From http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/0....

It's one of the many wonders of the internet.

I'm not sure I would use the term "wonders"… Revealing of human psychology perhaps.

But some of us are missing the second element of the equation… I wonder what that makes? :smile:

Most of us here are what I'd consider semi-anonymous. So rather than becoming "Total Fuckwad" we'd just become "Fuckwad" since people would be readily able to track us back to things we need our online identities for.

If however you're completely non-anonymous, then I'd gather it could be quite bad beyond life on forums if removing that anonymity completely still has the same end result.

That's such an interesting premise actually. I wonder if it's been researched yet?

Eh well.

Well let's hurry up and apply for a research grant to see if we can test the hypothesis. :wink:

I'd be astounded if somebody hadn't done studies on how people act when anonymous… there are a lot of psych labs at universities, after all. :) Wouldn't surprise me if economists were interested, too, at least as far as game theory related to social choice is concerned.

I imagine that it could be linked to the psych experiment where the subjects were told there was someone hooked up to an electrical charge and they had control over how much voltage they received, and when the researchers told them to continually up the voltage, pretty much no one objected.

I can only imagine the result would have been very different if they were told the people being shocked could see them, or vice versa.

I think the anonymity of the other people has a lot to do with it as well. I think it's far too easy to forget there's an actual person with feelings on the other end of that internet handle. Unfortunately, I do agree the anonymity of the poster also seems to affect whether or not they -care- that there is an actual person with feelings.

I do agree it speaks quite loudly as to not only Human nature as a whole, but what type of person someone is when no one they know is looking.

I think it speaks highly of Lobotomy's character over on TMC when he has nothing to gain (and probably more to lose) by standing up and trying to help stop the madness in the Mudbytes bug thread.

I was thinking about that experiment as well; but I believe it was trying to explore authority relationships between the zapper (the subject) and the person telling them to zap. But I agree that had the zapper been in contact with the zapped (who wasn't actually getting zapped – everybody was complicit) it might have been different. Then again, maybe not – as the Prison Experiment showed… (The one where a bunch of people were put into a "prison" and told to be guards or prisoners; after a short period of time, the "guards" started acting very abusively of the "prisoners" despite being in direct contact and being equals IRL.)


It seems that there are so many references like this one that I simply don't get because I don't follow the TMC forums… :smile:

There isn't much reason to follow the TMC forums. They're a cesspool. Believe me, I took notice of who was doing what and it's always the same small group of troublemakers and trolls who are the most vocal. The vast majority either didn't read the thread, or did and found the whole thing childish and insane and chose not to comment. In hindsight I wish I had been among those who thought the whole thing was childish and insane, but it's my reputation on the line and for whatever that's still worth I felt compelled to defend it.

Huh. Well, I gave the thread a cursory glance… looks like I managed to get my name slandered in the first page of that thread without having been aware there were really forums over there to begin with. :rolleyes: Ah, well, I read the first and last pages; if they were at all indicative of the rest, I'm glad I didn't follow the rest… The MUD community seems to be fairly, erm, "incestuous" (for lack of a better term), with many forums and relatively few people and disputes being dragged from the one to the other…

A common complaint goes along the lines of "this is why nothing has gone forward in the MUD community recently". What is it exactly that people would like to see going forward, I'm curious? Are we all waiting for the rise of the Next Great Codebase? (just curious)

I think we're all just hoping that sites will come up that aren't all about trolling, flaming, and being general assholes to each other. TMC is a leftover from the old guard where anarchy was the rule of the day. Icculus isn't a bad person, quite the contrary, but his hands off attitude has led the forum portion of TMC to where it is today - a place where all the troublemakers can go to create their drama with nobody overseeing the results. In effect, it's become a cesspool.

The same kind of thing reigned supreme on Mudmagic for quite a long time until Kyndig got sick of it and clamped down. Unfortunately, when he did, he swung way too far in the other direction with all of the mass bannings and punishments against innocent parties.

TMS was also a haven for flamewars until Lasher bought the site from Synozeer. The reforms going on there have met with much less resistance from the general user base. No doubt because Lasher banned the only serious problem that developed. http://www.topmudsites.com/forums/tavern... makes for an eye opening read. Read all 4 pages. It should become obvious.

Given that, Cratylus was on a short leash. It really shouldn't have surprised anyone that he got nailed. He's admitted openly he enjoys getting banned from sites and sees it as a badge of honor. Usually he'll go tell his tale on TMC in a big long mess of a thread telling everyone about how he's the victim of some grand conspiracy or that he's fighting for eveyone's rights or some such crap. In the end, he's a victicrat. Pure and simple.

