Facebook Comments Have Silenced The Trolls — But Is It Too Quiet? | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Comments Have Silenced The Trolls — But Is It Too Quiet?

techcrunch.com

90 pointsatularora95 comments

Modest proposal: Just turn the comments off all together. TC doesn't give a shit about their commenters, and if something kicks off a big enough shit storm i'm sure there'll be a bajillion blog posts in reply and twitter will alight with the fire of righteous nerd rage.

If their comments are that much of a problem, just get rid of them. Facebook commenting is just a dumb half measure, trying to artificially impose additional social constraints on their commenters.

Besides, it's not like TechCrunch is leading by example in the first place. Is it any surprise that their comments are filled with trolls?

I totally agree with the observation that TC comments are pretty shitty. That being said, what good will it do to turn them off?

People like me who think reading comments on TC is a waste of time don't read them anyway. I won't be better off if TC decides to shut down comments.

On the other hand, people who enjoy reading the trolls (probably trolls themselves) will lose an enjoyable activity.

No one would really benefit from your proposal. (and no, I don't think anyone at TC is paid to read/moderate comments)

Well, it'd save the rest of the internet this ridiculous debate :D

But you're right. TC probably makes ad revenue off of comments as a draw. I'd be interested to see if a decrease in comments has an economic impact for them.

I have seen the TC authors and the subjects they are writing about directly interacting with readers in the comments. I haven't seen as much of the engaged community conversations that I see on HN, I think TC readers would miss out on a lot if they just removed them.

But I would say that I tend to go to TechCrunch to read the articles, but HackerNews (or Reddit) to see the community reaction.

When I argued that anonymity was a major factor contributing to vitriolic comments on the Internet[1], I took a lot of heat for it. Sample comment from Hacker News[2]:

"It's darkly amusing how people pretend this is about anonymity. As if there had never been a sexist jerk who had a name. ..."

I have to say that the results of this experiment make me feel vindicated.

On another note, multiple commenters here say that they won't be using Facebook comments because they don't want to spam their friends' feeds. Apparently they missed the checkbox right underneath the comment box that says "Post to Facebook"?

[1] http://33bits.org/2010/08/30/women-in-tech-how-anonymity-con...

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1647760

It's not just anonymity, it's anonymity coupled with a lack of consequences.

The ideal solution would be to make users sign in through their Facebook page, but then let them comment under whatever pseudonym they wanted. That way commenters could have anonymity, but abusive users could still be permanently banned.

What stops them from making more facebook accounts?

Minimum account age, minimum number of friends, need to have your account vetted the first time you post, need to be friends with certain people or within two degrees of certain people, etc.

Essentially it's extremely difficult to create a new Facebook persona and have it look at all authentic. Not impossible, but at least 250x more difficult than creating a new GMail account.

What stops them from making fake Facebook accounts now?

Facebook stops people.

I have never, nor shall I ever, maintained an account on Facebook.

This means that I will forever opt out of commenting on TC articles.

You can use a yahoo account as well which is essentially anonymous.

What year are you in 1998?

I let my Yahoo account die over half a decade ago.

Takes 5 minutes to make one. Don't even need an email address.

This, to the power of infinity. I don't have a Facebook account, or a Twitter account, or any other "social networking" account -- and I never will.

IM(NSH)O the massive drop in comments on TechCrunch is an indicator of how many people don't have (and don't want) an account on Facebook.

I don't see why you should decide to never have a social account. Personally, I don't trust Facebook, so I don't use it. Twitter, on the other hand, I've found useful both to follow people I know or know of in the context of a hobby &c., and as a microblog for myself.

You effectively outsource spam and troll blocking to Facebook. They allow test profiles (I have around 4) - but they know who you really are.

Fake accounts get shut down very quickly, they have a mechanism that seems to detect those accounts very quickly.

One data point: I've had the same fake account with a laughably fake name for more than 2 years and only one friend.

There are a number of accounts we created for inanimate objects while at uni which are still around. They all have a certain amount of friends and photos though.

We also used to create fake people using photos from stock art libraries and try to create realistic social lives for them, with our aim being that our real friends would eventually start enquiring after the fake people as if they knew them.

