Trolls (2008)
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
For example: I know for a fact that the various people who run HN use it to selectively market what they want, but maintain that it is some trust worthy news source for hackers. Since there's no way to distinguish between the astroturfed "top stories" advertising for YC companies and a real news story the entire forum becomes suspect. I consider this just as bad as trolling, except the leadership does it so people don't comment on it.
I've also seen huge double standards on here, again because people in charge can do whatever they want. They'll yell about ad hominem attacks and then do them two comments down. They'll post one-liner attack comments and call that "enlightened discourse", then call someone else's similar comment a "troll". Shit, people on here have outright called me a cocksucker and posted whole presentations vilifying me personally and nobody bats a wee little eyelash at it.
All of you are heavily manipulated on this forum and yet, here you are complaining about trolls? At least trolls can't hellban you to defend their little astroturf empire.
>You can't change a community you can only leave it.
This is very very true. I've quit many communities because they devolved into noise and spam. I've publicly said that I came to HN merely because I wanted a good list of links worth reading, and somehow I ended up with an account and almost 1000 karma.
I suspect in the next 2-3 years I'll leave HN because it really will have jumped the shark by then. Although, I think the discussion of the slashdotification of HN is off-topic according to the rules.
Because Linux is dying, BSD is set for world domination, and Microsoft writes the world's most robust software in the world. After all they write database servers which are used to run nuclear reactors!
(How many classic trolls can I satirize in one post? I don't know.)
I realize YC job posts can disable comments, and there is a separate tab for open jobs. That's no big deal because the behavior is externally visible and obvious.
If HN actually re-ranks articles to support YC content though, that is a big deal. And it's scary how that might subtly affect the Valley, given how large and influential HN is now.
While this site does permit random people to submit random links, and then allow more random people to comment on the articles, I'd just assumed it was fundamentally a source of marketing for Mr Graham and his activities. After all, it IS part of ycombinator.com...
1. There are hundreds of YC companies now, each with multiple founders, almost all of whom are HN readers. Each person here votes on topics, articles and companies they find interesting. I follow a lot of YC-related news because it's fun and helpful to be informed about YC and the alumni. Therefore, I'm more familiar with YC companies and founders, so I will tend to vote on their news slightly more often. With hundreds of founders from YC, it only takes a small bias like this to create a slight lean toward YC news getting better results here than other similar news.
2. This same bias isn't exclusive to YC alumni. Most people on HN familiar with YC like it, respect PG, and are interested in YC companies and the progress of the portfolio. So, in addition to a small bias on the part of the alumni, I have also seen that YC news gets more votes and comments from the rest of the community.
While that might mean that YC news gets more exposure and other news less, more people seem to be interested in it than not, so it seems the forum still works as it should.
I've been on HN for a long time (longer than my already pretty old profile suggests), and I've never heard about this. Apologies for the need for clarification, but this is important. It would greatly affect my attitude toward the site, and I think others' as well.
You are mistaken. Only job postings have their own decay algorithm, and those are visually distinguished from stories by e.g. not having points or comments. All stories have the same decay rate.
While you are vague here about what you mean by this, you are more precise later in this thread,
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3354698
and what you say there is false. Stories about YC companies don't get any extra points or have a different ranking algorithm. They are also treated the same by anti-abuse code, like the voting ring detector.
If you'd thought more about it, you'd have realized things couldn't be otherwise. I know people will ask me whether there is any sort of bias in the frontpage rankings in favor of stories about YC cos, and I have to be able to say truthfully that there isn't.
Considering the crap that Patrick (patio11) and Google received about mixing advertisements with results in (intentionaly?) confusing ways, it might be better to put the YC company job ads in a different location (top of the page, un-numbered and time limited to 24 hours or so) just to make the intent and separation more clear. --It's just a thought.
Your handling of the AirBnB fiasco was stellar. You let the negative story posts stay on the HN, and you allowed them to be up-voted to infinity and beyond. The thing most people don't realize is "Why the stories eventually started to decline in rankings, and why they declined so quickly?" --The reason is people like me; those who got tired of seeing the font page loaded with derogatory speculation and opinion about AirBnB, and decided to 'flag' all of the submissions. Though I have no proof, I'm certain I'm not the only one to be annoyed to the point of flagging all the nonsense.
The most recent HN Troll happened this morning, namely the HTTP LoLCats crap. It made it to the #2 spot on the front page (possibly #1 for a short period). I was impressed that in the 17 comments, there were no "This doesn't belong on HN" posts, so a lot of people were smart enough to just silently hit the 'flag' link. I just finished checking, and the HTTP LoLCats submission was nowhere to be seen in the first 360 results. Had the HTTP LolCats submission still been on the front page after I got a few hours of sleep, I may have logged out of HN and never returned.
It's fantastic to know you have voting-ring detection functioning to some degree. It's a great way to prevent spam in all of it's various forms. Without knowing the code you're really running (secret sauce and all that), I can see one potential problem; Since the HN moderators are from the ranks of the YC funded company founders, their participation on HN is most likely weighted differently. In other words, the friends amongst the YC founders not only constitute a voting-ring of sorts, but their actions/votes on HN may have more weight. With human beings wanting their friends to succeed, there is really no way around this issue, technical or otherwise.
Though I have no special weight or privileges here on HN, I openly admit to voting up and rooting for some of the YC funded companies that are doing great things. A more direct way to say it is, I'm also part of the "problem" of YC funded companies getting preferential treatment. Maybe I'm a terrible person for wanting them to succeed, but then again, maybe I'm only human, like rooting for good people doing great things, and maybe there are plenty of other normal humans like me around here.
A lot of people, including Zed, only notice the very real inconsistencies, but they don't understand the fundamental and technical causes of the inconsistencies. You did address Zed's point, but you are essentially defending a non-issue.
EDIT: Seeing this post get down-voted is disheartening. It tells me that there is something definitely wrong, and the cause could be me, or HN, or both, but I don't know for certain.
(By "stories" I don't mean to include job posts. They are a different type of object, though they get displayed similarly.)
Moderators' votes are not weighted differently than anyone else's. I don't weight votes at all. I've occasionally considered it, and I might try it in the future, but if I did I wouldn't do it based on whether someone was a moderator.
Additionally, just about any algorithmic way to assign greater trust, and hence, additional weight in voting/flagging, will most likely result in a higher percentage of moderators being trusted than the normal populace. If your algorithm did not result in a higher percentage of moderators being given greater trust/weight, then I'd be worried. ;)
The tough thing about an algorithmic approach is whether or not a person with highly up-voted comments and submissions has good habits, intentions, and judgement when it comes to their voting and flagging? Pure "common sense" (cognitive bias) speculation suggests the two "should" be correlated, but you're the only one with the data needed to prove it.
If there is a way to algorithmically define your standby phrase, "He means well," then I don't know how to do it. If you do figure it out, please write about it. It would make the world a better place.
In this respect, HN is (or has become) just like Reddit.
There is a huge editorial bias, even if it is not the perennial 'Hacker News favors YC companies in some insidious way' and even if it isn't 100% from PG himself
They'll yell about ad hominem attacks and then do them two
comments down.
and nobody bats a wee little eyelash at it.
All you have to do is follow three simple rules.
One: never underestimate your opponent.
Expect the unexpected.
Two: take it outside.
Never start anything inside the bar unless it's absolutely necessary.
And three: be nice.
Come on.
If somebody gets in your face and calls you a cocksucker, I want you to be nice.
OK.
Ask him to walk, be nice.
If he won't walk, walk him. But be nice.
If you can't walk him, one of the others will help you.
And you'll both be nice.
I want you to remember that it's a job.
- It's nothing personal. - Uh-huh.
Being called a cocksucker isn't personal?
No. It's two nouns combined to elicit a prescribed response.
What if somebody calls my mama a whore?
Is she?
(laughter)
I want you to be nice...
..until it's time to not be nice.
Well, how're we supposed to know when that is?
You won't. I'll let you know.
Be nice.
(Oh, and by the way, I'm letting you know now when it's time to not be nice here: never.)
tl;dr: maintaining an online community is anything but simple.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean. One possibility is that you're referring to the hackers that build communities online who try to establish some sort of guidelines for behavior.
If this is what you meant then I think I disagree. I've tried a very similar experiment to pg's with HN. I run a small community site http://yakkstr.com and most of the users came from an older site called soulcast. soulcast had no rules and it degenerated exactly as expected and was full of trolls in no time. My entire goal was to recreate that site minus the trolls, and I ruthlessly enforced one simple rule. Do not directly insult other users of the site. (actually two rules: no porn, illegal stuff, or spam)
Simple right? Not really. I loved pg's child metaphor, and just like a child the trolls from the old site, who are smarter than actual children, do everything they can to find the limits to what is allowed, and they hover right around that line. As soon as they think you're going easy they push it farther.
One example, people like to argue about politics on yakkstr and one of the trolls uses a pattern of associating a label like "liberal" to someone then they insult the label. Moronic ideas for liberals, liberals are morons, etc, etc. Technically he's not violating my rule, but it's very hard to define an explicit rule to deal with such instances because you want to allow people to sometimes say controversial things about generic groups.
