StumbleUpon and Chimpzilla: Just how stupid will this get, I wonder?

[Joseph Dunphy]

Old Popular Hypothesis about the Internet: Today's moderators are
yesterday's trolls ...

Dunphy's Disclaimer: ... but that doesn't mean that they can't be
today's trolls as well.


Fairly recently (Nov.23), I became a user of a site called
"StumbleUpon". You can find a link to my blog at Stumbleupon here

http://groups.google.com/group/josephdunphy/web/stumbleupon-redirection

with (at the time of this writing) a complete list of my posts,
including the ones already archived, here

http://groups.google.com/group/joseph-dunphy/web/my-reviews-on-stumbleupon

It's been a fairly positive experience for me so far, but about seven
weeks ago, I already started feeling a little concerned. I came across
a beautifully done blog by somebody calling herself caile-girl, whose
blog you can find this way

http://groups.google.com/group/josephdunphy/web/caile-girl-redirection

and read a post stating that she was on the verge of deleting her blog
because of the level of harassment she had seen on the site. I'm glad
to say that she changed her mind, but I couldn't imagine why somebody
who seemed as sweet as she did would run into trouble. "Really, Joe",
you start to ask. "Log in for the first time yesterday, did we?" OK,
yes I had a good guess, because the reason is almost always the same
online - because something is profoundly wrong with the people who
were bothering them and they like it. They weren't trying to be
reasonable.

A few weeks later, I found myself thinking that either I had just met
a few of her old friends, or at least had met a few possible friends
for them.

[Joseph Dunphy]

As is so often the case with online incidents, I never saw what hit
me. Stumbleupon has a number of discussion groups. "And you posted to
one of them?" Indeed, but I would point out that I've found social
networking sites to generally be far more civil than Usenet or its
latter day successors. This was going to be one of the exceptions.

I signed up for a group with the promising title "Science and
Skepticism", which I've reviewed on my blog


http://groups.google.com/group/josephdunphy/web/chimpzilla-redirect


not knowing at the time that the moderator for the group, at the time,
was a high school dropout whose friend was a Fortean; at least, such
would be suggested by a message I recently received. More about that
in a bit.

If you've never encountered the Forteans before, after you take time
to offer a prayer of thanks to the deity or deities of your choice for
the good fortune with which you have been blessed, the name you will
want to look up is "Charles Fort", and be sure to do so at the
library, not online, where the Postmodernism fad of the current era
has been very kind to Fort and his followers. To say that Charles Fort
was a crank would be akin to saying that Adolf Hitler was not a good
friend to the Jews - true, but hardly adequate as a description. Fort
wasn't just a crank, he was the crank of all cranks, the sort of man
who, if he came to life today and saw an episode of the X Files would
think "oh, the news is finally covering the real stories". The
Forteans follow in his footsteps, imagining themselves into a
delusional world in which the tabloids show the world as it is, or
something very close to such a world. About all that one can really
say for them is that they did find some passably good graphic artists
to do the layout for one of their sites, which the Fortean friend of
the group moderator was good enought to link to, without acknowledging
that he had done so and without explaining the nature of the Fortean
times.

The article he linked to, one with a professional enough look to fool
the uneducated and unwary, was one about a truly remarkable discovery
(insert obligatory muffled laugh) about a new species, a giant
gorilla / chimpanzee hybrid that was supposedly killing the great
predatory cats with its bare hands, singlehandedly. Let's call it
"Chimpzilla". Remarkable, indeed, when one remembers that chimps are
genetically closer to humans than they are to gorillas. If a human
male found himself so lonely as to wish to mate with a female
chimpanzee, as I suspect a certain rock star wannabee of a group
moderator probably has in the past, what would be the lovingly
confused couple's chances of having children? A reference, in case you
doubted me:


http://groups.google.com/group/josephdunphy/web/chimp-and-human-dna-comparison-paper


Remarkable claims sometimes turn out to be true. Rocks really do fall
from the sky, as much as many once doubted this, and we call them
meteors. (Hmmm, I wonder what people back then thought shooting stars
were). But remarkable claims are remarkable precisely because most of
the time, they aren't true and this one was no exception. I read to
the bottom of the page (oooh, doesn't anybody do that any more), came
across the mention of the Fortean times and did little more than
indicate my skepticism and mention Mr.Fort and the attribution of this
story to the Fortean times. Weak references are linked to on the Web
with some frequency, so, at this point, little had occured that was
that far out of the ordinary that I knew about - but this would soon
change.

