?

Probably being between the ages of 10-14 years old. Bartle Killer-explorer?

[Kiro]

The hardcore persistent trolls making it their life's mission to ruin my site have always been 20+ after I've managed to identify them. Kid trolls just spam, get banned and move on.

[flangola7]

Attention seeking + lack of moral compass.

[yamazakiwi]

A lot of them are edgy underage children and don't know any better. They think that they have a dark sense of humor but really they've lived a life disconnected from those words, so they like the idea of pushing others buttons at no cost to their selfish existence.

[wolfi1]

not only attention seeking, sometimes the motivation is "to spread the truth", at least as they perceive it, and sometimes it's people who get triggered and are not able to stop their rants

[nico]

Had a similar experience recently. A random person started repeatedly filling out contact forms for one of our clients. They were doing it manually, and they did it for several days straight until finally blocked.

It also left me wondering why that person would spend an hour or two each day for several days in a row, filling out online forms. What’s the motivation?

My suspicion is that the person doing it works at the company and was trying to mess with their systems. But I’ll never know for sure.

[efxhoy]

I spent some time working in a prison, it was very eye opening for someone like me from a pretty sheltered background. Most of the inmates were decent enough people that made bad choices but there were a few who were just horrible sadistic bullies.

[username3]

Whitehat moderation tester

[cm2012]

Mental illness

[wahnfrieden]

i'm more sad to see founders repeatedly put out ugc-oriented software or communities without any design priority for safety.

safety is the hard part of ugc products but is left to figure out after scale and ossification.

[t11hrow]

How would you plan for 'safety' in UGC-oriented software? I'm actually interested in this.

[wahnfrieden]

I have a lot of thoughts on this that I plan to start writing on under indiedevstack.com before long, for now you can follow my one biz social where I will promote it once ready @manabiSRS

But some quick references... One approach is to avoid algorithmic surfacing of UGC outside of one's own network (or secondary connections etc), which makes discovery harder (must be compensated in other ways). Twitter may explore similar ideas with pluggable algorithms (though I don't trust them). Another approach is to constrain UGC: eg a music/audio community which has barriers to sharing new audio outside your network, but which freely allows remixing and promoting remixed audio of known good audio without as much safety control over the remixes because the operations allowed on the "good" source material make it difficult to subvert. This kind of idea is at the core of a product concept, not an additional layer to tack on later. I believe that finding these kind of cheaper ways of managing UGC and lending discovery to UGC can be a huge competitive edge.

[t11hrow]

Hey man, thanks. Really interesting. I've added indiedevstack.com to my bookmarks, so I'll check in that once you've launched

[wahnfrieden]

Cheers, good luck with your own work

[bunnyswipecom]

competitor obviously

[expertentipp]

"Is my girlfriend pregante?"

[golergka]

Alcohol.