The problem arises when someone gets offended and reacts by directly insulting the savy troll. How do you deal with it? Not so easy. And occasionally a good user gets made at something and calls someone a moron. It leaves a bad taste in their mouth if you come down with an iron fist on them.
I don't have good answers to these problems, but I think the hard work is working out pretty well for my little community. But it is complicated and requires constant vigilance.
I was referring to the hackers who use the forum, not the ones who run it. Sorry for the confusion.
It really is much easier and more beneficial for everyone to just be nice. Why work harder to achieve less?
A few strategies that have made it easier for me to "be nice":
1. Avoid long back and forth threads. Say what you have to say and get back to work.
2. Try to plan your comment to not be misinterpreted. This avoids much unnecessary pain. It's also difficult.
3. If someone responds negatively to you, wait and let others respond on your behalf. It's amazing how much better this feels.
4. Imagine that the other person has 42 legitimate reasons for not being nice. Let 'em slide.
5. Imagine that the other person may someday be your ideal co-founder, mentor, collaborator, customer, or angel. (Or more likely, your ideal co-founder, mentor, collaborator, customer, or angel is witnessing this exchange.) Don't say anything to scare them away.
6. Most of all: It doesn't matter! This is all optional. We were all busy working before Hacker News and will be busy working after Hacker News is gone (perish the thought). Lighten up.
If everyone followed all those rules I think this one would be detrimental. Seeing you smarter-than-me people go back and forth about stuff I'm right on the verge of understanding is pretty cool.
I think the point is: as soon as it gets personal, get back to work.
I think you can reduce the chance of misinterpretation but never eliminate it. Language is not sufficiently precise to prevent all misinterpretations.
I've pondered this issue a lot, and I've also noticed that, as you indicated, lots of troll messages would be acceptable under your rule, but many responses to those messages would not be.
My favorite example comes from a discussion group about hamsters as pets. Someone -- clearly a troll -- posts a recipe for barbecued hamster. 100 people respond something like, "You're sick!"
In that case, it seemed to me that it was not the trolling that wrecked the discussion, but the response to it. And of course the troll is not violating your rule, but those who replied to him are. So I like your rule.
> And occasionally a good user gets made at something and calls someone a moron. It leaves a bad taste in their mouth if you come down with an iron fist on them.
Hmmm ... but directly asking them not to do it again would probably work well. If they can't even handle that, then you probably don't want them anyway. (And really, is the iron-fist policy so bad? So someone gets a bad taste in their mouth. That someone was wrecking your community.)
The person I'm talking about was/is a good member of the community, but they got mad 1 out of 200 of their threads. I don't want them to leave.
http://pugs.blogs.com/audrey/2009/08/my-hobby-troll-hugging....
Discussed here on hackernews: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=786874
Trolls are important.
Trolling, especially as seen on places like slashdot/4chan/somethingawful/etc., can oftentimes be a mechanism of critique for ideas and rhetorical styles.
One of the best things about the 'net is that, frankly, none of this really matters. None of it. It's a big joke. My twitters and my wikis and my posts don't mean anything. They're bits in the stream. My karma is an int on a server somewhere, incremented and decremented by the whims of my fellow users.
Trolls can help remind all of us that hey, this is all light-hearted. They say outrageous things, they stir up trouble, they cause annoyance, they sully the pristine conditions of these high-minded realms of discourse.
In short, folks, they keep us all honest. They call us on our bullshit. And when a community takes itself so seriously that it becomes a habitat for trolls, it usually is a sign that that community needs to be dispersed, cleaned, and reformed elsewhere.
HN is a pretty cool place, and I hope it lasts a long while before ossifying and becoming infested with trolls.
Besides, if a troll makes a reasonable point, does it matter that he was actually trolling? Truthfully it's snark that bothers me most - I can deal with someone being playful or contrary for the sake of it, but too much snark just triggers a very primal part of my brain that makes we want to start cracking skulls, and that's not very conducive to continuing the discussion.
I am presented with another person's responses to my inputs in the form of communications, and I build a model of the person. Sometimes this model is correct, sometimes this model is incorrect. I might misjudge a person who is kind to my face as being decent, when behind my back they spread rumors and gossip. Similarly, I might have a coworker who always criticizes my approaches to problems, but is the first to stick up for me in meetings.
Sometimes you judge rightly, other times wrongly, and in either event life goes on (real or virtual). This is just part of the human condition--and trolls remind us of this fact and the fact that sometimes you can't tell.
Similarly, when someone posted a fake obit of Steve Jobs (well before he died), it caused quite an impact despite none of it mattering.
But seriously, it is a representation of something physical. Money. Money which can in turn be used for other physical things. Reputation "karma" isn't. It /is/ meaningless in this context, because you can never log into HN again and your life will go on.
I don't think the argument was "anything digital is pointless."
Do we have to revisit the barter system where value is traded for value to once again realize the reason money was invented? Fish for tools works, until you want apples.
It doesn't matter whether something "intrinsically" has value (wood as fuel, apple as food) if you can trade it for something that does. As long as that remains true, karma remains an int and bank accounts remain buying power. Fin.
Anyway, for karma to be effective, all it has to do is have enough value to outweigh the (equally intangible) value of the satisfaction of posting something trollish.
It's not like a bank keeps a physical amount of cash equal to all account holders' deposits (if they did, they'd have nothing to lend). Instead all you do with your money is transfer it, or get paper vouchers for it in forms like checks, money orders, or federal reserve notes......
That people accept those for things that are physical doesn't change the fact that the money is in fact not a representation of anything physical.
"One of the best things about the 'net is that, frankly, none of this really matters. None of it. It's a big joke. My twitters and my wikis and my posts don't mean anything. They're bits in the stream."
I Really don't see any other way to interpret that. The "bits in the stream" are having an increasingly large amount of impact on the world outside the internet every day, and to pretend otherwise is irresponsible.
Karma has evolved to merely mean: I don't post unpopular opinions.
This is merely anecdotal, of course, and should go without saying (but needs to be said here). I see this happening with other people's comments far more often. It's a shame that while we removed karma from posts, we still display and indicator of the groupthink to the world.
In the end, a comment should either be displayed, or flagged and removed.
I would like to participate in and read honest discussion. Trolls poison honest discussion. The "none of this matters" line of thought is a red-herring. Trolls get in the way of what I, personally, get out of forums.
I do think it's probably better if it's in areas where there's at least tacit agreement that those are the local discussion norms, though. If you post somewhere like SomethingAwful's FYAD (though I haven't taken a look in a few years), or 4chan, you can hardly claim to be surprised or misled by the conversational norms. On HN, the local culture prefers a different style of discussion, and I like that in its own way as well. Though I also liked some subset of Slashdot trolls in their heyday, even though they weren't officially welcome at Slashdot: OGG THE CAVEMAN, the BSD Troll, and a few others were some of the more interesting posters, some mixture of net-art and actual discussion.
This idea of trust is a very strange thing, to me. If I present an argument or point logically and it is accepted, then there is no problem. If I do so and it is rejected logically, there is no problem. If I do so and are assailed with noise and rubbish, then it is usually pretty clear that it's just garbage and to be ignored.
If I seek affirmation and reassurance from people online instead of flesh-and-blood folks I can talk to directly, I being to wonder if this is actually an okay state of affairs. If my support group could be replaced with a bunch of clever Python scripts, Markov models, and machine learning algos, I would suggest that something is deeply wrong--and that is exactly the sort of inscrutable interface forums provide.
Only when you start to "trust" the personas you encounter online and become invested in your model of them do you actually run the risk of getting hurt. Treat it like a game, learning what you can when you can and ignoring the rabble, and things go best.
:)
Online forums are, by definition, right there on the 'net along with Google and Wikipedia and other resources, so flat-out misrepresentation of facts seems somewhat difficult. If somebody chooses to be irrational, they are readily identified as such, right? So where does honesty fit in all this?
I'm a very trusting person. I don't lock my doors, for instance. But I exercise, or at least I like to think I exercise, a healthy scepticism without falling into paranoia. You can never really know or understand what everyone else's motivations and intentions are and you should remember that fact at all times.
I disagree. I think the shift from personal to electronic interaction is largely to blame for the level of shrill nastiness that pervades our present-day culture. It's okay to express yourself in ways that would have been completely socially unacceptable, or just plain embarrassing, in past times. Social norms can be stifling, and self expression is good, but it's possible to take it too far. And on the internet, it frequently is. (Although this problem predates the internet. Talk radio in the 80s and 90s comes to mind.)
Nowhere is this more evident to me than in the realm of politics, where things really do matter. The process is seemingly held hostage to whoever can scream the loudest. The result is the sort of do-nothing congressional bitchfest which is currently pleasing to a whopping 8% of Americans. I read accounts of the way things used to work (30+ years back) in Washington and am amazed--it's like studying a lost civilization.
Even today, offline culture somehow seems more nasty/violent to me than online culture. It's not only in movies that people get into bar fights over stupid things. They not only yell at each other, but actually punch each other, and occasionally stab or smash bottles over each others' heads. It's a crazy world out there.
I don't mean to call out the Republicans for being uniquely unpleasant in this regard -- there have been periods when the Democrats have been just as calculatingly obstructive.
