“Creating Passionate Users” has been a must-read blog for me for quite some time now. I don’t know of any other resource on the web which provides such valuable information in such a thought provoking and entertaining way (bold statement, I know). This morning, on my way through my feeds, I ran across Brian Oberkirch’s post about a horrible string of events which have plagued Kathy Sierra. I’m constantly surprised by what some people are capable of when shielded by the protection of anonymity.
Mob mentality has always been very puzzling to me. I’m not terribly versed on the psychological aspects of it, but I suspect there are certain evolutionary drivers of the phenomenon (protect the village, survival of the fittest, acceptance by the group, etc). Regardless, I’m amazed by the fact that everyday individuals who would normally never break the law are capable of utter lawlessness when caught up in a group behaving in this manner. Anyway, back to the issue at hand. As apophenia pointed out, the incubation of the hatred directed at Kathy was promoted through the creation of a website named meankids.org:
The brief story is that three prominent bloggers got annoyed at another female blogger for not permitting mean-spirited comments in her blog. They created a site called meankids.org as well as a spin-off. These blogs encouraged people to say terrible things about others and it spun out of control. The content by the sites’ creators (again, prominent bloggers) was completely unacceptable – misogynistic, racist, and horrid speech. Their words were bordering on hate speech so it’s not that surprising that anonymous commenters took it one step forward.
And now we have the equivalent of the cyber-mob: an anonymous group of individuals completely abandoning their sense of morality and causing others to feed off of it. Lovely. Combating this type of thing in your standard social medium isn’t terribly difficult. You either have explicit moderation, disallow anonymous comments, or have the community police it for you (i.e. X number of people indicated that this comment offended them so it’s automatically deleted). But when you have a website that’s purpose is to embrace this type of behavior…well, that’s a whole different issue. As the web becomes more and more ubiquitous in our everyday lives, and continues to evolve and leverage our personal information to provide valuable products and services, maybe the shield of anonymity will slowly disappear, effectively abolishing this practice. Wishful thinking, I know, but one can hope.
