j"19HxigV4QyBv3tHpQVcUEQyq1pzZVdoAutMÕ=Notes on Craig Wright's "Trolls and bullies"
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I have personally experienced trolling and bullying on the internet and it is extremely irritating.
The basic problem is that because there is no money on the internet, everything is paid for in a roundabout way rather than with money. Instead of seeing a feed of content worth paying for, everyone sees a feed of whatever content gets the most attention. That includes a large fraction of trolling and bullying, and also spam, fake news, and propaganda.
People pay for most content with their time and attention rather than with money. If people could pay with money rather than with their time and attention, they would not pay for most trolling and bullying and so it would be far more rare. Instead, content worth paying for would take its place.
Craig Wright has written an article on this issue. Since this is a personal interest of mine and is also a problem that Money Button helps to solve, I have taken notes on his article.
> The irony of those seeking anarchy and calling out for BitCoin to act outside the law is that they are not only trolls but simple bullies. Itâs rather hypocritical to talk about an anarchist society where everyone gets along when itâs the same people who cannot act in society. It is generally the antisocial loser who fails drastically who seeks to put down other people rather than address his own problems.
Indeed, trolls are bullies and they are scum.
> Such is the realm of the anonymous coward. It is itself the one reason many of the same people think that anonymity matters. They believe that it gives them power in their otherwise useless lives.
Anonymity indeed has a lot to do with it. If people used their real identities on the internet, they could be held accountable for their words. That would decrease the amount of trolling and bullying. The basic solution to trolling and bullying is for actions to have a cost. So long as the cost of trolling and bullying is higher than the gain, that behavior will largely vanish.
> The hypocrisy of them seeking privacy while attacking other people and invading the privacy of their victims should not be lost on people.
Craig is specifically referring to the anonymous trolls who want anonymity for themselves but not for people like Craig. They are hypocrites.
> When they complain about the consequences, it needs to be remembered that they are the consequences brought upon people through their own actions. Metanet is a system that differs from the Internet as such losers no longer have power. The damage that social media has released upon society comes from the typical tragedy of the commons that all free systems or seemingly free systems release. With the Internet, the inability to charge access based on use leads to abuse.
MetaNet is just Bitcoin at scale. What this allows is for everything to be priced in a transparent way with money. For instance, sending someone a message can have a small price. Users can set a price to receive messages. Rather than forcing users to read every message even when it comes from a troll, adding a price for messages allows the cost to be paid by the troll rather than by the recipient. Users could then whitelist people they communicate with regularly and can in general set prices appropriate for the circumstances.
> There are costs associated with the Internet. PII or personally identifiable information is sold by social media and other groups to pay for such free access. It incentivises and encourages the worst aspects of society. They who do the worst feel good momentarily as they attack others and engage in antisocial behaviour designed to boost their own worthless egos.
Most things already have a cost, they just aren't transparent and aren't paid for with money. For instance, when people use Facebook, they are paying with their personal information rather than with money. Facebook is not especially transparent about this and many people do not realize that is how it works. By allowing for everything to be monetized, people could simply pay for Facebook directly and not give away their personal information. That would make the cost transparent and paid for with money rather than opaque and paid for with non-money.
> With the introduction of small micropayments, individuals will be able to incrementally select the amount that an individual has to pay to communicate with them. For individuals we want to talk to we can set the bar very low or even make it free. For people we are only loosely acquainted with we can set a smaller but slightly larger amount that in balance evens out if we communicate with such people. Conversely, those seeking to sell us products we donât want who seek to engage with us whereas we seek to avoid them will have to pay more.
Exactly. I have been wanting something like this for a long time. I will personally charge a fee for all unsolicited messages, and will whitelist people I regularly communicate with. We are getting very close to having this with Money Button.
> When taken together, we alter the incentives and make it less profitable in every way for the Internet troll and bully. Rather than having free reign to gratify their minuscule worth through ego stroking, the necessity to pay for access means that they will have to start acting within social bounds.
Yes. The incentives with payments are much, much better than without. People worry that "people won't pay for things on the internet", but this is not true. People are already paying, they're just paying with non-money and for something that is low quality (lots of trolls, fake news, spam, etc.). When we integrate payments for everything, the true cost of everything can be found. The production of high quality content will be incentivized. People will be rewarded (paid) for producing and consuming quality content (real news, real science, real history, etc.), and punished (losing money) for producing and consuming low quality content (trolling, bullying, fake news, falsehoods, spam, etc.).
> The promise of the Internet was the creation of a place where people could freely express themselves. The problem is that anonymity and the lack of costs have led to a system of trolls spewing hateful messages with no social consequences. In fact, many of such fools engage in a race to the bottom as they compete to formulate responses and go to the bottom of the barrel. Such is the tragedy of the Internet, and it lies in the creation of cyber bullies and trolls.
