PG on trolls
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
I tend to down mod rude and aggressive people on here and I also up mod people who I think have been down modded unfairly.
I am not sure if I am alone with my way of thinking.
That's not a troll behavior ("troll" comes from the fishing term), and it's much less common here than on reddit or digg or (god help you) dailykos, where intelligent but unfashionable opinions get sunk hard.
There are only a few fashionable subjects around here (the importance of lisp, for example), whereas on other sites almost every question has a boilerplate answer, against which all opposition is "trolling". At any rate, no amount of actual "trolling" is as bad as groupthink. I'd rather a whole parliament of disagreeable colicky horseradish farmers than one unipartisan politburo.
ADDENDUM: Just thought I'd tack this on. Near the top of digg right now is this:
http://digg.com/business_finance/What_1_Million_Buys_In_Home...
That's sort of an interesting subject, but look at the comments. At the top with 9 diggs:
I dugg the story, but I refuse to click on anything with Forbes magazine. They force a full-screen ad (that you can skip) but in my efforts to help stop obnoxious advertising, I boycott Forbes.
Okay, there you have a 15-year-old combining 1) his irrational dislike of full-page ads (perhaps he thinks Forbes survives on government grants), with 2) his irrational proclivity to upmod things without looking at them, with 3) his belief that Forbes cares whether a 15-year-old looks at its slideshows. This sort of sad lameness is actually what kills online discussions, not "trolling".
Wow. That is the best sentence I have ever read in a comment thread.
It only becomes abuse when people resort to karma bombing: downvoting a lot of comments by one user without reading them in order to subtract maximum karma. Fortunately we now have several levels of software to protect against that.
I have seen quite a few comments that were extremely insightful, and/or interesting that got downmodded due to an unpopular opinion. The reason this is unfortunate is not only that you tend to miss these (assuming that there is a higher probability that you read or think about comments that are rated higher, which I am surely not the only one that is guilty of) but also that it tends to promote groupthink . This is especially important on a forum like this where we are here to learn and share our thoughts, ideas and experiences for a very particular niche: Starting startups.
I have noted that comments that don't promote the "build it and they will come" view tend to be voted down. Since this site is primarily populated with hackers this is entirely understandable - it is human nature to think that your part of the project is the most important. But the reason we all come here is (I presume) to learn. And the things about which we know the least are the things where we have most to learn.
It is not only a question of abuse, but also a question of opening peoples eyes to issues, problems and points of views that lie outside their expertise, but which they will probably encounter in a startup. And this includes such diverse fields as marketing, financing and sales.
I am here to learn about stuff I didn't know already, and that is often outside my field. In return for this I will offfer my opinions in the fields where I may have something to contribute.
At the end of the day this makes us all better entrepreneurs. Because as anyone who has ever done a startup will tell you - you have to get everything right. Hacking, finance, sales, PR, marketing, hiring, etc.
So I think that the up and down arrows should not express agreement, but insightfullness or truth. Not opinion. That way I will be able to judge the validity of a comment in a field that I do not know well by its points. And hopefully learn something.
Once there, I'll stick a post on the front page and get downmodded into oblivion.
And that's where I take my queue for comments. If I agree/ laugh/ enjoy a comment I upmod it. If I don't agree I leave it. If the guy is trolling I downmod it.
According to him, you should have just downmodded him. What's with all this discussion and reason?
I hope that my opinion about trolls is worthwhile, and hopefully will be corrected if it's not. What I observed, but didn't hear directly stated: trolls feel threatened. For whatever reason, unfamiliarity sends some folks into a state of neurosis, an upsetting of their equilibrium.
I think of a troll partly in the case of the Three Billy Goats sense: the troll is an owner of a critical pathway. He collects tolls (tribute) a/or has a reputation to uphold in performing his daily routine. He is defining and defending the status quo. If he sees that you wish to build a new alternative (bridge), this threatens his current monopoly. Instead of scaling his current operations and building new bridges, outsourcing the admin of them, and franchising the operation, he wants NO NEW BRIDGES. Perhaps he inherited his power, or wrested it away in a primitive sense. Any evolution of methods that doesn't go the way he likes, he will thwart, dismiss, or destroy. Perhaps it's bullying, not to defend the troll, but to see things from his perspective: he was bullied, and overcame bullies to get where he is now. All he sees are threats and he doesn't want to play any new games. If you owned the phone lines, perhaps you're seeing wireless that way.
