As flippant as it may sound to some, anyone who's spent any particular amount of time in any kind of online community can tell you about a particularly disturbing rite of passage that every community that goes on for long enough seems to go through: the day a user threatens to kill themselves via post.
On Saturday night, micro-blogging service Twitter experienced its very first public suicide threat, by way of prolific Twitter user, NickStarr.I got wind of the story through another prolific and notorious user (though for very different reasons) Nick Douglas, who was asking for help on locating (and stopping) Starr on Saturday night.
A search on Twitter's search engine revealed mostly thoughts of concern directed to Starr, while a few said he was being "whiny" and others expressed apathy towards the situation, claiming he had done this before, all typical responses from the peanut gallery: many people become concerned, others become angry at the outburst, the persistent worry is whether or not the person is being serious. No one wants to unwillingly help someone kill themselves by their inaction.
What was most striking to me about this case was the lack of information on how to actually contact Starr in person. When I'd seen this go on in other communities, namely Livejournal, it's an entirely different situation: you may only know the person's screen name or vague whereabouts; you truly don't know where to begin.
With Starr, it was a very different scenario: he updated Twitter with his whereabouts constantly, and from the looks of his blog, attended parties and tech industry events quite frequently. You would imagine that he would be able to be tracked down somewhat easily, but from the looks of it, that was not the case.
No one, at least on Twitter, appeared to know where he lived or worked. As Nick Douglas lamented at the end of the night, without an actual physical address, police couldn't be sent out to check on him. It goes to show us how even in the face of constant complaints about "overshare" on the Internet and how everyone is so open all the time, the reality is, we don't really know too much about our social media friends and neighbors, just very limited pieces of information that they want to share with us.
In the end, Starr turned out to be OK and safe, finally sending out a Twitter update over 12 hours after sending out his disturbing threat. He said that he "just need some time offline" and explained that he "suffers from depression". Douglas, who had spent so much time trying to find him, says in response: "Nickstarr is alive -- until the next time I see him."
Image via Jonathan Crossfield