Exactly. The basic problem is that the internet does not enable proper pricing of information. With the enablement of monetization, the true prices of everything can be found. Pricing is what allows us to have the type of free speech we really want. People can say anything they want, but they can't force other people to listen to them.
> Trolls seek to rile online communities to their discontent. They do so in order to attract attention which they feel theyâre not gaining and they rightly need and are worthy of. They stroked their egos starting social unrest. Cyber bullies, on the other hand, simply use the Internet to hurt people.
Yep.
> Sometimes, such people are both cyber bullies and trolls, and sometimes they switch between such equally despicable and antisocial processes.
Yep.
> Trolls are able to leave inflammatory comments designed to stir discontent because they can hide between the anonymous layers of the Internet. The cost of tracking them exceeds the cost born by such worthless individuals. They make out a target that they can throw incendiary comments at. It can be hate posts or racist, sexist, or profane material designed to cause pain to other people while stirring their incestuous communities into a feeding frenzy.
Correct. The lack of money on the internet causes the true price of things to be hidden and causes incentives to be less than maximal. Trolls are able to get away with trolling because there is no monetary cost to their trolling, and instead the cost is overloaded onto the recipient of the message. The consumers who read this material pay the cost by having to filter these messages with their mind. This costs time and mental energy.
For those of us who have developed large followings and who hold unpopular views, the reality is that the cost is too high. I have stopped using Twitter because the trolling is so expensive it is not worth it for me. The way this could be resolved is simply to allow users to set a price of comments on their tweets. A small cost would eliminate almost all trolling and radically imrove the signal-to-noise ratio. But Twitter does not have the feature and in fact has no ability to set prices of any sort inside the app.
> All of it is about attention. They want to take away from the author and draw attention onto themselves. They seek to extract value from other people because they are too worthless to onus on their own. The more they take away from the original author of a post or the commentary that follows, the more attention they get and the happier they become, until the ego is stroked through their antisocial attacks.
Exactly. Twitter, reddit, and most other social media apps are about attention first and foremost, and they are not about truth, substance, meaning or utility. They are only about attention.
As we continue to build the social network on the blockchain (MetaNet), this will become increasingly clear as all the high quality content ends up on the blockchain and all of the low quality content continues to reside on the internet. MetaNet will be worth paying for, and the internet will not be worth paying for.
> Trolls focus on being a mere nuisance.
Let the trolls have Twitter (and reddit, and all other troll-encouraging platforms). Let's move to the blockchain.
> Such individuals can shift focus and start to become something worse, a cyber bully. Such antisocial criminals start to target individuals. Rather than simply posting inflammatory statements about a community, they start to target individuals seeking to shame or intimidate them. They seek to remove the privacy of others as they hide in the shadows. They seek to take away the power of other people as they cause fear and intimidation. Such individuals use anything from mean-spirited comments over private pictures right up to falsifying information and data. They taunt, and they seek to bring the person down. It is only in hate and fear that such low individuals who seek to hurt and demean others gain pleasure.
Yep.
> Such sick individuals seek a reaction. They seek to create negative attention on those they attack, and try to cause distress. It is the problem resulting from the social media format of selling identity rather than paying for access. Bitcoin and the Metanet change the format forever. The same people will no longer hide behind their lies, frauds, and deception, and we move to a world where they who seek to make others fear are punished for their deeds.
Yep. We are getting much closer to that. I am posting this very article on the blockchain with BitPaste and Money Button. Many of the basic tools are in place already and there is not much more to do before we can start porting everything of value over from the internet to MetaNet.
> The troll tax is not just a cost benefiting women, it is a cost benefiting all those who are targeted.
Correct. Everyone is paying the troll tax.
> ["For female writers, being harassed online means a tax that steals time, steals energy, costs productivity, lessens their ability to compete, to promote themselves, to network. For anybody who in any way presents as a woman online, there is a danger of a mental toll, and sometimes a real world physical threat. What am I told? Get off Twitter. But, are women just not supposed to participate in the public forum? The public forum is happening online, and women cannot just be told to leave it. Thatâs not a viable option."](https://blog.mozilla.org/internetcitizen/2017/07/31/a-more-inclusive-world-and-web/)
The above is a quote from an article on Mozilla. It is worth reading. It describes exactly the type of trolling women experience on the internet. But it is not just women - many people experience trolling for different reasons (like myself, for liking Bitcoin). The reality is that the cost of trolls are being paid not by the trolls but by the consumers of information. We can end this sad state of affairs by enabling money to be used for everything, even in very small amounts. Things can cost money. This does not introduce new costs, rather it allows payments to be made in money for the correct things in the correct amounts for the correct reasons, leading to the end of low quality (unprofitable) content and the rise of high quality (profitable) content.
> As the Metanet replaces the Internet, trolls will slowly become extinct.
We're making it happen one button swipe at a time!
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Ryan X. Charles
Founder & CEO of Money Button
https://www.ryanxcharles.com
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