The patient is a global meta-organism comprised of several billion homo sapiens sapiens. The patient is several thousand years old since its inception and several decades old in its current form; a precise age cannot be established as the current form fluidly emerged out of previous forms.
The patient possesses several meta-organs which may overlap and share H. s. sapiens with each other and may be subdivided into sub-organs. Examples of organs include nations, corporations, political parties and fan clubs. Due to the fluid-form properties of the patient, a full taxonomy is not practical to carry out.
Medical history
The patient has a long history of infections affecting large parts of its H. s. sapiens body, most recently the Covid-19 pandemic.
The patient has a strong tendency towards autoimmunity, with H. s. sapiens attacking and killing other healthy H. s. sapiens, most often on the individual scale. Organ-scale autoimmunity happens more rarely, and when it does, most often between Nation-type organs or political party-type ones within a nation-organ.
The patient’s corporation-type organs have a tendency to become tumorous, binding large amounts of resources and putting self-preservation above the preservation of the organism. In some cases, the organs have turned cancerous and spread across the organism, swallowing smaller organs and merging with similar-sized ones.
The patient is not vaccinated against major changes in climate.
Acute symptoms
The patient is experiencing acute cases of resource shortage, autoimmunity attacks and various tumors and cancers. An onset of climate changes appears present.
Proposed treatments
A large part of the resource shortage is caused by tumors and cancers. These are generally non-vital organs which may be removed without majorly affecting the well-being of the patient. Additionally, changing nutritional sources for the individual H. s. sapiens towards less resource intensive food sources may reduce the resource shortage further. More generally, reducing energy consumption across the organism may further alleviate the resource shortage; details to be discussed with the patient.
The above treatments also would reduce the intensity of climate change.
The strength of the autoimmune attacks may be decreased by suppressing availability and lethality of weapons, both on an individual level and on an organ-level.
Schedule
The treatment may be administered immediately upon approval by the patient.
I’m going to assert that the human interface guidelines on this subject are outdated. For this, I need to go into some depth first. If you’re just interested in when to use it, I make my recommendation at the bottom.
This is an ancient convention among OS HIGs regarding the use of ellipses in menu items. In essence, it works as thus:
If you click an action in the menu, it immediately does something
If you click an action in a menu that has a … at the end, it first asks you something (in a dialog box).
Details for different HIGs can be found on Stackoverflow, strangely enough. I find this section particularly interesting:
The visual cue offered by an ellipsis allows users to explore your software without fear.
Fear. That’s not a word I want to see anywhere near my UX evaluation form. And visual cue? It’s only slightly larger than the smallest possible symbol.
So I dug around a bit – it’s present since the very first iterations of Windows and macOS, as well as some DOS versions, during which time it actually had some affordance thanks to monospacedness:
Notably, this is a decade before “User Experience” as a term was coined. During this time, using computers indeed was scary: “one wrong keypress and everything disappears” was a thing back then.
However, ellipses didn’t actually prevent you from making a wrong keypress, but they did provide a mostly consistent way of distinguishing actions which make everything disappear immediately from actions which first show a dialog (which you can escape from) before everything disappears once you knew about this. So either you learned this pattern (which isn’t super obvious), or it does nothing for you – but gives ample opportunity for others to tell you to RTFM.
Fast forward some 40 years and computers now have variable fonts and smaller pixels (and many more of them) and ellipses have become so tiny, they’re very easy to overlook. They have been carried forward from edition to edition of the relevant HIG, but I highly doubt they’ve been reconsidered. Meanwhile, in the wild west that is the web, nobody knew about these rules, nor did anyone care, so it’s rarely seen in the web, and when website building gave way to modern webdev and mobile apps, it got completely lost here. Instead, the ellipsis has found it’s way into overflow menus everywhere, replacing the hamburger menu in some cases.
Even on Apple’s very own HIG page, this example is shown in the context of iOS:
Just like “Save as…” needs additional input so it knows where and as what to save, “Share” needs additional input before things before it can know whom to share it to. But it’s been forgotten.
Which brings us to today, where in practice this guideline is ignored when building apps.
The problems
As said earlier, the ellipses are barely visible today and don’t really offer any affordance to most people.