To return to your point: trolls aren't interested in learning new things about stuff outside their field. They aren't nomadic like the goats, so they see goats as merely trespassers, competitors, or as victims. Not as neighbors, partners, or customers. That would take a more open mind.
Part of rudeness is not knowing how really rude one is; the other part is not caring. Back to the old joke of when the punk is asked "are you ignorant or apathetic ?" he replies "I don't know and I don't care !" Perhaps it's natural that trolls see life as a zero-sum competition.
Whether it's worth the added complexity, I'm not sure, but it would resolve an ambiguity in the signals sent to commenters.
(To squeeze into the existing UI and mental model of this sort of site, I might make the current up/down mean quality -- should more people see this or should it recede from view? -- and add a right/left for agreement, giving posts tiny little inline spot polls, of a sort. Maybe it could even be a sparkline or two-tone percentage-bar.)
The karma system should predict how good I am going to feel after consuming the media -- nothing more. The problem is that for a simple question, the solution ain't so simple. I believe there is one, and I believe we've danced around this subject long enough for those paying attention to have figured it out.
Also -- thanks for the term "karma bombing". I've been a victim in the past, now I have a cool geeky name to describe it.
I guess we don't always behave in a grown up way online. I am as guilty of that as the next guy.
People often tell others acting like an ass to grow up.
This has nothing to do with being an informative description of children and more to do with PG's troll post, now that is somewhat ironic :p
For example, saying an asshole needs to grow up, is demeaning him by saying he is in an undesirable state (not grown up) which implies being a child is bad.
Like in this thread, we can note the irony (and worshiping) of the community, with the top comment (11 points so far) done by anewaccountname, deliberately taking a piss out of PG's essay.
The fact that people here upmod/downmod based on whether they agree rather than whether it's insightful really bothers me. I think it's the wrong incentive structure.
Likewise, it was funny that the "Funny..." comment was modded to -1. At least, I found it funny. Point being, I don't think these were rewards for groupthink, so much as rewards for geeks being clever.
I could go down a longer list: because mob rules is a not-so-good policy for quality reading material, because if one group votes on agreement and another group votes on quality then the agreement group "drowns out" the quality group, because it takes about 2 seconds to determine whether you agree with something, whereas determining if something is worth reading takes a lot longer (and is more valuable information), etc.
Note that I upmodded you, even though I take issue with your position. That's because you asked a good question. In another world, I'd just downmod you because I thought you were mistaken and for most readers the question would never have been asked (or answered)
If you want to downmod, it's no big deal. But there seems to be some proportion of the audience that feels vindicated in their views just because the opposite view was downmodded. Downmodding does not make opposing positions less legitimate.
These people seem to be different than the ones who write replies. I've had multiple lengthy threads where I hardly get any mods either way while discussing, and then when I wake up the next day I have -20 karma, but no new replies.
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.compression/browse_threa...
followed by the famous "Is Your Son a Computer Hacker?" troll from adequacy.org:
http://adequacy.org/public/stories/2001.12.2.42056.2147.html
Trolling is a scam performed for the purposes of a humorous prank on a discussion board.
Watergate was a scam to pervert the course of democratic government.
I think in the early days of Reddit, the fact that everything including comments could be voted on was intimidating to trolls, so they were kept at bay. But some time later every primal scream was rewarded, and trolls started posting in droves.
It never helped that a really low-scoring post with a high-scoring rejoinder tended to be highly ranked. That's just begging for the sort of you-got-served culture that excites trolls.
"I've thought a lot about that. I would be surprised if current spam filters could work unchanged. There are not enough trolls on News.YC to make it worth investing time in trying to write it in Lisp, but it would be an interesting experiment to see if you could use C++ programming techniques to detect trolls in some large public corpus like Digg or Reddit or Slashdot's comment threads."
Spam filters routinely filter out emails based on a common set of words that are used without understanding the subject matter. For example, if an email contains the words viagara and store, the probability of that email being spam go up tremendously. Paul's "A plan for Spam" essay explains a lot more. And, from what I understand, Bayesian filtering is at the root of most spam blockers out there.
I'd be willing to wager that Bayesian filtering would be pretty powerful in filtering out trolls on social sites, as well. For example, if a post contains the words "asshole" and "fucktard" the probability of that post coming from a troll goes up exponentially.
If you trained a Bayesian filter, or spam algorithm well enough, it should be able to flag trollish posts fairly easily.
The moderation graph between users and comments would be really interesting. There's a lot of information in there to be mined.
