How To Stop Hostile Jerks From Killing Your Social Site by Cory Doctorow | Hacker News Reader

How To Stop Hostile Jerks From Killing Your Social Site by Cory Doctorow

informationweek.com

29 pointsandre39 comments

Thanks, I have just been worrying about this recently. The site is now growing to the point where people feel anyonymous enough to get quite rude in comments. I've tried asking them to be civil. Sometimes it works, but not always; and in any case it doesn't scale. So when I get back to the US in June I will try to add some flame-retardant features. If anyone has any suggestions, let me know on this thread.

I think this site has some built-in flame resistance because many of us are trying to facilitate a y-combinator application at some point in the future.

As far as improvements go, I think the lack of private messages hurts the sense of community, because communication is always one-to-many (which is much less personal than one-on-one).

The disemvoweling technique mentioned in the article was pretty unique, but I think the desirable goal is to train the users (us) to stop rewarding hostile posts with karma. That leads to strong disincentives to negative posts, without resorting to any micromanagement.

"I think this site has some built-in flame resistance because many of us are trying to facilitate a y-combinator application at some point in the future."

Yes, but it's also likely that that curve might be linear, and the total number either "hyper linear" or a steeper linear.

Trolls typically reject the value system of the host site, so they aren't deterred by negative karma. It's just a number, why care about it?

I think Reddit's system works reasonably well: enough downmods and the post is simply hidden. Trolls do care about attention; if they don't get it, they (usually) stop wasting their time.

How about treating trolls like spam?

That got me thinking: why not use bayesian filtering for trollish comments?

Best solution for this would be for you to start being neutral and less mercurial in your treatment of people on the forum.

As for me, since you think I'm a troll, you should delete my account. I'll move along... its no fun when for every 4-5 people you engage in good conversation you get 3-4 people who attack you personally, and the site owner is one of them!

Put another way- what this forum should be is a place where news is discussed and people provide encouragement and help to other founders. People here should be judged on how they help others, and the reasons they give for their advice.

What this has become-- since you have clearly stated that you judge applications based on how people act here-- is an ideological garden where people are judged based on how closely it is percieved that their statements are in line with the Party Line.

For instance, there are many ways you can fund a startup- credit cards or house equity being two that are more viable now that you don't need to raise millions. But because its percieved by your fans that "Venture Capital" is the only way to go, any suggestions to the contrary are met with derision. This is ironic given that you yourself have argued for venture capital being less important now days.

So, even your ideas are considered "trolling" in this forum ... because ideological purity is a good that you have put forth explicitly.

Excellent point: in a real discussion, you want to have people who disagree, whose opinions differ.

But if you condemn any variations in thought as trolling, then the resulting community of fan boys/Kool-aid drinkers is just as bad.

A few ideas:

1) If someone is downvoted, don't allow them to post for a set period of time. It seems angry people post a lot in succession, especially if they get voted down. More time to think and cool down.

2) Have a short timer (five minutes) stopping you from replying directly to someone who replied to you. More time to think means logic gets to fight emotion for longer and hopefully win over. I like reading strong arguments until they degrade into emotional monkey flinging.

3) Check for votes for or against a person over a set time frame as well as testing for variety. This would stop people who get a real hate on for someone and downvoting all their comments to torpedo their karma.

4) Force people to enter a reason when they downvote. Just a simple one line reason that would only be read by the moderators. Having to stop and think about why you are making a decision and justify it to someone else would cull a lot of the punitive downvotes. It would also provide you a place to start a dialog with people who aren't adapting well to the site.

point 1: Yes, except that I've had comments downvoted to 0 and then upvoted to 2... you shouldn't be penalized for an unfair downvote. Point 4 will eliminate some unfair downvotes. No one (except me, maybe) will admit to downvoting someone because of an ideological disagreement.

Point 2: OK, except it will sometimes be annoying.

Point 3: Yes, but it will be tricky to optimize this algorithm.

Point 4: This is the best suggestion to implement immediately.

No one (except me, maybe) will admit to downvoting someone because of an ideological disagreement.

I vote up a comment if I strongly agree with it. Conversely, I vote down a comment if I strongly disagree with it. Those in between, which I don't feel strongly about, I leave. Isn't that what the down vote is intended for?

Good suggestions but let me play devil's advocate (a lame one).

1. I am participating in thread A and get downmodded in another thread, and I write a message and see "please wait x minutes." It is trivially easy to cripple my participation ability this way. Of course, 3 and 4 are remeedies for this.

2. some replies warrant quick replies. A. blah. B. source? C. source of blah. The other thing is, all I need to do is post everything I want to post in succession, and check back later. That's actually what I do here; it's more efficient.

3. I think this is a good idea and should be a priority consideration. But there are multitudes of ways of doing this. To KIS, consider allotting downmodding points by number of upmodding points. You would need to find a happy ratio first, though; pg might have enough data to do this. sum upmod vs sum downmod. Say it's 12:1. Then maybe give one downmod point for 10 upmod points. This stops random downmodding just by controlling scarcity. But this does not stop trolls from posting. Of course when you have a whole upmod/downmod economy set up, you can then implement tresholding... and then here and there, and you have slashdot/reddit/digg all over.

4. I am hesitant on this idea. A troll can enter jibberish and you have useless data. On the flipside it prevents mistakenly downmodding.

