Hacker News Reader

Comment by prawn | Hacker News Reader

If you liked this chaos, you'd love my 15+ years of cobbled-together efforts at limiting forum spam and the like. I suddenly don't feel quite so alone in the myriad efforts needed to tackle this sort of thing.

View on HN

It's an endless arms race. I spend a lot of time studying unsavory people and a great deal of effort goes into the development of new dogwhistles that are designed to either provoke or connect with peers while maintaining deniability. You might like this paper on the evolutionary dynamics of covert social signaling: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-22926-1

I can really identify with that. My efforts are against spam and trolls; at least the spam is predictable and easier to take a sledgehammer to! Those grey-area trolls are such a miserable part of online content and moderation.

If they're covert and only members of the group using them know what they mean, then why fight it? Seems like a helpful way to communicate about things that others might not like to hear. The paper you linked said that too - "Such signals may allow coordination and enhanced cooperation while also avoiding the alienation or hostile reactions of individuals with different preferences.".

This happens all the time in cartoons that appeal to children but also contain subtle adult jokes so everyone can enjoy them on different levels.

Because it encourages more of the same, and it's rarely completely covert. Often and increasingly, it's racial dogwhistling and just devolves every thread to wasteful, antagonistic and unproductive conversation. You might've heard the line/story about accommodating nazis in your bar.

Maybe dog whistling isn't the problem but just plain old whistling?

At an online company I worked at we had various word filters for our forums, but new stuff was always popping up and getting through.

What worked in the end was having any newly created thread send a message containing the post title & body to a slack channel specifically for monitoring the forums. Employees and our forum moderators were in there, and any bad threads were nearly instantly deleted. Eventually the spammers mostly gave up. Hard to beat a dozen human brains :)

I get alerted to every new thread, and when I'm online my response rate is also very fast. When the message count was under 1,000/week, I used to get an email for every single post too. But if other moderators aren't around and I'm offline, I am out of luck. Shadow-banning can be effective. I also give regulars the ability to sin-bin any post which removes it from view and leaves it for me to check.

Having a dozen reviewers, especially if spread across timezones, would be a dream!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com