I don't understand the logic of "why not just ignore twitter" since I can't imagine being a game developer who doesn't use social media these days going well for you.
Just saying 'taking abuse is not part of a developers job' isn't really true. Because it's part of pretty much any developer who does anything but live a hermit like existence.
There's a clear difference between creative criticism (your game isn't good, here's why) and verbal abuse (you're game isn't good, kill yourself). One is absolutely acceptable in a creative field. One is most definitely not.
This has nothing to do with what I just posted.
I'm saying that statements like 'taking abuse isn't part of a developers job' is incorrect and that it's a factor of the job currently. Saying it's not just downplays the fact that it's a consistent issue.
Just saying 'taking abuse is not part of a developers job' isn't really true. Because it's part of pretty much any developer who does anything but live a hermit like existence.
There's a clear difference between creative criticism (your game isn't good, here's why) and verbal abuse (you're game isn't good, kill yourself). One is absolutely acceptable in a creative field. One is most definitely not.
This has nothing to do with what I just posted.
I'm saying that statements like 'taking abuse isn't part of a developers job' is incorrect and that it's a factor of the job currently. Saying it's not just downplays the fact that it's a consistent issue.
I'm not talking at all about criticism.
Let me restate, then.
Verbal abuse is absolutely expected when you are a part of any creative field, case in point being video game development. It is a factor, as you say.
The point being made here is that it should not be.
I don't understand the logic of "why not just ignore twitter" since I can't imagine being a game developer who doesn't use social media these days going well for you.
And I can't imagine being smart enough to make a game but not smart enough to not use your personal Twitter account.
It takes 23 seconds to make a Twitter account on my phone. I just tried it.
I'm all for some kind of starry eyed utopia, but I'm against thinking everyone some how has to protect everyone who doesn't show a modicum of self preservation.
If Twitter is social interaction then you should know damn well not to walk around with your cell number, full home address and place of employment sewn on your shirt.
I don't understand the logic of "why not just ignore twitter" since I can't imagine being a game developer who doesn't use social media these days going well for you.
And I can't imagine being smart enough to make a game but not smart enough to not use your personal Twitter account.
It takes 23 seconds to make a Twitter account on my phone. I just tried it.
I'm all for some kind of starry eyed utopia, but I'm against thinking everyone some how has to protect everyone who doesn't show a modicum of self preservation.
If Twitter is social interaction then you should know damn well not to walk around with your cell number, full home address and place of employment sewn on your shirt.
Yeah, she really shouldn't have worn a skirt that short if she didn't want bad things to happen.
Mhm? The abusers? Yeah they're bad I guess but really, let's focus on everything the victim did wrong here.
So here we have a game that has its main appeal of being frustratingly hard to the point of smashing expensive smartphones while the red mist descends and an easy way to contact the creator to vent abuse at him.
A recipe for disaster methinks.
Have left PA forums.
If this community believes that hating someone based soley upon their gender is acceptable and understandable, I have no interest in being a part of it.
I don't understand the logic of "why not just ignore twitter" since I can't imagine being a game developer who doesn't use social media these days going well for you.
What? This rather ignores the fact that:
a. Killing the golden goose to try to not have to ignore twitter cannot be justified by the necessity of twitter to create a golden goose.
b. I, at least, am talking about taking like a few weeks break, to take a vacation, maybe visit a foreign country, maybe focus on coding a new game, whatever.
Truly a selfless man (/sarcasm), helping out all those addicts. I ran into a prostitute trying to sell their body for just a single hit of Flappy Bird the other day.
When people chucked their Wii remotes at their TV because they failed to use the strap and played with far more exuberance than necessary, were they some how justified if they sent death threats to say Iwata (the company president) or perhaps Miyamoto if they did it playing Mario Galaxy? What about yelling at the salesman who sold them that TV in the first place? The person on the other side of the phone (non-human interaction!) when they call customer support to complain?
If you rage hard enough to break your phone playing a game you paid a dollar for, is it ever acceptable to send threats to the creator? Did the guy who created I Wanna Be The Guy get death threats? Did anybody break their keyboards in frustration and then believe it acceptable to rage publicly about it?
According to some? Apparently they did.
Making a hard game isn't justification for death threats. Duh.
Truly a selfless man (/sarcasm), helping out all those addicts. I ran into a prostitute trying to sell their body for just a single hit of Flappy Bird the other day.
The inventor of Cow Clicker did the same thing when he closed down his game and he had a good point. His entire game was based around showing how social games of that type exploited players.
We're second guessing the motivations of the guy here of course but if you had made something that made a vast number of people blind with rage and were getting a constant influx of money from it, you might have an attack of conscience.
Have left PA forums.
If this community believes that hating someone based soley upon their gender is acceptable and understandable, I have no interest in being a part of it.
When people chucked their Wii remotes at their TV because they failed to use the strap and played with far more exuberance than necessary, were they some how justified if they sent death threats to say Iwata (the company president) or perhaps Miyamoto if they did it playing Mario Galaxy? What about yelling at the salesman who sold them that TV in the first place? The person on the other side of the phone (non-human interaction!) when they call customer support to complain?
If you rage hard enough to break your phone playing a game you paid a dollar for, is it ever acceptable to send threats to the creator? Did the guy who created I Wanna Be The Guy get death threats? Did anybody break their keyboards in frustration and then believe it acceptable to rage publicly about it?
According to some? Apparently they did.
Making a hard game isn't justification for death threats. Duh.
Justification is a moot point. It's never acceptable to call someone a poopy head but we don't classify that as serious business.
Internet death "threats" are essentially the angry internet person's way of telling you he is very angry or another way a troll will to try to provoke a response.
You'll get plenty of threats of you discuss XBone vs PS4 these days, they're thrown around like popcorn.
Treating them as anything more than pathetic is giving them more respect and power than they deserve.
If Nguyen says he didn't shut down the game because of threats then I'm gonna take his word for that. He got "threats" from people saying they'd kill him and then themselves if he took down the game, he did it anyway.