If I was walking down the street with a $20,000 ming vase, and you were running around nearly hitting me, I'd probably swear at you. Likewise, if you were running around on the street wielding a sharp katana, I'd probably swear at you.
A car is both as expensive as a ming vase, and as deadly as a sword. The idea that a rational person would not get highly upset when somebody threatened both their life and the most expensive thing they own is absurd. "Distance" has little to do with it.
Speaking of incompetence, there is a third type of troll. These trolls manner of speaking is seen as hostile by those who come from a more genteel social milieu. For example, in person as on the internet, they might tell you to STFU, or use words like shitpump, yet be trying to make a point in a friendly and helpful (perhaps playful) way. You need not be an egghead to be abrupt. For an insight into this social milieu, see an episode of Trailer Park Boys. People need to learn to function differently on a forum, because it is a different social environment.
Cars give people that, guns give people that, web skills give people that.
Regarding News.YC: "Your ancient ritual has summoned me to News.YC so those tight-assed holier-than-thou fucktards can be shown the error of their ways. Maybe the reason there aren't trolls is because NOBODY FUCKING VISITS THEIR SHITTY SITE."-- terwin, Reddit
It's actually rather amazing that we are fairly unanimous in down-modding trollishness, without having community guidelines or a big discussion about it.
(And on a recursive note, a comment on the Reddit thread now links to the parent comment, which links back to the Reddit thread, and so on...yay stack overflow!)
I generally tend to avoid the "language war" threads for 3 reasons: 1. No one is really right or wrong. 2. Not much gets accomplished. and 3. It really doesn't make that much difference anyway.
Debates about favorite colors, on the other hand, should be strongly encouraged. Blue is definitely the best one.
Your point that not much is accomplished by such discussions is definitely what usually happens. But it isn't what must happen. There are rational ways of discussing these subjects which can lead to knowledge creation and agreement.
The reason I'm posting is basically that I think people are a little too quick to give up, and if they tried to discuss seriously a bit more, they might find it sometimes works. Especially if they are careful to ignore the bad replies they get and only reply to the other people who are also taking the discussion seriously.
Well, yes and no. There's only a truth to the matter if you can get people to agree on a premise. Two libertarians who adopt the same premises can have a meaningful debate with each other. They'll agree that there can only be one consistent position -- so if they disagree on what it is then one of them must be mistaken -- and set about trying to figure out which of them holds the fallacy. But if you pit a libertarian with the premise of self-ownership against a communist with the premise of "property is theft", nobody is going to accomplish anything because neither will view the other's argument as relevant.
This is the myth of the framework. See Popper's book by that name:
http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Framework-Defence-Science-Rationa...
Besides the issue of whether productive debate is possible across frameworks, there is also your (possibly accidental) assertion that what premises people believe affects what statements about reality are true (beyond statements about who believes what). That's solipsism.
None of the statements in question have to do with reality, only with abstract ideas. Libertarians believe that property ownership is a right; communists believe that it is an offense. Neither of these assertions is empirically testable.
If the debate is about what policies will make us wealthier rather than what policies are ethical, then that's a different matter. But in that case, both sides are sharing the common framework of utilitarianism.
Which policies are ethical, with "ethics" rightly construed, is also a matter of fact. Morality is about how to live, and it's not a religious concept. The notion that morality is (and must be) religious is unfortunately a bad, religious idea, that (oddly) most atheists still believe.
Just to get started, we can consider which lifestyles do and do not accomplish their own internal goals. Lifestyles that do not are bad ways to live -- they are "immoral". We don't have to use moral terminology; that isn't important. But whatever you call it, there are objective facts about how we should or shouldn't live.
And there's better than that. You can take a very wide variety of goals, and examine how to achieve them. And you can find common points -- certain ways of life are good for achieving many goals, while others are not. These common points, which make people powerful and able to accomplish things in general, are an important, useful, and objective find the field of morality.
That needs the caveat that we only mean goals you actually intend to accomplish. We don't mean vague goals, and we definitely don't mean the sort of goal you would be happy to partially achieve -- in that case, the real goal is just making progress towards ... your "goal". (It's the same word, but it's a different concept than the one I mean).
Back to your points, you say that even if you fail by your own standards, you might help others, and the net effect of your life may be positive. That's absolutely true. However, it'd be even better (more moral) if you did the same actions, but had wiser goals, which those actions were achieving. Then you'd help others, but also consider your own life successful.
Then, there is a the problem of heroism, which is defined by a person's courage to pursue a noble goal even if its achievement is very unlikely.