Additionally, the ellipses model doesn’t account for the humble Save menu option: On first use it requires you to specify where and as what to save it, on second use it is an immediate action.
There also is the question if it actually makes things easier to understand. Take one half of Audacity’s Effects menu, for example:
Outside of the absolutely overwhelming number of options (which, as an aside, I since have ordered into subcategories), you can see an overwhelming number of ellipses here, which don’t really serve anyone.
Remember, one of the stated purposes of using it is “users can explore the app without fear”. But what does a user expect when they go to this menu? Well, they want to apply an effect. Whether the effect they choose shows a bunch of sliders or not isn’t massively relevant here, it’s entirely predictable to the user what’s going to happen (an effect gets applied to the audio) and what to do if they accidentally apply an effect they don’t want (undo). There is no fear here, the ellipses are unnecessary.
Additionally, the plugin manager option used to be called “Add/Remove Plugin…”. I removed any ambiguity here on whether it’s an instant action or something that opens a dialog by renaming it to “Plugin Manager”. It’s a manager, it’s never going to be anything but some sort of dialog. Having a … here is unnecessary, because users will never be confused as to what it does.
If you still are on the fence whether ellipses actually solve a problem, consider this example:
We have two print options right next to each other. Our guidelines say this is fine; the Print option is an action and works without any settings (presumably printing one page from the default printer), while the Print… option summons some sort of dialog which lets you choose printers before it does something.
Does this look any intuitive whatsoever to you? To me it doesn’t, at all. This may be fixable by making it less ambiguous (“Print now using default printer” vs “Print setup” or something), but as it stands, it’s just a duplicated option and you’ll never know which one to click.
Especially when you’re not wearing glasses.
When to use ellipses today?
With all of the above in mind, I’d say the new guidelines should be as follows:
Use ellipses in menu items when the text itself is incomplete. So for example, “Save as…” would retain the ellipsis, while “Save Copy”, “Create Backup” or just “Save” would not have one.
When naming menu items, name them clearly and unambiguously. For example, an option simply titled “Overwrite” on it’s own is ambiguous as to what is being overwritten. Adding this information makes it much more clear: “Overwrite my_holiday_photo.jpg”. In the example above, “Add/Remove Plugins…” is ambiguous, “Plugin Manager” is not.
Use ellipses in cases where not doing so would confuse users. There’s no point going “but the guideline says” when your users are getting significantly confused by what you’re doing. This is universally true in design.
Kurze Frage: Sieht das hier nach Werbung aus, die einem seriösen Medienhaus würdig ist?
Natürlich nicht. Dieser Quatsch kommt von Werbenetzwerken, die behaupten, sie könnten “Native Advertising” betreiben, aber tatsächlich ist deren “Native Advertising” eher ein wilder Mix aus Betrügern und dummen Inhalten.
Die hübschen Frauen sind vielleicht aus irgendeinem Spiel (wahrscheilich: bei ersterer ist eine Skyrim-mod, bei zweiterem ein KI-Bildgenerator), aber auf jeden Fall nicht aus RAID. Und nein, RAID ist auch nicht das realistischste Spiel des Jahres 2023, denn es ist weder super realistisch…
…noch ist es aus dem Jahr 2023 (sondern 2018).
Gleiches gilt nebenbei für Forge of Empires, das “beste Strategiespiel aller Zeiten”, was tatsächlich in 2012 und 2013 in ein paar eher unbedeutenden Awardzeremonien nominiert wurde und eine noch unbedeutendere gewonnen hat.
Aber zurück zu RAID. Wenn man die Werbung klickt, bekommt man eine volle Ladung Porn-bait
Egal, welche Optionen gewählt werden, der Fragenkatalog rattert seine 8 Schritte durch und dann landen wir auch schon bei RAID – nur diesmal mit dem Vorwissen, dass wir bis Level 10 spielen müssen, bevor die “versteckten” “18+”-Inhalte kommen, die die “volle Aufmerksamkeit” verlangen.
Schwindel mit Schwindlern
Gucken wir uns als nächstes unseren dreifachen Heiligen an, der gerade einen Level99-Engel heraufbeschwört oder so.
