PepsiCo has been expelled

We just got this note from Adam Bly:

We have removed Food Frontiers from SB.

We apologize for what some of you viewed as a violation of your immense trust in ScienceBlogs. Although we (and many of you) believe strongly in the need to engage industry in pursuit of science-driven social change, this was clearly not the right way.

How do we empower top scientists working in industry to lead science-minded positive change within their organizations? How can a large and diverse online community made up of scientists and the science-minded public help? How do companies who seek genuine dialogue with this community engage? We’ll open this challenge up to everyone on SB and beyond in the coming days so that we can all find the right solution.

That is such a relief.

I agree that scientists in industry must be part of the discussion. However, putting that discussion in the framework of an industry-sponsored infomercial compromises it — there are just too many constraints on what could be said. I also don’t believe that PepsiCo in this case was interested in a genuine dialog — what they wanted was a PR whitewash, and they were willing to pay to get it.

Some people are reasonably asking what next. Notice that Bly is asking questions up there! You can help by making suggestions.

We have been scrutinized!

My post about women’s issues in skepticism/atheism got a lot of comments, and now those comments have been analyzed…so if you didn’t want to read them all, now you can get the numerical breakdown.

One thing surprised me: only a third of the comments were people arguing with each other! When did we become so nice? Also, only a quarter of the arguing comments were by men telling women what they should do, which is a huge improvement over what I expected.

The interesting experiment is already getting interesting

Speaking of the untrustworthiness of corporate drones, the decision by Blizzard to end online anonymity is already having consequences. Protests have gotten so hot that they are banning complainers and shutting down threads, and people are unsubscribing from the game in protest (impossible to tell if there are enough numbers there to make a dent in their obscene profits, though). There have already been instances of people revealing their own names, only to have a horde of prickly adolescent gamers descend in force on their facebook pages and email, and doing the unimaginative trick of sending pizzas to their home address.

Their player base is already enriched for the competitive male gamer element, i.e. arrogant jerks. I’ve heard from and read about many women who are very careful to hide their sex while online, because they know exactly what kind of harassment they will get. Look at the cases of Kathy Sierra and Jill Filipovic for perfect examples of what to expect. There are some prominent gay guilds on WoW, too — their members may not appreciate being suddenly outed. Sure, it may reduce some of the flood of trollishness online at their forums…by transferring it offline, to real world abuse of anyone who doesn’t fit the smugly heteronormative line of the testosterone-addled.

Interesting experiment is failing spectacularly already. One good thing about it is that having the 900 pound gorilla of the gaming world set itself on fire and jump off a cliff might open up the market to a little more diversity.

An interesting experiment in online social forums

Blizzard, which makes a couple of extremely popular computer games like Starcraft, Warcraft, and Diablo, also maintains a gigantic set of forums with an overwhelming volume of posts appearing non-stop. I’ve never dug into them — way too much stuff, and it’s scary how ferocious the debates can get over a change in a magic spell in a game — but they’ve announced a major, radical change:

The first and most significant change is that in the near future, anyone posting or replying to a post on official Blizzard forums will be doing so using their Real ID — that is, their real-life first and last name — with the option to also display the name of their primary in-game character alongside it. These changes will go into effect on all StarCraft II forums with the launch of the new community site prior to the July 27 release of the game, with the World of Warcraft site and forums following suit near the launch of Cataclysm. Certain classic forums, including the classic Battle.net forums, will remain unchanged.

Whoa. No pseudonyms at all, all anonymity removed. They can actually do this because everything is linked to subscriptions to their games, so they can demand accurate billing information…and they have just announced that part of that billing information will be made public. There have been a lot of debates about privacy and anonymity on the internet, and here’s an actual exercise in testing the Penny Arcade theory by eliminating one of the parameters.

Have no fear, I’m not proposing to do the experiment here. It could get interesting if we have a major before and after dataset available on the internet, though…I predict that many casual trolls might get filtered out fast, but there will still be online meanies and contrarians and aggressive debaters, and there may not be a huge change in tone. After all, I’m not writing under a pseudonym, and you don’t see me wilting politely into courteous discourse.