Finally, by your definition, I could be one of the most moral people by making my goal "do whatever I want." Everyone is always doing whatever they want, at least at some level. This would pretty much render all talk of morality pointless. But, I suppose I'm being too literal with your definition.
I'm definitely not claiming consistency of this sort is the only criterion of morality. Only that it's an important and objective one.
I don't mean to be a tease, but if I say too many things at once, I won't be understood as well. On the other hand, threads here go stale fast (usually in under a day), so I'm not sure how to ever get very far in explaining, here. By contrast, on another forum, I am in a thread that has been going for 4 years. And it's only 180 comments long -- so around 1 comment per 8 days.
I'll keep posting here if anyone replies. Or contact me, curi42 on AIM or curi@curi.us
So for depth, my best idea so far is to link longer, external writing. Here are two things I wrote about morality which explain my views a bit more:
However, at this point I have to veer into territory considered "religious," because such a claim requires at least an element of non-materialism to make sense of our moral intuitions.
At any rate, my views are not rigorously defined enough, and I'd benefit from critical, constructive discussion. I'll check out your links and see if I can participate.
I don't think there is any such thing as 'human nature', though I do think there is a lot of complex knowledge in cultures that achieves some of the same practical results.
I don't think the purpose of morality, or life, is to maximize happiness. I suspect maximizing happiness is consistent with the right way of life, if you understand enough, but I don't think it's the best way to look at things, and I think it makes it harder to see the answers.
In general, ideas don't need foundations. "You can't justify that," is not a valid criticism. This includes moral ideas. So if you have a "moral intuition", or think a common sense notion of morality makes sense, but can't justify it perfectly, I don't think that's a problem. It may be a sign of religion, but not a bad one.
The correct way to look at ideas is not to seek justification, but instead to compare them to rival theories. In other words, ask, "Got a better idea?" If there is no rival theory, then criticism is sort of useless. It can help us notice we'd like a better theory and find places to look for new ideas. But without a rival theory to compare with, we can't see which theory seems truer, or which stands up to criticism better, and can't abandon the current theory.
The ideas about foundations and justifications here were best explained in published work by Karl Popper, and also somewhat by David Deutsch (but more to come, he should have a new book out within 2 years). They are not especially popular, but in my judgment they actually make sense, unlike all the rival philosophies.
If you read Popper, be aware that he never wrote much applying his ideas to morality or education. He wrote a lot about science, and about communism and historicism, and also about certain (bad) schools of philosophy, but also explained epistemology in abstract.
Guess that's long enough for now. For what it's worth, I like fielding (non-hostile) questions in these areas.
What would you propose as an objective moral goal?
Do you recommend anything by Popper or Deutsch specifically?
http://www.amazon.com/Fabric-Reality-Parallel-Universes-Impl...
Popper has lots of books. Maybe The Myth of the Framework is a good choice. As I recall, it has content from lectures he gave to people not already familiar with his philosophy, so those parts are especially clear and accessible.
Proposing an actual moral goal is tricky, because we have to be careful to keep separate the issues of whether there are true moral ideas, and whether my particular idea is true. And very strictly, my idea will not be true. It will have truth to it, but not be perfect. Which may be a confusing concept, because the prevailing epistemology says that knowledge is "justified, true belief" by which it means 100% absolutely, perfectly true. That perspective discounts any possibility of "partial truths" as knowledge. Further, it encourages people to believe they possess (final, certain) truths. But I don't claim to have any of those, nor do I think one can have those.
If you're OK with all that, I can tell you some tentative guesses at moral truths.
So some good goals, in my opinion:
Long term: open-ended knowledge creation
Medium term: cure aging, invent self-replicating nanobots, win war on terror, write important book, invent AI
Short term: make a sandwich, be kind to one's children, quit smoking, make a useful product, solve a problem you were having, learn how to play Mario Galaxy well
None of these are (I imagine) especially odd. That is because we have to start where we are. We already have goals. Most of them are good goals to pursue, for now. In the event we decide we want something better, or see a problem with them, we should seek to make (gradual) improvements. So, nothing revolutionary here. In fact, while I think most people are mistaken about moral philosophy, I don't have a problem with most of their actual ideas about how to live day to day. We have the most peaceful, cooperative, and effective civilization ever to exist; or, in other words, we have the most knowledge of morality that has ever existed. Average people have this, and use it in their routine lives.