We were pretty bored.

Fake accounts get shut down very quickly

I have encountered numerous fake profiles that have survived for months/years. Many of these represent businesses that should really be pages. Others are accounts that are used on hate groups/pages exclusively and have highly offensive fake names.

The worst example I've seen was a vicious cyberbullying profile that Facebook allowed to accumulate hundreds of friends, under an obviously fake name, despite a large number of abuse reports.

That does seem to be an excellent middle ground. The pseudonymity would eliminate the element self-censorship that the Techcrunch article seems to be hinting at, while the threat of banning combined with the high cost of creating a new Facebook account would (hopefully) still suffice to keep the discussion reasonably civil.

As a cryptography researcher I've come across numerous cumbersome anonymous reputation systems, but it didn't occur to me that Facebook is in a position to roll one out right now with a minor change if they chose to. The caveat, of course, is that it is centralized and controlled by FB. Whether they have the incentive to implement it is an entirely different question.

"As a cryptography researcher I've come across numerous cumbersome anonymous reputation systems"

What's the best one you've come across? The only way I was ever able to dream up was basically requiring an iris scan to create a new account, but then not connecting the iris data to the account, just using it to ensure the user couldn't create a second account. This may actually be feasible now that every laptop has a built in camera and the patents have finally expired, but at the time I wanted to create this it wasn't yet possible from a business perspective.

I am not really convined, given facebook's past behaivor that any comment I make won't make it back to my facebook feed based on some new privacy change. Also, using facebook for login to third-party websites is not something I want to encourage.

Yes, this is my concern too. I had no problems with giving Disqus access to my twitter account. But I won't use facebook comments.

What about me? I simply don't want to have a facebook account for any reason whatsoever.

I wanted to comment on the TC piece about Shed Simove -- but I must have an FB account to comment on TC? Fark that.

Certainly killing trolls is a good thing -- but to make user interaction 100% dependent on FB is retarded. I choose to have absolutely zero of my online presence traverse FB servers, so I simply opt out of using them altogether.

I am not seeking to hide my identity, I am just choosing to stay clear of anything FB.

You can use a yahoo account as well. Did anyone in this thread try it?

Anonymity is not just a major factor in vitriolic comments - its also a factor in being able to comment at all. Ive seen on multiple occasions someone offer something really insightful on Slashdot as an Anonymous Coward saying something like - "My Employer probably woudlnt want be discussing this publicly". In the absence of anonymity current paranoia about "Intellectual Property", NDA's and employee tracking will ensure that a lot of things worth saying will remain unsaid.

Agreed. I also think that Slashdot's policy of starting Anonymous comments at less karma can give most of the benefits of both sides; it would probably work even better if anonymous comments started at say -5 karma. That way, stuff that had to be anonymous but was really useful content could get voted up, but most of the anonymous internet dickwads (to borrow Penny Arcade's terminology) would stay relatively hidden from view.

If you have a user with good karma, Anonymous Coward comments on ./ doesn't get less karma (at least they didn't back when I was using it).

For the purposes of this discussion, there's very little difference between joesomenick and Anonymous Coward.

Yea, I know. If I was posting them, I'd check with the employer as to if it is true and why.

There is an intellectual purity that is maintained through anonymity. I don't have to be consistent with my previous posts or any future posts I might want to make. I don't have to worry about what people will think of me. Heck, I don't even have to be _nice_.

But because I care about my post, I do have to try to be right. And because all of those other constraints are gone, each post exists independently.

A system that thinks vitriol shouldn't be _allowed_, that it should be actively fought instead of ignored, isn't taking the right tack.

Systems that allow anonymity and provide filtering for what the community views as trash are the right balance, because I get damn angry at things sometimes--we all do, there are a lot of things to be angry about-- and if I cross the line of decorum then at least I have the freedom to cross it (through semi-anonymity), just as y'all have the freedom to downvote me.

HN users aren't by definition anonymous as long as they value their HN identity (I'd say most do). Their "real life" identity might not be known but as long as they value their HN persona, they will try to remain respectable and responsible as their reputation is at stake. This is very different from the situation at TC where no one has a permanent identity.

