Trolling will get worse before it gets better

If you thought that the internet had a chance of becoming a nicer place at any point in the near future, it might be time to give up hope.

"Harassment, trolls, and an overall tone of griping, distrust, and disgust" will stay the norm on the internet over the next decade, experts told the Pew Research Center in a new report.

The Pew Research Center and the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University surveyed about 1,500 technology experts, scholars, corporate practitioners and government leaders in July and August 2016 for the study, and the results are pretty demoralizing.

Forty-two percent of respondents thought the internet would stay the same sometimes less-than-pleasant place over the next 10 years, while another 39 percent said they thought the internet would become a more negative environment. Just under 20 percent of experts thought the internet had any chance of getting better over the next decade when it comes to harassment and trolling.

Experts responded to these questions in mid-2016, before any public conversation about fake news or the role of social networks in politics and the election. But they still had some interesting ideas about why trolling will last.

"Things will stay bad because to troll is human," the report said. Bad behavior isn't new: it just has a new name on the internet.

There are economic and political incentives to supporting and allowing trolling, particularly for social networks like Twitter and other tech companies that have little incentive to shut down trolls. And the media organizations that used to shape public conversations — and were dedicated to an appearance of civility — have shrunk in influence.

The continued creation of online communities, with AI and human moderators who fight trolls, will at least be one way to fight harassment online, experts thought.

The rest of the report is just full of quotes from the professors, digital strategists and engineers who responded. You can read more of their thoughts here, or just, you know, go on Reddit.