Hmm.
The House passed a budget this year. The Senate hasn't for almost three years.
The House passed an extension to govt financing/ operations. The Senate hasn't.
The House passed an extension to the payroll tax cut. The Senate refuses to even vote on it.
I wonder which party controls which branch of the legislature.
I didn't really mean for this to be an unpleasantly partisan post, just a statement of facts about the situation in Washington as I see it. The current Democrats in power have many flaws, but I see no reason to think their goal is to avoid action, because a lack of action would provide no benefit to them.
To argue that the House has genuinely tried to get things done during this session, I would think you would have to assent to one of the following two things:
1. Even with a divided Congress, it is not required for both parties to work together in a bipartisan spirit of compromise to pass meaningful legislation.
2. The current House of Representatives has genuinely tried to work closely together with Senate Democrats and the President in a bipartisan spirit of compromise to pass meaningful legislation.
Do you believe one of these things?
> a bipartisan spirit of compromise
I see that the repubs have given the dems some things that the dems want and the dems have refused "the deal" because they didn't everything that they wanted. How does that translate to "the repubs won't compromise"?
For example, the Dems claim to want an extension of the payroll tax reduction. The Repubs gave it to them. Is it unreasonable for the Repubs to get something as well?
I'm not saying that the Repubs are blameless, but it's absurd to claim that they're the only ones to blame.
You disagree, so please define this "bipartisan compromise" that the Dems are (at least somewhat) willing to do and that the Repubs are unwilling to do. Do you agree that this definition should be somewhat symmetric?
Note that the payroll tax extension package that passed the House did get some Dem votes. Do you interpret that as "some Dems were willing to compromise" or "Repubs offered a package that was acceptable to some Dems"? How, exactly, did you come to your conclusion?
You're not paying attention. Obama and the Dems DEMANDED a specific payroll tax cut, which the Repubs provided.
During those two years, the House was controlled by Dems and Dems had 60 votes in the Senate (until Kennedy died). How did the Repubs block things then?
Still, until Lincoln was elected and states started seceding, they did manage to pass routine funding bills. So that puts them one ahead of the current bunch of goons.
I remember reading about it in one of my american history class.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preston_Brooks
I'd watch CSPAN more if they had officiated brawls :)
There tends to be an ebb and flow in these sorts of things. I think that there is a clear case to be made right now that the decline in common news sources among people with different political views in the last 20 years has led to nastier politics. When everyone more-or-less agreed on the facts and many of the terms of debate but disagreed on what the outcome of the debate should be, I think the form that debate took was healthier.
But that period was the byproduct of a limited number of TV news programs all of which adopted a sort of consensus mainstream agenda, combined with a newspaper system with one or two papers per town that tended to do the same. This was a specific period, not an all-purpose "in the old days" thing.
In some earlier eras, it was common for there to be a number of different newspapers in a city, each of which had quite a different agenda -- as still survives in the UK, for example.
Some might say that the kabuki theater of American politics is now exposed for the facade that it is given how corrupt and captured our system really is... in fact, the corporatist coup happened a long time ago, and only with the Internet (ie, electronic interaction) is this layer peeled back and exposed.
First there are the discourse enhancing trolls, those who provide value to a discussion by suggesting alternative, usually taboo points of view.
Then there's the troll trolls. You know the type. The ones who spew racist or derogatory comments just for the hell of it.
Many people commonly mix the two into a single bucket, which I think is wrong to do, since one is a ++ for a forum, the other a -------.
Anyway, that's my take on the situation as someone who has ran 3 mid size forums in the past.
The worst are the flamebaters. Another example from Slashdot (context is Firefox compilation hitting memory limits):
A- My resource usage rarely goes about 1 GB with multiple applications open.
B- If your usage rarely goes above 1GB then you're not a user of Firefox
PG in his article, 3 years ago, describes the second kind of troll in more broad terms and notes, "Now when people talk about trolls they usually mean this broader sense of the word." 3 years ago. The first definition of troll is, in my opinion, near dead. The broad, asshole, troll reigns. They don't just 'sully the pristine conditions of these high-minded realms of discourse,' they break it down, and erode it.
A troll might think everything is a big joke, but many people deal with problems communicating in person: they don't have groups interested in the things they are near them, they have social and personality issues, they feel passionately about their views and enjoy expressing them but don't feel confident face to face or in a room of people. Connecting and communicating can happen legitimately on the internet, to say it's all a joke devalues that connection and that communication, which is how trolls hurt communities and people.
Actually, it's more of a deliberate choice than an opinion, and I think it's clearly the correct choice based on the nature of anonymous online communities. Other people can choose to take anonymous trolling seriously, as if it were a person insulting them or being inappropriate face-to-face. But to do so is to misunderstand the idea of anonymity and online communities. I would argue that anonymous online communities really don't matter, in the sense that it's foolish to even be invested enough to be offended by insults or inappropriate behavior. I think people who choose to invest themselves personally in an anonymous online community are failing to understand the nature of the community, analogous to someone who misinterprets a work of parody or farce as sincere and is thus offended.
Obviously, there are exceptions, namely when people aren't acting anonymously online. No one is suggesting for example that an entrepreneur or a VC shouldn't be held accountable for things they post on twitter or their blog. When you're not anonymous, then online communication is essentially equivalent to face-to-face communication, with full liability.
Also, I'm not necessarily arguing against moderation in online communities. It's fine for admins to be restrictive in who they allow in a community, or to remove "troll posts." I'm just arguing that to invest yourself personally or emotionally in an anonymous online community is to misunderstand the nature of such communities, and is objectively unwise.
I don't think it's in 'the nature' of online anonymous communities to be cruel, flippant, and intentionally inflammatory. Anonymity is not in place to devalue the communication, or the community. the asshole problem is a negative side effect.
I would argue that some people, just as in face-to-face problems, have issues disconnected themselves from online abuse or trolling.
This goes beyond emotional issues, though. It matters to me that Hackers News (or a handful of other sites I spend time on) is a place where you and I can have this discussion in this way. When I'm done writing this there will not be 5 replies of "fag" to my or your post, because we are all invested in keeping this community respectable. We're invested in well thought out discourse, and we take the rules seriously. There's a trust that ripples throughout this online anonymous community that the users need to conduct themselves respectfully. It matters to me, and while I'm not invested to the point of letting it hurt me if someone were to troll me, I'm invested enough that I treat people and their words with respect because I expect the same. Good, healthy, strong online communities are of great value to me, they matter.
I should add that the biggest problem isn't necessarily with insulting users. Something I see a lot these days, especially on reddit, is people clearly looking for real human connections through the communities, only to get burned. I think there have been several times where someone makes a highly emotionally-charged claim (they have cancer and need emotional/financial support, they caught someone abusing a child or animal and want justice, etc.) that the community rallies around, only to find out that the post was complete bogus. I don't condone the people creating the hoaxes, but I'm more concerned with the widespread tendency, even active desire, to invest emotionally in an anonymous post with absolutely no proof provided. Call me cynical, but I'm content to only emotionally invest myself with my real life friends and family.
My primary issue is the, "it doesn't matter," as a correct choice. It might be the correct choice that it doesn't matter if someone calls you a fag on the internet, you should shrug it off and carry on, or ignore it altogether. I read angersocks answer as basically saying it's OK to go into online communities and disrupt them because they don't matter, but they do. People wouldn't take time to type all this stuff out, to talk to each other, to engage, if it never mattered.
A community works to create an atmosphere and an environment, if it didn't matter they wouldn't try to maintain it. I do believe that the communities we create online matter and its a wonderful thing when a community can maintain itself respectfully. I guess I just feel that discussion and exchanging ideas is important face-to-face or online, and we should invest enough to show respect.
However, I think HN supports truly funny comments, but they have to be original, creative, and slightly non-obvious. I've made a few valueless pithy comments that got a decent amount of up-votes, and I've seen others do the same thing.
But, repeated and reused jokes aren't met with much enthusiasm here, so you don't get the same memes developing like you did on /. There is practically no spin on "a beowulf cluster of these" (or similar) that would ever fly here.
Overall, I'm pleased with HN's handling of humor-based comments.
And even when it does not matter very much, trolls deny others the right to be serious, derail discussions, and spew bullshit. By insisting on turning everything into a joke, trolls are selfish.
Like your bank account is just a database entry somewhere, like a dollar bill is just a paper, like all of your life's memories are just some information stored in your brain -- again just a few cells. In the end, everything is just some atoms anyway, right?
as someone who dabbles in trolling as a hobby
Oh wait, I fell for it! :)
I wondered on that myself ;)
It's recursive, then.
On the other hand, you have people like Ted Dziuba who often provoke controversy and critique popular ideas/products. I find those critiques both entertaining and legitimate in their content.
I worry you lose a lot in a community when you rule out both types of Trolling.
Whether any of this matters or not is immaterial. If someone thinks it matters and you want to convince them otherwise, pushing them to drop the banhammer in anger isn't the way to do it.
"There is no consistent legal principle that prevents an attempted murder charge from being prosecuted against someone for the use of voodoo dolls."
or
"I think it's perfectly Constitutional to require that parents, if necessary, donate kidneys to their children."