So the lesson here is simple. Don't let people like that destroy something you love. Get rid of them.

Actually there have been a few studies on the effects of anonymity and the internet on behavior. After a bit of research I was able to find two articles. The information contained in the articles is quite interesting. Should make for interesting reading. The articles and abstracts follow.

Raskausas, J. & Stolz, A. D. (2007). Involvement in traditional and electronic bullying among adolescents. Developmental Psychology, 43(3), 564-575.
Abstract: The increasing availability of Internet and cell phones has provided new avenues through which
adolescents can bully. Electronic bullying is a new form of bullying that may threaten adolescent social
and emotional development. In this study the relation between involvement in electronic and traditional
bullying was examined. Eighty-four adolescents completed questionnaires regarding their involvement in
traditional and electronic bullying. Results show that students’ roles in traditional bullying predicted the
same role in electronic bullying. Also, being a victim of bullying on the Internet or via text messages was
related to being a bully at school. Traditional victims were not found to be electronic bullies. Perceptions
of the effects of and motivations for electronic bullying are discussed.


Douglas, K. M. & McGarty, C. (2002). Internet identifiability and beyond: A model of the effects of identifiability on communicative behavior. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, 6(1), 17-26.
Abstract: K. Douglas and C. McGarty (2001) demonstrated that being identifiable to an in-group
audience in a computer-mediated communication (CMC) setting leads people to
describe anonymous out-group targets in more abstract or stereotypical ways. On the
basis of these findings and the social identity model of deindividuation effects (SIDE;
S. Reicher, R. Spears, & T. Postmes, 1995), the authors aimed to test a model of the
effects of identifiability on communicative behavior in and beyond CMC. Participants
in 3 studies, 1 CMC and 2 pen and paper, were asked to write responses to controversial
messages. In all 3 studies, communicators who were identifiable to an in-group
audience used more stereotypical language to describe anonymous out-group targets.
Studies 2 and 3 suggested that rather than being strategic, this may result from more
subtle or implicit communicative processes.

As for more up-to-date research on internet anonymity's effect on behavior, nothing specific yet, but I will keep looking.

I have truly found that sometimes the best thing for a person's reputation is to NOT defend it, or to post briefly about it once and then move on.

In my case, after being attacked for basing End of Time largely on Final Fantasy after trying to do some good in pointing out License Violators (an attempt at a good deed I will not make the mistake of repeating), I did my best to defend my position, but at some point came to realize that the more I argued about it, the worse I'd look, and the more I replied, the more negative attention that was being cast on me and my MUD.

I really hate that things spiraled down as far as they did, and the more Cratylus continues to try to wave around his supposed "victory" the more and more I feel a bit red in the face for having attempted even the slightest defense of him.

I'm not to worried about it anymore, really. If Cratylus wants to continue making an ass of himself, he's got his own forums and his own intermud network to do that with. And I have my blog to make as big an ass of myself as I want in return.

It is somewhat amusing in a way that he's all over me for having been a hypocritical banhammer wielding fascist scumbag when he has carried out the same against his own forum and network membership in far greater numbers than any bans that MudBytes, MudMagic, and TMS combined. Maybe he somehow feels guilty about it? I don't know. But the more he goes on and on about it, the more I'm inclined to believe my original gut assessment of him is right: He's delusional.

And I can see your point about dropping it and moving on. I only wish I hadn't been such a hot-headed idiot in going at it with him for so long. But we're all human, with flaws and imperfections, right?

Of course, and I personally hold no grudges over anyone about anything involved with any measure of this.

Surely you and I did have words about the subject, but I know what it's like to feel in some way that something you've poured so much time into has turned on you, and that's a terribly difficult thing to deal with. Truly, I hated to see things go where they did, and any thing that Crat did that made himself look like a victim or like he was just or what have you, he's very effectively destroying with the longer he gloats about it on TMC.

I try to think of it as a growing pain. It's unfortunate that it ended the way it did, and it probably could have ended otherwise while maintaining the positive effects it did have. But, at least some of it had to happen sooner or later, and many things have been improved since. More later… have to run.

Glad to see a voice of reason has returned. There are times when we should just agree to disagree then get on with our lives. Fighting, mudslinging, and ugliness do not solve anything in the end.



Point well made, Hades Kane! Couldn't agree more.