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Comment by frostburg | Hacker News Reader

One gets the impression that there is a relatively small amount of people that spends a lot of time looking for related comment threads to pollute.

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My anecdotal observation is that in the last week or so, the extremist right-wing[0] trolls have returned to HN after being silent for a time, maybe since Trump's election and especially since the inauguration time.

First there were brand new accounts that posted trolling questions to otherwise intelligent discussions. Things like, 'how can we really predict the climate years in the future?' or 'maybe Putin really is an ally' - i.e., the old technique of raising vacuous, speculative, provocative questions, without contributing anything substantive. Then I saw older accounts doing it.

[0] To be clear, they have no more to do with the rest of people on the right than al Qaeda has to do with Islam. One is not a reflection on the other.

EDIT: Also, others are voting for them. For example, I can only wonder how this relatively bizarre comment (judgmental, I know, but a pretty safe judgment in this case) get voted to the top of a front-page thread?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13703286

And there's no better proof of your claim than the two holocaust deniers in this very comment chain - both of them have very old accounts, with some very old comments, and then over a year of utter silence - and then today, they're both all "holocaust never happened".

reply to self:

Nevermind. The deniers are getting their comments flagged, which hides them... so either they had a year of utter silence, OR the last year's worth of comments were all bad enough to get removed.

Fascinating, either way.

You can turn on "showdead" in your profile and check which one it is.

With some (but not all that many) comments, and not very much karma. They're old enough to not appear as green, but they're little-used accounts.

It vastly exceeds even what you would expect from the 80-20 rule. I don't have a source for this, but I've read that about 0.7% of commenters are responsible for about 75% of the comments by volume, and they trend overwhelmingly negative.

That suggests that banning a small number of people would greatly improve most comment areas.

It's probably not that simple. They'd just get a new account, marked green of course, but still someone "completely different" as far as comment history is concerned. You banned the account, but not the person.

You could go further, by tracking the IP addresses that people post from, and banning new accounts from those IP addresses. But that's not foolproof, in an age of DHCP. It's also turning the hosting site into something that tracks you, which is a bit frightening.

Sure, but this is banning 101 - if it's trivial to create accounts then banning is ineffective. Similarly, if you don't check IPs then running a mail server becomes impossible as you drown in spam. And this is why so many places ban Tor.

(The extreme end is metafilter, who have maintained a sustained long-term stable friendly community by charging $5 to make an account. They don't ban many people - they don't have to. Difficult to replicate this!)

No, it's easy to replicate. Just build a community where it's worth $5 to people to be a part of.

Oh, yeah, I guess that is hard...

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