Can we do even better? Of course. But most of my suggestions are not about changing one's goals, but instead about changing how one tries to accomplish them. So, for example, it is very important to enjoy criticism. This is common knowledge, but people still have trouble with it, and often don't fully understand the reasons it's important. To sketch out my answer, criticism stabilizes true ideas (because they withstand it better than their rivals), while an environment without criticism does not differentiate truth and falsity. And criticism is a means of error correction. Error correction is the only way to reliably achieve any goal. There is no way to reliably come up with the right approach, initially, so anyone who wants to consistently succeed has to be able to find and correct errors.
Why do people dislike criticism, anyway? They take it personally. They hear that they are mistaken, or bad, but they want to be right. That is an irrational and ineffective attitude towards life. If you want to be right, the only path forward is to be willing to change what you are, until you are what's right. And whether you are criticized or not does not change whether you are mistaken. It only changes whether you find out about it. That is a gift. Instead of being mistaken and ignorant, you have a change to change your mind.
So to tie this back to what I was saying earlier, one of the common points for the best way to accomplish many different goals, is to enjoy criticism. Alternative approaches such as disliking and avoiding (some) criticism are immoral, because they sabotage achieving one's goals. The more distasteful you find criticism, the less reliably you can accomplish what you want to.
To add to this, we could go through all the different attitudes which are important to learning and problem solving in general, and list them as important pieces of morality. They are all fundamental to how we should live.
...unless I assert that morality is subjective. :-)
As for the rest of it ... well, I do disagree. I think Guy Kawasaki outlined it best in his book, "Rules for Revolutionaries". It has a section titled, if I remember correctly, "Don't let bozosity get you down".
A certain amount of criticism that a person will encounter will be, well, wrong. It can even be wrong when it's coming from an expert. You see this all the time in the business world. I can't tell here if you're suggesting that a person take all criticism to heart -- I think so, because of the way you talk about changing to adapt to criticism -- but, if you are, then you're suggesting that a person allow themselves to be buffeted by the winds of the popular and the trendy.
There's no way to always to always be correct, to always do the right thing. You might listen to a bunch of criticism, and a bunch of suggestions, and still make the wrong decision for all the right reasons. Listening to more criticism, and allowing that criticism to further change your habits, doesn't necessarily ameliorate that.
I counter that it's important to know when to accept criticism, and when to ignore it and forge ahead. I also posit that it's impossible to know that, so you just have to make your best guess.
Regarding "forging ahead": Scheduling criticism is a different issue, and one well known to writers: if you keep editing the first chapter, you'll never finish. There certainly is a place for that kind of thing. It is really a separate (and large) issue.
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Of course you have to use your judgment about which criticism you think is correct. The point is not to dislike criticism generally, or to ignore it. Doing those things makes it harder to find and use good criticism.
To use a YC example, some people have posted here asking for comments and criticism for their fledgling startup. And people have blogged about how this criticism was harsh and hard to take, but made their startup better, so they encourage others to ask for comments/criticism as well.
This illustrates a few different attitudes. There are some people who are too scared of criticism to ask for any. Their startups won't get the improvement that some more bold or open minded people have gotten.
And then of the people who did ask for criticism, many still partially dislike it, which makes it harder to fairly evaluate the criticism (finding it somewhat painful is distracting!), and their distaste makes them overlook some other, more subtle opportunities to get more criticism, that a person who loves criticism would have found.
So this is an important and relevant issue even at an exceptionally enlightened place. There is no magic formula to always make correct decisions, but there are ways of life which are more effective and reliable.
Well, subjectivity doesn't mean you're right in the objective sense. See, you opened your comment with a logical trick to prove the correctness of what you were about to say before you even said it, and you did so by deciding that there are intrinsically right and wrong moral decisions. I think that morality, specifically, happens to be an extremely subjective thing, first of all. It varies dramatically from culture to culture, society to society, era to era. Secondly, I think that was kind of an underhanded thing to do, and a friendly jest was my way of calling you on it. If I were to pull an equally underhanded trick, I might say that my reply is in fact a criticism of your thinking, and, according to your own principles, you must take it under consideration and use it to change the way you act.
> The point is not to dislike criticism generally, or to ignore it.
This part I like. It makes me really want to agree with what you're trying to say. But, then you go from that, to things like, "...more subtle opportunities to get more criticism, that a person who loves criticism would have found." I have a problem with that, because I think of criticism as a distraction that is sometimes an opportunity. To really love criticism is to dwell on what will ultimately be a distraction.
