Impact of Removing Registration: 250,000 posts | Hacker News Reader

Impact of Removing Registration: 250,000 posts

lukew.com

53 points8ren19 comments

>And the quality of posts? The post kill-rate (removal) actually dropped -hovering below 2%. This is less than half of the number incurred when registration was in place.

edit: the above refers to an automatic spam-killing filter, and nothing else. From what I saw, at least.

-------

Some numbers:

Behind registration: ~4.5%, out of an estimated 125 posts/day * 31 days ≈ 174 spam posts over 31 days = 5.6 spams per day

No registration: An anemic estimate of 1% of spam killed, out of an anemic estimate of 2,000 posts/day over the rest of the graph (2000 * (108-31) * 0.01) ≈ 1540 spam posts over 77 days = 20 spams per day

Removing registration lowers spam? Not really. Comparatively? Yes, because you have more non-spammers, and registration is not a barrier to entry for a spammer. But it doesn't reduce spam, and non-spam quantity is not equivalent to quality.

I'd be interested in a moderator-killed post number, weighted against the users/moderators ratio. I'd bet it skyrocketed - anonymity is fertile ground to flamebait.

Chris Tolles, the guy in charge of Topix, has said more than once that he's a fan of loose / little moderation on his boards.

Why not link to the actual blog post?

Topix.net forums on fire: the Ni-chan paradox (2006) http://blog.topix.com/archives/000106.html

This experiment, if I recall correctly, was done by Shii. Shii was (at one point) involved in 4chan, and along with moot and W.T. Snacks implemented the period of forced anonymity on /b/.

He has his own website, where he talks about lowering the barriers to participation: http://shii.org/knows/Anonymous

I don't remember a "the period of forced anonymous on /b/". It's happened multiple times, although most people are already Anonymous so you wouldn't notice.

Although I also don't see what it has to do with this. Removing names isn't somehow more anonymous than just allowing no name. (And having a random name is the same thing as no name. Slightly more interesting too.)

Ok, but from an economic perspective - if Topix is not collecting email addresses, how can they monetize all these people in the long run? From a marketing & user retention standpoint isn't that throwing away a pretty valuable channel? What monetary gain does 780 random anonymous non-threaded text-only comments bring?

(Just really curious, I've recently started trying to see things from this perspective and I'm interested in hearing discussion from the business model end)

What kind of value would having a forum user's email address give you? Unless by "monetize" you just mean "send them activity notices so they'll come back", it sounds like you want to spam them.

Personally, I recommend monetizing internet forums by selling people things and having them buy them for money. You can keep interest by just being interesting.

I don't think sending your users emails should be considered spam. Mailing lists and email upsells can be very lucrative, even if you're not emailing users immediately, an email address is a valuable thing to be leaving on the table.

what is does is increases the "skin" a user has invested into the site, whereas before, they wouldn't even consider registering

I can tell you that there are a lot of sites I use that ask for my email address and I'd rather not give it to them, and I can tell you that I give them crap. I.e. I give them an address I've set up specifically for the purpose of giving it to sites that require one. There's an awesome, self-explanatory site called 10minutemail.com that I love using; sites can ban their domain (I think some do) (but it's a new one every month), but there's no way a site can tell the difference between my real Gmail account and my crap other Gmail account. And I think a lot of people use similar tactics.

In other words, requiring an email address doesn't mean users will give you their email address. I only give my actual address when I want to. Meanwhile, it's a pain when a site requires one, and sends me an email with a confirmation link. I feel alternately clever (ha, I outsmart them) and sleazy (this probably isn't what they intended), and always annoyed, when I do this.

I recommend making emails optional (but if it has a definite use, like for resetting a password, then explain this to the users). I was happy, kind of exhilarated actually, when I signed up on Hacker News and all it asked for was a username and password; the email address is a text field that one can fill out when desired. I think I remember it explaining that this address wouldn't be visible in your profile; it would just be used for notifications about your account, or something. Take note.

mailinator.com is brilliant for this.

This is something that I have been thinking about for a while, and I have implemented systems not requiring registration several times.

In order to try to keep the quality of the content relatively high on those sites I also do some very simple statistical analysis on the text of each post/comment. It works very well! I've had one of the sites up for over a year and haven't had any real problems.

There is a Rails plugin that I wrote for implementing a comment system without registration here: http://github.com/aarongough/has_threaded_comments

And that system integrates automatically with my system for doing statistical analysis on the text: http://github.com/aarongough/validates_text_content

Examples of both in use can be seen at: http://whyiamangry.com/

Why do you have a pseudonym field for a one-off rant? If it's optional, why doesn't it say so? It doesn't add anything and just annoys people as they stop for a few seconds to type in "wtf" before continuing.

Mainly so that people can establish an identity associated with their rants if they choose, many people seem to do this.

Additionally it allows people to identify themselves as the OP when posting comments, and allows people to be more expressive by giving themselves a name to match their rant like 'AngryAtSuchAndSuch'.

The pseudonym is not optional.

The concept of sign-up forms are fine. The problem is every web developer wants to write his own. Even if some rudimentary "simple sign-up" REST API started to catch on, then browser plug-ins could be written handle all the in-between steps in signing up, checking your email, and confirming identity.

I run a forum without registration (about 700-1000 posts/week). People can register, make up an alias for each post, or just post anonymously. Many people don't record an email address when they post and the majority are not registered or logged in when they post.

The majority of spammers do leave a valid (free-account) email address and register to spam (probably not used to a forum that doesn't require registration).

the spammers are most likely just using xrumer so it's a bot doing everything for them

As a data point, I've participated in Topix forums for many years and have never seen a single spam post despite the lack of required registration. But I have seen a lot of really dumb and contentious discussions.

I think this happens everywhere. I have first hand knowledge of this problem on news websites. (I'm talking about the "really dumb and contentious discussion")

Reply on news.ycombinator.com