Time Economics and Basic Politeness

The Information Wars Part XIV

"The two most powerful warriors are patience and time." -Leo Tolstoy

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is a form of information attack. It involves showering a node in a network with more attention than it can process.

I phrased the attack differently in order to make the analogous leap: 

more attention than it can process.

Recently I've worried that I, and perhaps many others, are under something like DDoS attacks. In fact, I'm certain that we are the subject of such attacks on some levels. Most of the time we probably ignore these attacks and move on, but there is a combination of a prisoner's dilemma and blackmail involved, and sometimes it is worth stopping and taking a swipe back at those making attacks. In this case, I wanted to do so patiently, and leave a record here for the Substack community (and maybe employees since there is a problem with the technology).

Now, before I move forward, I would like to point out that there is really no way to distinguish between somebody wasting our time maliciously, through incompetence, or due to mental illness without something like a personal psychological examination or a good evidence of motivations. At the level of something that approaches a DDoS attack, it doesn't matter. It's like (a less extreme example of) facing a perpetrator with a gun. You simply have to remove the threat. This is part of the reason why I was willing to be a bit harsh in my critique of Dr. Ardis and his hypotheses who should not have been given an emotionally promoted platform to consume millions of human hours without first doing more work (due diligence) with a larger range of competent people leading up to his attention grabbing moment.

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Appropriate Boundaries

Personally, I hate phrases like "appropriate boundaries" because they're so often applied in counterproductive ways or by social game players. But however fuzzy the boundaries of some etiquette (crypto boundaries are really just class barriers), well-communicated boundaries do work as a clear bright line under most circumstances.

Recently I've found several members of the Substack community crossing personally expressed boundaries, as in ignoring requests by other members of their community as to when, where, and how to engage.

So, just ban/block and move on?

Except those buttons don't seem to work with some people, and it's unclear as to why. I've emailed tos@substackinc.com about it, and hope to receive a reply soon.

I've only banned/blocked 2 or 3 people (nonsubscribers) and a couple of clear spammers. Abuse is the only reason I ban, though in a case like Professor Jeffrey Morris, that takes some explaining. Most other cases are obvious. For the most part, the Substack community is an excellent one. There are disagreements that are debated reasonably in a million different corners of Substack. Some of those disagreements are a bit hot, and still don't cross over into bloodsport. As it should be!

But here is where I got bothered: articles for Bitcoin beginners (here and here). Somebody who goes by "Ungovernable Rich" and advertises some sort of branding of rudeness, wants to take on politics surrounding Bitcoin with a wall of words that obscures lessons for beginners. This would be like taking over the parking lot at the school for drivers' education with activists moving rapidly around the parking lot, knocking on windows, and engaging teenage kids with questions about climate change while they're demonstrating the basic ability to back out of a parking space. Heck, even keeping activism across the street from the drivers ed school, like at an article not aimed at beginners that draws the attention of a wide crowd. That would be fine. Also fine would be the many thousands of other Bitcoin-themed discussion forums, assuming he hasn't been banned from them.

Yeah, there is a lot to unpack here. This reads like one of those times when somebody is talking about your profession, but it's clear that nothing they think they know about your profession is actually how your profession works, but you don't have the time to entreat anyone to three years of graduate school in a day.

Like the way most doctors, dentists, and pharmacists talk about statistics?

Like that, yes, except insistent and parked at the drivers ed school. One problem is Rich doesn't know what he doesn't know. Somebody who would say something like this clearly doesn't understand what Bitcoin is. But the larger problem is spamming the basic education posts.

And it's fine if somebody doesn't see the problem with Rich's understanding of Bitcoin. That's just means they're a Bitcoin beginner. But a primary point of Bitcoin is that each individual is sovereign within the network in terms of their own money. An algorithm that removes that agency would be something other than Bitcoin. And that's fine, but it's clear that we're being held hostage by somebody who has not put in the basic time to understand the topic. This could be sabotage, but I doubt it. I suspect he is just out of his depth at the level of the technology, but unaware of his limitations.

Rich seems to be Richard Seager, so far as I can tell. As an aside, I once worked with a guy in a bond trading group named Alan Seager whose name is an anagram for 'anal grease'. Shit happens, I guess.

What I found out is that Richard Seager is a climate activist with an academic degree to show for it. Okay, that's fine. I think I understand why the topic of Bitcoin triggers him, though I believe that's a misunderstood topic and that most people will come around to understanding that Bitcoin is about electricity commoditization and optimization. This veers into the advanced class topics, and far away from the beginners articles. But we have some disagreements about some topics, which is perfectly okay. Great discussion for another day.

(And honestly, if there were some way to organize comments so that his spamming commentary on every thread didn't force attention away from beginners' concerns, I wouldn't even lift a finger to moderate.)

I noticed that Rich was so active in engaging his community in New Zealand about the topic of climate change that he was eventually suspended from FOIA requests. Here is an example of how such an information exchange developed. It is unclear reading the exchange why Rich needed the government to convert carbon units for him since he is the degreed expert, or why he would think carbon emissions go down in the process of taking up a bureaucrat's time to perform additional work besides simple document uploads, but I see a bit of a parallel between my interaction with him and what appears to be biweekly ill-defined FOIAs.

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Personal Abuse

Here is where we cross well over the [next] line.

While I can't ban Rich, he can hurl abuse specifically at me or other people who comment on my substack. Honestly, I'm a bit of a potty mouth, myself. I hold back a lot online, but I couldn't care less about a few four-letter words or the ocassional p-bomb (you know…pfuck). I mean…I judge them on artistic merit, at least. What I find obnoxious is holding my articles hostage with abuse that I then have to spend time policing. And as nice as I was about it, I was told that my moderation was the abuse.

So, what I recommend to other substackers is to compare notes over difficult users—particularly those who also write. The system seems to treat their posting rights differently (why can't I ban him from posting?), and then they have the ability to drag the drama to their own quarters (which I can't do anything about unless/until I'm slandered).

There's a current attempt to take my substack down

It is likely that he refers to our exchanges, but doesn't want to actually link to them, and instead describe (vaguely) his victimization at my hands. Oh, the humanity.

Note: I did not contact Substack in any way until after Rich wrote this article claiming that he was being attacked, and I saw reference to me. I lost seven subscribers, including Rich, the day Rich made that post (it would be unusual to see more than one in a day). I'm not worried about the money or the influence of people who think my moderation of Rich is unreasonable (it's not). But I draw another line at the point at which somebody's apparent fantasy seems to include suggestions of malice in my character when the only steps I took were,

1. Explaining that the beginner Bitcoin posts were not the place for forceful political discussion that skipped the warrants prior to the conclusions.

2. Deleted posts that were vacuous, aggressive, or profane, and were posted after I explained boundaries.

3. Tried to ban Rich from posting (but that button doesn't seem to work as he kept coming back to post more).

For anyone who cares to look, again, articles for Bitcoin beginners (here and here) include almost all the posts that were made except the one with profanity and a couple (maybe three?) that were repetitive and aggressive after Rich's initial posts. I'm happy to be judged by what seems like a simple, straight forward, and honest defense of reasonable boundaries.

Substack needs to solve the problem of the faulty ban button and allow Substackers to moderate discussion to their own judgment.