For some reason, Russian-speaking Internet users do not use many useful concepts, laws, and rules of thumb created by Anglophones. For those, the era of active network communication and mastering digital technologies began in the early 1990s, and by the end of the decade several interesting concepts had been created, which, with rare exceptions, the most interesting are not so common. Here we will explain how the failure of SOPA, today's closure of the Russian-language Wikipedia and the cat are related to a few unusual positions, why anonymous people are so angry, why some good publications on Habrahabr never have comments, and why the security bottleneck of any system is a man.

1. One percent rule
2. Dancing pigs
3. The theory of Internet activism from cute cats
4. Warnack's Dilemma
5. The effect of online disinhibition
6. Everest Syndrome

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One percent rule

The empirical principle 90-9-1, somewhat similar to the Pareto rule (20/80), describes the relationship between the number of people who will participate in the community, comment and just read. According to it, 1% or less of people will create new content, 9% will change it or comment on it, and 90% will just silently familiarize themselves with it without any participation. The rule also states that for every active participant in the Internet forum there are 99 people who simply read his message.

Is it true? Of course, the exact ratio will change, for example, as Akil Awan’s research showed on the radical jihadist forum, 87% of users wrote nothing, 13% wrote at least once, 5% wrote 50 or more messages, and only 1% left more than 500 messages. But even if there is a system of invitations and registration is closed, the creators will still be in the minority. This conclusion was reached by Michael Wu, who analyzed the uneven participation in hundreds of communities, divided by field of activity and type of audience.

Dancing pigs

The problem of Dancing pigs / rabbits is a concept in computer security that claims that the user neglects the security of the system literally for the sake of a momentary whim, and therefore the system should be ready for use with the guidance of a complete idiot. The concept was introduced in 1999 by Edward Felten and Gary McGraw: “If you give the user a choice between dancing pigs and safety, he will always prefer dancing pigs.”

Literally, this means that if, after clicking on the button promising dancing pigs, the warning “The application“ Dancing pigs ”can contain malicious code, harm the system, steal your money and deprive you of having children,” the user will still choose the pigs, without even reading, and in half a minute he will completely forget what he was doing. On the other hand, the user's fault is not so clear: he receives only a set of tips, and not complete protection.

The statement was confirmed experimentally : the study showed that many participants took a funny decorated copy with animated bears for this site of Bank of the West.

The theory of Internet activism from cute cats

The theory mixes Internet activism, online censorship and cute seals. In fact, most people do not care about any activism; instead, they just want to watch photos and videos of cute cats. They created a variety of tools to view this material: social networking sites (Facebook), social media (Reddit), blog platforms (Blogger, Livejournal, Twitter), image galleries (Flickr, Instagram), etc. that turned out to be useful for social media. activists who lacked such tools.

Zuckerman, author of the theory, claims that Web 1.0 was created for the exchange of publications of scientists, Web 2.0 is designed for photos of cute cats. If the tool is used for cute seals, then it can and will be used for Internet activism. If the state is going to shut down a website, people may lose the opportunity to look at cute cats, and hence the whole Internet activism. Sometimes, instead of the seals, they talk about pornographic materials.

And, however outrageous this principle may be, but it works. For example, censorship in China does not cause a protest: inside they have created their own tools to solve the problem of cute cats, and blocking Western sites does not affect the opinions of people. SOPA also threatened to close many popular sites, and Reddit, one of the most popular photo-sharing resources with cats, contributed a lot to the cancellation of the initiative of the act. Today's shutdown of Russian Wikipedia is primarily associated with the problem of seals and porn: the bill in question may limit their distribution.

Warnack's Dilemma

Created in 2000 and named after its creator, the original rule describes the lack of response to publications on the mailing list, the Usenet newsgroup or the Internet forum. The lack of an answer does not always mean a lack of interest in the topic put;

• The publication is correct, well-presented information does not need further comments. There is nothing to say, except as: "Yes, he is right."
• The publication is completely meaningless, and no one even wants to waste time, energy and traffic to indicate this.
• Nobody read the publication for some reason.
• No one understood the publication, but for some reason would not ask for clarification.
• For some reason, nobody cares about the publication.

The effect of online disinhibition

Modern anonymous communication in the network is characterized by complete disregard for any moral norms and social restrictions inherent in ordinary conversation with a person. Not feeling many inhibitions, some people are beginning to be more open and share their feelings in an attempt to achieve emotional catharsis. John Suler called this phenomenon benign disinhibition.

As a rule, in the worst case, the user may be restricted from using a certain forum, which will not protect him from registering with a new login, so very often unacceptable behavior can be observed on the network. Suler called this effect a toxic disinhibition.

The effect was already observed during the spread of civil amateur radio communications: racism, erotic fantasies, insults - all this was still in the 70s. Today, the exposure of the malicious nature of man and moral regression comes to extreme forms; for example, SWATing is possible, an anonymous call for a special purpose home outfit to an undesirable person, for example, who has banned you on a game server or Xbox Live moderator .



Suler cited six reasons why people behave differently than when they talk face to face:

• You do not know me. Anonymity as a protective mask allows a person to express what he would not have allowed in such a situation.
• Do not you see me. The network is a shield for the user, there are no usual physical manifestations of emotions: tone of voice, movement of facial expressions, gaze directions, etc., which cannot be avoided in a normal conversation.
• See you later. The difference in time zones and daily routines allows you to leave a message that will be read by the interlocutor much later, and you can never read his answer. On the other hand, thanks to the ability to edit messages and set the time for writing it, many of them do not speak so eloquently in the ordinary conversation, convincingly and harmoniously.
• It's all in my head. Due to the lack of visual contact, a person is forced to assign external characteristics to his interlocutors, and such a mental scheme of the physical component of the interlocutor obeys his own fantasies and desires.
• This is just a game. Escapism, based on solipsistic fantasies, makes us perceive cyberspace as a kind of game, where the rules of everyday life do not apply.
• We are equal. On the Internet, the social status of a person is unknown to almost anyone, and such a lack of hierarchy also makes network communication easier.

Everest Syndrome

Everest syndrome is a concept introduced in 1994 by Maddux. It is based on the example of the irresistible desire of George Mallory, an Olympic mountaineering champion who died in the 20s of the last century while trying to conquer Everest, describes the tendency that teachers and teachers will use the new technology, especially for the Internet. that it exists, without any apparent reason. It also describes the detrimental effect of an excessive amount of information resources and various tools available on the Internet.

The concept of death from PowerPoint or Hell PowerPoint, first introduced by Angela Garber, is associated with the Everest Syndrome. Often the information is unnecessarily abbreviated, because of the small screen size, abbreviations are often used that should be explained and deciphered, so viewing the presentations does not give a complete picture of the true nature of the issue being described. PowerPoint death is a common state of boredom and fatigue while watching a presentation due to the overload of the presentation slides and the speaker reading the text directly from the slides. The effect may be useful: Thomas Hammes, a former colonel of the Marine Corps, said that such “hypnotizing chickens” was useful when dealing with the press, when disclosing information was undesirable. In Switzerland, since May 2011, there is even a political party whose goal is to reduce the use of PowerPoint and other products for creating and viewing presentations. Instead of bringing a loss of 2.1 billion Swiss francs of presentations, it is proposed to use lecture flipchart pads.