Adam-Jackson

My translucent lifestyle didn’t really start until I got Twitter back in 2006 despite blogging and sharing really personal data online since I was 13. Why did I share so much? Honestly, I found it interesting to get feedback from people and learn what they thought. Most of the time, critical feedback was positive and uplifting and the same people also gave supportive comments that proved extremely valuable.

My first hater came in 2003 in the form a guy who profits from the Mac community with events and a blog. I was a “fanboy” of his site and content and because of my commitment to help, he found it necessary to threaten me publicly by saying, “I’m going to shoot you, rip off your head and take a shit down your throat.” I’ve tried to make amends with him but he still talks shit about me to this day. The story is longer but I’ve told it before so you can search the interwebs for that one.

After Twitter and moving to San Francisco to do this “Internet thing” as a profession, the number of people that hate me online has grown. To this day, no one hates me in person aside from that first guy who wasn’t hiding at all. Now, it’s just anonymous hate from all angles. I receive hundreds of replies, emails, comments and calls every week that are supportive. Only once every two weeks does someone say something to me negative and usually it’s pretty harmless.

That brief chapter in my life known as AdamsBlock accelerated the hate for a moment but it has leveled out since taking that camera offline in December. That incident was pretty scary at the time. The pushback was still in the single digits and compared to the people that were supportive, the haters stayed at around 5% compared to 95% positive. That’s mostly why I was able to ignore it. If the hate hit double-digits, it would be time to rethink if what I was doing was actually a bad thing.

Haters don’t actually bother me. I can deal with it. If you’re a guy in Nebraska with some time to kill on a Tuesday night, you find my blog and disagree with my stance on health care and leave an anonymous comment, that’s fine. Honestly, I’d like for you to say that though. What does bother me is that I have a very large network of “friends” I see on a monthly basis at events, meetings and conferences and I always wonder if it’s someone that I know.

Some comments are personal things that only a few people would know about. So which of the 10 people that know about this specific thing be hurtful enough to reply to me from some anonymous account when they could have just called me. I think that’s the only thing that bothers me. As much as I share online, there’s still so much that I don’t share. This not only keeps me safe but also because sharing everything is too time consuming.

Now that everyone knows where I stand on this, I’d like to say that I’ve started embracing the haters. Sharing responsibly is important because when someone has “dirt” on me, their hate can be a lot more powerful. If I told you that I had HIV (which I don’t), I’d win a ton of support from people who were affected by HIV and the support would be terrific. You all would really help me get through it but there would be that single digit percentage that would use it to throw shit at me about my sex life, or somehow guess that I’m bisexual and say I should, “stop going to orgys with dudes” and more useless hate.

So there has to be a line drawn. At what point do you share in order to gain support or don’t share in order to not put fuel on the fire by giving out info that can be used to hurt you.

Some would say that’s what friends are for. When something is happening in your life, share it with a close friend, get advice and support and feel better by having a human connection and not a virtual connection. Yes, I completely agree but for some of the people that say that, you may have not truly realized the value of crowd-sourced support.

By telling over 5000 people that I lost my job, I’m able to get my resume out there within 5 minutes and land a new job quickly. Of the huge network that knows I was laid off, 5 people might respond back that I’m a broke ass loser who can’t hold a job. Yeah, it’s hurtful but without dealing with that, I now have to manually apply to hundreds of jobs in order to get one and you know that being referred to a job is much more valuable than sending in a resume blindly to a company. In that case, I chose to be public.

This value greatly exceeds the loss of giving people more crap to throw at me. Sharing selectively has been my goal ever since AdamsBlock happened. Share less, more often which results for a lot of unusable information like linking to a news story or a funny video. This info isn’t leveraged for hate and only serves as filler for the really important stuff.

The latest, somewhat harmless hate is in the form of another anonymous Twitter account. The account known as “Fake Adam Jackson” is certainly doing their best to mock my extremely boring tweets. I give them some credit for trying. The content of that account is mild which is either because the person on the other side is making an effort to be civil and have some fun or because my goal of not giving anyone enough meaningful info about me to truly do any damage.

There was another account that replied to me over a month ago at random that I have blocked. Here’s a screen-grab of that tweet. That tweet came out of nowhere and I don’t know why they even thought this. We were living together at the time and it was just someone screwing with me. Like I said, these are mostly harmless but a group of people are really wasting their time and not mine.