He treated those words as the impotent hot air they were. Good on him.
Have left PA forums.
If this community believes that hating someone based soley upon their gender is acceptable and understandable, I have no interest in being a part of it.
You know, the people saying "man, he gave up $50k a day just because of some abuse?", have you tried coming at that from the other angle? "Man, the abuse was bad enough that he decided to give up $50k a day to try and make it stop?"
Because we may all have different tolerances and methods for coping with it, but for this guy, it was clearly bad enough that he decided to give up the kind of income that you're lusting after. To me that says it was pretty bad and someone has suffered unfairly, once again (you all know this chorus), for making videogames.
1) How sure are we that the dev took the game down because of internet abuse? I think I read that the abuse started once the game was taken down.
2) How sure are we that he is walking away from all the money? Unless he took down the ads, he is still making money from those that continue to play.
Not that those throwing around abuse and death threads aren't shitbags, but if we are going to sit around and extrapolate from just a few facts, I'd like to be sure about those facts.
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
1) How sure are we that the dev took the game down because of internet abuse? I think I read that the abuse started once the game was taken down.
2) How sure are we that he is walking away from all the money? Unless he took down the ads, he is still making money from those that continue to play.
Not that those throwing around abuse and death threads aren't shitbags, but if we are going to sit around and extrapolate from just a few facts, I'd like to be sure about those facts.
In this vein, I'm annoyed that I never questioned where that $50k figure came from. It's an estimated average pulled from a Verge article with no given source, that has since been treated as fact.
His statement about taking it down because everybody's playing it is consistent with his earlier tweets when it first went, so if it turns out to not be the case that abuse made him do it, then that's that part of the story. Still doesn't excuse the appalling behaviour by both column-writers and the vocal asshats who did spout abuse, regardless of the result.
I don't understand the logic of "why not just ignore twitter" since I can't imagine being a game developer who doesn't use social media these days going well for you.
And I can't imagine being smart enough to make a game but not smart enough to not use your personal Twitter account.
It takes 23 seconds to make a Twitter account on my phone. I just tried it.
I'm all for some kind of starry eyed utopia, but I'm against thinking everyone some how has to protect everyone who doesn't show a modicum of self preservation.
If Twitter is social interaction then you should know damn well not to walk around with your cell number, full home address and place of employment sewn on your shirt.
.. what?
If you think a new Twitter account is going to protect you from the world once the media decides you're famous or rich enough to be a story, you have a surprise coming.
Honestly, I expected better from you. By this argument you're basically saying it's his fault for publishing content for the world to enjoy and you should just expect death threats and THAT makes them ok.
That is, in my opinion, the worst kind of attitude in regards to situations like this. It's not acceptable for people to act this way. Period.
In this vein, I'm annoyed that I never questioned where that $50k figure came from. It's an estimated average pulled from a Verge article with no given source, that has since been treated as fact.
His statement about taking it down because everybody's playing it is consistent with his earlier tweets when it first went, so if it turns out to not be the case that abuse made him do it, then that's that part of the story. Still doesn't excuse the appalling behaviour by both column-writers and the vocal asshats who did spout abuse, regardless of the result.
Really we shouldn't be suprised.
Gaming journalism these days is trash. Opinions and rumours stated as fact, articles are written more to clickbait and stir up controversy rather than inform or comment.
Have left PA forums.
If this community believes that hating someone based soley upon their gender is acceptable and understandable, I have no interest in being a part of it.
In this vein, I'm annoyed that I never questioned where that $50k figure came from. It's an estimated average pulled from a Verge article with no given source, that has since been treated as fact.
His statement about taking it down because everybody's playing it is consistent with his earlier tweets when it first went, so if it turns out to not be the case that abuse made him do it, then that's that part of the story. Still doesn't excuse the appalling behaviour by both column-writers and the vocal asshats who did spout abuse, regardless of the result.
Really we shouldn't be suprised.
Gaming journalism these days is trash. Opinions and rumours stated as fact, articles are written more to clickbait and stir up controversy rather than inform or comment.
It's the sad truth, and this mentality is infiltrating game developer communities as well. Mostly it's just hypocritical waves of circlejerking.
Example: The media/community got into an uproar over over King.com and their Candy/Saga filings. Death threats, harassment, the whole 9 yards. Not a few days later, Flappy Bird takes off and suddenly Nintendo owns all forms of green pipes and how terrible the owner is for making art that was inspired by Mario art. Death threats, harassment, again the whole 9 yards.
It's really infuriating to watch this stuff happen, and to watch it poison the communities I know and love(ed).
The sad truth is, people miss the point. A lot. At any point in time if you can argue why harassment is acceptable , you've already stepped outside the bounds of the argument and I'm confident in saying that no amount of discussion or logic will get through to you. You just have two people operating at different wavelengths.
Perhaps it's just a lack of empathy in the world. Perhaps people are just so bored with their own lives they sit on an invisible internet throne. Perhaps it's jealousy.
I know I am not perfect, but I could never see myself making a case that results in victim blaming. To play the devil's advocate against myself, maybe that kind of tunnel vision prevents me from seeing a logical case.... for harassment.. the same way other people can't seem to see why it's a no-go 100% of the time.
I don't understand the logic of "why not just ignore twitter" since I can't imagine being a game developer who doesn't use social media these days going well for you.
I think the suggestion is more "if it bothers you so much it's affecting your quality of life then change your personal twitter account and keep it private while using some of that avalanche of revenue to hire or contract out PR duties, including Twitter responses to fans, to someone else".
Money can't buy happiness, but it can certainly buy trained professionals to deal with social marketing and customer service. And reporting death threat issuing dicks to the police, for that matter.
I don't understand the logic of "why not just ignore twitter" since I can't imagine being a game developer who doesn't use social media these days going well for you.
And I can't imagine being smart enough to make a game but not smart enough to not use your personal Twitter account.
It takes 23 seconds to make a Twitter account on my phone. I just tried it.