Wenn wir uns den anklicken, landen wir auf “Ratgeber der Gesundheit”. Das “Magazin” hat genau 5 “Artikel”, die alle der dünnste vorstellbare Inhalt sind: “33 Lebensmittel für bessere Abwehrkräfte” sind 33 Lebensmittelnamen ohne nähere Erläuterung, gefolgt von einer Liste von Vitaminen, ebenfalls ohne nähere Erläuterung, gefolgt von der Standard-Zufuhr-Tabelle – das ist alles. Und auf dieser unglaublich dünnen Seite steht ein Klopper von Advertorial über irgend ‘ne Medizin gegen Schwindel:
Aus diesem Advertorial (und der mehrfach verlinkten Shopseite) geht eine Sache nicht hervor. Zwar wird Naturheilkunde, Heilpflanze, Arzneimittel alles mehrfach erwähnt, aber das eigentlich Wichtige steht klein und nicht lesbar ganz unten – mit einem Kontrast von 2.75:1, was bei schlechteren Augen und/oder Bildschirmen eher wie Schneemann im Schneesturm aussieht. Darum hier noch mal ganz groß:
Das Angebot ist kein Ersatz für Medikamente oder andere Behandlungen, die von einem Arzt oder Gesundheitsdienstleister verschrieben werden.
Dieses Produkt ist nicht dazu bestimmt, Krankheiten zu diagnostizieren, zu behandeln, zu heilen oder zu verhindern.
Wirkstoffe: Anamirta cocculus Dil. D4, Gelsemium sempervirens Dil. D5. [Produkt] wird angewendet entsprechend dem homöopathischen Arzneimittelbild
Es ist also Homöopathie, die aber nicht mal den Anstand hat, diesen Fakt offen zuzugeben.
Geraune mit Versicherungen
“Krankenkassen verheimlichen”, “Pflegekassen verheimlichen” – mit diesen Formulierungen wird etwas sehr natürliches (“wer seinen Berater nicht fragt, bekommt auch keine Beratung”) als skandalös dargestellt, und direkt die Lösung präsentiert: Beratung von anderen Versicherungen/Kassen/Anbietern.
Ob die beworbenen Berater was taugen oder nicht, kann ich an dieser Stelle nicht beantworten, zwielichtig ist diese Werbemasche allemal.
Alufolie um Kopf und Türgriff
Wir sind offiziell bei Clickbait-Werbung angekommen. Wenn bei den vorherigen Werbungen zumindest noch irgendwo eine Verbindung zwischen der Werbung und dem, was tatsächlich angeboten wurde (und die Verbindung war schon dünn!), haben wir hier jeglichen Zusammenhang verloren. Die Seite hat 100 Sicherheits-Tipps, jeder Tipp mit 2x Werbung eingebettet, und keiner erwähnt Alufolie! Stattdessen:
1. Ersetzen Sie die Schrauben der Türscharniere durch längere
28. Verwenden Sie immer eine Firewall zum Schutz des Wifi-Netzwerks
81. Geld im Katzenklo verstecken
89. Rutschfeste Badematten für jede Wanne und Dusche kaufen
Da freuen wir uns doch auf die nächsten Artikel des Seite:
Diese Contentschleudern verkaufen nix, aber sie bieten unendlich Werbefläche. Will heißen, was auch immer an Werbegeld an den Spiegel oder die Zeit rausgeht, kommt vielfach wieder rein durch die Menge an Werbung auf der Contentschleuder selbst.
Seriöse Werbenetzwerke für seriöse Angebote?
Die müllspuckenden Werbenetzwerke sind hier vor allem Outbrain und Taboola. Das soll nicht heißen, dass die anderen Netzwerke irgendwie großartig besser sind – Google Ads verbreitet Malware seit Dezember, und das haben sie anscheinened immer noch nicht in den Griff bekommen. Google und Facebook stehlen dazu auch noch Geld von sowohl Werbetreibenden als auch Medienhäusern.
Outbrain behauptet zwar, diverse Dinge nicht zuzulassen, in der Praxis lohnt es sich für sie aber nicht, zu genau hinzuschauen. Eine Inhaltsplatform, die voller Spam ist, ist ungemütlich für die Menschen, die sie verwenden wollen und der Spam kostet auch noch Hostinggebühren. Ein Werbenetzwerk, das voller Spam ist, macht Geld.
