Mass Reporting: Effective Vendetta or Fruitless Activism

People often mean well when they try to help someone, but sometimes they end up doing more harm than good, or is entirely misguided and it all becomes a wasted effort on everyone's part. Welcome to the phenomenon of mass reporting!

Mass reporting is when one person tries to get their followers or a group of people to report another person all at once in the hopes that the website administrators and moderators take notice sooner than usual—as in right that second. Oftentimes, the goal is to have the moderators ban the person instead of just punishing them based on whatever the event was, whether it was a small offense such as calling someone a name, or a huge offense, such as infringing someone's intellectual copyright. Sometimes someone offended this person directly, sometimes this person is trying to help someone else, and, rarely, these people just wants someone banned, so make up events to make this other person seem like the criminal. Then, altruistic people—trying to be their kind and helpful, but gullible, selves—reports the person the instigator posts about almost without a second thought. They get one link or screenshot as "proof" and think it's enough without realizing there might be more to this story. A few may point out these flaws in logic, but are often ignored or yelled at because the pack mentality has set in.

Here's an example of what I observed. First, let me tell you a little about the website where this event took place.

QuoteV is one of the few websites that allows users to create stories, quizzes and polls, but also embraces collaborative works within the website's function itself. That means that people can co-author stories, and have all party's username attached to one copy of this story on the whole website, instead of the website having numerous copies of the same story so each author can have it in their published section. In fact, QuoteV also allows writers to employ editors, similarly to co-authors, but not like co-authors. The differences between editors and co-authors as a website function is that the original writers of the story can remove editors whenever they wish and editors can't publish any changes they make to the story, whereas if that writer lets in a co-author, once the co-author made and published any changes, the initial writer couldn't remove them. That co-author would have to remove themselves after that point.

What most members of this site don't realize is that co-authors aren't editors. Editors help the writers improve their story, thus they wouldn't have any rights to the story itself, and that's why the author can remove them at any time. Co-authors write with the other writer, contributing their own ideas and writing style, so should be able to keep their rights to the contributions they make just as much as the other writer.

People are afraid of co-authors hijacking their story, where this new co-author goes off-script and writes whatever they want despite it going against the outline they agreed to, if there was an outline at all, or trying to get rid of the original author to keep the rights and credit of the entire story; however it can go the other way too. The original writer allowing in co-authors, and then somehow convincing the masses that this co-author isn't contributing anything, or is ruining the story, and then somehow gets the co-author booted off the story through peer pressure or, you guessed it, mass reporting, and the original author gets to keep the co-author's contributions to the story. You're probably thinking this is a crazy assumption, and no one would actually do this, but this is why the original author couldn't just remove their co-authors, but lots of members don't understand this, and often end up in disputes, and because they can't seem to solve it by themselves, they get their friends involved, and it becomes a bigger mess.

I've seen collaborations that work well, so this is not an impossible task, but it's because the partners understand what co-authorship means and take the time to work together from step one, agreeing on an outline, what roles each of them write in, and finishing their project. Together. Those that don't understand, fail, mostly because one of the authors, often the original, lets their ego get involved wants more credit.