Fantastic. Another part of the internet that can be as bland and humorless as my Facebook news feed.

Odd comment to see on HN. TechCrunch had a lot of crap comments because of the audience they attract. I'm glad to see it get a little more serious there. We don't need humor everywhere on the net. Places that invite troll comments end up becoming 90% troll comments. Also, maybe it's just the people on your friends list? I notice a lot of public persona people have extremely bland statuses, but my normal friends don't mind having funny statuses.

Edit: It's possible I once again failed to detect sarcasm.

It's not that TechCrunch comments were great, it's just the way that Facebook seems to produce really stilted and artificial interaction:

a) Half the comments in my news feed are dull trivia. ("I just ate a ham sandwich").

b) The other half are thinly veiled bragging ("I just ate a ham sandwich in Paris")

c) Weirdly, even friends who are funny in real life tend to be afflicted by the same condition.

Now, it could just be my selection of friends but I think it's actually people self censoring.

Finally, the idea of my posting on an internet site following me around until the end of time is revolting. I don't say anything particularly out there on HN, but if they switched to Facebook comments, I'd leave.

Edit: Looks like you've responded to my previous iteration of this post. Sorry to reword it all on you :)

At least we're on the same page about TechCrunch comments. :)

Edit: Snipped what I wrote in response to your previous iteration. No problemo.

>Now, it could just be my selection of friends but I think it's actually people self censoring.

I think that's what it is. Everyone has a reason for censoring themselves on FB. I think it's the mix of people we have on there. People in the tech community, real life friends, family, etc. Either you can or cannot get past it -- many people stick to censoring what they write. I gave up on it to an extent. I'll troll my brothers or post a YouTube video but I don't post angry statuses about someone or get all crazy on there.

>Finally, the idea of my posting on an internet site following me around until the end of time is revolting. I don't say anything particularly out there on HN, but if they switched to Facebook comments, I'd leave.

There is a similar comment on this thread that expresses this. It's understandable. I have things on the Web going back to when I was 16. I can't wait until those archives are dug up. I do enough things now that I attach my real identity to that I just had to start thinking about what I really want to say before I say it. There isn't any trolling, though I can still be brash and opinionated at times. My answer to it all was to clean up how I act. If in the future I was really dumb about something I said then at least I was sincere when I said it.

"were the ones who either had a different real account where they let loose"

Not that I would recommend this in the PR 2.0 age, BTW.

Sorry, I rewrote what I said in response to the OP's rewrite, but to anyone interested the context was:

-------

>The strange thing is that it even afflicts friends who are really funny in person.

That's something I used to struggle with when I was forming my friends list in the beginning. It was a mix between bloggers and other people in the tech community and my IRL friends. For awhile there I was really boring. Then I realized the people being boring were the ones who either had a different real account where they let loose or they really just want to keep the show up. Most normal people aren't all business on Facebook.

I really think there is a HUGE gaping hole for a competitor to step in and really hurt Facebook. If someone brought out something that had sane support for what Facebook calls 'lists', they'd kill it. The biggest problem with facebook is that using lists is really difficult. You can set a default that's really narrow or you can set a default that's really broad. Restricting status updates is really error prone as they provide very little feedback about what you're doing.

If someone built sane grouping with a nice UI to support and built that out as part of a larger privacy play....I think they could go a long ways.

Frid.ge is trying to do something along these lines.

> We don't need humor everywhere on the net

Yeah, but maybe humor is the wrong term. I know that many of my friends (after they got some warning mails from facebook about profanity, etc) now watch out what they post and say on facebook. It's so sterile.

Posting on facebook feels to me like living under a facist regime where you have to watch out what you say because it can be always hold against you. And the judge and jury are one.

Your friends are bland and humorless? In my experience, that isn't the fault of Facebook.

I won't be commenting on techcrunch because of this change, and if I can't comment I'll be less likely to visit regularly. I liked disqus .. and I'm annoyed that Facebook is invading this space.