I'm all for some kind of starry eyed utopia, but I'm against thinking everyone some how has to protect everyone who doesn't show a modicum of self preservation.
If Twitter is social interaction then you should know damn well not to walk around with your cell number, full home address and place of employment sewn on your shirt.
.. what?
If you think a new Twitter account is going to protect you from the world once the media decides you're famous or rich enough to be a story, you have a surprise coming.
Honestly, I expected better from you. By this argument you're basically saying it's his fault for publishing content for the world to enjoy and you should just expect death threats and THAT makes them ok.
That is, in my opinion, the worst kind of attitude in regards to situations like this. It's not acceptable for people to act this way. Period.
Harping on the righteous high-horse card doesn't make you sound any less naive. Every time someone in this thread tries to use logic or common sense on how to live in today's world, you guys just declare "victim blaming!!!". You won't like to hear this since you love being outraged, but choco can critisize how someone handles their online persona while condemning the abusers. At the same time.
On the subject of 50k a day in ad revenue. I want to share some very... MILD numbers, but I think it will help clarify. Google has very strict regulations about posting specifics, and they have shown themselves to be very aggressive in the past at removing you from their services for life. As such, these are just averages.
The "average" mobile ad revenue per VIEW of the ad, is 1 dollar per 1,000-1500 views. This fluctuates WILDLY but it's a general ballpark. And for this, we're excluding "clicks."
So when you're talking 30+ million downloads, and then repeated viewings - the ads are recycled every time you die, so that really increases the rate since in this specific game you die a LOT. You're having a new ad shoved in your face every 10 or so seconds.
Now, that being said, some of the ads were high profile games, and they pay tons of money for those ads to be #1 in the most popular games. So there is a snowball effect, where a semi-popular game will get a % of the basic payouts, where as if you have say.. 10 million views, you put yourself in a category where the ads coming into your game are the most high profile paid ads.
With something like Flappy Bird, the sheer number of downloads over the time that it happened, it was loading only the most top-tier ads possible, and they pay out the most. In fact, now that the game is removed from the market, the algorithm that Google uses is surly skewed to hell and back now, because the ads being displayed are bottom tier. So he's still making money hand over fist, but it's the difference of maybe at most 5%.
Given the ad rotation ratio, the volume of downloads from both market places, I would say that the 50k a day is possibly lower than the average peak for this game.
We're all talking specifically about the abuse, but what about where he said one of his main reasons for taking it down was because of the addictive quality? Didn't he also not want any attention at all? Not denying the abuse happened, but is that the sole reason this is all happening?
I don't understand the logic of "why not just ignore twitter" since I can't imagine being a game developer who doesn't use social media these days going well for you.
And I can't imagine being smart enough to make a game but not smart enough to not use your personal Twitter account.
It takes 23 seconds to make a Twitter account on my phone. I just tried it.
I'm all for some kind of starry eyed utopia, but I'm against thinking everyone some how has to protect everyone who doesn't show a modicum of self preservation.
If Twitter is social interaction then you should know damn well not to walk around with your cell number, full home address and place of employment sewn on your shirt.
.. what?
If you think a new Twitter account is going to protect you from the world once the media decides you're famous or rich enough to be a story, you have a surprise coming.
Honestly, I expected better from you. By this argument you're basically saying it's his fault for publishing content for the world to enjoy and you should just expect death threats and THAT makes them ok.
That is, in my opinion, the worst kind of attitude in regards to situations like this. It's not acceptable for people to act this way. Period.
Harping on the righteous high-horse card doesn't make you sound any less naive. Every time someone in this thread tries to use logic or common sense on how to live in today's world, you guys just declare "victim blaming!!!". You won't like to hear this since you love being outraged, but choco can critisize how someone handles their online persona while condemning the abusers. At the same time.
You've really got it all wrong.
Understanding the effects of social media and how people use it, and disagreeing with it doesn't make anyone naive. It's when you use that as an argument to give acceptance to the fact that people are acting that way. That's when it becomes a problem.
That being said, you're grouping me in with "these guys" and I never once said "victim blaming." You're also assuming that "I love being outraged" and that I somehow think that Choco isn't allowed his opinion.
You can't be more wrong, and once again I think the issue is that you have no focus on the actual point and issue that is at play here. You're portraying a message as if you're seeing things that do not exist as a justification for the disgusting acts of others, and it's just one big circular logic trap.
Harping on the righteous high-horse card doesn't make you sound any less naive. Every time someone in this thread tries to use logic or common sense on how to live in today's world, you guys just declare "victim blaming!!!". You won't like to hear this since you love being outraged, but choco can critisize how someone handles their online persona while condemning the abusers. At the same time.
You're appealing to logical fallacies if anything, not logic, and 'common sense' is just another way of saying, "My biased perspective,"
Talking about how the victim of an attack should have behaved in order to avoid being attacked is blaming the victim. Choco didn't condemn the abusers at all - in fact he cast them in a sympathetic light, arguing that perhaps their actions were justified because something bad happened to them to provoke their harassment.
Anyone can say with 20/20 hindsight, "Well, I guess I he / she shouldn't have been walking in that neighborhood that night," - it's a worthless observation at best & an attempt to distract from what happened at worst.
Being cynical and expecting the world to conform to your cynical perspective doesn't make your observations better.
Again, it doesn't matter what the dude did before or after the abuse.
All that matters is the abuse. And all responsibility falls on the shoulders of the abusers.
It's that stark and clear cut. It's not Nguyen's fault for not hiring a PR manager (BTW, WTF?!), it's not his responsibility to "not check twitter". Even if he actually didn't see 99% of the abuse, the abuse is wrong.
And none of us should tolerate abuse or make excuses for it. It's not Nguyen's job to work with the abuse, it's the abusers duty to not abuse.
Nobody has said, not ONCE as far as I can tell, that the dev was in any way responsible for dickish behavior falls on him or that it was somehow justified.