You can checkout Fake Adam Jackson on Twitter [LINK]

I do encourage you read my previous posts on “anonymity” on the web [link]

Those that have followed my blog since 2001-2002 that I still interact with today know that I’ve changed things a lot. Even the past year has seen big changes to what I share online. That’s how it will have to be from now on. Most of you that truly care and are supportive get less meaningful info but I still focus on sharing enough so that it’s interesting. This is the new way I have to live. Almost all of you are supportive and I thank you for that.

SFGate.com is the online destination of The San Francisco Chronicle and I’m pretty sure all of their print stories are put on the website but it’s a known fact that the comments on SFGate are only a step above YouTube in the category of ignorance, grammar mistakes and trolling. For those that don’t know, Trolling is, “Being a prick on the internet because you can. Typically unleashing one or more cynical or sarcastic remarks on an innocent by-stander, because it’s the internet and, hey, you can.” You can find alternative definitions here. Now that we’re all caught up on the definition of trolling, I’d like to provide a few quotes from a recent SFGate article.

The article was posted today and you can read the entire post on SFGAte.com and the story is called, “Comments on news stories a double-edged sword”. The post explains how SFGate’s traffic has exploded since they began allowing comments on news stories back 2007. Page views on the comments grew from 30 thousand page views to over 4 million so comments aren’t going away anytime soon but SFGate along with other publishers admitted that comments aren’t always of the highest caliber and racism, idiocy and trolling is rampant on the site and sometimes the comment wars (AKA flame wars) go rampant and erupt into serious arguments.

As you know, I’ve been a recent supporter of breaking anonymity on the Internet and using systems like Facebook Connect or Amazon to verify the identities of your commenters to help raise the quality of comments and breed a community that serves the reader and doesn’t look like hundreds of simple minded people bickering back and forth. Below are some excerpts and I’m going to comment and offer my thoughts.

The over-the-top declarations and playground humor often spring from the ability to comment anonymously. Most sites have required registration for their commentators, but they’re able to hide behind screen names without punishment, at least until they get booted off for objectionable behavior.

That shroud can be empowering for people who are emboldened to speak up, as if addressing a crowded town square. Or it’s like an invitation to open mike night at a comedy club.

Exactly. Asking for an email address isn’t acceptable and often times, people use fake email addresses or email account reserved for “junk”. Think of a community member as a member of your family. You’re allowing them to post content on your site and this serves to spark conversations and increase pageviews but your first experience with that person is asking for an email address and a username (which can be anything they want to use) and this “family member” doesn’t have the decency to give you an email address they check regularly. It’s similar to allowing my sister’s boyfriend to stay at my place while he’s in town and the first thing he does is give me a fake name and phone number. I think we’d all agree that this relationship is off to a bad start. Let’s continue.

Michael Lee, a vice president for Bank of America in San Francisco, enjoys both options. He often takes to SFGate and the Green Bay Press-Gazette’s Web site (he follows the Packers) to present his views, usually from a more conservative perspective. Other times, he tries out a one-liner or two to lighten the mood.

He said he looks forward to the challenge of facing an often-hostile crowd and getting his thoughts across on news as it’s happening.

“If you’re a conservative voice in a liberal environment, it takes a certain amount of courage and mettle to stick with it,” said Lee, 34. “But in the same vein, it’s easier to take a stand online than in real life.”

I think it’s great that Michael is honest about this and he raises an excellent point. I’ve spoken to HUNDREDS of people who spend hours a day engaging with other people on blogs, forums and chat rooms and when I ask them if they would use their real name, they instantly object despite the fact that they are very responsible users and their comments and interaction with others is always free of foul language or trolling. I feel that most people think they need to hide behind a facade but the truth is, it’s not really necessary. Michael is about to post a comment that reflects Bank of America and I understand why an anonymous voice is important to him but I say to him that you don’t have to comment. If you’re a member of the PETA but think a CGI commercial of a duck being hit by a car is hilarious but you don’t think it’s appropriate to comment then you don’t have to. In my opinion, commenting as “steve from PETA” is a great idea! You can be a little official but also recognize the hilarity of an animation involving the duck. The issue of covering your ass and watching what you say stems from a corrupt society and my opinion of, “who gives a crap” but we’ll save that for another blog entry because this is the society we live in and you have to conform or you’ll be out of a job.