I really wish I could find my copy of Rules for Revolutionaries. (I really dig that book, and it was signed! Sometimes I loan it out ... rats.) It cited some specific examples of this, sometimes where businesses had too closely followed criticism and been hurt by that, and others where they hadn't followed it, and benefited from that.
So, it's not just scheduling criticism. In the book writing example, sometimes you have to know when to ignore your editor altogether.
However, at the point where you want to say someone should or should not do something the subjective morality comes back to bite you (saying curi's trick was underhanded). I think this is curi's point.
All you can really do with subjective morality is describe your rationale for why you do what you do, and hope the other person buys it. Even that is inconsistent because you are motivated by the thought that the other person should do something.
Curi, while it is true we start from first impressions, either our goals have to be mutually independent, or they must have a common foundation. Otherwise they end up contradicting each other. That's the point of moral philosophy, and what I meant by justifying moral intuition.
You can also remove contradictions locally if you find any. If you want, you can say that is based on the common foundation "if two ideas contradict, at least one is false". But the point is, you see a contradiction, you know at least one of the ideas is mistaken in some way, so you know there's room for improvement there, until you come up with some changes that remove the contradiction.
But certainly seeing as much of an "ultimate purpose" to aim for, as we can, is helpful. We have ideas of parts of it. Creating knowledge is good, and destroying it is bad. Freedom is good, and controlling other people is at best a temporary stopgap measure, not an ideal. Cooperation or indifferent tolerance is good, and violent conflict is bad, both because it's destructive, and because it's not a truth seeking process. Settling for less is not ideal, and anything that puts pressure on people, or creates incentives, to not strive for all we can, is bad.
Some of these assertions have directly applicability today. For example, the common perception that striving for more is "hard" (unpleasant) indicates something or other is going wrong. Or there's the idea that life is about compromise, which is essentially settling for less. People don't just fail to find a with to proceed with no downsides, but often people don't even try, and assume such things do not exist. The ideas in our culture which cause these attitudes clearly have room for improvement.
"moral philosophy has to do with determining the end"
Yes, but that's not all. How to approach goals, how to solve problems and correct errors, what sorts of policies for how to live your life are effective, are also very important topics (and perhaps more accessible and directly useful). One of the critical ideas here, I think, is that all these things depend on knowledge. How do you approach a goal? In general, you need to create knowledge about the goal and how best to approach it (and also whether it's worth accomplishing, in case it was mistaken). To solve a problem, you have to figure out how to solve it. (And if implementing the solution is hard or unpleasant in any way, that could be avoided with still more knowledge of how to solve the problem in an easier way.) To correct errors, you have to create knowledge of what ideas are in error, and what would be better ideas. And so on. And therefore, anyone who is seriously interested in morality ought to study epistemology.
On the other hand, if you judge a source of criticism is going to be a waste of time, then it's fine to skip it. Not because you would ever ignore or disregard a criticism without thinking about it, and definitely not due to disliking criticism, but just because you reasonably expect they'd give criticism you'd already considered and rejected, and you have better things to do that you judge will bear more fruit.
The reason I'm not too worried about drowning in low quality criticism is that if there is no new information, it only takes a few moments to properly address. You don't have to ignore it because it's such a fast process. Just remember your take on the subject, verify that it already addresses what's being said, and then you're done. Don't even reply. But I don't call that "ignoring it", since you do quickly think about it, and if you notice there is something new to you, it will get proper consideration.
I'm not even going to make a full argument, but I do want to point out that if people from many cultures/eras/etc have different ideas about something, that is not evidence that there isn't a truth of the matter. If there is a truth of the matter, we still wouldn't expect them to all have found it.
As far as consistency, can you give one good reason it would be a good way to live to make choices in a way that won't achieve the results you are hoping for? If not, then that is my point: that is a bad way of life. It might, by good luck, turn out well, but it doesn't work reliably, and better ways of life are available.
You see, a moral is extracted from a story, it is interpretation. Good stories don't have to spell it out. Some stories have many morals. Some stories the moral of the story is it's hard to find the morals, or the boundaries.
You can give up, though, and perpetrate the crapstorm, or you can remind yourself that being good at communicating your ideas and opinions is an important part of being a well-rounded hacker; then you can view the posting of only coherent and non-inflammatory replies on fora as practice for when you'll have to communicate about programs you are writing.
As for solutions: there have to be consequences. Either losing the ability to post or losing the ability to have your posts seen. Certainly banning accounts is an option, but then you have to fight with the crapflood, if and when it comes.