Supposedly he didn't even take it down for that reason so it's kind of a moot point. Doesn't make much sense to assess his reaction to abuse if his actions weren't taken in response to abusive behavior anyway.
I don't understand the logic of "why not just ignore twitter" since I can't imagine being a game developer who doesn't use social media these days going well for you.
And I can't imagine being smart enough to make a game but not smart enough to not use your personal Twitter account.
It takes 23 seconds to make a Twitter account on my phone. I just tried it.
I'm all for some kind of starry eyed utopia, but I'm against thinking everyone some how has to protect everyone who doesn't show a modicum of self preservation.
If Twitter is social interaction then you should know damn well not to walk around with your cell number, full home address and place of employment sewn on your shirt.
My point is as an indie game developer you're still expected to be easy accessible through social media. Notch or someone could still have a personal, private twitter but he's still got to check @notch for people to contact him and anyone would still know what his real name is. You do "walk around with your place of employment on your shirt" because game making is, shockingly, your employment.
Oh god. So apparently now that Flappy Bird has been yanked, it's now a "thing" for people to sell phones pre-loaded with Flappy Bird on it.
Wanna talk about social engineering, well here you go.
Its not really a thing so much as it is people playing the the fiddle game with ebay accounts.
I doubt anyones paying $5000 for iphones with flappy birds except for stooges artificially inflating it and idiots taken in by the stooges who think they can sell it on.
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
I don't understand the logic of "why not just ignore twitter" since I can't imagine being a game developer who doesn't use social media these days going well for you.
What? This rather ignores the fact that:
a. Killing the golden goose to try to not have to ignore twitter cannot be justified by the necessity of twitter to create a golden goose.
b. I, at least, am talking about taking like a few weeks break, to take a vacation, maybe visit a foreign country, maybe focus on coding a new game, whatever.
Truly a selfless man (/sarcasm), helping out all those addicts. I ran into a prostitute trying to sell their body for just a single hit of Flappy Bird the other day.
Do you actually care about this game and its developer that much?
The most important part of this is "I've never experienced any hate like this." Red flag. The Verge speculated Flappy Bird was generating $50,000 daily. Nguyen's simply said it's "a lot." This has become the de facto excuse for why it's okay to dismiss Nguyen. He's rich! Who care if he's miserable about it? If a person is making a substantial amount of money, the logic goes, that's reason to put up with whatever the Internet can throw you. (Whether money buys happiness remains an open-ended question in academia.) But this displays an amazing lack of empathy. Can you imagine what it would be like to become a celebrity overnight? No. What gives you the right to evaluate their mental well-being? Why are you allowed to tell them how to feel?
Words are powerful, and people should be responsible for them. When we characterize threats as "idle," we remove the individual from the equation. It's victim blaming. It's hard to imagine how Nguyen is to blame here.
When the Internet turns on you, it's hard to describe the emotional rollercoaster that goes along with it. You can't exactly walk away from the Internet forever. While looking at a long list of abuse Tweets directed at Nguyen, it's easy to distance yourself from it because, hey, it's not you. But I've been on the other side of that equation, albeit not to the same scale as Nguyen. When someone directs a threat of violence at you, it feels very personal. Every single one of them. When someone photoshops my wife into a photo to try and unsettle me, it feels very god damn personal. You cannot distance yourself from attacks that are directed at you, and to suggest otherwise only underscores one's lack of experience with the subject. You need a thick skin to survive as a public figure on the Internet, but that doesn't mean there aren't chinks in your armor. And as Jim Sterling mentioned on this week's morning show, it doesn't mean there isn't skin underneath. That skin can get raw.
Nobody has said, not ONCE as far as I can tell, that the dev was in any way responsible for dickish behavior falls on him or that it was somehow justified.
Actually, this is pretty much what chocobolicious and Bubby are saying. It's the dev's fault for staying on Twitter and checking what people have been saying about him, according to them. Which is analogous to saying that the solution to receiving death threats from complete strangers via post is to stop checking your mail. This is absolutely blaming the victim, not for receiving the threats, but for not having a thick enough skin to just ignore them. Like it's some sort of personal failing that he can't just accept the money and laugh all the way to the bank.
What others have been trying to argue is that just because chocobo and Bubby would be able to tune everything out and move on with their lives without any sort of problem doesn't mean that's the only valid response to being a target of mass internet abuse. And unless either of them has been in such a position before, I would contend that they don't actually know how they would respond, and that marginalizing the problems Nguyen was (is?) facing is really comfortable when they're not on the receiving end of said abuse.
In any unmoderated online community, most people will be normal nice people, who adopt the standards of the community. About 2% are going to be trolls who try to break the community and hurt the people in it. You can choose to moderate a community, but I've never seen any strategy that's effective at reducing trolls without heavily moderating a community.
Wide-scale moderation isn't really feasible on social networks - there's no central set of standards, no moderation to be enforced, and by nature the service is something of a free-for-all. Twitter could hire moderators and enforce a set of community standards, but then it would be a different service, and the niche it left would not go unfilled for long.
"Take away the anonymity!" Most people don't have a reputation, and most of the time they don't care. What are you really going to do now that you know their name? Harass them back? Find the name of the construction company they work off the books for and try to get them fired? You can't be bothered to track down the guy who's mean to you in traffic, you certainly won't bother to track down some random internet troll indistinguishable from all the other trolls. In the meantime, you've kneecapped the actual oppressed minorities who often rely on anonymity in order to not be targets of harassment everywhere they go.
"Prosecute them!" Great idea. Minorities are being oppressed, let's go to the US penal system for help. I'm sure they're up to the task of navigating tricky free speech issues, likely with the same deftness they use to navigate tricky issues of race and class.
"Social pressure!" Trolls and bullies don't care about your social pressure, that's the whole point. They're there to break your community, not to be a part of it. The more pressure you apply the happier you'll make them.
So what solutions do work to keep unmoderated communities free from harassment? None that I know of. I'm open to suggestions if people have any, and in the meantime I'd suggest that if you're a public figure on Twitter you hire a professional PR person and let them act as your filter. No, it's not fair. It's also not fair that shit fills up my house if I don't pay for a plumber sometimes. Unfortunately, it's what we have until we come up with something better.