Der Übergang von ordentlicher Werbung zu unlauterer Werbung und Spam ist fließend, doch im Fall von Taboola und Outbrain ist niveaulose Clickbait-Werbung nicht nur im Programm, sondern sogar auf der Startseite vorgestellt:
In anderen Worten, wenn man Werbenetzwerke irgendwie nach aktiv gewollter Qualität der Werbetreibenden sortieren kann, dann sind Outbrain und Taboola irgendwo ganz unten. Selbst TrafficJunky (das ist PornHub’s Werbenetzwerk, bekannt für “Willige Frauen in deiner Nachbarschaft”) sagt nicht so explizit, dass sie Müll in ihrem Netzwerk haben wollen.
Kurze Frage an die Medienhäuser und Redaktionen
Grundsätzlich sollten sich die Medienhäuser jetzt eine Frage zum Native Advertising stellen:
Angenommen, Native Advertising funktioniert, weil die Leute eher redaktionell aussehende Inhalte lesen, und die Glaubwürdigkeit der Publikation die Glaubwürdigkeit der Werbung mit beeinflusst… heißt das nicht im Umkehrschluss, dass mülliges Native Advertising die Glaubwürdigkeit der Redaktion ruiniert?
YouTuber kennen schon längst diesen Zusammenhang. Wer zu schnell, zu früh und/oder zu oft fragwürdige Sponsorships akzeptiert wird öffentlich von den eigenen Fans geröstet. YouTuber trennen sich oftmals bei den kleinsten Anzeichen von Fehlverhalten der Sponsoren von selbigen, teilweise haben sie ganze Forensektionen dediziert, um ja nichts zu verpassen. YouTuber bauen sich Vertrauen aus dem Nichts auf, das gilt gleichermaßen für einzelne Influencer wie Rezo als auch für größere Produktionen wie Kurzgesagt.
Warum müssen Medienhäuser dann ihre Glaubwürdigkeit mit einfach zu vermeidenden Müll verspielen?
Ich sage: Schaltet algorithmisch ausgespieltes Native Advertising aus. Wenn ihr unbedingt Native Advertising machen wollt, guckt euch zumindest vorher an, wer bei euch so tun darf, als sei er ein “Vorgeschlagener Artikel”. Und wie der Artikel/das Advertorial aussieht. Outbrain hat kein Problem damit, euch “Wundervoll aggressive Windschutzscheibennotizen, die du unbedingt klauen solltest” auf die Hauptseite zu setzen.
so, i was with my coworkers partying having just released musiGANy 3
That’s your AI music generator thingy, right?
yeah and you know how it goes the company pays for all of the drinks so I’m gonna use all of the drinks
Of course.
and well first we just went to the pub to get us glowing up not sure john got the memo though he downed like half a bottle of vodka
Oh dear.
anyway, once we were done there we went to uh one of the clubs anyway dont remember lol and we had the idea to demo our app to the crowd
No crashes this time?
nope😎 also no endless loops all went fine but then content id said we stole something?
Eh?
so the dj told us to stop
But doesn’t your app generate music from scratch?
it does! well it should we do train it on real music but like it clearly is fair use
If you say so. Anything else?
oh yeqajh yeah ive got tea to spill 😏 maria got absolutely railed by some guy
No way!!
and the best part i got it on cam here look [image could not be loaded] oh strange it doesnt let me sened is she on the npl or somethign
???
no porn list or something its bullshit the ai identifies blond chick as the same thing
But Maria is a brunette?
as i said its bullshit anyw ill show you later still got one more thing
Please tell me it doesn’t get worse than that.
sure does so we took the wayme home and you know promenade road
Let me guess, it crashed into one of the many flower pots they have to slow traffic?
almost but not quite however it did make john puke
Ew.
and because he went everyone joined in
Ewwww. Did you clean up?
i wanted to! but the thing just slammed the door on us before we could even attempt cleanup i hope nobody had to take it after us
I just checked the reviews, looks like someone did:
Absolutely filthy. Sick everywhere, ceiling was written on with lipstick, and someone left their panties. I couldn’t request another vehicle instead of this pigs dye. Absolutely terrible, I’ll never order this again, even if it does come with random wallets.