[Joseph Dunphy]

The moderator deleted almost every post in the thread, yanking my post
out of the context in which it had originally appeared, creating the
illusion that I was replying to something other than what I had
replied to. It was, and please forgive the cliche, a new low - as low
as I have seen moderators go, I had never seen one, anywhere, sink to
doing that, "a cut and paste job done with defamatory intent", as I
explained in a message I sent to the Stumbleupon staff in a report
about the incident. The moderator had falsified the local historical
record as stored in those archives. Why would he do that? One need
only look at the man's own words:


" We know what Dragonhead believes in and he is free to do so
in this group. He also happens to
be a long time buddy of mine and a damn fine individual."


"Dragonhead" was the offending Fortean poster, who was now pretending
that I had lied about which site he had linked to, the thread,
massively edited after the fact, now sending the reader to a less
overly goofy article posted on the site of a British Paper called "The
Guardian". Whether that paper is a tabloid or not, I could not tell
you, but I was more than slightly interested in the fact that I
couldn't find a single .edu reference for the very different creature
alleged in that article, the so-called "Bili Ape", from any biologist;
the few ,edu references that existed were found on the pages of social
scientists. A new great ape species that no biologist was showing any
interest in - a real skeptic would wonder about that.

But let's get back on topic. In his very attempt to rebut the
complaint, emortis9, who I've just confirmed is the moderator of the
group in question (I just visited it), had provided a motive for his
grossly unethical conduct as a moderator - he was convering the
backside of one of his "buddies". Look this copy of his post for
yourself and see that I haven't quoted him out of context. If you're
seeing this more than a few minutes after the time on this post and
your browser is having trouble connecting to the page linked to below,
it is there. Just reload and it should appear and no, I don't know why
Googlegroups does that.


http://josephdunphy.googlegroups.com/web/emortis9_post.html

[Joseph Dunphy]

Naturally, I voiced an objection in the group the moment I saw what
the moderator had done, which is what the post you just saw a link to
came in response to, and got to see the usual intriguing ethics out of
one of the group's me-toos. Perhaps I'd better post what is up before
the moderator has a chance to get back to his usual tricks.

Just before the editorial abuse, I had written this:


"(Eyes roll and slightly glaze over) Real science, brought to you
by the Fortean Times.

The name for people to look up is "Charles Fort"


after which came that unprecedented abuse of moderatorial power,
leaving our dragonhead cackling in glee:


"No, you silly person. That's not the Fortean Times, it's The
Guardian. Did you actually read the article?


Answer: Yes, I did. Our crackpot friend continues:


"These apes exist, and no matter how much you roll your eyes and
play 'cleverer-than-thou'
they will continue to exist."

Though strangely enough, no biologist seems aware of this at this
point, and even more strangely, dragonhead and his acknowledged friend
the moderator felt the need to change the subject of the discussion
after my reply was posted. There is a considerable difference between
alleging the existence of a cooperative hunting tribe of chimpanzees
who have collectively attacked large cats, and the existence of a
giant chimp/gorilla hybrid who can tear lions apart with its bare
hands. That much having been said, legitimate academic references for
the much less remarkable claim that dragonhead and emortis9 had
substituted for the original in this pseudointellectual game of bait
and switch were scanty; it isn't altogether clear at this point that
even those cooperatively hunting unusually big chimps exist.
Dragonhead's blathering continues:


"Yes, Cryptozoology is a 'fortean' topic, but judging from your
inane comment, i don't think you
actually know what 'fortean' means.

Add to that the fact that you've dug up a thread from summer
last year so you can ponce about
and feel superior."