None of that has anything to do with victim blaming, because blame is irrelevant. The world is not a just place, and doesn't matter who's fault you think it is. I'm all for discussing solutions if people have them, but outrage isn't a solution to anything - and in this case, all it does is feed the fire.
X user tweeted death threats against someone? X user is prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
It's not a free speech issue, death threats or threats to do bodily harm are illegal in the US. The only exception is if a reasonable person would understand them as hyperbole.
When it comes to anonymous postings on the internet, I think they should be treated just the same as anonymous letters in the mail, seriously and harshly.
Truly a selfless man (/sarcasm), helping out all those addicts. I ran into a prostitute trying to sell their body for just a single hit of Flappy Bird the other day.
The inventor of Cow Clicker did the same thing when he closed down his game and he had a good point. His entire game was based around showing how social games of that type exploited players.
We're second guessing the motivations of the guy here of course but if you had made something that made a vast number of people blind with rage and were getting a constant influx of money from it, you might have an attack of conscience.
X user tweeted death threats against someone? X user is prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
It's not a free speech issue, death threats or threats to do bodily harm are illegal in the US. The only exception is if a reasonable person would understand them as hyperbole.
When it comes to anonymous postings on the internet, I think they should be treated just the same as anonymous letters in the mail, seriously and harshly.
Legal issues along these lines are rarely that simple. Something being considered an actionable death threat in the US has to meet an extremely high standard. If you're curious about some of the legal issues involved, this blog post provides some useful incite specifically related to cyberstalking, and what a threat has to do to meet the standard. In general, harassment coming from a bogus account over a medium like twitter would have a very hard time meeting the reasonable person standard, precisely because most bogus twitter accounts are engaging in hyperbole and most twitter users know that. Generally, the 'threats' made over Twitter and Facebook aren't real and lead nowhere, which in turn makes it harder to show that they are actual threats.
And it's just as well, because I have no faith in the US "Arrest The Minorities" justice system to show the judgement or nuance necessary to prosecute these kinds of cases. I suspect cracking down on these sorts of threats would lead to a lot of innocent people being jailed, and protecting the speech interests of the wealthy and powerful at the expense of everyone else. This is how the legal system is typically applied today, and I don't see any reason to believe that it would be different in this sort of case.
Besides, even if you remove all the explicit death threats, you're only dealing with a tiny tiny fraction of twitter harassment. What about the rest?
X user tweeted death threats against someone? X user is prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
It's not a free speech issue, death threats or threats to do bodily harm are illegal in the US. The only exception is if a reasonable person would understand them as hyperbole.
When it comes to anonymous postings on the internet, I think they should be treated just the same as anonymous letters in the mail, seriously and harshly.
Legal issues along these lines are rarely that simple. Something being considered an actionable death threat in the US has to meet an extremely high standard. If you're curious about some of the legal issues involved, this blog post provides some useful incite specifically related to cyberstalking, and what a threat has to do to meet the standard. In general, harassment coming from a bogus account over a medium like twitter would have a very hard time meeting the reasonable person standard, precisely because most bogus twitter accounts are engaging in hyperbole and most twitter users know that. Generally, the 'threats' made over Twitter and Facebook aren't real and lead nowhere, which in turn makes it harder to show that they are actual threats.
And it's just as well, because I have no faith in the US "Arrest The Minorities" justice system to show the judgement or nuance necessary to prosecute these kinds of cases. I suspect cracking down on these sorts of threats would lead to a lot of innocent people being jailed, and protecting the speech interests of the wealthy and powerful at the expense of everyone else. This is how the legal system is typically applied today, and I don't see any reason to believe that it would be different in this sort of case.
Besides, even if you remove all the explicit death threats, you're only dealing with a tiny tiny fraction of twitter harassment. What about the rest?
The threats, at least as I see it, are the issue. Someone want to tweet that something is bad? Not an issue. That it's shit? Not an issue? That someone is shit? Not an issue.
Someone threatens to rape/murder someone or their family? That crosses the line from just being shitty to something else.
As to if issues along that line are really that simple, your example shows someone who is never clearly saying "I will kill you!". He talks in fantasy talks.
Which, if you look here, there's plenty of people very clearly saying "I will kill you" and "I'm going to murder you".
Is the statement of "I'm going to kill you" a
1. threat at all, as opposed to an incitement for others to beat or murder?
2. threat, as opposed to a rhetorical device?
To both, yes.
As to the third test in the blog post you linked, if one started receiving hundreds of anonymous threats to their life over the phone, people just calling up and yelling any one of those twitter messages, do you think the feds or police would take it seriously?
How about those threats in writing?
I'm not going to say anything else, because I'm genuinely curious as to your response. This doesn't take much nuance, you threaten to kill people, you should be punished by our legal system.
X user tweeted death threats against someone? X user is prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
It's not a free speech issue, death threats or threats to do bodily harm are illegal in the US. The only exception is if a reasonable person would understand them as hyperbole.
When it comes to anonymous postings on the internet, I think they should be treated just the same as anonymous letters in the mail, seriously and harshly.
X user tweeted death threats against someone? X user is prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
It's not a free speech issue, death threats or threats to do bodily harm are illegal in the US. The only exception is if a reasonable person would understand them as hyperbole.
When it comes to anonymous postings on the internet, I think they should be treated just the same as anonymous letters in the mail, seriously and harshly.
The reason you don't have "death threats" on twitter treated as serious death threats is because from a legal basis, they aren't.
To be treated as a legal death threat a court case would have to prove that the person being threatened has real reason to believe that the person sending the threat had the ability and the intent to actually carry out the threat.
Otherwise prosecuting to the full extent of the law comes down to harassment charges.
