Cliques, Clicks, Bullies And Blogs
from the not-the-usual-suspects dept
There have been plenty of stories about "electronic bullying" and how the typical grade school bullying patterns have moved online, but this new article in the Washington Post points out that the online bullies are not your typical bullies. They often are kids who are considered the "good kids" who are the ones least expected to be bullying. To be honest, this doesn't surprise me. To some extent, the ease of the internet makes it possible for anyone to let out their aggression (plenty of bullying happens online by adults as well). That the bullying can involve words over physical intimidation probably fits the kids who are quieter in person, but feel they can let out their aggression from the (relative) anonymity of the keyboard.
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Funny thing happened on the way to the blog today.
Still, every blog/dotslash site with comments has had it's problems (including deadly.org of all places!). ./ probably came the closest to making it bearable, but there are still people who routinely browse bellow 0 for legitimately useful contributer content. As it is, I change to nested and search for comments containing http:// in them. Funny thing about comments... it's easy to tell just how desperately horish a site is for attention by the number of obviously reflexive trolls in the face of pathetically slim numbers of contributions (congratuations techdirt, you've won yet another award!).
Oddly, in the 10+ years that individuals and companies have attempted to recreate Usenet, none have really succeded. Usenet is dead due to SPAM (even the walled gardens leak!). Mailing lists probably come the closests to getting it right.
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