Both are classic trolls. However, they are fun, and they are hard to grapple with.
Graffiti happens at the intersection of ambition and incompetence: people want
to make their mark on the world, but have no other way to do it than literally
making a mark on the world.
Let me propose, for what it's worth, that a "Banksy!" reply to a statement like the one above is the sort of accidental troll that invites the slow degradation into real trolls. Whether or not Banksy is graffiti or whether or not graffiti is art: these aren't the question of the submission. This isn't to say that tangents are always bad. It's rather that these sorts of discussions quickly turn in to "what color should we paint the dog house?"* That is: lots of firmly-held beliefs with little that can dissuade someone.
So: when posting why someone is wrong, first see if there's a small or trivial way in which you can 'fix' their point. If you can, their point wasn't really broken in the first place.
*I've long been trying to find the original 'why meetings go bad when you're talking about something everyone has an opinion on', but I can't. If anyone can help me out: much appreciated.
Wow, now it's more like 120,000. If I was already worried about the problem then (which I must have been if I took the time to write about it), I'm surprised the site is even usable now.
1) Devils advocate. People that interject with an opposing view, even one they don't believe. I often do this one myself cause another poster to go into deeper description. Often just asking for an deeper response will be ignored, but opposing a view will always bring out an argument.
2) Denial and Righteousness. Essentially nasty fan boys. People who have brought into a belief and refuse to acknowledge any second point of view at all. I had this explained at a trolling seminar at a hacking conference quite well and they picked on the audience themselves to explain how to manipulate IT people.
With most IT people they have the myers-briggs archetype finishing with --TJ. This means they are thinkers and judgmental. They will look at a problem, find the evidence, evaluate it, and make a judgmental decision on what is correct. The facts don't lie.
However the facts can be like quantum variables, you chang angles and then entire structure changes. Making judgmental calls leads to obvious one set of true factual analysis being completely wrong in another setting.
Challenging a judgmental person is challenging there core makeup. Saying they are wrong undermines there very basic personality, drawing on the opposing variable to "thinking" on the myers-briggs scale "feeling". So intelligent people do not react with intelligence first.
Instead of reacting with an "oh ok I didn't realize that was the case in your area" they respond with a protective "I don't think so Tim" and things go down hill from there, especially if the second person is also judgmental.
3) Tribalism. This is the us vs them mentality. Either you are with us or against us. A non ordained view/comment against a group of people who maybe self validating can be seen as a extremely contrasting. Becomes the group has created a false sense of security it can draw out primal responses (like feeling over thinking mentioned above) when that sense of security is threatened.
Many groups become polarising and when confronted with opposing views become more and more fundamental, close ranks. This often forms tight knit groups but also leads to a side effect of making everyone an enemy, including people with in the group who aren't are right as they should be, or people with neutral opinions.
There was an article I read a week or two go about how to talk skeptically to people. If I can find it I'll post it. It addresses how to oppose a view and avoid the bottom two responses.
I disagree that most hackers are --TJ types. They are more likely to be -NT- with a bend towards INT-. The N is _the_ trait that tends to abstractionism, so it would make little sense for a hacker to be -S-- at all. If you look at the polls here it comes out in spades:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943722
The reason that we argue is that as Rationalists, the truth is more important than anything except for the fact that there is a truth. It is why Rationalists are likely to pick up an Aristotelian view of the word (though that might be a tautology since I think it is an axiom of that worldview).
There is a reason why people are not usually grouped in the --TJ category (the broad categories being -NT-, -NF-, -S-J, -S-P). The reason is that the most important variable, the one that correlates to income, happiness, intelligence is the second letter. It fundamentally effects how you approach the world.
Insofar as people say a pop personality test describes them, it's likely due to the Forer Effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forer_effect).
There are correlations with IQ, with employment, with other accepted tests. The primary weakness of MB is that results are normally distributed across each letter, so a majority of the population is not strongly correlated with each letter. Just look at the hacker news response. I know it is self reported, but I don't buy that the two of the least populous types self reported themselves by a factor of 1000.
I find this useful as a means of provoking discussion, but preferably labeled as such if you don't genuinely hold the position you advocate.
> 2) Denial and Righteousness
Many rational people have a low tolerance for irrationality, particularly when they have to deal with it often. Particularly when participating on a technical medium or technical topic, rational people expect rationality, and sometimes react poorly when they don't get it. Rational people should not react badly to corrections supported by evidence. However, rational people react quite badly to irrational "corrections", and I can hardly blame them. Personally, I react to irrationality through detachment: if I can't correct it, I write it off and try to make it have as little impact as possible; fortunately, I rarely encounter situations where I have no choice but to deal with irrationality. However, if you don't include the second half of that (giving up when not worth it), you fall into XKCD's "wrong on the internet" problem (https://www.xkcd.com/386/), and that quickly gets out of hand.
I find unsubstantial / uninteresting / obvious / superfluous comments (like "I love it!" <send>) worse than very controversial or insulting comments. As long as the general information in the forum stay interesting and enjoyable.
Also isn't the "naughtiness" (some pg essay used that word I think) part of what some of the best contributors here have in common? And aren't entrepreneurs trolls, too, according to the OP's definition?
They disagree with something, they choose a path that is more fun than an ordinary life, they want to leave a mark.
These folks make a good living by essentially trolling. It's a well-known media business model.
> Trolls try to undermine a working system solely for their own enjoyment.
poor communication -> negative emotions -> unconstructive conflicts
Selfish enjoyment really does get at the root of a trolls motivation, otherwise, "controversial" comments supported by sound logic, factual evidence and a genuine desire to get closer to the truth actually do add to the discussion. The real problem for a moderation system is determining if the motivation of the contributor is in line with the values of the community[1].
HN's rise in popularity and decline in quality commentary demonstrates how difficult it is to maintain the values of a community in the face of fast population growth (this just began to sound a bit too similar to arguments you hear in the immigration debate). If it's important to maintain your values, then it might also be important to mandate some level of assimilation in order to acquire certain privileges. The stackexchange sites have a fairly complex system for this and I rarely see trolls there, maybe HN should implement something similar?
[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, HN's Values
I'm not sure that anonymity or distance are the driving factors in online trolling. Most of the assholes I know have no problem saying mean spirited things when they're standing right next to me. I think the bigger issue is that it's easy for me to avoid those assholes in real life. In an online setting, I can't see them coming and they are Legion...for every one that we vote down, two more will rise up to take its place.
I understand Paul's frustration, but I don't know if we'll be able to find a technical solution. I think this is just one of the drawbacks (balanced by many benefits) of unfiltered communication.
I would get frustrated that there was no reward (and often there was punishment) for correcting errors in others posts. It's incredibly rare to see a rebuttal followed by the original poster simply saying "I was wrong about that, thanks for the information." It's far more common for the OP to simply insult you, or mischaracterize your argument, or otherwise engage in nonsense as their response.
I would get frustrated that comments and posts are promoted on style, not substance.
I would get frustrated that substance was judged inaccurately; often resulting in people whose knowledge was either entirely absent, or only Google deep arguing fiercely with people who'd worked and studied the topic for years.
I would get frustrated at the general lack of respect for truth, for civility, and for each other.
I would get frustrated at pedantry.
I would get frustrated at double-standards and hypocrisy, with people posting uncited nonsense, but demanding citations from their opponents.
I would get frustrated at debate opponents who would willfully misrepresent their opponents side in the argument.
I would get frustrated that semi-plausibly-deniable passive-aggressiveness was accepted by moderators, but direct responses to that aggression were not.
I would get frustrated that sticky lies beat dry truth every time, in votes and moderation.
And once I got frustrated, I lost respect for the forums, but I didn't leave them. I liked what they could be, but not what they were.
So I trolled. I disrespected people who, I felt, were being assholes in one way or another and thus "had it coming".
This wasn't a great response, and for this I blame myself.
I should've done something more constructive with my time. The forums are going to revert to the mean with or without my help; there's no need for me to accelerate the reversion.
First I saw HN as something to have an intelligent discussion, but after a few "controversial" posts, and having negative karma, I don't bother. I only post something when I think it's "safe" to post, or when I have time to write a detailed essay.
I think some people can have an intelligent discussion on HN, not for me, maybe because of my dyslexia I'm bad with words. But then again, maybe that's the price to pay to keep the trolls away.
I am not seeing this any more on HN.
This is the second time I read this essay, and my concerns are still the same: people who have minority opinions might not be able to express them in such a polite way as to be considered "thoughtful" by the majority.
I'm a bit of a contrarian commenter. That's because forums such as this one naturally gravitate to extremes. The programmer who lost his dog, and suddenly everybody is looking for him. The news story that causes us to be concerned about an intrusive government, and suddenly everybody sees Nazis everywhere.