You're not going to get a harassment charge over just sending one tweet unless it's deemed a terrorist threat, and that hasn't gone down well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Joke_Trial
One obsessed nutjob that sends dozens of messages is of more concern than a million individuals sending one tweet each. These are the only people you're every going to see prosecuted, and again they were charged on harassment/stalking/abuse charges rather than "threat to kill" laws which are more serious and carry a sentence of up to 10 years in UK law.
This means that on a sheer statistical basis a death threat on twitter should be considered as less life threatening than toasters, which claim dozens of lives each year.
Have left PA forums.
If this community believes that hating someone based soley upon their gender is acceptable and understandable, I have no interest in being a part of it.
Posts
This has nothing to do with what I just posted.
I'm saying that statements like 'taking abuse isn't part of a developers job' is incorrect and that it's a factor of the job currently. Saying it's not just downplays the fact that it's a consistent issue.
I'm not talking at all about criticism.
Let me restate, then.
Verbal abuse is absolutely expected when you are a part of any creative field, case in point being video game development. It is a factor, as you say.
The point being made here is that it should not be.
Sorry if I was unclear, there.
And I can't imagine being smart enough to make a game but not smart enough to not use your personal Twitter account.
It takes 23 seconds to make a Twitter account on my phone. I just tried it.
I'm all for some kind of starry eyed utopia, but I'm against thinking everyone some how has to protect everyone who doesn't show a modicum of self preservation.
If Twitter is social interaction then you should know damn well not to walk around with your cell number, full home address and place of employment sewn on your shirt.
Yeah, she really shouldn't have worn a skirt that short if she didn't want bad things to happen.
Mhm? The abusers? Yeah they're bad I guess but really, let's focus on everything the victim did wrong here.
The game was gaining a legendary status for it's rage inducing difficulty.
There's plenty of stuff you can quickly google about that https://www.google.com/search?q=flappy+bird+broke+my+screen
So here we have a game that has its main appeal of being frustratingly hard to the point of smashing expensive smartphones while the red mist descends and an easy way to contact the creator to vent abuse at him.
A recipe for disaster methinks.
If this community believes that hating someone based soley upon their gender is acceptable and understandable, I have no interest in being a part of it.
What? This rather ignores the fact that:
a. Killing the golden goose to try to not have to ignore twitter cannot be justified by the necessity of twitter to create a golden goose.
b. I, at least, am talking about taking like a few weeks break, to take a vacation, maybe visit a foreign country, maybe focus on coding a new game, whatever.
Though apparently, he did everyone a favor and delisted Flappy Bird not because of an abuse, but for out benefit:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/lananhnguyen/2014/02/11/exclusive-flappy-bird-creator-dong-nguyen-says-app-gone-forever-because-it-was-an-addictive-product/
Truly a selfless man (/sarcasm), helping out all those addicts. I ran into a prostitute trying to sell their body for just a single hit of Flappy Bird the other day.
If you rage hard enough to break your phone playing a game you paid a dollar for, is it ever acceptable to send threats to the creator? Did the guy who created I Wanna Be The Guy get death threats? Did anybody break their keyboards in frustration and then believe it acceptable to rage publicly about it?
According to some? Apparently they did.
The inventor of Cow Clicker did the same thing when he closed down his game and he had a good point. His entire game was based around showing how social games of that type exploited players.
We're second guessing the motivations of the guy here of course but if you had made something that made a vast number of people blind with rage and were getting a constant influx of money from it, you might have an attack of conscience.
If this community believes that hating someone based soley upon their gender is acceptable and understandable, I have no interest in being a part of it.
Justification is a moot point. It's never acceptable to call someone a poopy head but we don't classify that as serious business.
Internet death "threats" are essentially the angry internet person's way of telling you he is very angry or another way a troll will to try to provoke a response.
You'll get plenty of threats of you discuss XBone vs PS4 these days, they're thrown around like popcorn.
Treating them as anything more than pathetic is giving them more respect and power than they deserve.
If Nguyen says he didn't shut down the game because of threats then I'm gonna take his word for that. He got "threats" from people saying they'd kill him and then themselves if he took down the game, he did it anyway.
He treated those words as the impotent hot air they were. Good on him.
If this community believes that hating someone based soley upon their gender is acceptable and understandable, I have no interest in being a part of it.
Because we may all have different tolerances and methods for coping with it, but for this guy, it was clearly bad enough that he decided to give up the kind of income that you're lusting after. To me that says it was pretty bad and someone has suffered unfairly, once again (you all know this chorus), for making videogames.
2) How sure are we that he is walking away from all the money? Unless he took down the ads, he is still making money from those that continue to play.
Not that those throwing around abuse and death threads aren't shitbags, but if we are going to sit around and extrapolate from just a few facts, I'd like to be sure about those facts.
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
In this vein, I'm annoyed that I never questioned where that $50k figure came from. It's an estimated average pulled from a Verge article with no given source, that has since been treated as fact.
There were definitely some pretty mean-spirited opinions doing the rounds about this game before he took it down, though. Hell, man-with-an-opinion-for-all-occasions Ian Bogost wrote this lovely piece about it: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/02/the-squalid-grace-of-flappy-bird/283526/
His statement about taking it down because everybody's playing it is consistent with his earlier tweets when it first went, so if it turns out to not be the case that abuse made him do it, then that's that part of the story. Still doesn't excuse the appalling behaviour by both column-writers and the vocal asshats who did spout abuse, regardless of the result.
.. what?
If you think a new Twitter account is going to protect you from the world once the media decides you're famous or rich enough to be a story, you have a surprise coming.
Honestly, I expected better from you. By this argument you're basically saying it's his fault for publishing content for the world to enjoy and you should just expect death threats and THAT makes them ok.
That is, in my opinion, the worst kind of attitude in regards to situations like this. It's not acceptable for people to act this way. Period.
Really we shouldn't be suprised.
Gaming journalism these days is trash. Opinions and rumours stated as fact, articles are written more to clickbait and stir up controversy rather than inform or comment.
If this community believes that hating someone based soley upon their gender is acceptable and understandable, I have no interest in being a part of it.