Basically, I don’t think you need to comment on every post that you read and if it’s not appropriate given your job, location or political views then don’t comment and tell your friends later over beers what you think but the few people that have to conceal their identity is only a “few people” compared to the millions of people trolling boards, blogs and chats looking for their chance to dump nonsense into the mix with their hatred, foul language and stupidity. I don’t mind giving up a little privacy if the community as a whole improves and benefits from exposing the first name and last initial of its community.

For many, the draw is to just run a thought up a flagpole and see who salutes. JonSmith, a 49-year-old San Mateo technical writer, is often embarrassed by his many comments, which he dashes off in a minute or two, rife with misspellings and bad grammar.

But he looks forward to communicating and connecting with people, finding validation in both the acknowledgements and attacks of fellow readers.

So Jon likes being anonymous because he’s a technical writer and enjoys the fact that he can say, “whatever” to his grammar and typos and quickly spout off opinions about a subject matter. He then loves “shooting the shit” with other readers who either agree or disagree with his opinion. That’s great Jon and I’m happy you’ve found a place to be lazy, give some commentary and participate in a community. However, SFGate is owned by a newspaper that carries itself to a high caliber of editorial integrity (or at least you’d assume that was the case) and your comment that’s full of errors, misspellings and whatever you feel like saying only causes the quality of comments to degrade to the point where people like myself just don’t bother to read them. People that read SFGate to learn something ignore the comments because it actually leaves us with a bad taste.

You being a technical writer can probably find dozens of issues with my grammar in this blog post but I do my best with a limited education on writing but you would be doing everyone a service if you tried your best to be formal with your comments so everyone benefits from a comment that’s easy to digest and understand.

Jon Continues:

“We do this for the response, and if you get a reaction either good or bad, it’s more worthwhile than if you get nothing,” Nadelberg said. “The disappointing moment is when you write something and no one hated it or liked it. That’s when you fail, when no one gives a damn.”

Jon, this is considered trolling (in my opinion) and if you’re saying something to get a positive or negative response from someone, then join a fight club or create an Argument club on Meetup.com where you can meet up once a week to argue with people. What I find interesting is how childlike this sounds and how no one realizes that these tendencies are so animalistic and basic. Maybe some of you have younger siblings or children and I’m sure you have realized that once the kid figures out what gets a rise out of you, they’ll keep doing it because they get attention. Some kids become starved for negative attention and they keep doing all of the wrong things just so you’ll yell at them. What do you do about this? Ignore it and they’ll stop and go away.

I’ve been ignoring trolling for years and it’s not going away. The issue is becoming more widespread but now that we have the tools and software to combat trolling, it’s time to take a stand and force our users and commenters to hand over a valid E-Mail Address, upload a real photo of themselves and use their real name. If we continue supporting anonymity then the Internet will become worse than reality television and I fear it may be too late.

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The Time 100 voting is open where we get to submit and vote people in as the top 100 people in the world of 2009 or something like that. It’s a very serious contest organized by a large media corporation and the results are published in Time Magazine and hundreds of other publications also cover the people who make the list.

Some anonymous cowards on a popular site, 4Chan have decided to “hack” the results and vote up 4Chan’s creator “moot” as the top of the list and completely ruin the top 20 finalists with fake voting. You can read the full report at TechCrunch. First of all, 4Chan is one of the primary sites that is fueled by anonymity and their mob hacking isn’t funny or cute. I blame Time for not implementing Facebook Connect or OpenID to reduce the anonymity. Sure Time would be narrowing the voting to users of Facebook only but it’s a solid 200 million people which isn’t too shabby. Furthermore, I’m sure Facebook would be happy with the news and help Time promote the voting on Facebook.com.

If Facebook isn’t the answer, Time could use systems that call the voter and the vote has to give a verbal confirmation code that they saw on the site. Each number was logged and an even better method is auto-mailers that go to homes with a code that the voter enters on Time.com. All three of these would reduce voting but I think the Time 100 can deal with a 15% drop in votes because it would barely make a dent in the amount of people that do vote in this if this system meant that there was zero anonymity to the voting process.