People in groups naturally gravitate towards extremes. Whether they are right or wrong, other people may choose to try to persuade them of their error (and most times, the crowd is wrong because it takes things too far). In a highly-emotional discussion, it is almost impossible to convince the crowd that they might be wrong, no matter how you phrase it. People who try this are called trolls by the definition I see here, and they don't belong in the same category as folks who aren't part of the group but drop in to throw rhetorical hand-grenades at the rest of us. Quick test: if there were topic on HN titled "Final proof that the Earth is Still Flat" that linked to a reputable source and all the commenters were in agreement (stretch your imagination a bit) could you comment in such a fashion to show thoughtful consideration of the majority's opinion yet ask for people to really think this over? If you can follow along in my thought experiment, you'll find this is not a very easy thing to do at all. Most folks would just throw out a snarky rejoinder.
In my opinion a bit of nuance is required in this essay which is not present. EDIT: J.S. Mill, is on the money here: "...He argued that even if an opinion is false, the truth can be better understood by refuting the error..." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill#Views_on_freed... Note the conflict between how the real world has to act, and how the online community is desired to act by the site owner (and the majority opinion) The short-term interest of the site, perhaps "a happy majority pushing forward to a new understanding in a specific field of study" and the strategic interest of a well-functioning society are very much in conflict here. This is a hugely important point, and in my opinion PG does not recognize this except in passing.
I put up a forum online for people in my journalism class. They're nice people, but something about the fact that the conversation was online turned the discussion into something pretty dumb.
My hope is that people who grow up with the internet their whole lives will realize that you still have to be civil online. It's no different than real life, yet no one is teaching you manners online.
Of course, there will be kids that are smart and don't do this, but kids that want to 'fit in' or 'be popular' may well end up rolling with the crowd and posting things that will hurt them later on.
As parents, we should be looking out for our kids, both in real life, and online.
It'd be nice if it taught stuff like "how not to be an idiot on the internet."
I think there are a whole lot of reasons internet forums are different than real life communication. I think there are technical solutions that can change the balance. We all know there is a big difference between, say, the comments on YouTube and the comments on Slashdot. Do you think it is all "culture"? I don't. I think it is mostly that Slashdot has technical solutions that discourage trolling (and substanceless posts, etc), while YouTube doesn't. If the culture is different, it mostly because of the karma system (or lack thereof).
Also karma doesn't count for a lot here (that being one exception). Ultimately, a good karma system should simulate the what happens in the best real world environments....where there is a very complex feedback loop that reinforces the sort of behavior we want and suppresses that which we don't want. In my opinion Slashdot comes kind of close, but it has huge flaws itself.
PG mentions that people seeing "...their reputation in the eyes of their peers drain away..." is motivation enough to keep delivering high-quality content.
I think part of the lure of karma is simply getting affirmation that what you are saying is accepted by others.
In this case the "others" are not people you know but people you respect in many ways because of the intelligent way they write or some other power they have. Or how they appear at least to be accepted by the group.
In a sense it becomes a challenging game to write something striking a balance between sharing some knowledge or opinion and not ticking off others by going to far out of bounds with what you are saying.
"quality of Hacker News remain the same without the novelty of individual karma "
I don't think it would at this scale. On a smaller scale though it might. There is a wide range of topics and people here. On a smaller site (AVC.com comes to mind with usually 1 idea a day posted) it is a core of users and while there is karma and likes it is far less important than on HN.
I for one think on the whole conversation is still good and worthwhile checking out :)
"Also, a traffic update: HN now gets over 120k unique ips on a weekday, and serves over 1.3 million page views."
Back in late 2009 I built a forum that allowed every user to temporarily ban any other user. There were restrictions... bans lengths were temporary (and voted on democratically), expiring after the voted time limit, you could only ban a person you replied to, and everyone would be able to see that you were the person who banned the parent post. Other than that, the forum was completely anonymous, and it was able to regulate large numbers of trolls (mostly from 4chan). They seemed to appreciate the equality and the natural regulation.
So it does not just shut off the "trolls" as in the "assholes". It also shuts off any unpopular opinion.
That is sad, because unpopular opinions are generally interesting by nature, and sometimes insightful. That is because popular ones are well-known, thus cannot be "interesting".
For example, if you bash a popular company by saying what they do is wrong (whichever it is, Google, Apple, you name it), you will get down voted a lot. No matter how insightful and righteous you were.
I find the downvoting due to disagreement to be amusing here. Sometimes I read downvoted comments just to get a different viewpoint.
What I do find disturbing in this discussion are people with substantially high karma who have been hellbanned. That strikes me as dangerous. I have seen at least 4 hellbanned people on this forum and I would have disagreed with the banning of two of them (the other two were clearly trolls by any definition).
Some of the heartiest laughs I've ever had are sourced from trolls.
My troll spotting ability is falling at the wayside though. I used to be really good at spotting trolls, nowadays I come across something every now and think, "Is he trolling?". And that's the beauty of the best trolls, they border on insanity but keep it just within the realms of believability.
Anyway, he's wrong on several accounts:
> Trolling tends to be particularly bad in forums related to computers
This really makes me wonder what other forums that aren't related to computers PG frequented, probably not very many. Let's see, there's forums related to wicca, libertarians (the nutty kind), religion/spirituality, failed startups, "magick", seduction, conspiracy freaks ... all those topics attract significantly more trolls than computer related forums. Both of the "broader" definition ("assholes") and the sports trolling type.
> There's a sort of Gresham's Law of trolls: trolls are willing to use a forum with a lot of thoughtful people in it, but thoughtful people aren't willing to use a forum with a lot of trolls in it.
This is just false. Of all the forums I've seen, the two most thoughtful and intelligent communities just happened to be largely made up of trolls and people very familiar with trolling. It's because they won't stand bullshit and call people on it. Regular forums or forums that can't really deal with trolls always tend to plateau on a certain level of intelligence and thoughtfulness, which can be high, but limited. This is not at all a rule btw, most trolls anyone is going to find will be forums filled with screaming kids, obscenities and bug porn.
I just mean to say this "Gresham's Law" thing is false, sometimes the trolls are the thoughtful people and the ones that get driven away are good riddance.
After points stopped being shown on comments this point seems ironically moot.
Any chance of getting them back? Personally I think it's the worst decision in the history of HN.
For example, on Facebook, a troll might play out like this:
Sarah posts "Having the worst day ever, ugh!"
David "likes" this post.
Link baiting, tagging people places they are not actually at, and other forms of this exist as well. At least in a few of my friend circles they do. In fact, at one point, one of my friends and co-founders created a Facebook group called "Operation Troll Cullen". He invited around 20 of our mutual friends, and the idea was to respond to anything I said or posted with extremely positive messages. "You're doing so great Cullen! Well done!" or "This was the MOST insightful, amazing, article I have ever read. Thank you so much for sharing Cullen, you're amazing!" would be two examples.
I of course had no idea this was going on, but suspected something was amiss. It was quite the week for me, to say the least (and I did find it quite funny, after the fact).
(Normal Person) + (Anonymity) + (Audience) = (Total Fuckwad)
See: Banality of Evil http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banality_of_evil
and, http://www.radioopensource.org/hannah-arendt-and-the-banalit...
For example, recently there was the thing with Rob Malda's resume. The entire thread on that was rather derailed into either sucking up to Rob, or saying Slashdot is full of trolls.
Or rather, it had a rather unfavorable signal to noise ratio. I tried to vote comments accordingly, but it didn't really seem to help.
[1] Tried to stick up for FOSS and expose Microsoft/Mono for what it really is, got downvoted for doing the right thing. Oh well, the trolls got me, not really a big deal.
This is a common effect in HN and other so called "enlightened" communities because they do have higher concentrations of honestly intelligent people, people particularly susceptible to cognitive dissonance.
When you say something truthful that a "normal" person thinks is wrong, 9 times out of 10 they will ignore you, because they "know" you are wrong. Not so with intelligent populations.
Which, you know. He was. HN voters have this tendency to downvote posts that sound like crazy-person conspiracy theorizing, for some strange reason. (I downvoted him because he was maliciously inaccurate--mistakes happen, but that wasn't a mistake. That was fabrication.)
Nobody wants to be around a negative person, so not only does the negative person have a minimal negative impact on the people around him (since no one will listen), but the main problem arises when he gets online. Not only is this troll frustrated that no real people will listen to his negativity, but when he jumps online he's equal to everyone else. There are no groups. Nobody looks at his username like they would his face in the real-world and says "oh he's an ass, don't listen to him." I think it's partially because faces are easier to remember than usernames, and partially because we associate a whole personality with a face so we can avoid this person next time.
When everyone's equal they each have the same impact. This would be a beautiful system if there was 0 negativity online because the new guy with great ideas would be heard just as well as a 10-year online veteran. But in the online social world its strength seems to be its weakness. How am I supposed to know if the person commenting is a really cynical person or a constructive criticism-type person until I've fully read his comment, and by then he's already made his impact on me.
I don't think modern social networks have this problem as much though. I only socialize with my real friends on FB, Twitter, and G+.
If you've used facebook for a few years, you might remember the introduction of the "Like" button. Facebook before the "Like" button was very different from a UGC perspective. People did a lot more bitching and moaning. People posted much more inane ramblings about what they ate for lunch lunch or random happenings in their day. The "Like" button created a positive reinforcement loop and consciously or not people started to try to post content that would get more likes. Someone being emo about their shitty boyfriend or girlfriend is probably not going to get likes, probably wont get surfaced in the news feed and will never be heard. Eventually when people stop seeing those posts they are less compelled to post those things themselves. Facebook describes this as the virtuous cycle of sharing. Someone posts something, they get patted on the back. YOU see their post and their pats on the back and you tend to want to do the same thing. If you have friends on twitter and friends on facebook, just put the two feeds up next to eachother. You'll see a HUGE difference in the types of updates that people post.