It was at the top of the menu of threads for the group. Read the tone
of the reply; this was payback for my having called him on a bad
reference and his friend, the moderator, was more than happy to play
along. Thus the reply of mine which emortis9 responded to:



"Cute, Dragonhead. Somebody (you?) has edited the comments
after the fact, creating the illusion that
I was responding to one post which made reference to one
article, when in fact I was responding to a
now deleted post that linked to another - this thread, at the
time of my posting, was on its second page.

Amazing ethics. If this is how you're going to behave, you can
count on getting a complaint about this
group from me to Stumbleupon. Enough people follow suit, and
history suggests that you can kiss your
group goodbye."


As, indeed it did as one could see in a posted complaint about the
deletion of some "Holy Trinity" group. Continuing the pathological
liar game, somebody calling himself Northpaw started out with this bit
of wisdom:


"If you mean that there were already 10+ comments/posts in this
thread before your Feb 1 post, I
assure you that you are mistaken. It's not possible."


when, in fact, one can go into the archives for a number of groups and
find threads that run into the hundreds of posts: you can find one
over this way


http://groups.google.com/group/josephdunphy/web/counterexample-thread-redirect


But then what are facts?

[Joseph Dunphy]

How about "what lies at the center of the discussion in any culture
even remotely worthy of respect"? If one looks at the Halls of Eternal
Disbelief, assembled with a great deal of labor on my part during the
bad old days of the Politically Correct 1990s, one sees what came out
of the need to deal with fashionable willingness to lie about what was
out for all to see, in black and white, but it was out for all to see,
more or less. Sometimes Usenet posts would be subjected to forged
cancels and the record would see gaps, but nobody crossed the line
into actually falsifying the record, as far as I know. If just dealing
with the mislabeling of existing material can prove to be such a
chore, imagine the possibilities of this novel new practice.

Let us be practical. If this is tolerated, then the only way in which
a poster can defend himself against this particular abuse is for him
to archive copies of entire threads every time he posts. Just how
practical does that sound to you? Would you want to spend the time
needed to do that, and if you did, what would it say about the
emptiness of your day that you could find the time to waste on a
pursuit like that? This is not something that the lone user can
reasonably be expected to muddle through on his own, so this lone user
didn't. I wrote in to StumbleUpon's management, writing on Feb.2 at
11:19 pm that



"I've sent my complaint in to Stumbleupon. I'll be pleased
if they do the right thing, but I'm not building
any expectation of that into my plans. I will say that
until I see a civilized resolution, I'll refuse to post
to any group on this site and I would suggest that others
do likewise for at least one simple, excellent
reason, if no other - who needs the headache?"



Certainly not me. I never did hear back from them, and just as I said
back then, I haven't posted to any group on StumbleUpon since. I don't
imagine that I will see them do the right thing, but even if they do,
unless they do it soon, I won't care. Yes, justice delayed is justice
denied, but more importantly, the delay would speak to a reluctance on
StumbleUpon's part to do the right thing. A third party looking in may
be left in the dark about who is or is not telling the truth, which is
what makes the moderator's actions as reprehensible as they were, but
StumbleUpon has logs and can check the facts for themselves. If they
didn't, it is simply because, wishing to "make nice with the lowlives
and the trolls" as I said before, they simply don't care.

Good and Evil aren't all or nothing propositions with human beings or
organizations. There are things that StumbleUpon seems to do very
right and they are sources of pleasure, and as a user I am glad to
show my appreciation for that, but where they have clearly chosen to
do wrong, that choice should have consequences commensurate with their
level of contempt for morality that appear in close association with
that which brings them forth. If the wrongness of what StumbleUpon
does is associated with those groups, then the groups themselves
should specifically be that part of StumbleUpon that comes to harm as
a result, and what sort of harm could be more natural than that which
comes to a forum when all who could contribute to it in a worthwhile
manner have chosen to boycott it, instead. No need to do much more
than that.

Looking at the level of traffic in some of those fora and comparing it
to the number of stumblers who seem to be in existence, I found myself
thinking that more than a few other users had come to much the same
conclusion.

[Joseph Dunphy]

I'm burning daylight right now, so I think I'll take a break for a few
hours and go out to enjoy what is, in Chicago, a sunny and beautiful,
if fairly cold, midwinter day.

