Shocking that a company behind the "Gawker Stalker" app, an app that allows you to stalk celebrities' locations from your phone, wouldn't do anything about this!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-avakrR…

Tough one, on a philsosophy level. There is a strong moral imperative these days to not record IP address or tracking info on news sites, especially for comments, or to favor email services that strip such information at a minimum from sent-mail headers, like gmail. Extreme anonymity at times can be politically or legally essential.

I remember being on another discussion site (Plastic.com) that got infested with a similar kind of trollery and it made the place suck (not that it didn't already have troubles). Assholes who embrace their assholery have great potential to make people want to be someplace else.

>a very real and immediate threat to the mental health of Jezebel's staff and readers.

for fuck sakes people...

There's actually a relatively simple workaround to keep Gawker editorial and Jezebel editorial happy here that may be legally safe (they need to check with their lawyers) that I just tossed over to them:

1. Track IP addresses for X days to let them ban and handle people

2. Toss out/auto purge ALL IPs then after some cut off so there is no lasting correlation between IPs and IDs.

Might be legally safe and keep everyone happy except the now banned trolls.

3 and 5: Explain yourselves.

why don't they just ban GIFs? (yeah that would suck but it would solve the problem)

9: Use your words.

I'm very confused by this. Obviously, the people posting the gifs are utter slime. But: the IP tracking thing? Is it that Gawker is dropping the ball and not logging IP addresses of commenters (which I really doubt), or is it that these commenters' burner email accounts and other practices spoof their IP addresses and make tracking useless? Is there a feasible technical solution Gawker has failed to provide? Because I've seen trolling commenters elsewhere, and it's pretty far from obvious ...

As to why Gawker allows its commenters to post images as comments, it's part of their brand,. I suspect they'd really like not to change that.

@7: Because just because it is someone's job to read the internet, and maintain a safe space for comments, doesn't give them the right to be free from harassment. They could just close their eyes!

Outsource comment approval to army of underpaid foreigners and/or underpaid interns who have spent so much time on the internet even the most violent and vile .gifs no longer faze them?

If it is such a huge threat to everyone's health, why don't they just ban gifs/images from comments?

@7,

Bitches ain't shit. That's their explanation.

If your staff is subjected to hazardous working conditions, you need to improve your work environment, better train your staff, and compensate them appropriately. It's not my place to say whether obscene gifs are as hazardous as, say, coal dust, but the principle is the same. If Gawker can't/won't effectively ban the gifs, they need to train their staff to deal with them.

Simple solution to this issue:

Ban burner accounts on Kinja from posting images. If you want to post an image in comments, you need to associate your Kinja username with an IP address/verified email address.

This won't entirely solve the problem, but it will cut down significantly.

"None of us are paid enough to deal with this on a daily basis."

Probably true, but makes me wonder what the dollar mount to deal with it on a daily basis would be...

Rape GIF's go beyond the normal bounds of trolling. But it would seem to me that there's a way to disable them. You can't post images, GIF's or videos in The Stranger's comments, and we're all still here.

@19: not sure about the compensation level, but I've spoken with people who work for streaming video companies and when they receive a complaint about content, there is generally a person whose job it is to view the questionable content and determine if the complaint is valid. It's a rotating position, they don't let any one person hold it for more than a few months at a time, since they recognize that having to go look at potentially nasty stuff a minimum of several times a day will eventually take its toll.

@24 What level is he? Do I have to bring the spell components or does he take care of that?

Shit website gets shit following.

@7 this is why the rest of society isn't getting on board with this corner of overly-reactive victimhood-seeking social activism. I'm actually being asked to "explain" my take on seeing bad pictures as a "mental health issue"?
Take care of yourself and your own shit. Crying "oh god my mental health, I'm encountering upsetting images on the internet" is for baby people. If that angle of the story crept any further out into the internet it'd be made into a mockery and rightly so.