5 Of Your Favorite Sites That Have Screwed-Up Dark Secrets

If you step virtual foot in the inn, you'll find an aggressive community of people who shout, "Oh yeah, cum for all!" and send private messages like, "You horny? What's your number?" If they like the look of your character, they might tell you that they want to "fuck [you] unconscious." That all sounds awful, but if you accidentally stumbled into the inn, you can just leave and get back to actually playing the damn game, right? Here's the problem: Part of the appeal for regulars of the, ugh, Rape Tavern is the rape. And while you can't rape someone over the internet (yet), you can harass people who are trying to flee you. One perpetrator described fleeing players as "really hot," because pursuing them makes it just like a real rape. It's unclear why anyone would admit that to a journalist, but here we are.

So imagine trying to play a game, only a bunch of people are following you around, bombarding you with questions like how old you are and whether you'd be willing to have sex for money, using racist and sexist language, and casting spells that emit white light so they can pretend that they're ejaculating. And if you complain, you're told that if you really don't like it, you can always log out, because otherwise anyone who tries to persist and play a game about killing monsters and collecting loot must secretly be really into pretending that giant pandas and trolls are jizzing on them. How nice that the virtual world also has a "Well she didn't fight back hard enough" excuse.

Oh, by the way, you only have to be 12 to play World Of Warcraft, and the Goldshire Inn is in one of the game's starting areas, meaning it could be among some baffled and horrified players' first experiences in the game. Players have spent years asking Blizzard to do something about the inn for both safety and their own sanity, to which the company has responded with, "Yeah, maybe we'll try something," and then not trying anything. At least WOW has faded in popularity, although that probably means we'll hear about a sex trafficking ring run through Fortnite any day now.

Scale that up, and at any given moment, Bitcoin miners are using enough energy to power 2.26 million American homes. And it's only going to keep increasing, because Bitcoins are booming and every transaction is designed to be a little bit harder than the last. One analyst estimates that, if prices remain steady, miners will use 24 terawatt-hours of electricity in a year. That's about what all 186 million people in Nigeria use annually, which will be a fun one for aid workers to explain.

That has consequences. On a personal level, Bitcoin miners, some of whom only have a vague idea of how Bitcoins worked, have seen their electric bills shoot up by $200. The small city of Plattsburgh, New York banned mining because their cheap electricity made it a hot spot ... right up until overage costs made electricity more expensive for everyone, regardless of whether they even knew what Bitcoins were. One mining operation was consuming 10 percent of the city's power. East Wenatchee, Washington also became a Bitcoin boom town, but unlicensed miners were melting insulation off wires and overwhelming transformer stations. One overheated transformer started a brush fire.

In addition to annoying locals, this is also terrible for the environment. One Mongolian coal-powered Bitcoin mine (a phrase no futurist could have ever predicted) puts out 24,000-40,000 kg of CO2 an hour. That's equivalent to 126,000 miles traveled by car. The price of a currency that's inefficient by design is the stupidest page in the future's textbooks on climate change.

Other ads include "Avoid cooking like you avoid Times Square" and "Cooking is so Jersey." Their ads are all would-be memes about how social interaction and adulting are, like, suuuper hard, because they all appear to have been written by a middle-aged marketing committee that spent half an hour browsing Twitter. Are you antisocial and too lazy or stupid to cook? Then Seamless is the perfect service for you, you childish moron! They also advertise with a weird attitude toward gentrification.

Gentrification is a complicated issue, but maybe it's not the greatest idea for a company to joke about neighborhoods getting rebuilt with expensive new homes if their target market is also made up of Millennials who can't afford those homes. Use Seamless, because cooking is for gross, un-hip poor people!

If that criticism is too abstract for you, Seamless also screws their delivery drivers by treating them like exploitable cogs with no rights, and they take a percentage from every order a restaurant gets through their site. There are four "commission levels," ranging from 12.5 percent to 20 percent, and the more a restaurant pays, the higher they'll appear in search results. Those commissions can add up to $110,000 a year for a typical restaurant, but the alternative is worse. In New York City, Seamless has such a monopoly that restaurant owners believe they'd be forced to close if they didn't have a presence on the site, making it a protection racket with whimsical hashtags. They don't dominate or annoy their other markets quite as much yet, but if you ever see a local ad about how you should order in because your mom is on her deathbed and is going to take the arcane art of spaghetti with her, you'll know that the cancer is spreading.

There are also huge arguments over nomenclature. Wikipedia's gun enthusiasts hate terms that they consider broad and meaningless (like the vague "assault weapon"), while their opponents argue that pro-gun users employ terms that are little more than PR-friendly marketing slogans (like "modern sporting rifle" as a euphemism for AR-15, because apparently modern sportsmen need to kill dozens of deer in minutes). That means pages and pages of bitter and esoteric arguments in lieu of doing anything productive, although that's admittedly not an online situation that's exclusive to Wikipedia.

It's not inherently problematic for Wikipedia to be full of interest groups. That's actually how the site functions -- you have to be invested in a subject to write thousands of words on it for free. And it's valid for the pages on various gun models to be focused on their technical aspects, because people look them up for that reason too. But that level of emotional investment can also skew your perspective, especially when it's a subject as heated as guns.

So the Firearms project has been accused of breaking Wikipedia's rules against canvassing for changes and using charged, debatable language, like the NRA's claim that they're America's "oldest continuously operating civil rights organization." Regardless of what you think of the NRA, there's a subtle but important difference between writing a Wikipedia page that uncritically declares their self-description to be true and writing a page that points out that this is how the NRA styles themselves, then presenting the cases for and against its veracity. But hey, Wikipedia articles are perpetually in flux thanks to behind-the-scenes debates, so we're sure that both sides will eventually be able to hash out a compromise any decade now.

Mark has a book and is on Twitter, a website with no downsides whatsoever.

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