Dear @AskFM, I've enjoyed using your platform for many years, but your absolutely piss-poor approach to handling spam, harassment, and threats is somehow even worse than Twitter. At least Twitter *pretends* to care about it. You clearly do not.



http://i.imgur.com/3gAPFBp.jpg



The image above is only one example of the shit I deal with from bizarre and creepy individuals who dedicated sizable fractions of their day trying to annoy, upset, or intimidate me using your service. In fact, this is one of the more benign versions - and let me assure you it represents only a sliver of the posts they left me this morning.



At least they used words today. Usually they just hammer the keyboard randomly and hit "send."



Other "questions" I get regarding your service involve threats, my personal details sent to me in an attempt to give those threats credibility, and lengthy essays by genuinely alarming weirdos who try their hardest to cross personal lines, insult members of my family, and otherwise desperately try to provoke a reaction from me. The saddest part is that these all seem to be coming from maybe three or four individuals at best, all of whom maintain multiple anonymous accounts so they can continue their behavior the moment they're banned or reported.



As the above image shows, they know full well there's absolutely no consequence for their behavior. They seem to have infinite time on their otherwise totally empty hands and no dignity to go with it. You *might* ban an account or two, but you won't go beyond that, and your justification for doing so is really flimsy.



http://support.ask.fm/link/portal/30134/30188/Article/61/Why-can-t-ASKfm-block-a-user-from-making-new-accounts



The harder something is to do, the less inclined they are to do it. I know this because when I revoked the ability to send me questions without making an account, I reduced a TON of abuse. Making an account is more effort than it's worth for most of them, but it's still pretty easy to do so a handful of total fuckups will continue to fling shit. You have the power to make it even harder to do and thin the herd more, whittle down their options, but you won't. You let me put up one easy hurdle to jump over, and won't put up any higher ones.



And really, "use a friend's computer"? How many friends do you these kind of fuckwits have?



What's hilarious is that last note - "Abusive users tend to get bored and stop at some point as long as nobody is feeding into their negativity."



I've got some news for you - they don't. They have no concept of boredom.



I know this because there's one particular troll, the one who tries harder than anyone to provoke a reaction, and they've been at it for months, if not close to a year now. Blocking them hasn't worked. Ignoring them only makes them try even harder. Ignoring them for long enough causes them to lose their minds and just start posting gibberish spam to get ANY sort of reaction.



This one person always writes in the same creepy style, asking "how it feels inside" when they insult my wife, threaten my family, or send me examples of homophobic behavior online. They've reserved dozens of Ask accounts already, cycling through them even when I ignore them just *in case* they've been blocked. When I managed to ignore this person for several months, they created accounts named after *existing users* who regularly send me questions, in an attempt to trick me into interacting with them. They moment they get a single response, they start their same old shit again. In all my years of working online, I've never met someone this obsessed. And you won't do fuck-all, even when they demonstrate just how easy it is to impersonate others.



I reported, I blocked, I went on to email you a long description of their behavior, with evidence. Your response? A canned and patronizing boilerplate email telling me how to report and block people.



Thanks to Twitter's inability to deal with harassment, I had to limit the way I use it so that I never see general @ replies and can only see responses to my own specific tweets for a few minutes. It sucked because I could no longer fully interact with my fans and answer their questions. Now, it seems, I have to say goodbye to another outlet for that. Ask was pretty good for me - I enjoyed talking to people, I liked discussing my job and personal issues with them. It was actually a pretty therapeutic outlet at first.



In the time it took me to write this out, they left another page's worth of bullshit for me. Just FYI.



Now I'm going to deactivate my account because it's unusable. I'm tired wading through poison to get to the worthwhile content, and I'm certainly not about to waste my day deleting hundreds of gibberish spam posts (you don't even have an ability to mass delete shit, for fuck's sake).



I'm sorry to my audience and community members who reach out to me on the service, who've asked questions about the games industry, who ask for advice/encouragement, and otherwise enjoy interacting with me on there. I'll try and find a new way of opening up communication, perhaps on my own site, but for now this is just another avenue to talk to my audience that I can no longer utilize because the amount of spam, vitriol, and venom on it has begun to outweigh the positive stuff.



As for the sad little pricks who spent hours at a time trying to get a reaction... I guess... you... won? Is that the word? I guess you did. I mean, I'm going to go and continue making a living doing the shit I love and you can languish in your miserable mediocrity, but... yay for you, I suppose.



Hope you find a life worth living.

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