⭐
Rating: 1 out of 5.
A wayme user
ohshit i dont remember the lipstick WAIT FUCK MY WALLET
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We live in a time where apparently Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are running a tight race of who can kill their own social media network faster than Rupert Murdoch did with MySpace and who can lose more money in the process than Yahoo! did with tumblr. Musk and Zuck are being supported in their quest by the unlikliest of partners: Discord, Telegram, Whatsapp and various governments. So what is happening?
Social media is connecting us
Social media – and stop me if you heard this one before – brings us one main benefit: Staying connected with friends, family and classmates, and finding new friends. This benefit very clearly serves a need within all of us, as becomes evident when you attempt to leave a social network: Staying connected becomes much harder and takes lots of effort in 1:1 conversations to keep the connection alive.
Yet, at the same time, social media has become a battleground of attention. It’s a free-for-all between advertisers, influencers and your friends, and your friends are hopelessly outmatched. Facebook is a marketplace competing with ebay, YouTube is competing with TV stations on ad money, and inbetween it all are influencers, opinion leaders and content creators, trying to get their voice heard and their art seen.
And it’s tiring.
Social media is dividing us
This battleground of attention is particularly nasty when it comes to politics. There is no discussion, there never has been. It’s a strawman building contest, the “other side” needs to be vilified, and the most outrageous believable claims are typically the most viral. Social media sites intentionally or unintentionally support this behavior: Enragement = Engagement. And once the villain is constructed, it can be justifiably attacked, either with hate online or with hammers, guns, explosives or incendiaries offline. Throwing soup, cakes and paint suddenly is one of the least worrying outcomes in context.
But remember, the battleground of attention isn’t actually why we are on social media sites! It’s a byproduct of the technical availability of it. It’s a fluke, caused by a product manager many years ago figuring out that by adding a “share publicly” option, social media also can take over the blogosphere.
Social media is dying
During the rise of social media sites, there was nothing which could connect us in just the same way. IRC and email were cumbersome and ill-suited to picture sharing. SMS and MMS got expensive real fast, and the very thought of using mobile data when it wasn’t strictly necessary burnt a hole in our pockets.
This situation has changed. Group chats and communities exist, on Discord, Signal, Telegram, Whatsapp and more, and they help us stay connected with friends, family, classmates and find new friends. Social media is obsolete.
Group chats are the future
Group chats don’t need to participate in the battleground of attention. Should an influencer invade a space and start promoting products, an opinion leader appear and always and exhaustively talk about the same issues, or a new parent share baby pics excessively you can just make a new group chat with everyone you care about, and without this annoying person. The original group chat may grow quieter or die altogether, but at no point did anyone need to interfere, kick someone, or hurt anyone’s feelings.
Group chats also facilitate the one good thing about Google+: social circles. It’s not just possible but naturally occurring that you share stuff with only the people you know will care about it – you ask your question on how to draw perspective in your art group chat, share the news that you just broke up in your close family group chat first, and geek out about model trains in a model train group chat.
To me, the group chat apps of today – especially discord and signal – have completely replaced social media as a way to stay connected. To me, twitter now is assuming the role of YouTube for most intents and purposes: It’s just media now. Media which I passively consume and sometimes create, the battleground of attention.
A battleground that no longer is a source of social connections.
We all know that big tech has a problem, from unfair policies to monopolistic bullying behavior. Back around new year 2018, I finally had enough and made an account on Mastodon – a federalized, not-for-profit-but-for-good kind of Twitter alternative. I’d be a trendsetter, I invited all my friends, some of which joined as well – but very quickly I was back on twitter again, anyway. What happened?
I didn’t know back then, but I think I do now. Part of the problem was the network effect, with just more interesting people being on Twitter than Mastodon, but the other part is what I want to talk about here:
Mastodon has some inherent structural problems.
Instances are fragile & exploitable
Trust & safety is awful
The UX gets sacrificed for band-aid fixes.
Let’s tackle these one by one.