I'm curious why you won't be commenting? What does the new interface lack that Disqus had (or vice versa)? Or is it merely your annoyance at Facebook for trying to build something better that drives your decision? (Keep in mind, no one is forcing the Facebook comment widget down publishers' throats. Perhaps it bothers you because it feels like it's more optimized for publishers than users?)

Disqus had detachment from the rest of your online life if you wanted it to, and anonymous commenting.

I don't want to use my Facebook account for anything other than facebook.com. I don't particularly trust Facebook as an organisation and I certainly don't wish to live in a world that's dominated by only one or two huge mega-corps.

I wouldn't want every blog post from every blog I read submitted to HN. By the same logic, the problem I have with Facebook comments is that I don't want everything I comment on to be broadcasted to all my Facebook friends, mostly because most of the content wouldn't interest them and just increase the noise on Facebook.

I'm not convinced that any one social network can capture or handle all of my communication needs.

I want diversity.

There is a very clear checkbox that says "Post to Facebook", which you can uncheck.

Doesn't address your other issues about communication needs, but broadcasting to all your friends is a problem with a check-the-checkbox fix.

Ah, you're right, I totally forgot about that. Although given Facebook's history, I wonder if they'll remove that option once they achieve critical mass.

+ retroactively for all comments made already.

The worst part about using Facebook is the fact that it is Facebook. Almost like a butterfly effect, you never know what you post using some extended form of fb goes back to your timeline. True there is a checkbox that gets rid of your comment from being posted to your profile, but the comment that I posted on some random website which in no way is Facebook's business to be archiving, will be in their databases forever.

Probably had it been some company that had shown high moral grounds for user privacy, I would have been OK, but with the brilliant track record they have shown for user privacy I would be highly wary.

Something about this does not feel right.

The most tedious commenters at TechCrunch are the ones who use their real names. The anonymous trolls are frequently funny and insightful.

Here's one problem with that article. If you don't use Facebook you can't leave them a comment about how you don't like the new comment system because it requires Facebook. That's going to exclude a large number of valid opinions about the new comment system. You'll only get feedback from those already willing to 'opt in'.

I don't use FB or Yahoo so I guess my TC commenting days are over for the time being.

Do I understand this correctly? To comment on Techcrunch, one now has to become a customer of some other unrelated company, Facebook, whose main purpose seems to be tracking all of people's private activity across the entire web?

That's like telling McDonald's customers that they can't buy a Big Mac unless they first carry a Sears credit card with an RFID chip. What does one have to do with the other? Nothing.

I should start telling my customers that they can only buy my software if they buy my favorite brand of peanut butter.

Err they did say they where using Disqus before so theres nothing new here.

Saying they have nothing to do with each other is entirely disingenuous. Blogs want comments to be tied to the commenter's identity. Facebook is by far the largest identity provider on the web. Thus, blogs tie comments to Facebook. While some may not like it, it makes an abundant amount of sense.

On Twitter from Matt Cutts (head of Webspam at Google) to Seigler (author of article): @parislemon I understand the appeal of switching to FB comments. But just be aware that you're throwing out a few Matts with the trolls. :)

I have a Facebook account, but I have the platform stuff disabled, so no commenting for me.

There are certain topics, such as sexual abuse and drug addiction that merit anonymous conversation, but this is tech. The main thing that folks are hiding behind is the fear of being wrong in hindsight.

If you're going to make a bold prediction or have a strong opinion, be prepared to back it up enough to slap your name on it. That's really not asking a whole lot.

Anonymity has its place in civil discourse, but definitely not in public comment threads that require no registration.

> The main thing that folks are hiding behind is the fear of being wrong in hindsight.

I'm not so sure that's true.

I can think of many other reasons people might want or even need to participate anonymously (e.g. to protect their job, or their future employability, or their relationships with others in the industry to name just a few off the top of my head.)

Further, some of the most insightful comments seem highly likely to come from people with one or more of these privacy needs.

While I agree with you, I think there's a better solution to allowing these kinds of comments in than to open the floodgates and allow any number of people to post under any name they wish. The thought is noble, and as you point out, the potential is very rewarding in terms of insight.

That said I've seen pseudonyms used far, far more to disparage and to make cheap, hurtful points that can't be backed up. I don't think anybody thinks that what Techcrunch had before is the best we can do in commenting systems.