I say this in that reading the post, and then the comments from you all-- I see a bit of disparity between philosophies. I mean, for the most part I think from it's very root, trolls are trouble makers, and we can all sort of agree on that. But, there are people here who revel in that, see a symbiotic nature (good needs evil), people who think trolls are important, and that they keep things interesting--people who've even been trolls (full disclosure, when I was younger and immature I partook in such acts...nothing malicious, but acts none the less). When I read things like this I wonder where and at what time these people were introduced to the internet and forums and the like. A lot of younger people (at least the ones I know) are familiar with the trolling culture, and share many of the same previously mentioned opinions, however when I think of my Dad who was introduced to things much earlier when the internet was much more "pure", he loathes such things, "there's no place for that".
As a non-formal study, purely for my curiousity would anyone interested write down their age, the time when they were introduced (ballpark it) to the internet and forums, and their stance on trolls.
From theoretical perspective this is very similar problem to links and webpages. A troll is equivalent to a spammy web page. Upvotes/downvotes are equivalent to traffic you get on your web page. When UserA upvotes UserB, a link is created between two. The goal of a troll is to get as much traffic as possible. They are incentivised to give each other upvotes in the hope of return favor, or in other words, create as many links to each other as possible. It would be mistake to think that few "good guys" can be used as gate keeper to protect the system against these trolls. In nutshell that is the hope and approach many early search engines had and they failed as the size grew out of their hands. The solution has to be technical and automated. Algorithms like PageRank or machine learning models is highly applicable to trolling issue. For instance, the real value of karma should not be a naïve count of upvotes (in the same way that real important of the page is not how many other pages points to it) but rather who has upvoted it. I think algorithms like PageRank can be easily applied to calculate the value of karma. If trolls upvotes each other 1000 times, their net karma would be much less than 1000 de- incentivising them for putting in the efforts for upvoting. Of course, there are many ways to fool PageRank and but I think algos like this should be sufficient for forums were you don't have to deal with more sophisticated folks like search marketers.
I think that in programming forums the biggest source of trolling is due to clueless people that still want to say something... in the real world they would be put at the door, but you can't do this in a forum, and even after a ban it is too simple to re-enter.
The simplest form of protection about this is to associate a cost to username creation in a forum. Even 5$ is enough. This time the ban is a real cost for the troller that will likely stop after the first 5$ rounds.
Another widely used form of "cost" is badges, that is, you start with an account that can do very little and it takes time (and a good comportment) to grow in features. However there is the risk of trolls opening N accounts in parallel just to have reserves of usernames, so it is also very important to penalize non used accounts.
Reddit actually has a fascinating, rich culture. Trolling is just a part of it, but the community seems to be managing.
Really, in communities I frequent, there are so many trolls, we troll them back. Perhaps we're using the term differently from how pg is?
http://www.google.com/trends?q=hacker+news%2C+reddit
Edit: That number was from 2008
http://trends.google.com/websites?q=reddit.com%2C+news.ycomb...
Yes, I should write this, but I'm not smart enought to stop myself to type it. After reading the definition my mind instantly draw his face...
This was entertaining:
"He's like Goldilocks, scala's too complicated, fantom's too simple"
Anyway, it doesn't happen all the time but it's definitely out there.
Often time, I find something funny, say it as a comment, and get down-voted. It's not a stupid joke or something inappropriate, just a comment that'd make the reader smile. And I know it's hard to judge because I keep saying the score of these comments oscillating (I.e. people upvote it because it's funny, and people downvote it because it's funny (or they don't find it funny.))
About contrived opinion, that one is sad. There's a difference between something wrong and saying your opinion. For instance, someone saying "I don't like Backbone.js because x, y, z" will get on average a really small or negative score. Why? People who agree with this statement in small minority +x, people who disagree with this statement but agree that it was some good arguments and points: +y, majority of people who disagree with the statement -z. It just so happen that z>(x+y) with controversial statements.
Lastly, trolling is more about searching for trouble or pissing of people. For instance, they'll say "Wtf, stop wasting your time with perl. It's a DEAD LANGUAGE, WAKE UP". This kind of posts should just get deleted and the user warned and then banned from HN imo. Note that there're a couple of wrong things with this statement. First, it's extremely aggressive and provocative. Personally, I hate this but some well known people act like that and are really appreciated so I won't judge. Secondly, there's no argument or fact.. it's just trash talking without ground to base yourself on. Lastly, there's usually lots of words in caps and 'wtf' 'lol' 'trololol' which make it look unprofessional for readers of HN used to read well written text. (Ironically, I know this current text isn't well written but it's because english is not my main language, not because I'm trying to skip words or be unprofessional).
Anyway, what I'd suggest is to have a way to differentiate between theses. 1- A 'flag as spam/troll/non-respectful'. 2- A +1 (like what we have) to say this is an interesting post/comment. 3- A Agree/Disagree button to express your opinion.
So basically, someone saying "You guys are fucking stupid; 1+1=2" would be flagged as unrespectful but could still be valid and agreed by the majority.
But in the end, is it worth it? As they say in engineering, it it works, don't fix it. HN is not perfect, but I still enjoy reading the comments and I learn quite a lot.. is it worth trying to fix it for a minority of trolls or disrespectful people?
(You're seeing fluctuations because not everyone knows this.)
It would be good if something could be done. Nearly every Perl post here that gets some traction will often have this problem [1]. And sadly in most cases this engulfs the topic being posted :(
[1] And often its the same few people causing the problem.
If you've been to Reddit recently and tried to engage that community, you might not be so worried about things here at HN. It's like hot and cold running compassion/rape over there. They either flood you with love, or ransack your house and ruin your life. Dangerous stuff, that Reddit Hive Mind.
It's just something that happens on the Internet: more people = more trolls and perceived-but-not-really tolls. I wonder if someone could do a paper on the average parts per million for trolls in any mass of words on the Internet.
Does anyone know what the tipping point for license plates was?
I don't think the license plate number gives much in the way of identity. In fact, it gives less identity than your average username--it is usually completely random, created with no input on the part of the driver.
> There's a sort of Gresham's Law of trolls: trolls are willing to use a forum with a lot of thoughtful people in it, but thoughtful people aren't willing to use a forum with a lot of trolls in it.
I think that pretty much sums it up. Trolls are attracted to the forums with the most interesting/intelligent users (the "best" forums). I think that news.yc has been very successful in terms of the amount of trolling that takes place, especially since:
> The core users of News.YC are mostly refugees from other sites that were overrun by trolls.
Too much can definitely turn everything brackish.
But seeing some humor/sarcasm even if it's pointed mixed in with all of the serious discourse keeps it all manageable.
This reminds me of an old phrase - "fish swimming against the current gets electrocuted".
Having your features pared down is a fine line between "we're doing this for your own good to save you from yourself" and "we think your input is less valuable than everybody else here."
To be honest, it felt good. Made me feel like I had been heard. Shot down, sure, but still heard.
I understand this could introduce agreement bias, but I feel like that's something that could be fixed by tweaking the numbers (i.e. only auto-collapse comments with -20 votes).
As it is now, it's easy to game the comments thread by piggybacking off the top comment of a post. This can be abused for trolling or just plain discussion visibility (unfairly, IMO).
This is good when it allows honest feedback about an idea and products, but can also come across as coarse sometimes.
What if there were a separate "flag" that people could click for trolls and spam, but when you downvoted someone, you were forced to post a reply explaining why?
That's crazy. We still don't know what causes Trolls?
http://blog.techboy.co.uk/the-gardening-trolls-of-pennadomo-...
Unfortunately, as the article says, the anonymity of the Internet allows these thoughts to rapidly bubble to the surface, where in most cases there's little repercussions for posting whatever the hell you want. I've encountered very little of this attitude when it comes to meeting people in real life. For most people, it's hard to be a dick in front of a real life person.
We don't need repercussions for posting bad content, as we will evolve powerful judgment to filter it. This is a natural market mechanism I think.
You could fix this with a simple feature.
When reddit was small, it was full of, and dominated by, crackpots. It was barely even at the level of being entertaining, and I'd hesitate to call it a community at all. Intentional trolls generally don't mess with crackpots, for some reason. I don't know if it's because it's too easy or unsatisfying, but the trolls usually come with mainstreaming.
(There are still lots of crackpots there, but it's gelled to a far more coherent community that is much more fun to incite).
In each case nothing I'd ever said would be considered trolling by any rational observer. Here on HN, however, as with most communities where you start to recognize the regulars (tptacek, raganwald, etc), "trolling" is redefined to simply mean "going against the grain".
There was one discussion that I participated where I predicted that Apple would see declining profit margins due to increased competition. Remarkably this completely benign, seemingly obvious observation saw me declared a troll, and shortly thereafter yet another account was hellbanned from HN (whatever the mechanism -- is this the verdict of a bored PG, or has he anointed some particularly under-employed members to apply it? -- it is horribly broken).