[Joseph Dunphy]

That was a pleasant hike, once the wind died down, and I'm glad to say
that the temperature has risen above zero (Farenheit) again. Not much
more to be said about this: in response to emortis9's decision to go
trolling on the review page for my StumbleUpon blog and tell a few
lies, I went onto the review page for his and told the truth.


http://groups.google.com/group/josephdunphy/web/stumbleupon-emortis9-review-redirect


"Isn't it your word against his?", you might ask. For now, perhaps ...
up to a point. The man's words speak poorly for themselves. Let's take
a look at that defense he offered for his actions, again:

"We know what Dragonhead believes in and he is free to do so
in this group. He also happens
to be a long time buddy of mine and a damn fine
individual."

For a moderator, whose job it is to be impartial, to post something
that amounts to an argument that "he is my friend, therefore he is in
the right" is for him to post a confession that he has engaged in
cronyism; "reality is defined by my own personal prejudices" according
to an author who, in making such a statement, tells us far know than
he knows about just how much value he places on the truth which, as
always, simply is what it is, whether it suits any given person's
political purposes or not. I notice that he has edited his review. I
also notice that more than a few people have already seen these posts,
so should he attempt to lie about what recently occured, as I'm almost
certain he will, there will be witnesses aplenty and the rumor mill
will be fed.

"Read between the lines?", somebody might ask. "As in, be psychic?",
you ask. No, as in see the message implicit in the action. Let's say
that somebody grabs you by the collar, tries to shake you around a bit
and screams "give me your d**ned wallet". One message clearly
expressed, among others perhaps, is that he feels entitled to get your
wallet. If, as you rise, he discovers that you are closer to seven
feet in height than you are to six, and more than capable of breaking
every bone in his body, and he squeaks out a continued request for
your wallet in a less confident tone of voice, he adds a new message -
namely that he'd much rather than you didn't notice how little bite
was behind the bark. Think of that little wet patch building up on his
pants as an exclamation mark. In either case, is the message really
that hard to understand, even if it is left unspoken? In either case,
take a look at what the speaker conditions his unpleasantness on, what
one would have to do to make the unpleasantness go away, and there is
his demand.

Take a look at what this moderator has demanded - the right to engage
in deception with defamatory intent, without getting any backtalk -
and he feels entitled to get that. Somebody like that doesn't have it
in him to straighten up and fly right, because his sense of right and
wrong are so badly askew that he would not know how to live honorably.
If watched, as I'm sure he knows he is being right now, he may try to
put on a performance, but one can not long fake the presence of a
level of understanding which one lacks and under any circumstances,
staying in character indefinitely is not easy for anybody. I've told
you what to look for in his behavior. Just keep watching and I'm sure
you'll see more of it in the future, at which point, there will be no
need for any leap of faith, unless you doubt the evidence of your own
eyes.

As for emortis9's threat to get StumbleUpon to crack down on me
because I didn't mind my place - I wonder if he wants to call me "boy"
now - if StumbleUpon or its parent company (eBay)


http://groups.google.com/group/josephdunphy/web/stumbleupon-acquisition-confirmation-redirect


wants to go down on the record as being the company that disciplined
one of its users for questioning the veracity of the reports of the
discovery of Chimpzilla, the lion eating gorilla / chimpanzee hybrid,
or for protesting the antics that followed, I will be more than
prepared to deal with that and much more than happy to give both
companies that kind of publicity as I raise the forbidden question:
just how stupid is this going to get? If StumbleUpon has the sense to
laugh off one of the most bizarre complaints in the history of the
Internet, good for them. If not and my pages are deleted in response
to a complaint this silly, I'll just reload all of them elsewhere
(easily done, since I've saved them to my harddisk), the Halls will
get another page and a very credible story about the company will be
put into general circulation, where would-be users of the service and
prospective stockholders in the company can see them and decide for
themselves just how much confidence the company and its services
merit. It's a little thing I like to call "market discipline".

Any questions? Let's move on.


http://groups.google.com/group/josephdunphy/web/chimpzilla-return-redirection-page