Quote Originally Posted by Malevicton View Post
So, one more time: How do parsers cause or increase the amounts of negative behavior?
This so much. Parsers don't cause harassment. Harassers cause harassment. You can already report harassers.


Dear anti-parser folks, are you against the Internet? Why not? People use the Internet to harass, every day. You should be against the Internet. And basically every other form of communication ever invented by humankind, because, you know, harassment.

Sounds ridiculous? That's because it is. But that's quite literally the argument you are making. It's fallacious as hell.

Mind you I'm not saying harassment is a fact of life, whether in meatspace or online, we should quietly accept. Quite the opposite, we should actively fight it. But to do that, we need to fight harassers, and not the tools they happen to use. If you are so against harassment, petition SE to hire more GMs and implement better rules and mechanisms so harassers can get reported, warned, and/or banned both easier and faster. Step in if you see someone get harassed. Make harassment something that's not accepted within the greater community, and which is actively punished if it happens anyway.

But stop blaming some tool. A tool that does nothing but gather data & calculate numbers for you, because, you know, that's what computers are pretty good at (and humans suck at). It's up to you and your fellow players to give those numbers context and meaning. If the community is so shitty and toxic that people will use these numbers to harass each other, then they'd have done that without the numbers as well.