Fragile Instances
Mastodon runs on the idea that there is no central server, but instead a federated bunch of servers owned and operated by random people on the internet (including yourself, if you want to). This “fediverse” is somewhat interoperable, so you can follow and talk to people from other instances. There’s some caveats to this, to which we come later.
“random people on the internet” doesn’t sound trust-inspiring, and this is because it isn’t. A quick scroll to instances.social shows that some 73% of the instances listed have been shut down again. Why? Probably for the same reasons why most personal website projects die: Lost interest, too expensive, too time-consuming to maintain. If you host your own instance this is fine – it’s yet another personal project after all – but if you have users, this is a problem: As a user, I cannot count on my social media profile to still exist tomorrow. This is in stark contrast to any of the more established social media websites and honestly, even the most chaotic of startups, where you generally can count on being told that they’re closing shop a few weeks before the lights go out.
No trust, no safety
Trust & Safety (TnS) is a catch-all term for the teams at websites that write and enforce community guidelines, combat fake news and spam bots, moderation and stuff like that. Since Mastodon is federated, this team often consists of one person: The instance owner.
I have had my fair share of volunteer TnS work over the years, and I can tell you: This stuff is very time- and soul-consuming. The community you run has certain expectations on what content is and isn’t shown on the server and will both yell at you if your rules and enforcement is too strict, and also if someone broke the rules while you were asleep and it was able to stay up for a few hours. For more subject-focused matters it’s often somewhat more forgiving – very few people will show up on a model train subreddit or discord server with the intent to post anything but model trains. But Mastodon generally doesn’t work like this, rather, you, as a user, choose your home instance (possibly the same one your friend uses) and once you have it, you post whatever. And “whatever” ranges from porn to gore to CSAM – child sexual abuse material.
In which case you, as the instance owner, already are in hot water, hosting CSAM will get the cops to your door sooner rather than later. For companies like Facebook and Twitter, this is part of their calculations. They can hire content reviewers and – in theory anyway – take steps to ensure that these people don’t break from constantly watching the worst part of humanity. For a mastodon instance, the best you can do is get volunteer moderators – untrained, unaware how bad it can become – and hope for the best. Or shut down the instance once it becomes unbearable.
Blanket banning
There is a small ray of light for the TnS matter though: Likeminded people tend to be on the same instances. By simply blocking any interactions from an entire instance, an instance owner immediately can get rid of a large chunk of potentially problematic users…. Or the entire country of Japan. The owner of one instance I’m on felt compelled to essentially block all mastodon instances ending in .jp to not have to look at lolicon content – sexual drawings of young girls, something legal in Japan and some other countries, but deeply illegal in many others.
This kind of blanket banning has some degrees of severity – maybe images from these instances won’t be served, maybe posts from these instances won’t be shown unless you follow someone, maybe all interactions are banned. Whatever setting the instance owner chooses, it directly affects the experience of the users, from “I have to leave my timeline to look at this image” to “I actually need to have a second account on another instance to interact with a friend”.
User experiencen’t
Mastodon, being an open source thing, of course comes in many forms and colors. Some instances try to emulate twitter’s (now: old) design, some try to emulate tweetdeck, some instagram, some are non-browser-based standalone apps, and so on. But as far as I can tell, they all have in common that they leak abstractions – especially this be language about “instances” when moving accounts, or usernames being @username@instance.tld. It also doesn’t feature a real search function (if you want random people to find your content, use a hashtag) or a quote-retweet equivalent (because it encourages people yelling at each other). You can’t even just join mastodon, you first have to jump through the hoops of understanding what instances are and then doing even more research to find which one suits you.
In the face of the aforementioned I can understand some of these decisions, sort of. Alas, I don’t think they’re particularly good decisions. There are tools which can be used for TnS in a federated system – shared blocklists, a CSGO-overwatch-like system, and more – which would do a better job than the current systems. Putting UX last is ultimately what made me stop using Mastodon:
It’s hard to sign up and get friends to sign up.
It’s hard to find interesting things.
It’s hard to share interesting things you find and add commentary.