That's how it works on this forum. I leave "showdead" on just to see what the trolls and spammers are up to.
If you've ever hung out with a lot of girls (from a guy's perspective), you can beging to understand the trolling community. 1 on 1 with a girl and you can get intellectual conversation, but the minute 3 or 4 girls get together, they start talking about clothes, guys, dramas, and all other stuff that just isn't interesting. I bet girls see it the same with guys too (5 guys together = WoW, DOTA, girls or crude jokes).
Solutions? Keep it small. This fails to keep in line with the existing goals of news.yc (advertising for existing startups, attracting smart people, etc). Another solution? Maybe try to preserve the small community feel as the site gets bigger. One way to do this would be to use user upvotes and downvotes as community boundaries for each user - ie: making their community presence only to those who rate them up, and to make their personal community those who they rate up. This is speculative at best, though.
@PG, I've always wondered, are you able to see all the comments that I've posted and then deleted two minutes later? And if so, is this an acceptable way to send you semi-private messages?
I am sure everyone on this forum is on some kind of social network. If we can get every user's handle to link to their flavor-du-jour social network's public profile, verify via email -- that should at least cut down on some of the noise.
PG: What do you think?
EDIT: I even wrote about it a long time ago, when I still updated my blog with any semblance of regularity. Weebly seems to be down for approximately the millionth time in the last month or so, though. I'll post the article if Weebly gets righted within the edit window.
I do have my email and website (with real name) in my profile, though.
By "become undeletable", I mean there is no "edit" or "delete" link on the comment.
I'm not saying one is better than the other, but there is a tradeoff. On Reddit, you can be rude, and people can downmod you, and it doesn't matter once the post sinks. Here, if you act like an asshole, you get downmodded, and your karma suffers. But even if you make a well reasoned, but controversial comment, you often do still get downmodded because of your unpopular views.
Not that I comment here often, but I'm at four down from seven at one point, and it's really the logical consequence of such a system. It seems to work here, but I do wonder, as Paul expresses near the end of his article here, does this technique scale?
Great essay.
How would you know? How would you know it does not stiffle unpopular opinions?
I think that I would personally practice self-censoring if I would lose karma by expressing unpopular opinions that are likely to be down-voted. I know that I already do on reddit, and there the down-votes are at least only temporary.
Not wanting to lose karma may seem a foolish reason for not expressing your opinions, and at first I din't mind. I kept writing my unpopular opinions on reddit, the down-votes made me put even more effort into them so that they would be above approach. But they' still only get a handful of points whereas one-liners expressing the popular opinion would get much more. So eventually I gave up.
Now I mostly just read a couple of stories a day, and occassionally write the one-liner comment.
As a final comment, I've always been disgusting by the way that people on reddit would constantly compare themselves, always favorable, to their bigger, would-be rival: Digg. Now you do the same thing towards reddit, and I can only shake my head in disgust. Learn to value your site in itself, not as the compare to other sites. It does not need to be a competition.
The fascinating thing is, all the data is still there. You can go and look at the old comments and stories and see what the site used to be like. If you could find a good proxy for stupidity, like comment length or spelling mistakes, you could graph the change as the site grew.
People who bully other people because they have better computer knowledge, mainly the two areas of administration and programming
The thing is learning, working ... are both hard, and many ppl got screwed or unlucky over their lives, they either learned useless crap at school or university, or work at non interesting jobs with bad bosses or collegues
And sometimes, we are humans, we are attracked to certain aspects of what we try to learn to escape, or trying to improve upon our bad lack
And sometimes the cyberbullies call us trolls. It's okay, thought, better be a troll than a bully, the thing is, in time we will learn, and on that road we will have fun, and, the road will not end, and it will meet plenty of bullies, and overtime we will learn to be quiet, for the next person we talk to, and dare to show to them that we don't know, might just be, the next bully ... who will accuse me of being troll ... or that other word incompetent.
But the bully don't see, just like the one in the school yard, its just a school yard, don't take yourself too seriously, its just a forum or irc!
I am reading chatting and enjoying my time, until you came and changed the game, ... thou shall not speak! and now the book seller might have won, for you know, thought can't do teach! And most of the blogs I read were just trolls!
Hacker News is a "forum" whose main purpose is getting people to talk about/think about/post links to information related to startups. It has a very explicit purpose and to this end I would not expect it to be "infested" to the extent of a lot of other forums.
For instance, would we expect to see a lot of trolls on a forum devoted to advanced topics in theoretical math? "Orbifold cohomology is so much better than Hopfschild cohomology!" No. No, we wouldn't. A serious, well-defined, topic begets serious discussion.
