Trent Reznor meets The Trolls
p2pnet news view P2P:- “I guess nobody explained ‘Don’t feed the trolls’ to our buddy Trent,” says Michael C in an email.
“You can probably relate to his frustrations.”
I can.
Trolls (and Spam) are the bane of anyone with a site which pulls a decent amount of traffic, and p2pnet is no different.
Trent is Nine-Inch-Nails’ Trent Reznor who, in a post on the NIN site, says:
“It’s been an interesting experiment over the last couple of years or so. Faced with leaving the infrastructure of traditional record labels and figuring out what the right thing to do is in this new world – I found myself realizing that for me to have any concept of how to interact with the community and know what they might want / what they find appropriate, I need to immerse myself in that world and live it for a while.”
Record labels don’t know how to market anything to new media because, “they don’t live there,” he says. “They don’t get it because they don’t use it.”
But for Trent, “There’s no handlers or PR people here, it’s me and my guys – that’s it. There’s no real plan, even – it’s just trying to do the right thing that respects you the fan, the music, and me the artist. That’s the goal – a mutual and shared respect.”
Which is the way it’ll eventually be everywhere online, although will still have corporate conclaves trying to pretend it’’s still the 1990s, and that they, and not customers, dictate terms.
And that’s cool. But Trent is also being forced to come to grips with the realities of running a blog,and he goes on »»»
The problem with really getting engaged in a community is getting through the clutter and noise.
In a closed environment like nin.com a lot of this can be moderated away, or code can be implemented to make it more difficult for troublemakers to persist. It’s tedious and feels like wasted energy doing that shit, but some people exist to ruin it for others – and they are the ones who have nothing better to do with their time.
Example: on nin.com, there’s 3-4 different people that each send me between 50 – 100 message per day of delusional, often threatening nonsense.
We can delete them, but they just sign back up and start again.
Yes, we are implementing several changes to address this, but the point is it quickly gets very old weeding through that stuff.
Welcome to the world, Trent.
Cheers! (And thanks, Michael)
Jon
June, 2009
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June 13th, 2009 at 7:55 pm
Matthew Good had the same troubles and had posted a comment from Trent about it too, seeing as he found someone with the same problems.
As a result, http://www.matthewgood.org no longer has registered users or comments. It’s easier on Matthew and Trent will probably go down that road. It sucks but it is better than dealing with asshats who have nothing better to do than ruin it for others, for their own satisfaction of being a fucktard and anonymous.
June 14th, 2009 at 9:49 am
Trent went ahead and got himself a private twitter account.
http://twitter.com/noise_floor
Couldn’t these morons just lock their existing accounts?
June 14th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
Rock stars have always tended to attract a small cult of obsessed (and often deranged) followers among their fanbase, and the internet allows these few people to greatly expand the footprint of their otherwise-insignificant existence.
Trent Reznor has had to cope with both by celebrity-worshipping airheads as well as the more common-variety blog trolls. I’ve had the misfortune of running into a couple of people like this, who would write long rambling diatribes and send me several in sequence (apparently too impatient to wait for me to read and reply to the first)
But for someone to take the time to write and send a hundred mails a day suggests a truly disturbed person or some kind of ‘religious’ fanatic on the other end. Maybe all sites get their share of these crazies. I would hope that P2PNET does not attract (or retain) many of these basket cases. A completely open forum like this one also makes it easy for these people to massively retaliate for things like deleted posts, so it’s a little surprising that this site has remained open for as long as it has.
June 14th, 2009 at 9:24 pm
” Couldnât these morons just lock their existing accounts? ”
It would be nice if it were really that easy.
Those type seem to have endless amounts of time on their hands,
so all they do is create new accounts on newly created e-mail addresses and
continue. It’s almost an obsession.
” A completely open forum like this one also makes it easy for these people to massively retaliate for things like deleted posts, so itâs a little surprising that this site has remained open for as long as it has. ”
Yup, that’s never happened here
.
Seriously though, I would have to agree that the more dedicated trolls have some must serious ‘issues’ IRL so
the use their anonymity to feel like they have some kind of power, knowing that they could never get away
with what they do in a real social setting, and yes, all sites get their share, in proportion to their popularity
and longevity.
June 15th, 2009 at 5:48 pm
People are more likely to report on– and complain about– something when it starts affecting them, not when they first hear about it.
9/11 got a lot of complaints and reports, but there weren’t so many when it was the USS Cole being attacked.