Spite marketing
I’m on a mailing list where one particular member is so abusive of those who disagree with him — which includes most of the people on the list — that reading his latest post reminded me to donate to the ACLU.
In fact, I’d like the ACLU to send this guy a message saying that “A donation in your name has been made as a response to your behavior on the ______ list.” It wouldn’t change his behavior, but such an option on non-profits’ sites might spur some more giving. (Citing the venue where the obnoxious behavior occurred would be optional.)
Of course, you can already make a donation in someone’s name at many sites. I’m not suggesting a new facility. I’m suggesting a way to market it.
(During the Howard Dean campaign, some contributor to the blog’s comment thread started the practice of responding to trolls by kicking in another few dollars to the Dean campaign, and thanking the troll for the spur. I loved that idea.)
Dear David’s Blog:
As to your guys’ theories about blogging and the use of the internet in society:
I am slowly figuring out how to blog and use blogs, etc.
My comment is that it is just as important -equally important -for there to be the alternative of a “real world” that his outside of the electronic one. The attainment of variety (miscellaneousness in o. words) on the space of the internet is not ral variety and not complete unless one’s world consists of both the internet world and the NON-iternet world; or, everything outside of it. You can also say “exogenous.”
We have that sort of thign happen in long threads on MetaFilter where people are being really aggro and weird about [in this case] Obama, and people responded by saying they’d donate $X to the campaign for every fighty comment that people posted. While I don’t know abotu the chilling effect on speech, I thought it got the point across that people’s approach to their topics can backfire, big time.
But wouldn’t that have the obvious Unintended Consequence of encouraging supporters to secretly pretend to be trolls in order to generate donations? Sort of like the PR people who try to make controversies to get attention for their clients.
I suppose it could happen, Seth. But it’s less likely to happen on mailing lists (except for the mega ones) where people tend to know one another or get to know one another.
There’s no evidence that it happened on the Dean list.
How does people getting to know one another prevent a member from pretending to be a hostile troll? Are you saying they’d be found out? But for example, Wikipedia is full of cases of “socket-puppeting”, it’s an ongoing scandal.
Sure, it may not have happened on the Dean list, but it took a while in the growth of the Net before spam started, and now look at where we are.
Doesn’t it stand to reason that financial rewards connected to trolling can have very perverse incentives?
I suspect there’s quite a few people in the world who, if you told them they could raise money for a cause by provoking what they’d view as a bunch of thin-skinned whiners who can’t take a joke, would jump at the opportunity.
[...] View original post here: Joho the Blog » Spite bmarketing/b [...]
Offline I saw “spite marketing” happen in my neighborhood.
I noticed an Obama sign with a handwritten note on it that said: “For every sign you steal I donate another $100 to the Obama campaign.”
I assumed they’d had a number of signs stolen.