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Comment by Mendenhall | Hacker News Reader

What I see is some people dont like foolish words on a screen so they want to clamp down on open discourse to control dialogue because in their opinion its fruitless or mean or whatever they feel.

Some silly troll spamming idiotic statements is not nearly the threat that controlling dialogue on the net and deciding what is trolling and what isnt.

Socrates would be labeled a troll these days if he was on social media.

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My screen is of a fixed size; my days are of a fixed length. If you want to put foolish words on your screen more power to you, but if they're on my screen or taking my time, that impedes me doing whatever I want to do with my screen or my time.

That is, the more dialogue that I'm uninterested in that I lack tools to filter, the more my dialogue is being controlled by DoS. That is the fundamental paradox of open discourse; I don't know what the right answer is, but naive open discourse isn't it.

So your solution is to be given tools to enforce your cognitive bias reinforcing filter bubble? That's not a solution, that's a technology provided lobotomy.

A dialogue takes two - if you don't like the dialogue taking place, instead of attempting to quiet the other voices, perhaps just remove yourself from the dialogue.

As a counterpoint, the biggest gripe of "trolling" that I have is that it prevents dialogue rather than adding to it. It's one thing to argue for say Nazi ideology in a relevant conversation with the purpose of expressing a genuine point (this would be a rare event indeed), but that is not what trolls are doing. Instead, they are invading a conversation with ad hominem attacks as well as distracting and attention-seeking behaviors.

Preventing trolling does not inherently involve silencing points of view. All it should be doing is removing unhelpful, unsolicited, and off topic nonsense. Even the most evil views that I can think of should not be censored, under the condition that they are actually being discussed with the interest of discourse, for that truly is what "dialogue" is. But again, in that event it isn't really "trolling".

Filtering out thousands of "Obama is a monkey" type comments is not reinforcing anyone's cognitive bias...

The conflation of "Obama is a monkey" type comments with people who legitimately dislike the man's policies is not a good faith definition of trolling.

That's what they're trying to do.

But I'm getting really, really, really tired of people conflating the "other side" stuff with the trolling stuff. Look at all the stuff sent to Leslie Jones last summer. Do you honestly think that was meant to be a dialog? Of course not. That was trolling. That was harassment. And that is what people are trying to filter out.

I would agree with you there. I think the problem is we are talking about 2 separate issues, but due to intentional conflation of the two by ideologically motivated factions, we're crossing the streams by using the, now overloaded, term "troll".

If i say "leslie jones sucks" am I trolling or do I think she actually sucks at her job. If a million people one after another go on leslie jones profile and say "leslie is a horrible actress" is that trolling ? harrassment ?

If someone says "Trump sucks" should they be filtered out ?

Do I think its a dialogue, heck no. Do I think it should be filtered, double heck no.

If you send her dick pics, dead animals pics or photos of apes with "this is how you look like" under it, all that from hundreds of different accounts so that she can not effectively filter it, then yeah, you are trolling and harassing.

Likewise, if you flood someone employer customers with the above material to get him or her fired, you are harassing.

Let's not pretend this was just about "slightly impolite words". Or misunderstood dialog.

No. I am rejecting your reply. Go back and look at what happened to Leslie Jones, then try again. This is not simply "Leslie Jones Sucks".

You are conflating. I simply asked a question. I did not say that is what happened to Leslie. I do notice you avoid the question like the other who responded. That to me is very telling.

It looks like your account is teetering on the edge of using HN primarily to argue about politics and ideology. That's not what this site is for, and we ban accounts that use it this way—we have to, in order to preserve the intended use of the site, which is stories and conversation that gratify intellectual curiosity.

Hmm this kind of surprises me, but do what you feel is best. I am not attached to ideology or politics.

The post you responded to was me wanting to find out where respondees would want to draw the line on what is harrassment and what is open discourse online. I think this is extremely on topic, relevent and devoid of ideology.

As far as arguing I dont see it in my posts. I usually make one comment then read responses. I will take your warning to heart but I dont really see my post style changing.

When I look at your account history, it's mostly civil, but it does look like you're (bordering on) commenting primarily on political issues. The key word here is 'primarily': that's our present criterion for whether the site is being abused or used as intended. I realize the reason for that takes some explaining, so let me try again.

HN is for stories and conversations that gratify intellectual curiosity (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). That implies a wide range of things that are interesting just because they're interesting. We want people to comment here because their "oh!" circuitry gets activated—not their "burning issue" circuitry. (I'm using that word metaphorically.) It's not primarily a question of the topics since these things overlap, but of the spirit of the discussion.

Ideally there are larger lessons learned here than "there are assholes on the internet"

Like I would hope people now recognize that stoking a culture war to market a shitty movie is a bad idea.

I think there are two fundamentally different kinds of dialogue on the internet.

1. Dialogue in communities directed towards a purpose. 2. Dialogue in public forums.

In my mind, the only place where filtering should take place is in #1. If you want to see information about specific kinds of basket-weaving, then the communities directed towards basket-weaving should give you the tools you need to see that information, and should police their communities such that there isn't too much non-basket-weaving content. But in public forums, I think that people should actively resist filters. I see filters as a case of trying to make something straight out of the crooked timber of humanity. Not only is it a goal that may be fundamentally impossible, it has negative impacts on the people who use the filters. To the well-filtered person, the general public may look more civilized and reasonable than they actually are. This can manifest itself, for example, as the well filtered people being baffled by the success of populists candidates because "everyone I talked to online could see right through them!"

I think online communities would be better off ahead of time if they made an explicit choice about which type of dialogue they were hosting, and communicated that choice to all visitors.

I think the apparent "rise" of trolls is mostly borne from sites with a disconnect between their stated goals and their actual rules. News organizations are likely to say they want free-speech forum in their comment section, but people mostly expect conversation directed towards the topics being reported on. Reddit was formerly a free-speech platform, but subreddits started behaving more like directed-communities, and the admins encouraged this site-wide. Hacker News is clearly a directed community, and so has fewer trolls, while 4chan is clearly a free-speech community and therefore ALSO has fewer trolls (i.e. most people on 4chan conform to 4chan norms, even if that would be considered trolling elsewhere.)

This seems to be borrowing from the 'your right to swing your fist ends at my nose' cliche. So, let's put it in those terms. 'Your right to post a comment on an open internet forum ends when it meets my right to only have things I value on my screen.' Surely most folks can see why that doesn't work at all. Moderation is already ubiquitous, and that is not the same thing at all. That's the forum's owner exercising their right to boot your account and delete your comment. I'd be interested to hear any sensible proposals for dealing with trolls that we don't already have everywhere, i.e. moderation and user-centric filtering tools.

Very much this, and the realisation that attention is finite and very highly rivalrous is one that needs a great deal of amplification.

I'm finding Herbert Simon and Alvin Toffler's Future Shock to be pretty fascinating reading in this context, both from the early 1970s. Toffler cites significant earlier work.

I'm also starting to wonder what the long-term effects of high-level information overload are. Toffler's giving me considerable pause on that account.

If you're using Twitter to communicate with some people, and you're getting a hundred stomach-turning tweets in your feed every day, then you can't communicate with those people any more. Abuse isn't about discourse.

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