Time basically screwed themselves by allowing this system to be used so I don’t blame 4chan. If you put a piece of candy in front of a child and close the door, he’s going to eat it because no one is looking and that’s just human nature. The web is crawling with children that feed their egos because no one is looking but if more and more websites expose the children and put them under a microscope, it will reduce a ton of this tom foolery on the web. Take a stand, unmask the cowards and let’s kill anonymity on the web.

Two days in a row that I’ve spoken about this but a video today made by the crew at College Humor honestly upset me to the point where I have to link to it and once again state my case for the toilet bowl that is user generated content on the web.

This is going to get worse as more and more people join the web and contribute their anonymous crap. There are some amazing minds out there contribute great content to the web and sharing their videos, photos, life experiences and opinions and the majority of comments coming from anonymous cowards are completely negative and they lack grammar or common English principles.

The answer to this is requiring tools like Facebook Connect be used to ensure that people commenting are who they say they are. Today, add Disqus or Facebook Connect to your blog and force your readers to be human and be real. Your comments will improve, a community will thrive and you will get fair and respectful commentary instead of the shit that people exclaim without thinking.

If you need help, let me know and I’ll set it up for you. This has to be stopped and the answer is forcing people to be who they really are. If they won’t come out behind the curtain, you don’t want them commenting anyway.

I’m going to begin pissing everyone off by becoming a Facebook Connect Evangelist. If you work with me on a project, ask my advice or mention starting a site that relies on user interaction, I’m going to recommend you use Facebook Connect and I’ll even set it up myself. The Internet is growing exponentially and there are still new users joining every day. Millions of people launch a web browser for the first time every week and a new person discovers YouTube, RSS or Blogging every minute. It doesn’t take very long until that person is sharing their ideas with others via comment boxes. The ability to comment on someone’s work is fantastic and interaction with any kind of media wasn’t possible in such an easy to use way until the web. You could write letters to the editor or maybe call into to some question & answer show on the radio or TV but most times the volume was so high that all you would get was a busy signal.

I love commenting on blogs and I also love creating my own content. When people reply or comment on my content, it’s a great feeling because I’m able to see their opinion and collaborate on ideas. As many of you know, I’ve lately had an issue with anonymous commenters. As The Internet grows larger, you’ll notice that more people comment anonymously and thus they feel that there is no need to offer responsible and insightful feedback. Anonymity reduces our midset below that of children and to that of wild animals and this is 2009 and the excuse of anonymity cannot be tolerated anymore.

There was an excuse from one person that made sense. A commenter on TechCrunch stated that she works for a company that is in PR and commenting on articles could get her in trouble. My response? Don’t fucking comment! What’s so hard about that? Do you have a disease where you have to comment on posts?

From this point forward, everything I work on will have Facebook Connect integration. I spent 4 hours setting it up on this blog and I’m very happy with the results. I’m not a developer and it took a lot of reading but it works beautifully.

You can comment using Facebook Connect and you can even share these posts with friends via Facebook Messages or a Share on your profile’s wall without leaving the site. There’s also a box that shows recent visitors and you can see their limited profiles and some comments they made on this site using our Facebook App Combined with Disqus comment engine.

This is just the first step to reducing anonymity on the web. Facebook’s platform is excellent and if you’re not able to share your identity with everyone when commenting then I don’t want your comment. Feel free to call me out with anything you want. You can even tell me “you suck” and that’s your entire comment but I will know that you’re John Smith the Realtor from Ohio with three kids and a dog named Willie. That’s how it should be. I’m going to expose my life in this blog and I’m going to be completely honest then you should be as well.

Today I saw this blog post via DaringFireball. I’ve included it in its entirety below but only because it’s so perfect that I don’t think I’ll have to write anything else to explain my decision to not allow comments on this blog from this point forward.

Internet comments as heckling

I remember seeing blog comments for the first time in the 90s, thinking they were so awesome. The whole world could tell me what they thought, not just about anything, but about my own stuff specifically. Wow.

Then came YouTube. No, that’s not quite right; YouTube is just the holy grail of awful Internet comments.