This. I'm not about to tattoo all the most controversial opinions I hold now or ever across my forehead, and it's not because I expect they're incorrect (though that would be reason enough). I have to negotiate for food and shelter with members of a nosy, judgmental, sometimes irrational species.

But the other interesting thing we’re seeing is that whereas trollish garbage used to infest the comment section, now we’re seeing almost the opposite. Many people are now leaving comments that gush about the subject of the article in an overly sycophantic way.

I've never been a TechCrunch poster, so take my comments with a grain of salt, but: duh! All they've done is amplify the negative consequences of unpopular posts a thousandfold, because the stigma will attach to your real-life identity instead of an easily abandoned online identity. The mechanism they chose deters people from posting comments that might engender personal hostility. That isn't selective at all! Everyone feels shame when they say something wrong online and a little twinge of pain when someone attacks them; that's only human. Trolls just feel less than others. Crank up the pain to get rid of the trolls, and you'll get rid of a lot of other people, too.

Compulsively positive people, of course, are safe anywhere because they don't trigger anyone to viciously lash out in defense of their favorite technology or company, and they feel even more welcome than they are because they're blind to any subtle negativity that is directed their way.

There's another breed of posters who will stay, too -- professionals in whatever is being discussed. They're used to standing behind their opinions, but more importantly, they actually benefit from the positive impression they make, because it bolsters their professional reputation. Sure, you won't lose those guys, but why would you be surprised at losing other positive contributors? I'm only a professional at programming, so the consequence of connecting my personal identity with my words about anything else at all is pure downside.

Let's not turn every corner of the internet back into real life. Every time you open your mouth with a critical opinion, you run the risk of personal negative blowback. In real life, people spend their "negativity" budget carefully. I use mine up in person on personal issues and work issues. I have no desire to blow any of it online. The nice thing about the internet is you can shut down your defenses and relax. We're playing with Monopoly money here, and even so it still hurts a little! I've built up decent karma here and at other semi-anonymous sites with my only incentives being my self-respect and the meaningless little number next to my id. The anonymity that is allowed here doesn't liberate me from my morals and my pride; it just liberates me from the constant oppressive calculation of honesty versus risk.

When I comment anonymously, I get a chance to clarify my ideas, express myself, and receive feedback. (Sometimes I do this by expressing opinions I'm not sure I personally hold, and which I am not ready to personally endorse -- does that make me a troll?) Connecting my personal identity just adds personal risk and forces me to turn on all of my social defenses. Ugh, that's tiring and paralyzing, and it isn't conducive to clear thinking. It makes me feel tired just thinking about it. No thanks!

> Sometimes I do this by expressing opinions I'm not sure I personally hold, and which I am not ready to personally endorse -- does that make me a troll?

No, a devils advocate.

There are many times that I will play devils advocate only to foster more interesting discussion and to get a viewpoint out there that may not be popular but necessary to get the full picture of something.

If you don't make it clear you're doing it, or if you don't phrase it as a question, then you're being dishonest. I don't talk about anything serious anymore with few people who've pulled this trick a few times on me. I'd rather address people real opinions instead of their made up ones.

I don't think all negative comments are looked down upon. At least for me, I don't feel uncomfortable criticizing something on Facebook if I feel like I have solid reasoning to justify it.

To me, adding the Facebook commenting system to Techcrunch seems to be transplanting a lot of what makes HN work as a place for discussion:

- a persistent online identity that you care about - having to sound reasonably intelligent or to contribute meaningfully, in order to get votes / likes. - comments are ranked, so the comments deemed the most valuable are the most visible.

"Let's not turn every corner of the internet back into real life." Great point, could be the start of a manifesto!

Even though I have a facebook account I doubt I'd ever comment outside of Facebook using it.

I'm not embarrassed by my comments, I just don't want to be spamming friends' news feeds with all of them.

This reminds me uncomfortably about that crazy "internet ID" program Obama has been advocating.

Also, I'm not giving TechCrunch my Facebook login. I don't want them messing with my Facebook, and I really don't see any reason to trust them.