It's the sad truth, and this mentality is infiltrating game developer communities as well. Mostly it's just hypocritical waves of circlejerking.
Example: The media/community got into an uproar over over King.com and their Candy/Saga filings. Death threats, harassment, the whole 9 yards. Not a few days later, Flappy Bird takes off and suddenly Nintendo owns all forms of green pipes and how terrible the owner is for making art that was inspired by Mario art. Death threats, harassment, again the whole 9 yards.
It's really infuriating to watch this stuff happen, and to watch it poison the communities I know and love(ed).
The sad truth is, people miss the point. A lot. At any point in time if you can argue why harassment is acceptable , you've already stepped outside the bounds of the argument and I'm confident in saying that no amount of discussion or logic will get through to you. You just have two people operating at different wavelengths.
Perhaps it's just a lack of empathy in the world. Perhaps people are just so bored with their own lives they sit on an invisible internet throne. Perhaps it's jealousy.
I know I am not perfect, but I could never see myself making a case that results in victim blaming. To play the devil's advocate against myself, maybe that kind of tunnel vision prevents me from seeing a logical case.... for harassment.. the same way other people can't seem to see why it's a no-go 100% of the time.
Money can't buy happiness, but it can certainly buy trained professionals to deal with social marketing and customer service. And reporting death threat issuing dicks to the police, for that matter.
Harping on the righteous high-horse card doesn't make you sound any less naive. Every time someone in this thread tries to use logic or common sense on how to live in today's world, you guys just declare "victim blaming!!!". You won't like to hear this since you love being outraged, but choco can critisize how someone handles their online persona while condemning the abusers. At the same time.
The "average" mobile ad revenue per VIEW of the ad, is 1 dollar per 1,000-1500 views. This fluctuates WILDLY but it's a general ballpark. And for this, we're excluding "clicks."
So when you're talking 30+ million downloads, and then repeated viewings - the ads are recycled every time you die, so that really increases the rate since in this specific game you die a LOT. You're having a new ad shoved in your face every 10 or so seconds.
Now, that being said, some of the ads were high profile games, and they pay tons of money for those ads to be #1 in the most popular games. So there is a snowball effect, where a semi-popular game will get a % of the basic payouts, where as if you have say.. 10 million views, you put yourself in a category where the ads coming into your game are the most high profile paid ads.
With something like Flappy Bird, the sheer number of downloads over the time that it happened, it was loading only the most top-tier ads possible, and they pay out the most. In fact, now that the game is removed from the market, the algorithm that Google uses is surly skewed to hell and back now, because the ads being displayed are bottom tier. So he's still making money hand over fist, but it's the difference of maybe at most 5%.
Given the ad rotation ratio, the volume of downloads from both market places, I would say that the 50k a day is possibly lower than the average peak for this game.
You've really got it all wrong.
Understanding the effects of social media and how people use it, and disagreeing with it doesn't make anyone naive. It's when you use that as an argument to give acceptance to the fact that people are acting that way. That's when it becomes a problem.
That being said, you're grouping me in with "these guys" and I never once said "victim blaming." You're also assuming that "I love being outraged" and that I somehow think that Choco isn't allowed his opinion.
You can't be more wrong, and once again I think the issue is that you have no focus on the actual point and issue that is at play here. You're portraying a message as if you're seeing things that do not exist as a justification for the disgusting acts of others, and it's just one big circular logic trap.
You're appealing to logical fallacies if anything, not logic, and 'common sense' is just another way of saying, "My biased perspective,"
Talking about how the victim of an attack should have behaved in order to avoid being attacked is blaming the victim. Choco didn't condemn the abusers at all - in fact he cast them in a sympathetic light, arguing that perhaps their actions were justified because something bad happened to them to provoke their harassment.
Anyone can say with 20/20 hindsight, "Well, I guess I he / she shouldn't have been walking in that neighborhood that night," - it's a worthless observation at best & an attempt to distract from what happened at worst.
Being cynical and expecting the world to conform to your cynical perspective doesn't make your observations better.
All that matters is the abuse. And all responsibility falls on the shoulders of the abusers.
It's that stark and clear cut. It's not Nguyen's fault for not hiring a PR manager (BTW, WTF?!), it's not his responsibility to "not check twitter". Even if he actually didn't see 99% of the abuse, the abuse is wrong.
And none of us should tolerate abuse or make excuses for it. It's not Nguyen's job to work with the abuse, it's the abusers duty to not abuse.
Supposedly he didn't even take it down for that reason so it's kind of a moot point. Doesn't make much sense to assess his reaction to abuse if his actions weren't taken in response to abusive behavior anyway.
Wanna talk about social engineering, well here you go.
My point is as an indie game developer you're still expected to be easy accessible through social media. Notch or someone could still have a personal, private twitter but he's still got to check @notch for people to contact him and anyone would still know what his real name is. You do "walk around with your place of employment on your shirt" because game making is, shockingly, your employment.
Its not really a thing so much as it is people playing the the fiddle game with ebay accounts.
I doubt anyones paying $5000 for iphones with flappy birds except for stooges artificially inflating it and idiots taken in by the stooges who think they can sell it on.
Do you actually care about this game and its developer that much?
Actually, this is pretty much what chocobolicious and Bubby are saying. It's the dev's fault for staying on Twitter and checking what people have been saying about him, according to them. Which is analogous to saying that the solution to receiving death threats from complete strangers via post is to stop checking your mail. This is absolutely blaming the victim, not for receiving the threats, but for not having a thick enough skin to just ignore them. Like it's some sort of personal failing that he can't just accept the money and laugh all the way to the bank.
What others have been trying to argue is that just because chocobo and Bubby would be able to tune everything out and move on with their lives without any sort of problem doesn't mean that's the only valid response to being a target of mass internet abuse. And unless either of them has been in such a position before, I would contend that they don't actually know how they would respond, and that marginalizing the problems Nguyen was (is?) facing is really comfortable when they're not on the receiving end of said abuse.