So the cool kids of the Internet don’t like comment posts. This has come up a lot recently, and there’s a minor backlash. The analogy to comments in real-world situations – Q&A sessions, business meetings, performance art – is helpful, but only if we can figure out…

… some similarities between Internet comments and real-world comments:

• They can be moderated heavily (confirmed users/registering with real contact info), moderately (anonymously registered users/Q&A session) or not at all (direct, anonymous posting/shouting match).
• They can be very useful (additional information, provocative or inspiring questions), bland (making the speaker repeat points already made, going off on tangents) or harmful (vicious arguments, heckling, trolling).
• Even at their best, they are often missed (by people who don’t stick around for the Q&A/don’t read comments); even at their worst, they can do some good (by showing how the speaker handles stress, by making them clarify their message as they restate it, by illustrating what not to do).

Some differences between real-world comments and Internet comments:

• Public comments are far from anonymous. We can all see you, dude. Notice that some forms of public comments allow more anonymity: talk shows on the radio and TV, for instance. Also notice that the quality of this type of feedback isn’t always great (“Hi, I don’t have a question, just a comment…”)
• Leaving a troll-y post on a blog or forum takes a few seconds of rage, three or four clicks, and some unedited typing. After that, the troll can go on with their day as if nothing happened. Contrast that with the heckler, or even someone who asks an incendiary question at a conference/talk: they now have to deal with the entire crowd, and maybe even with a bouncer.
• Public comments are transient; Internet comments stick around and bait every new visitor.

Consider this:

The single worst Internet “feedback” I have ever seen was a YouTube comment on a video of a family visiting the zoo. As they watch bear cubs play, the three-year-old says, “awww, they’re like little kitties!” The comment, plainly visible on the first page: “kitties? they’re bears you stupid bitch”

Can you imagine a public forum – a tech convention, a book signing, a high school debate – where a lone sociopath could get away with this sort of thing?

Some people do better in collaborative, challenging environments. Others prefer to work in peace and solitude. Some writers and directors read reviews of their work, others don’t. There’s likely no rational answer to the question of whether comments on the Internet are a good thing or not. Managing comments is the best we can hope for, but this is where the technological temptation rears its head (“just throw better PHP at it”). Captchas, user registration (including banning), comment moderation, and community guidelines all help, but not everyone wants to spend time running their blog like a night club. Some people just want to, you know, write.

With that said, I’m no longer allowing comments on this blog. You can reply to me on Twitter and I’m working out a system to make that easier. It’s the best way to manage the hecklers and trolls and allow me to just write.

There are a few of things that I’d like to address. Don’t worry, this won’t be a boring blog entry and I think it will be very enlightening for anyone that takes the read it. Let’s break it down into sections.

1. Anonymity on The Internet: It’s over. Being anonymous is how things were done back 2004. It’s 2009 and the are standard authentication tools like OpenID, Google Friend Connect or Facebook Connect that allow users to login with their credentials and submit content to the web as a real human and not an alias. I hate aliases. I’ve had one other alias and the influential power of “macdaddy” just wasn’t working out so in 2003 I went with AdamJackson and never looked back. If you’re in social media and you’re commenting on TechCrunch as “yourmom1972″ then your time is over because it won’t be long before everyone agrees that authenticating with your real first and last name and a photo is the best way to collaborate.

On Friday, I was reading this post on TechCrunch and someone by the name of “AJ” without an Email Address or Web Address posts this

How much did Evan pay you to write this post?

I’ve seen comments all week from anonymous cowards and, in all honesty, the likelihood of seeing a healthy contributing comment from someone that posts anonymously is nearly zero. Those that login with Disqus, Facebook Connect or their Google Account generally have something more meaningful to say. By the way, the commentor is inferring that CEO of Twitter, Evan Williams paid TechCrunch Editor Michael Arrington to write this post. That’s the first reply to that post and it’s complete bullshit.

I kindly reply to his comment because enough is enough.

STFU. Use your real name, URL and email address or GTFO.

I’d love to debate Twitter with you all day but hiding behind cowardice as an anonymous commenter is petty and childish.

Michael. Can you please require Disqus and Facebook Connect comments ONLY? I’m tired of this anonymous commenter bullshit. SUBSTANCE is needed on TechCrunch and the comments get worse every day.

