PAX East 2014: Why Internet Jerks Aren’t Going to Win, And You Can Help

That was a really interesting panel. I like things that make me think in a different way and reassess my actions, and Zoe was successful in that regarding labelling people good or bad. I fall into the trap of holding a grudge and judging someone based on one bad thing forever.

Man, Patrick can look scary sometimes.

For me, I have never been a jerk in the internet before. I mean, what's the use of being a jerk online? It serves no purpose whatsoever. In fact, it makes you a nasty and pathetic person.

You still have an identity on the internet and it may haunt you in the near future as the world go more digital. Just imagine someone interviewing you for a job referring you not from just your resume and the information you give them but referring you from the internet. That will not be great. This will be plausible some day in the near future.

Perhaps I was born from an era where the internet does not exist at all and I have to meet people every day to go through my daily routine. I will and cannot be a jerk on the internet. Even though you can't see them, you are still talking to a person on the internet.

Be smart. Don't be naive.

A very interesting watch and I'm glad to see it posted to the site. The central tenet of "take responsibility for your own actions and hope to influence other by those actions" is an old argument but a goodie, and on the internet - which in so many ways is and will be for some time yet, the Wild West - is emphasised more than ever.

Obviously many of our existing institutions move much slower then the web but I do wonder (as other have mentioned) if we should be taking 'net education' much more seriously and including net etiquette as an important addition to the classroom. Taking a child and putting them online for the first time is akin to placing them alone in the middle of Piccadilly Circus and hoping that they don't get abused or learn to abuse before someone has a chance to tell them how this new world actually works. This is how bad habits are formed and how trolling/bullying becomes seen as the acceptable, and indeed as the 'expected' way to engage online.

Of course this is a massive subject with no clear cut answers but I do think that instead of having our legislators cutting back on net freedoms they should be looking more seriously at why people see it as acceptable to abuse these freedoms and looking to curtail that behaviour through education rather than cutting the nets nose off to spite its face, so to speak.

It's not nihilism when it's reality. We all prey upon those weaker and less privileged than us. Don't let yourself be the prey. Let these people talk mess all they want - their threats are empty. Only when they start sending you video or images of your loved ones in captivity or in any form of physical discomfort would you then need to take action.

You claim that it's easy to be an alright person and I agree. But don't go in with the expectation that other people will do the same.

Life's tough. As far as I know, no one has survived it yet.

Yes, you are not alone.

@eulogize_my_baked_goods: YES YES YES!!! Good comment! Excellent!

This is highly relevant to my interests. In the future when some jerk screams about us mods violating their "right to free speech" or "censorship", I think I'm just going to reply with this new XKCD comic:

I haven't played it either. I bought DS2 that month. But Patrick has talk around it before. My guess is he opinion of the story is so low. He doesn't think it could or should hold any value for others. But what is done is done.

Great job Zoe and Patrick

I'm sure Patrick has reasons to think the flappy bird guy was sincere, but from the excerpts he presented it sure sounded like he was just trolling really hard.

@white: Your claim would hold a lot more water if altruism wasn't a thing.

That was a great panel. Thanks Patrick and Zoe (Drew and Vinny too)

While I'm not going to dig through tweets from years ago, I can assure you this was not the case.

Whaaaaat! Just... no, dude. I can state with some certainty as a human with a brain that it is fallacy to abdicate responsibility for the human brain. On either side of this issue. Those who exploit the underprivileged make a conscious decision to do so, to have flown in the face of nearly every moral teacher available to them. Those who receive threats and insult and abuse in silence have weighed the psychological relief of sharing their insecurities with an empathetic audience against the potential for people who think like you to shame them for their honesty.

The fact that you believe the line past which it's acceptable to produce an emotional response is when the people you care for most in this world are being actively threatened just confirms to me that you're not willing to account for the realities of our social condition. You can choose to not leave others to suffer because you know how painful suffering can be. You can choose to not suffer in silence because you understand there are people in the world willing and able to help you. But that's not immediately clear to everyone! Which is why talks like these, which encourage both parties to exhibit their bravery through the reiteration that they are not alone in a void, will always be relevant.

Yeah that's fine, I wasn't really looking for proof or anything. Just in my head when you paraphrased that tweet in that way I imagined some Ukranian kid trying to ask you a sincere question then just coming across as a huge asshole.

I feel that my generation is in large part responsible for a lot of the most hateful stuff on the internet today, and that behind the worst comments you'll probably find a dude in his 30s who definitely should know better.

Back when the internet was just a bunch of ostracized nerds, it was like there was a competition on who could be the biggest ironic asshole on the internet. Everybody wanted to be the detached, "cool" nerd who picked apart everything and looked down on everyone else.

The result was that you got this insanely toxic environment where nobody could be genuine about anything. There were witch hunts on every other sub-culture who were active on the internet at the time, and people casually used homophobic and racial slurs all the time under the guise of irony.

Some of those kinds of comments are obviously written by clueless teenagers, but I believe a lot of the bile is from people who refuse to acknowledge that we're no longer living in the mid '00s and times have changed.

Great panel btw.

Simply put, this was fantastic.

This was a really great talk.
Good job.

Excellent panel.

Really enjoyed the talk. I think I need to write some emails and apologize for the shit I said years ago.