Wide-scale moderation isn't really feasible on social networks - there's no central set of standards, no moderation to be enforced, and by nature the service is something of a free-for-all. Twitter could hire moderators and enforce a set of community standards, but then it would be a different service, and the niche it left would not go unfilled for long.
"Take away the anonymity!" Most people don't have a reputation, and most of the time they don't care. What are you really going to do now that you know their name? Harass them back? Find the name of the construction company they work off the books for and try to get them fired? You can't be bothered to track down the guy who's mean to you in traffic, you certainly won't bother to track down some random internet troll indistinguishable from all the other trolls. In the meantime, you've kneecapped the actual oppressed minorities who often rely on anonymity in order to not be targets of harassment everywhere they go.
"Prosecute them!" Great idea. Minorities are being oppressed, let's go to the US penal system for help. I'm sure they're up to the task of navigating tricky free speech issues, likely with the same deftness they use to navigate tricky issues of race and class.
"Social pressure!" Trolls and bullies don't care about your social pressure, that's the whole point. They're there to break your community, not to be a part of it. The more pressure you apply the happier you'll make them.
So what solutions do work to keep unmoderated communities free from harassment? None that I know of. I'm open to suggestions if people have any, and in the meantime I'd suggest that if you're a public figure on Twitter you hire a professional PR person and let them act as your filter. No, it's not fair. It's also not fair that shit fills up my house if I don't pay for a plumber sometimes. Unfortunately, it's what we have until we come up with something better.
None of that has anything to do with victim blaming, because blame is irrelevant. The world is not a just place, and doesn't matter who's fault you think it is. I'm all for discussing solutions if people have them, but outrage isn't a solution to anything - and in this case, all it does is feed the fire.
Preventing x user from making 30 more accounts immediately afterward? Slightly more difficult.
It's not a free speech issue, death threats or threats to do bodily harm are illegal in the US. The only exception is if a reasonable person would understand them as hyperbole.
When it comes to anonymous postings on the internet, I think they should be treated just the same as anonymous letters in the mail, seriously and harshly.
maybe you would...
Legal issues along these lines are rarely that simple. Something being considered an actionable death threat in the US has to meet an extremely high standard. If you're curious about some of the legal issues involved, this blog post provides some useful incite specifically related to cyberstalking, and what a threat has to do to meet the standard. In general, harassment coming from a bogus account over a medium like twitter would have a very hard time meeting the reasonable person standard, precisely because most bogus twitter accounts are engaging in hyperbole and most twitter users know that. Generally, the 'threats' made over Twitter and Facebook aren't real and lead nowhere, which in turn makes it harder to show that they are actual threats.
And it's just as well, because I have no faith in the US "Arrest The Minorities" justice system to show the judgement or nuance necessary to prosecute these kinds of cases. I suspect cracking down on these sorts of threats would lead to a lot of innocent people being jailed, and protecting the speech interests of the wealthy and powerful at the expense of everyone else. This is how the legal system is typically applied today, and I don't see any reason to believe that it would be different in this sort of case.
Besides, even if you remove all the explicit death threats, you're only dealing with a tiny tiny fraction of twitter harassment. What about the rest?
The threats, at least as I see it, are the issue. Someone want to tweet that something is bad? Not an issue. That it's shit? Not an issue? That someone is shit? Not an issue.
Someone threatens to rape/murder someone or their family? That crosses the line from just being shitty to something else.
As to if issues along that line are really that simple, your example shows someone who is never clearly saying "I will kill you!". He talks in fantasy talks.
Which, if you look here, there's plenty of people very clearly saying "I will kill you" and "I'm going to murder you".
Is the statement of "I'm going to kill you" a
1. threat at all, as opposed to an incitement for others to beat or murder?
2. threat, as opposed to a rhetorical device?
To both, yes.
As to the third test in the blog post you linked, if one started receiving hundreds of anonymous threats to their life over the phone, people just calling up and yelling any one of those twitter messages, do you think the feds or police would take it seriously?
How about those threats in writing?
I'm not going to say anything else, because I'm genuinely curious as to your response. This doesn't take much nuance, you threaten to kill people, you should be punished by our legal system.
Twitter has issues.
http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/12/twitter-blocking-policy/
Also, good luck proving twitter threats are actual threats against your life.
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
The reason you don't have "death threats" on twitter treated as serious death threats is because from a legal basis, they aren't.
To be treated as a legal death threat a court case would have to prove that the person being threatened has real reason to believe that the person sending the threat had the ability and the intent to actually carry out the threat.
Otherwise prosecuting to the full extent of the law comes down to harassment charges.
You're not going to get a harassment charge over just sending one tweet unless it's deemed a terrorist threat, and that hasn't gone down well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Joke_Trial
It's only the individuals that are obsessed and throw a large amount of abuse that really a concern.
http://www.classicrockmagazine.com/news/woman-charged-for-chris-cornell-web-death-threats/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2535270/Twitter-trolls-rape-death-threats-Caroline-Criado-Perez-plead-GUILTY.html
Apologies for linking the Daily Mail, it was the only decent article I could find regarding that news on short notice.
One obsessed nutjob that sends dozens of messages is of more concern than a million individuals sending one tweet each. These are the only people you're every going to see prosecuted, and again they were charged on harassment/stalking/abuse charges rather than "threat to kill" laws which are more serious and carry a sentence of up to 10 years in UK law.
As far as people making death threats on twitter and then actually carrying them out is concerned. The number stands at 0, or possibly one, and that one wasn't even directed at someone specific.
http://metro.co.uk/2013/08/18/new-warning-over-legal-twitter-trap-after-landmark-murder-case-in-us-3928991/
and as you can probably tell from reading that he could have just been spouting YOLO stuff and then accidentally hit a guy.
This means that on a sheer statistical basis a death threat on twitter should be considered as less life threatening than toasters, which claim dozens of lives each year.
If this community believes that hating someone based soley upon their gender is acceptable and understandable, I have no interest in being a part of it.