I think #4 would be counterproductive. Downmods are harmless, and serve as a relief valve of sorts. Flames are anything but harmless. When you raise the barrier to downmodding, you make the flaming alternative more attractive.

In the same spirit: right now, no down-arrow is available for replies to your own posts. I think a better alternative would be to make the down-arrow available but have it only influence comment score and not karma.

The solution to these types of problems seem so obvious to me that I want to startup a company around it. I am trying to prove out my idea right now. If anyone is interested (joining or funding), let me know.

This is a very important problem, and definitely worth working on. When do you plan to launch?

Right now I am running my idea up against the netflix prize dataset to explore it more and prove it out. I would really like to find a co-founder to launch with.

Auto down-mod posts that start with "Uh, "

Here's an idea that may or may not have unintended consequences - I haven't thought about it long enough yet...

For every down-vote a comment receives, give some fraction of an up-vote to that comment's parent.

The idea is that, even if someone is rude and doesn't care about their own karma, if they are sufficiently rude they will actually wind up helping the person that they insult.

That would lead to people creating sockpuppet accounts with which to flame themselves. (Admittedly, I would find this amusing.)

Yes, of course you're correct (on both counts!)

What kind of moron would bother doing that?

Give them more advice and guidance on the submissions page. http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=20487

Drop karma. Still have voting on threads and comments but don't collect that up into a public karma for an individual. Karma is clearly a motivator for some compared to peer respect from posting a well thought out comment. If ones comment goes negative it's more likely to be upsetting if you think it has hurt your karma, whereas without karma you'd just take it as feedback that people, or even a clique, don't agree. You'd be less emotive in replying.

Most of the other responses deal with changes to the karma system - I'm not sure that's the only way to go.

How about placing some nice text above the comment submission field that reminds the poster to be nice, ie "Please be polite.", or even better, throw up random literary quotes about politeness/helpfulness/communities.

It would be a neat experiment to see if the ratios of mean-spirited responses to other types of comments decreased due to the suggested (mine or otherwise) changes.

What about dispearing the comment without the poster knowing it?

For example a variation of this would be: If a post has -2 votes, 10% of the users will not see it. If it gets -4, 20% will not see it...etc. The poster will always see it and he has no idea that he is being gradually ignored.

Make a word replacement filter.

If someone is causing problems just word-filter their name into something embarassing. Or take a word they use frequently in their posts and word-filter it into gibberish.

what constitutes a negative post?

Something you wouldn't say in the same way to someone's face.

No, anything that disagrees with the common "community" view... in this case, people's perception of what pg has said.

I've disagreed with things PG said in the past, like this:

http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2007/04/26/ideas-are-worthless

I also think some of his "startups are the future" thinking is naive in that it excludes many fields of endeavor where far more significant amounts of capital are necessary to get anything going.

But I wouldn't have any problems telling him the same thing to his face, over a beer. From what little I know of most people on this site, they all seem reasonable enough that I'd quite enjoy talking with them about a variety of things, even those we might not agree about.

I think you gave what should be the correct answer, but unfortunately, I think in practical terms, it is not the current answer for this community.

I haven't really seen that on this site. There've been times when I've disagreed with PG and my comment has been rated up far higher than PG's response was, eg. http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=20249

Yes, but your comment was interesting and insightful, so it doesn't count. :)

Disclaimer: I don't really like Cory Doctorow very much.

This article seems very much like a lot of what Mr. Doctorow produces: it shows a lot of promise (in this case by suggesting that he has a silver bullet to the Problem of Trolls), but barely attempts to deliver.

There's no 'there' here! Does he suggest even one concrete thing we might do? If he did, and I didn't see it, fine, I'll eat my words. From what I could tell, he a) told us what we already knew about the problem, b) told us what other sites have tried unsuccessfully, and then c) tries to tell us about being a "troll whisperer" -- something about removing vowels and some other vague "techniques".

There is no 'there' there.

Incidentally, if you're ever tempted to read a Cory Doctorow short story or novel, expect the same thing: a premise that may seem compelling on the surface, but with prose that has no substance. (You might accuse Thomas Pynchon of the same thing, but at least that guy can write well. Cory writes with the subtlety and beauty of a chainsaw.)

I agree that there was no 'there' there, but just the promise of a 'there' got my subconscious guessing what it would turn out to be, which was enough that I didn't feel my time was entirely wasted. A little like when you see a bad movie, knowing its going to be bad, but you enjoy it just for the set-up it gives your mind to play around in. Doctorow's writing is just good enough to do that.

Sometimes subtle ideas are very powerful. The "troll whisperer" was something I hadn't previously considered.

The Wufoo's have another simple but apparently powerful idea -- on their blog, they prefill the comment box with "everyone needs a hug", or something like that.

That's a really good point. You reap what you sow, and the Wufoos sow lots of goodwill and good humor, and that's what they get in return (generally). There's a lot of that kind of thing on their sites ("dinosaur buddy", "like a champ", etc.).

I've been trying to start thinking like that in all of my interactions with customers and users of our Open Source products. People take just about everything, even bad news or criticism, better if it is from a friend.

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Glad you said that, because I was really wondering about this article. Did I miss something, or is the only recommendation for anti-trolling the disvowelling? That's really meager for such a long article. He just goes on and on and his only answer to trolls is "learn from the troll-whisperers" - yet he doesn't name any troll-whisperers one could listen too.

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