Some sociologist should get ready to study this…

There’s a good discussion going on at Shakesville — this decision is an exercise in privilege by Blizzard. There are a fair number of female gamers who would rather not advertise the fact…because many male gamers are jerks.

Who the heck are you?

Blame Ed Yong. He started this business of asking readers to speak up, and now it’s all over the place, so I guess I need to join in .

In the comments below, tell me who you are, what your background is and what you do. What’s your interest in science and your involvement with it? How did you come to this blog, how long have you been reading, what do you think about it, and how could it be improved?

You need some music to listen to while you’re composing your answers.

There are a couple of lines there that are so appropriate here:

I staggered back to the underground
And the breeze blew back my hair
I remember throwin’ punches around
And preachin’ from my chair

I spit out like a sewer hole
Yet still recieve your kiss
How can I measure up to anyone now
After such a love as this?

So…throw some punches. It’s what we expect.

Zombie sightings

How not to run a blog

A strange little blog has been carping at various atheists blogs for a while now. Called “You’re Not Helping”, it pretended to have the goal of keeping internet atheists honest and holding them to a higher standard. It wasn’t very interesting — it’s main claim to fame was a tone that combined self-righteousness with whining — but it has just flamed out spectacularly. The author has admitted to committing flagrant sockpuppetry, with four identities (“yourenothelping”, “Polly-O”, “Brandon”, and “Patricia”) who were active commenters there, all reinforcing the same views and sometimes congratulating each other on their cleverness.

So much for honesty and a higher standard.

You can watch sockpuppets in action here. After this revelation, it becomes hilarious. Highlights include this comment from “Brandon”:

Ha! Polly-O! beat me to it. Great minds….

Next best bit is where the blog author screws up and posts under the wrong name, making the sockpuppetry evident…and then tries to make this clumsy correction, posting as “yourenothelping”.

OK, it appears that Brandon is Polly-O! Both commenters have identical IPs. And now both are banned, too.

It’s total chaos. It’s a beautiful illustration of why sockpuppetry is a bannable offense here.

It’s the best example of blatant conversational masturbation that I’ve seen since the days of Earl Curley on Usenet. Curley was one of those net.legends, totally insane and convinced of his psychic superpowers, who used to frequent sci.skeptic with a collection of aliases that would chatter among each other about how clever Curley was. In fact, here’s the original invention of the phrase sockpuppet on usenet:

Earl “voted most popular with hosiery!” Curley lisped:

>but as I
sit here with a room full of friends (yes, gays were welcome to)

Why does the image of a person infinitely uglier and more awkward than Mr.
Bean come to mind, sitting in a room strewn with crumpled printouts, empty
cola cans, smashed beer bottles, and greasy pizza boxes? The chairs are
arranged in a circle, with Earl in one of them, wearing 3 day old boxer
shorts. On each of the other chairs is a sock puppet, with those silly
googly eyes and a name tag scotch-taped on them. One of the sock puppets
has a gay chat line ad from a sleazy weekly paper scotch taped to the back
of its’ chair. Wow, Earl, you sure are “with” the 90’s with your
tolerance!

You had to be there. But really, people who resort to sock puppets to prop up their arguments are universally reviled as pathetic — the author of You’re Not Helping has just had his credibility completely eradicated.

Believe me, if you’re playing games with sock puppets the worst thing that can happen to you is not that you might get banned — it’s that you’ll look pitiful.

I came to this story very late, after the final shameful confession. Much of the legwork that exposed the lies was done by The Buddha Is Not Serious.

And what’s really surprising me right now is the bizarre attitude some of the other commenters at YNH have — they’re still supporting the guy despite the fact that he has a long history of self-congratulatory lying. People are very peculiar.

Self-immolation is complete. The You’re Not Helping blog has closed its doors and is no longer accessible. I guess that means Will from Alabama will pop up somewhere else under a new pseudonym…or more likely, a few dozen pseudonyms.

It’s strange: since some of the persistent and obnoxious New Atheist haters on the internet have been exposed as having inflated their numbers at least four or five fold, suddenly my perception of the number of my critics has diminished, which isn’t necessarily a good thing.