#lambdamoo

[cfiesler]

I made a video essay!

About awful people using tech to be awful.  Featuring zoombombing + a history of awfulness online. 

[sasquapossum]

Facebook Continues Destroying Itself

Lately I've been seeing some strange messages on Facebook when I block people. Something about "blocking applies to a profile" and "you might still see something from the user's other profiles" - I didn't capture the exact details, but you get the gist. WTF? So I looked into it. Apparently FB is experimenting with a new feature - not yet fully announced, sure as hell not properly documented - that allows a single user (account) to have multiple profiles so they can interact with different groups of people. More details here:

Facebook tests way to add up to 5 profiles tied to a single account – TechCrunch

To help people tailor their experience based on interests/relationships, Facebook is testing a way for people to have more than one profile

This is not inherently a bad idea. Many people have a strong need to keep different "facets" of their lives separate - more so than the existing methods of controlling post visibility. Separate profiles for professional and personal "circles" is an obvious example, especially in professions with special privacy or security concerns. Another example is people who are vulnerable either individually or as members of an often-targeted group. LGBTQ+ people, for example, who might have extensive circles of people to whom they're already out but also extensive circles of people (including family) to whom they're not. And this is where the cracks start to appear.

<<<Flashback: circa 2000, before either Facebook or Tumblr existed. I was an active user of a social thing called LambdaMOO. The details of the place don't matter, except that it was highly programmable. As a programmer, I had figured out a way to block another user so I didn't have to put up with their constant BS. Knowing that I couldn't hear them, they took to hanging around where I was and saying things like "Trystan [my name] is a child molester." Since I was there and blocking was not a well known thing, I guess people were supposed to interpret my lack of response as some sort of admission. Fortunately almost everyone knew better, but it became a bit of a cause célèbre​​ in the online (and online-research) community at the time. Believe me, I know all about the power and the danger of blocking. But that was then and this is now. Now, I believe that blocking is an essential part of any online person's toolbox.>>>

You see, the design of this feature is an absolute shit show. The way I found out about it, via messages when I block someone, suggests why. Can you guess who benefits most from this feature? Who has absolutely jumped all over it, despite its not being well publicized or document? Stalkers and trolls. People who want to evade others' blocks. Let me make that even clearer.

The design of this feature endangers the very people that a better designed version should protect.

Clearly, nobody - or at least nobody with an ounce of sense or understanding of vulnerable people/communities - thought this through. This will, in general, not encourage people who were thinking of leaving Facebook to stay. Being exposed to more content that they have already signaled they find objectionable, or even that's directed at them personally, they'll go running for the exit. The creeps will become even more omnipresent.

If Facebook wanted to do they right thing, they could implement a better design that actually serves people's needs. In particular, instead of giving control to the often-blocked by letting them shed their blocked state with a new profile, it would give control to the person doing the blocking. If I go to block someone, for example, I should have the option to set up my own new profile as well (or instead) right then and there. There should also be far greater clarity about whether changing my profile picture or joining a group (for example) has profile-wide or account-wide effect, so people don't accidentally do The Wrong Thing and violate privacy or find themselves targeted.

There's certainly a lot more, and that's kind of the main point: this needs to be much more thoroughly thought through, and communicated, than it has been. What's there now is a half-baked mess that actually endangers people and will be bad for Facebook's user retention. And frankly, despite once working there, at this point I think they deserve to lose. "Evolve or die" are the choices, and they have steadfastly refused to evolve.

[hanakogames]

re: last post

also ow, I remember being 18 and getting really worked up over an insane online situation I had managed to insert myself into and (I think) my poor boyfriend having to rush over to tell me to calm down and not delete all my accounts, so I have a certain degree of sympathy for the idiot at the center of this.

not to excuse her actions because she did harm and fleece people and at least some of that was deliberate, just saying i remember the feeling of ‘I’m so clever, I’m going to be an internet spy and outwit everyone’ blowing up in my face to OH SHIT OH SHIT OH SHIT

(It involved small online communities only the cyber-historians among you will have heard of. And no, my part of it was not even related to the part you might have heard about in cyber-history class, just the same community. Also by this point I can’t even REMEMBER what the actual arbitration case I was on was about! only the names of some of the players involved.)

[virescent-phosphor]

Resource for MOOers

I’m not sure if anyone else here has any interest whatsoever in MOOs or MUDs, but I realize part of why I didn’t get onto any for ages was outright intimidation—it was something I’d never done, all text-based, and it seemed like there were a lot of rules, as well as an old community in many of them.

However, I recently found a resource written by Yib from LambdaMOO, who is a wizard, or admin. She wrote an entire book/guide to MOOing, starting with the basics of connecting, talking, and emoting, and working up to more complicated topics such as objects, and even how to program objects!

(nb: MOO stands for MUD, Object-Oriented)

Yib’s book has a special focus on LambdaMOO, but can be applied to any MOO, and arguably, to MUDs as well. However, ensure you study or note the differing aspects of an individual MUD.

So, enough rambling. Here is your resource. It’s downloadable as a complete PDF. Happy MOOing!

[crow-cathedral-blog]

How the fuck did I go from reading the Wikipedia article on Spivak pronouns to teaching myself how to use Telnet just so I can log into LambdaMOO?

[comm200students-blog]

Hitler after he realized what Mr. Bungle did to his Lambdamoo account

[comm200students-blog]

Running into Mr. Bungle on Lambdamoo

[untanglingtheweb]

I often compare the idealism of online communities with the idealism of the Christiania commune in Copenhagen, DK.

Initially open and free, with an anything-goes attitude, as soon as peole who didn't share their ideals moved in an exploited the openness and freeness, hierarchies and social structures emerged, dividing the group into people who believe in the original ethos and those who are freeloading.

Journalist and (almost) lawyer Julian Dibbell describes how the idealistic community LambdaMOO became a "society" after one of its members acted outside the unspoken (but community-accepted) rules of behaviour. That article, originally titled A Rape In Cyberspace and published in the Village Voice in 1993, is well-worth a read.