Perhaps they should use Disquss for their actual startup articles, and for their troll friendly iPhone/Android/etc posts they can turn on the Facebook comments? Or better yet, stop posting the troll friendly articles...

I like to leave comments on various news sites using my real name (or an alias based on my real name, like I do on HN). I also understand TC's motives for wanting users to stand up behind their opinions using their real names. It improves the quality of the discourse, although some people may feel intimidated to use their real names.

What I don't like about the new TC system is it ties the comments into Facebook, which I see as an area for communication with friends and family, most of whom are not interested in seeing my thoughts on technology.

"It improves the quality of the discourse"

That's a bold claim. Is there empirical evidence supporting it?

Topix did an empirical study and found that anonymity in comments increased the quality of comments.

http://blog.topix.com/2008/01/anonymous-comments-by-the-numb...

Maybe everyone is using Chrome with the "Disconnect" add-on? :)

The Chrome Disconnect add-on removes the annoying facebook items from all web pages.

Wonder if it's a coincidence that the guy who was getting the most trolled (MG Siegler) broke this news...

You mean, the guy who does the most trolling?

As I was reading I was thinking "who wrote this trollish article - it's blindingly obvious he has no respect for the view that Facebook comments are a bad idea, and is just paying lip-service to addressing the issue. And he's clearly trying to wind people up."

Ahhhhhhh..... MG Siegler

I didn't realise the negativity he provokes got to him.

I like facebook, but I also like to quit periodically because I find it distracting when I need to get work done, and frankly, my fb friends, god bless 'em, can get annoying as hell sometimes in aggregate. Even if we leave aside the debate on the pros and cons of anonymity, there are a lot of legitimate reasons why people wouldn't want to use facebook as a web-wide identity platform. Creating a forced dependency for something as basic as blog comments on a site otherwise unconnected with facebook seems very dismissive of people's preferences in this area. Hope it doesn't catch on :-/

Well, I've never commented at techcrunch, but since I refuse to get a facebook account, it looks like I never will. MMmmmmMMMmmmMMM Those grapes sure are sour!

It's like a search engine not indexing anonymous sites because they don't want to invent use a page rank or some other classification.

The TC change inhibit me for commenting again. I don't like to correlate my FB user with TC, FB is a more private stuff for me and far from my "hacker life".

Also, posting anonymously or with a user not correlated with your real life is something good about Internet. I believe that this is a big mistake from TC.

When can we silence TechCrunch?

They have discouraged some trolling. They have also alienated people like me who consciously choose not to have Facebook accounts.

Never had a Facebook account and never will.

So. How do I comment?

You do not exist. Go away!

Back in my day, we had moderators.

great. i'm sure my company will do a "meeh too" now and make me implement it.

Heh. Reminds me of how when Google Wave came out, the company I worked for at the time made sure I was trying my darndest to get an invite so they wouldn't miss the boat.

IMO what is needed is a move away from controlling the message. It is fundamentally flawed and causes many problems, including on this issue.

I hate the over-use of the term "troll". More than often people call other people trolls just because they don't agree on their opinion.

Opinions and statements that disturb the cozy hive mind feeling don't have to be troll-posts. To me they are an essential part of the internet discussion culture.

Sadly karma and rigorous "anti troll" comment systems make it all to easy to flag inconvinient opinions as stupid troll posts.

Given how dumb many of my thoughts and questions have turned out to be in retrospect, there is no way I'm associating my common Internet interactions with my real identity.

Rant: I just hate how now everything has to be about or revolute around Facebook.

I don't see any comments on the article, it must be a plugin of mine.

I don't see them either because I use Facebook Disconnect plugin. Great plugin, BTW.

Thanks, I'd installed it, but had forgot the ignorant peace it brought to me.

When enough sites start using Facebook Comments all the trolls will just make fake facebook accounts.

This already happens. Groups and pages that would be classified as "hate" are magnets for obviously fake profiles, which are often friends with other fake (and real) profiles. Facebook's real-name policies seem to be poorly and arbitrarily enforced. The more sites that use FB for commenting, the more innacurate FB's social graph will become.

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