This is the real problem with reddit, digg, etc. - there's no clear GOAL. Like, there's no -reason- that people shouldn't be assholes. What are they getting in the way of?
It's like if you opened the doors to your house and just held a "general forum." At first, discussion would be great (it's just your friends). Later, discussion would get worse (it's your friends' friends). Eventually it would degrade into the biggest losers who have nowhere to go sitting around and making fun of all the fun they're not having out in the real world (outside the house).
I agree with pg's sentiments that the architecture/rules of hacker news make it a much more intelligent, even (gasp) friendly forum, but I also think it's the community. They keep coming back because they have active interest. They have active interest because hacker news has established as its goal the provision of things of interest.
As always, I might just be woefully naive about human nature; but things seem so simple!
Update: this has been corrected.
Interesting, I know quite a few people that would in fact all but troll in person, to your face.
Although in their case, its more to do with them having no outbound tact filter: http://www.mit.edu/~jcb/tact.html
As you pointed out, people do things on forums that they wouldn't do in person. IMO, this is partly because they're hiding behind a handle and partly because their target is.
I'm not sure how you'd go about making accounts have more personality and identity, but IMO that would be considerably more effective than just instructing people to behave like they're face-to-face. They know they're not.
"The amount of an asshole a person is is directly proportional to the distance they are away from you at the time you discover this fault. Someone on TV is REALLY AN ASSHOLE! Someone in the car next to you is Pretty Much of an Asshole. A guy standing next to you on line: <whispers> 'this guy's a real asshole here'"
I am therefore pro-troll and anti troll-victim.
Very insightful. The Four Reasons feel very accurate.
Thanks, Paul!
My thinking is along the lines of UserXYZ posts something humorous and gets 150 points. This causes others who feel they have a funny bone as well to pile in and attempt similarly witty remarks (which are initially harmless or contribute positively); but then you have an avalanche of users who become aspiring comedians on the message boards they frequent. I sometimes feel that these types tend to herd together and give each other a reason to continue with their behaviour by giving one another a few up-votes out of sympathy...
I would also say that the competitive nature of men in general (I'm a dude, and I won't assume anything on behalf of the women here) would contribute to certain sub-groups within this population with an increasing need to out-do one another. Thus a majority of the discussion devolves to one-liners and people trying to be funny, when all they do is come across as cynical while at the same time contributing little value.
In addition, attempts to be funny on a message board are somewhat akin to guessing on questions on your SAT exam: there is no penalty for trying. Whereas weakly setup arguments can carry a penalty of getting a barrage of refutations making yourself look (or perhaps more closer to the truth - FEEL) intellectually weaker.
;)
(This place is too cool at the moment!)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=119120
I put forth a great deal of skepticism regarding a product and actually got a response from one of the founding members of the company. It turns out that they actually had a real product that shows a great deal of promise...
This just goes to show that sometimes being quick to judge can have drastic consequences for others. I would argue that this is a form of trolling when a great deal of skepticism mixed with anecdotal information from the past (which has nothing to do with the present as things are more mutually exclusive than we would otherwise like to believe) leads to quick karma points and increased skepticism on behalf of other members.
"I for one welcome our new overlords". Oops wait, wrong context. What I meant to say is that being quick to judge is in many ways similar to the reactionary "comedic lashing out" I was citing in the comedic trolling above and can often times lead to making yourself look foolish at no cost to nobody but yourself (as immortalized by Kent Brockman in the above opening sentence of this paragraph!).
Like the comedic attempts above, this is not something that can be easily controlled. Rather this requires restraint exercised on behalf of the author of any given comment. One thing that I feel works against this all is the fact that the anonymity of the internet often affords people to keep doing what they are doing.
The fact that I'm using my real name online (for the first time mind you) is causing me to respond more deeply to this issue and to the open (and unfair) skepticism I was voicing in another thread. Definitely a tougher thing to do...definitely worth it.
The university of troll. A website where should you supply enough bogus posts, you get posted a certificate... of course you have to pay a course fee. $100 should do it.
But, as anewaccountname shows, at least the trolls here do it with style. Well played, anewaccountname.
on parenting forums, you don't find so many jerks. when people are mean, they tend to be a bit more subtle (or passive aggressive) about it. but they make it emotional and personal, and i think that does a more effective job of actually hurting anyone.
Paul you are being "trolled" because people disagree with you. You haven't seen real trolls.