What a great talk! Both Zoe and Patrick brought up really interesting points and were very pleasant to listen to. Such an important topic as well. The internet might be the most important thing humanity has ever invented and it is crucial we make it the best it can be!

BTW: I've seen it happen quite a few times on YouTube that someone acting like an asshole completely turned around after the person being harassed showed he was a human being instead of just responding aggressively. As someone who sometimes loses hope for humanity it's quite a nice thing to see.

I only occasionally read comments and rarely post, and I don't do social media at all, so I know the hate is out there, but the depth of it is always astounding when I do hear/see it.

@ravelle: should've threw a fit and showed Patrick,he would've let you in on the panel.

Great job Patrick.

I made the mistake of looking at Reddit's reaction to this panel after it was mentioned on Bombin'. My braĩn hurts now.

Good to see some good discussion here, even if I'm guessing that some of the 28 deleted messages were pretty toxic.

Great talk you guys. So, I work teaching/mentoring teenagers anywhere from the age of 14-19. I feel a lot of the shitty stuff on the internet starts from young people being horrible and not growing out of it because no one called them out on their shit. I see some of these kids doing this kind of stuff, and even sometimes doing it to their peers just trying to get a negative reaction from them.

That's usually where I step in and try to explain why that isn't cool, especially in the case of the older ones. I've even used some stuff Patrick has said as an example at one point. And I guess hearing it from someone who they not only respect as a mentor, but also see as someone they can relate to (I'm not too much older than they are. I'm 21) makes it stick a bit more. And I'm glad to see them toning it down and actually trying to have proper conversations about why someone disliking a game someone else likes is ok, or something similar.

So, I agree with Patrick's point, and I think it's a good place to start.

You know how people who don't smoke will sometimes say that they prefer the smoking section to the non-smoking section, because that's where all the cool people are? That's sort of how I feel about this topic. I don't necessarily agree with the things that the aforementioned Internet jerks say, but I find them to be much more tolerable than the people who think that Internet jerkary™ is this huge problem that we all need to do something about. I put jerks on the Internet in the same category I would place a Justin Bieber song playing on the radio. Sure, it might be annoying, but ultimately it's not a big deal, and I'm probably not even going to think about it again for the rest of the day.

These people who talk about fighting online trolling and negative comments as if they're talking about fighting cancer are far more bothersome in my view. If there ever comes a point where the Internet has a jerk section and a non-jerk section, you'll find me hanging out in the jerk section.

Name one time I've been an internet jerk to you Patrick. You can't because you're a poopyface McGee who only plays indie games based on anime. Just messing with ya Scoops though I have to admit that felt pretty damn good. I'm one of the few people who have avoided social media like the plague because I knew from the start that things would get this bad. Giant Bomb is sort of an exception because it's a site I actually believe in if my subscriber status is any indication.

I personally think things like Twitter are only useful for journalists who can network with news sources, celebrities and pseudo celebrities who want to bump their publicity, and people who worship said celebrities. In a weird way social media has become like the worst case scenario for human telepathy as a concept. It's like if Professor-X was being overloaded by stray thoughts but has the option to turn them off. I can tell you first hand that it's a struggle on a day to day basis to not be an internet jerk because a) it would be so easy and b) some people have it coming.

This panel was surprisingly interesting Patrick. Props to you and Ms. Quinn for bringing some of this stuff to light. I remember how much flak you were getting when you started at GB and I was fortunate enough to have been exposed to your work at 1up to know that you'd fit in just fine with this bunch of goofballs. I think some of the idiots from comicvine would benefit from watching this talk instead of trying to berate others for having different tastes in books. Some of those people are not only mean spirited but also really boring in their spite. Thanks again duder.

Great talk, Patrick and Zoe! I appreciated the measured approach to things and that you actually had some ideas on how to improve the climate of the internet.

Daaaaumn, Patrick straight up killing it, truth bullet style!

I'm fairly sure I've never been a jerk to anyone online, but sometimes I look at old posts of mine and come across something.. unnecessarily angry or harsh in tone; that's certainly not the legacy I want to leave behind, and I can only feel sorry for those that won't make any effort towards building a positive or constructive legacy for themselves.

The internet never forgets; you have to conduct yourself as if you might accidentally become famous at any minute.

Fantastic talk, Scoops and Zoe.

Pretty absurd to twist his hypocrisy into some kind of virtue.

It's a similar phenomena to what happened with Anita. If a charismatic woman associated with video games gets publicly harassed, they become notable very quickly. As an FYI though, one of the forums that she claimed to have harassed her still vehemently denies having done so.

@fiercedeity: Being able to admit to and honestly apologise for mistakes and being open to criticism are all excellent virtues.

Of course, just never making any mistakes is even better than that – but not really a realistic goal for human beings to achieve.

So, yes, of course admitting mistakes and apologising is a great virtue to have, especially when so many people don’t seem to be able to.

Thank you for this content Patrick and Zoe!

Keep fighting the good fight guys! Thanks for uploading this panel.

Thanks, Patrick and Zoe. That was incredibly well articulated and informative. Keep being amazing people!

Good panel!

I've made a few game/music video things the past year or so, just for fun and as editing practice. They get barely any views, because it's just me dicking around, but a little while ago I got the following comment on one of them:

Which is A) something that still makes me giggle, because what? And B) If this was masses of people commenting on something I did for a living/something personal, then... yeah. I'm not sure how I would even react.