Troll is, more often than not, a term used to circle the wagons.
If you have showdead on, sometimes you'll see perfectly reasonable comments that are inexplicably dead-- this is why.
Though it happens less than in other forums, wagon circling is definitely a persistent problem on HN. I believe it's only further exacerbated by the fact that downvoted comments are displayed in a difficult to read color, meaning that downvotes can effectively censor things the majority doesn't like, regardless of the merit of the argument. It's not as bad as on Reddit, where groups of people form downvote cabals to actively censor specific users or ideas, but it's still problematic.
In general, a 1-line downvoted post is downvoted for good reason. For multiline posts, it's far more often a good post that people didn't like for other reasons. Those are the ones I take steps to manually highlight and read, and then upvote if I think it was downvoted for the wrong reasons.
In the interest of full disclosure, my suspicion is that the way you expressed these opinions ran counter to the kind of discussion people want to see on HN. I may be wrong, of course, which is why I'd like to see the actual posts.
I'd be curious to get your opinion on my (just discovered) ban: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3354475
That said, hellbans are fucking despicable. They might be the proper way to deal with spambots, but for contributing members they are as far as I am concerned incredibly unethical.
I'm curious--can you paste the text of that comment here if you still have it? It's possible that, for example, it was your tone that got you downvoted, not your message. Or it could have been the community perceiving you to be ignoring evidence, or any number of other things. In any case, this claim here isn't sufficient for us to judge the fairness of the response.
FWIW I do NOT think people should downvote based on disagreement. I think downvotes should be sparsely used and I personally upvote even people I disagree with.
I couldn't stop naive newbies from making dumb comments, but I could stop fanboyism and groupthink.
I decided that I was going to take a different approach to commenting. In essence, I wanted to be like DHH - highly opinionated, strongly worded, and unafraid to call people out. To ensure comment integrity, I stuck only to topics in which I strongly felt I was in the right.
patio11, joshu, tptacek and pg were some of the people I spoke out against. I made the argument that those people were flat-out wrong. But not just that, I clarified -why- they were wrong in a reasoned way. And that was the key - explaining why. It turns out that people DID care about the truth. People WERE willing to hear out an alternate view and they voted with their upvotes.
I was able to move my karma from 3.5k to 5k and move my average from 7 to 14 per comment. Many of my comments took a very contrarian view to the HN status quo. Many of them were directly targeted at the "HN elite". All of them took their share of downvotes from those who thought my comments didn't add value. But in the end, they were the most successful comments I've ever made.
So don't lose hope! There is a way out of groupthink. But it takes hard work, great communication, and an academic view of persuasion. In the end, I think reasoned and rational discussion is what makes HN great, let's get back to that.
I turned on "showdead" and looked through the posting history of users with dead posts. About a quarter of the time, I would have disagreed with the hellbanning.
If you're going to ban a user, you might as well be honest and tell them up front.
The really screwed up thing is that I've looked through the comment and submission histories of obvious spammers and I saw a guy with about 132 spam submissions with an account about as old as mine (almost 200 days) and his account wasn't banned. It seems that you can disagree around here but only to a point.
I get that maybe some are afraid of diluting the community but by being so overly sensitive you can really be doing everyone a disservice. Lately I feel like I have to watch out for the karma police. The guys who downvote anything that disagrees too much even if it's totally rational and put in as nice of terms as possible. And despite protests from the "in" crowd it really does seem like what they say gets auto-up voted. Experiments be damned, that reputation and age of any one profile really can make or break you.
Here's an experiment I'd like to see:
Pg, patio11, edw, reagawald, and the others all make new profiles and about commenting as always while not letting slip who they really are. Then let's see if their karma and average end up climbing at their usual rate.
It's also possible to track down contact information for most HN users, either via "about" or Google. I have notified several hellbanned people who were (now) making useful contributions to HN. After all, if people have learned to behave they should be encouraged to participate. (Of course, some people are spammers or incorrigible, see e.g. "los etho s" without spaces.)
I have a different style (I think I don't ever f-bomb in online comments) but your manner of making comments is food for thought, especially on issues where what I've learned in more than five decades of life experience leads to different conclusions from the majority opinion here on HN.
The first comment prior to this one on your comments feed starts of with: "Your entire comment is bullshit and it pisses me off. You've never worked at Zynga, so to purport that you know exactly what it's like to work there is bullshit. Your comment reflects exactly what Silicon Valley nerds think of Zynga externally. They think that Zynga is nothing but people refining skinner boxes for people to play in. You've probably seen one or two talks of Mark Pincus talking about "doing every dirty trick in the book" or something like that. Have you ever met him? Do you even know the last time he worked directly on a game? You're allowed to have whatever opinion you like, but this opinion is bullshit. Your entire comment is ridiculously biased and unreflective of Zynga internally or externally."
This part of your response is mostly a characterization of the commentator based on your own speculation about whether he's worked at Zynga or met Mark Pincus. While strictly speaking you're only characterizing the comment, this comes off as a personal attack to me.
Meanwhile, other people have been hell banned for linking to wikipedia pages defending scientific facts, because those facts go against the dominant ideology on hacker news (or that of the people with their finger on the ban button.)
I'm tired of hearing the refrain that reason and rationality rule the day here, when it seems pretty clear to me that if you're a liberal, an apple hater, an open source advocate who opposes property rights, you get a free pass for personal insults, but if you're none of those things, no matter how reasoned or rational you are, you risk being hellbanned.
I try to restrict myself only to commenting on safe subjects for that reason. I'm actually worried that disagreeing with you will result in me getting hellbanned. That's not the kind of environment where "reasoned and rational discussion" are really going to flourish.
Why do people worry about getting banned? It's just a screen name, it's not like you can't just make another one. Even if it's based on IP address, hacker news should be full of people that know how to get around that.
Just sayin' - if you've got something smart, constructive to say, say it. Who cares about banning if it's what you really believe in?
My personal rule about posting is simple: if a future employer links my HN profile to the "real" me, would that be grounds for not getting the job (or losing a job with my current employer)? If yes, then it's probably neither smart nor constructive, so doesn't belong on HN.
My last comment isn't my greatest accomplishment. I'd hope that my behavior would be looked at in whole, instead of cherrypicked.
That being said, I was characterizing the general feeling of HN as a whole. Of the 100k+ readership of HN, very few are actual Zynga employees. So in that light, I defend my comment. There is a large anti-Zynga sentiment on HN and that sentiment is driven by media-fueled propaganda.
I can't account for why others have been hell-banned or downvoted. But from my experience being very contrarian in my own way, I haven't seen that at all. In fact, I've seen the exact opposite.
Continuing from this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3354448
I'm not even sure if I get the point of trying either. I mean, I believe I have provided at least some value to HN, but every time I've "been unafraid to call people out", all I got was a bunch of crap for it.
Although you say we shouldn't lose hope, I think I already have. Its frustrating to have to deal with people claiming everything is the next new previous thing or the new black or the new white or the new Apple or the new Google or whatever else meme you can think of it.
I find startups intriguing, I like deeply scientific and mathematical discussions, I like hearing about stuff going on in the open source world. You'd think HN would be my thing, but there are simply elements of the HN community that rub me the wrong way and no matter how much you try to stop them, no matter how many times you down vote them, they just keep coming back stronger than before.
Honestly, there are just some people here who'd be happier over at 4chan than here, and I wish they'd just go.
BTW, I expect to get downvoted for this, and I don't care. I don't sugar coat the truth, and I'm sure as hell not going to start now.
There is no clear cut definition. Although, if you're asking the question if you should be here the answer is implied to be yes since you bothered to ask the question in the first place.
Additionally I think one should draw a line between trolling and flaming. Just some "you suck" comments are not making a troll a troll.
It is not obvious that increased competition leads to declining margins. Often increased competition validates the market, and increases consumer demand far more than the effect on pricing. I have seen it in my own industry, where our sales increase when a competitor launches a big ad campaign.
I think this is true by definition, after all, if the majority are trolling then it's culturally acceptable and you have 4chan.
But I think if you are being intellectually honest you need to be open to the possibility that maybe you were acting like a dick on occasion. I've dealt with heavy duty trolling before, and it's a common refrain that the admins are "fascist" and that they are simply "censoring" unpopular opinions. All the while saying things that would get their asses kicked if said in public. For the unskilled troll their behavior is obvious, but the skilled troll can make himself indistinguishable from someone who just has a mild form of digital Aspergers. Often the only goal is to piss you off and waste your time. So in the battle against trolls, detached and ruthless action is often necessary because anything else allows them to win. If there is some collateral damage because one's opinion is just too "different", probably the best thing is to move on to a different forum, or just start a blog. Then you can post your opinions and gain even more notoriety with "the regulars" possibly defending you with the backing of their mighty reputation. Witness Ted Dziuba, that cocky prick would for sure be hellbanned if he waded into HN, but he doesn't have to because everyone reads his posts directly.
http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html
to rate how well I do in disagreeing here.
You write, Here on HN, however, as with most communities where you start to recognize the regulars (tptacek, raganwald, etc), "trolling" is redefined to simply mean "going against the grain."