Ein Gedanke, der mir seit Jahren immer mal wieder im Kopf herumschwirrt, ist folgende Positionierung des Deutschen Olympischen Sportbunds zum Thema eSports:
Eine weitere Entscheidungsgrundlage war der Inhalt der Spiele und die entsprechende Darstellungsform am Bildschirm. In vielen Spielen ist die Vernichtung und Tötung des Gegners das Ziel des Spiels. Insbesondere die deutlich sichtbare und explizite Darstellung des Tötens von virtuellen Gegnern ist mit den ethischen Werten, die wir im Sport vertreten, nicht vereinbar.
Ohne da jetzt tief aufzudröseln, ist der Gedanke hier verständlich: Wenn in CS:GO die Terroristen Bomben legen und Kopfschüsse verteilen, ist das eine wesentlich andere Hausnummer als wenn Bayern München einen Luft-und-Gummi-Ball in ein Netz schießt. Allein schon vom Jugendschutzgedanke ist das eine ganz schlechte Idee – und selbst CS:GO-Spieler wollen bestimmt keine Jugendteams voll mit 8- bis 13-Jährigen in ihren Pubs sehen.
Wenn man aber diesen Gedanken ein bisschen weiter verfolgt, öffnet sich schnell eine ethisch komplexe Thematik, nämlich die der Gewaltdarstellung in olympischen Sportarten. Eine ganze Reihe von Sportarten basiert zu großen Teilen auf schwierigen und teilweisen heute verbotenen Praktiken. Zum Beispiel:
Fechten ist Form des Duells. Duelle waren bis vor “kurzem” (19. Jh) ein Weg, seine Ehre wiederherzustellen, in dem man den Ehrekränker (also jemand, der dich beleidigt o.ä. hat) auf faire Weise im Duell bekämpfte und ggf. verletzte oder tötete.
Diverse Formen des Schießens (Bogenschießen, Pistolenschießen, Biathlon etc.) funktionieren als eine Form der Soldatenausbildung, einzig das Ziel muss durch feindliche Köpfe ausgetauscht werden. Biathlon insbesondere basiert auf der Sportart (?) “Militärpatroullie“, bei der 4 Athleten 30km auf Ski unterwegs waren und auf halber Strecke mit 18 Schuss pro Nase auf Zielscheiben schossen.
Der moderne Fünfkampf basiert auf schwedischer Soldatenausbildung. Die Disziplinen Fechten, Pistolenschießen, Schwimmen, fremde Pferde reiten und Laufen repräsentieren ganz gut, was man so erwarten kann, wenn man sich hinter die Feindeslinie gekämpft hat, die Munition ausgegangen ist und man auf geklauten Pferden wieder zurück will.
Natürlich haben Athleten dieser “PvZielscheibe”-Sportarten nie die Absicht oder die Illusion, jemanden zu töten. Und auch in der PvP-Abteilung sind KOs gewünscht und Hirnverletzungen und längerfristige neuropsychiatrische Erkrankungen geduldet, aber getötet werden soll keiner. Gleichzeitig ist eSportlern ebenfalls bewusst, dass der Headshot in CS:GO nicht vergleichbar ist mit der Tötung eines echten Menschen.
Ich könnte an dieser Stelle noch eine ganze Weile weitermachen, mit weiteren Gegenargumenten gegen die DOSB-eSport-Entscheidung, oder einer weiteren Analyse des DOSB Ethik-Codes (der, Überraschung, nichts von Gewaltdarstellungen oder Tötungen erwähnt), aber das alles wäre politische Diskussion.
Viel mehr interessiert mich dieser ganze historische und ethische Komplex von Sport und Gewalt. Warum basieren so viele Spiele und Sportarten auf Gewalt? Auf Grund von Tribalismus? Wenn ja, warum werden diese Sportarten nicht weiter hinterfragt? Wollen wir als Gesellschaft nicht vom Tribalismus weg kommen? Müssen Sportarten hinterfragt werden? Und so weiter.
Ich habe noch keine Antworten auf diese Fragen. Vielleicht gibt es irgendwann einen 2. Teil hierzu, vielleicht inspiriert er Leser:innen zur weiteren Recherche. Ich würde mich auf jeden Fall zu weiteren Infos hierfür freuen.
Leo Wattenberg 