Michael Arrington replies back with, “i would have marked it as spam but you beat me to it.” So Michael indicates that I was in the right for replying to this and he didn’t reprimand me so I’m sure he agreed with me despite not publicly saying it. The conversation explodes though and suddenly anonymous commenters begin attacking ME for my “bitch session” claiming that I need to chill out and that anonymous commenting has its uses and that I’m completely wrong.

No problem and I replied a couple of times but basically ended it by saying that this conversation is against the scope of the post so it’s best that we just leave it alone. It didn’t end there and I popped in a couple of more times to see how the conversation is going but basically I’m wrong and they’re right.

After running AdamsBlock and using Twitter for 2 years, I’ve learned that spammers and trolls never go away. There are ways to prevent them. On Twitter, I block 5-10 people a day. Someone says something negative to me or a friend and I block them. I have the power to do that and on AdamsBlock the anonymity of that chat room caused all of the crazies to come out. Using Facebook Connect on everything is going to become my only choice for authentication. If you want to interact with me, login using Facebook. If you don’t like it, don’t comment or read my content. I’ve never seen a comment from an authenticated Facebook user be a negative comment without also being backed up with facts and written from a respectful point of view. It’s the anonymous commenters who say, “you’re wrong fuck you” and that’s it.

It’s not negative feedback that I hate, it’s the lack of rich and interesting feedback that comes from anonymity that I hate. When, “pimpdaddy72″ becomes John Smith, the Realtor from Ohio, the game changes and John is suddenly representing himself, his business and his family and the feedback from him is actual constructive feedback and not garbage that spurs from him having a stressful day.

You can read the entire TechCrunch Thread HERE.

2. I’m Adam Jackson NO not that Adam Jackson: Many of you may not know this but I moved to San Francisco and a month before moving I realized that another Adam Jackson lived here and was working in the same industry. Luckily, prior to my move I still dominated the page rank of Adam Jackson on Google and I had the LinkedIN profile of “AdamJackson” where I believe he is “AJackson”. Sharing my name with someone in the industry hasn’t affected me until Friday. To offer up a little background, the other Adam Jackson runs a website called DriverSide.com and he is one of the co-founders of that site. He loves cars, doesn’t go to tech parties, doesn’t Twitter (that much) and isn’t really a social media guy. Thank goodness because it has so far meant that no one confuses the two of us.

Here is a comment on the TechCrunch Thread I mentioned earlier:

Adam Jackson,

you have 40,000+ updates on twitter(do u ever do anything other than twittering … i hope your customers are aware of this fact) …. and only 2500+ odd follower … did u ever think y? coz your updates are crap, for example, ‘I’m at Westfield Center (865 Market St, 5th Street, SF) .’

you have your own website ‘Ideapply.com’ and this redirects users to your blogging website .. how amazing… least you could have developed an official website for your 10employee company ..

You also have a LinkedIn profile with 323 connections… oops! but you only have 2 people recommending you. Another strange fact…

I hope now you would realize how real name affect your personal and professional life …

Oh my god! I’m shaking this is so serious! Not really so let’s break it down. This guy who posted anonymously (of course) got it right when he noted my 40K updates. His attempt to take shots at me completely failed when he chose to not click the link in my Twitter profile but instead search “Adam Jackson” on LinkedIN. He failed a second time when he saw two Adam Jacksons in SF and didn’t click on the guy whose image matched the one on my Twitter profile but the other Adam. He then took shots at his blog (which I’m not a fan of the domain name) and the guy also failed to find a link to Adam’s DriveSide.com page. He then looked at Adam’s connections and noted a measly 2 people recommending him and says, “another strange fact”

So to be totally honest, neither me or the other Adam could give a fuck about this comment because the commenter is clearly a complete idiot who can’t navigate the web. Adam Jackson (the other guy) maybe didn’t make things completely clear on his LInkedIN page or Blog but I doubt it. What was interesting was that for the first time in 10 months, someone thought he and I were the same. That’s interesting and sadly unfortunate. Actually, Adam Jackson may be a terrific guy or he might be a complete dick. I have no clue and I’d like to meet him one day but I have a feeling as he and I continue our reach globally through the web, this identity confusion may become more apparent. I’m not budging though and taking a drastic move in changing my name and neither should he. Let’s just see how this plays out.