I disagree with this, because I have openly disagreed at least with tptacek, and certainly with other users who have higher karma totals than I have and have been on Hacker News longer than I have, and yet I have never been hellbanned. I have seen even more open, pointed, and frequent disagreements with some of the "regulars" here from some of the other regulars, but those accounts are still alive and well. I have used the same username here, and only this one username here, during all the 1122 days since I formed my user account. To the best of my knowledge and belief, each of my posts has been visible to users since it was posted, and the majority of my comments have stayed above 0 net karma ever since they were posted.
I agree with you that expressions of opinion that disagree with the joint opinion of the most active HN participants can result in individual net downvotes of comments. Before I got here, it was declared that the site founder is okay with participants downvoting to express disagreement with comments,
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
and when I lose karma on a net basis with a particular comment, I look at how the comment was written, and think about how I could make a comment that disagrees with prevailing opinion be more persuasive the next time. (Another user who has replied to you reports experiments in doing this, and I will look at the examples found in the past comments by that user to see how it is done.) Once in a while, if an issue is important enough to me, I'll openly (and, I hope, respectfully and thoughtfully) disagree, and figure that such occasions when I burn through karma is what karma is worth accumulating for.
To sum up, I agree with the proposition that some comments here are downvoted solely to express disagreement. The art of writing comments is to figure out how to express disagreement and still appeal to disagreeing readers as a thoughtful participant in intellectual discussion. On the other hand, I don't think most users here flag comments for disagreement, but rather for blatant violation of the site guidelines. I disagree with the proposition that anyone has been hellbanned solely for posting comments that are in factual disagreement with majority opinion here. I see plenty of live accounts that manage to openly express disagreement frequently, and I possess one.
AFTER EDIT: I note, entirely with amusement, that this comment is bouncing up and down in karma score just now. Whatever, I'm just trying to point to some reasons to think about the issue differently from the opinion expressed in the parent comment. Whether you the reader agree or not is up to you.
AFTER FURTHER EDIT, RELATING TO COMMENT REPLYING TO THIS COMMENT: Thank you for your reply. I agree that it is logically correct to say that pointing to accounts that survive despite disagreement is not an airtight proof that no accounts have been hellbanned for disagreement. On the other hand, my general point is that I don't see any affirmative evidence for the extraordinary claim that this site is moderated with swift and frequent hellbanning for disagreement as a routine part of the moderation policy. I join the other users who have already said, "link, please?" to follow up statements of the nature of "In each case nothing I'd ever said would be considered trolling by any rational observer," so that we can all see just what the problem was. I had showdead on for most of 2010 and 2011, and I never felt, as I read dead posts, that users who don't see dead posts are missing much from the thousands of posts here on Hacker News. The way to get a reality check on this statement, of course, is to turn on showdead and see what dead posts look like day after day after day on a variety of subjects in a variety of threads.
This is a logical fallacy. Simply because there exist an account that hasn't been hellbanned because they express disagreement doesn't mean that other accounts aren't hellbanned for expressing disagreement.
This is one of the dumber meta-threads HN has had. Not so much your comment in particular as the whole thing.
You'd be surprised, it doesn't take much to get pg trigger-happy. He's threatened me with banning a few times myself!
http://news.ycombinator.org/threads?id=CrabDude * enable showdead in your profile to read my comments
As you can see from my comments and contributions, most are extremely well reasoned and often entirely unique and invaluable contributions to a given conversation that to my frustration were inexplicably never upvoted or commented on, without any real insight as to why. I honestly am in shock and beyond frustrated that so much of my efforts and attempts to edify and contribute have been undermined by something that is explicitly allowed in comment guidelines. [1]
Specifically, the comment that is apparently responsible for my hellban, was on a post that linked to MY NodeKnockout entry which both won the competition category and received over 60 votes to end up on the front page:
HEY ALL! REMEMBER TO VOTE FOR US! WE'RE TRYING TO WIN THE INNOVATION CATEGORY!
http://nodeknockout.com/teams/starcraft-2-destroyed-my-marri...
AND RETWEET THIS WITH #nodeko! =)
Empty comments can be ok if they're positive. There's nothing wrong with submitting a comment saying just "Thanks."
To any in YC who have control over such things, please unban my account. I would greatly prefer to use it and retain all my contributions than be forced to play wack-a-mole in response to inaccurate rule enforcement.
[1] http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_caps
At best this is an example of incompetence in the form of a poorly written spam detection algorithm, at worst it represents an admin's lazy disregard for the effects of "hellbanning" on a sincere community.
However, it would appear I stand corrected as I missed the following:
"Please don't use uppercase for emphasis." [1]
However, I stand by the ridiculousness of banning a sincere contributer that's bringing traffic to the site solely due to (positive constructive) ignorance of the rules.
Would you kick a guest out from your home without warning for temporarily speaking loudly in good intention, and exclude them from all future discussions? It would seem in this case HN violates their own rule regarding civility treating people online as you would in a face to face conversation, and please don't give me the excuse of this being necessary in order to deal with spambots. Such an argument defends rudeness and laziness as a better algorithm could easily be written.
I'll keep lurking, at least for now.
Good luck.
I've seen people (that otherwise posted useful contributions, before and after) hellbanned for making a rather tasteless joke. The joke was sufficiently tasteless that I can totally see a moderator suspending or even banning that user. But not hellbanning. Not that it's strictly worse or anything, it's just so utterly useless and childish.
This user had no idea that anything had happened, and he just kept posting for weeks. All that wasted time! And I'm fairly sure that if a moderator would have just told him "hey we'd rather not have people make jokes about dead children here" the guy would have replied "right, my bad that was out of line, won't happen again" cause the rest of his comments didn't seem very inflammatory or anything.
Instead the guy gets no message at all and keeps on posting invisibly. A regular ban would have at least sent some message.
... and then there's these things I've heard about people getting temporary hellbans? So people can come back all butthurt after realizing they've been tricked into invisibly wasting their time? That's the dumbest kind of moderation I've ever heard about, really. A hellban should be forever, or not at all. There is no such thing as a "hell suspension".
What I don't like that I have seen a lot of, is what I like to call "karma police". People who abuse the downvote button to silence perfectly valid comments that they just happen to disagree with. That's a problem. I think we need to be more judicious about the up and down votes. It's easy to just up vote something with a title we agree with but does it really call for it? I liken it to how easy it is to press the Facebook like button everywhere. As for downvotes, that button should be reserved for off-topic, vulgar, or otherwise obvious trolling cases and not just because "I didn't like what he said, he's stupid, or whatever".
With that in mind, "perfectly valid" takes on a different light. While sometimes downvoting does get used to reinforce groupthink, sometimes it just thwacks a comment with incorrect but authoritative-sounding information, or an off-topic comment, or a rehash of an well-known unresolvable debate (valid or otherwise), or in general a comment which will produce more heat than light.
In this case, I disagree with your comment, but I've upvoted it because I think it deserves more prominence and more discussion.
Can you give an example of the kind of comment which you think received unwarranted downvotes?
I actually totally agree with you and the other responder to my comment. Now that you guys have said something I feel like I should rhrase and simply say that sometimes I feel like the up and down vote buttons are sometimes abused. I hate to see group think win the day. I really think the downvote button is a great way to show people that what they're saying isn't okay around here. Downvoted comments get frayed out and are almost unreadable. That's a signal that the comment isn't worth reading at all more so than "it deserves less prominence". So instead if we just up vote the good stuff, ignore mediocre stuff, and downvote bad stuff, then I think we'd be helping to show participants what kind of community this is in a better way. The real trolls get punished. The guys who are boring won't be offended and will be more apt to contribute better stuff next time if you just give them no points at all.
I don't tend to see groupthink as a problem in a community like HN. Sure, we tend to think about many things in the same ways (the ways we'd consider obviously right beyond any need for discussion, of course), but those tend to represent the boring topics anyway.
I do tend to follow the model you mention, ignoring mediocre stuff, rather than voting on everything. When I downvote things, I do indeed intend to suggest that people shouldn't bother reading it.
I disagree. Why do you think that? I think that "I didn't like what he said, he's stupid, or whatever" (e.g. I think this comment is foolish, I think this comment is unreasonably rude, I think this comment is uninteresting) is a very good reason to downvote. The purpose of the up- and down-voting is to allow readers to decide which comments are good and which are not very good. Why would you accept that readers have the power to move up comments that they like, but not to move down the ones that they don't like?
It's okay in the cases of foolish and unreasonably rude comments, there's no question about it. But in cases where you simply disagree its uncalled for. In the case of uninteresting comments that don't qualify as rude or foolish I don't think there's a reason to downvote. Instead you up vote the good ones around it and let it just stagnate.
Downvoting is a way you can kind of give others hints of the kind of things that are expected around here. If you downvote on the basis of it not being interesting the person may come to believe they've said something offensive or foolish when really it was just boring. If they see they're getting no up votes then they can kind of tell that what they said was boring without giving them the wrong impression. People who get severely downvoted definitely get the hint if they're being off topic or foolish but when they're downvoted for being boring I don't think they get it and may think something else is up.