The 'broken windows' theory of crime is tested and seems correct | Hacker News Reader

The 'broken windows' theory of crime is tested and seems correct

economist.com

108 pointsrobg35 comments

I wonder how that translates into online communities - both in terms of wrongful behaviour (spiteful and illiterate comments, trolling) and in terms of user experience impacting quality of user generated content (wow lot of user- related buzzwords in the last sentence).

An interesting experiment would be a video/music/file sharing site which specifically prohibits (and removes) copyrighted content and one that doesn't -- and how that affects other interactions (e.g. comments, forums).

I really think there's something to that - broken "windows" in online communities. A wakeup for me was how trolls are dealt with here and comments on other sites. Different communities appear to take on the conditions of their founding and then that DNA spreads as it replicates. However, any mutations along the way left unchecked become cancerous.

Strong agree. Case in point: the politics and automaker bailout stuff that has had more of a pass since the election. Even in the weeks leading up to the election the articles were policed more heavily than now.

Not sure it doesn't beat another half dozen articles on BS ruby infighting, though.

I'm a big believer in the broken windows theory. I was living in NYC when Giuliani took over. I was also a Reddit user when it was overrun by trolls. It was clear there was a correlation between trolling and other types of badness. That's why News.YC not only bans trolls, but also does things that seem unrelated, like fixing spelling mistakes and typographical abuses in story titles.

I like how you've set the example and then folks here have taken it upon themselves to help police things. It really has felt like a community watch.

I wonder if the folks at Reddit could have stomped out trollish behavior if they called it out as it developed. Did users try to do so? Or was it like a mob smashing windows every where?

The founders of Reddit had a deliberate policy of never censoring anything. They only banned spammers. And the trolls arrived gradually, so there was never a point where it was clear that something had to be done about it. Exactly like happened to NYC, actually.

All this stuff is still being figured out. I do think that trolling (in the broader sense) is temporary, though. It's just the kind of bug that happens in any new system before it stabilizes.

Is Reddit a stable system? If not, will it ever be?

There is a lot of trolling on present-day Reddit.

Reddit is stable in the literal sense of not changing, but not in the sense of being (socially) bug free.

Interesting that you mention one place where things got worse and another where they got better -- any chance that the reddits could reverse the trend?

The tipping point seems to be when low-value comments get more attention than thoughtful posts, because that's when the valuable contributors leave. At least on K5 that's what happened, all the smart contributors left because every time they'd submit an article the response would always be "-1, faggery" or whatever. So I guess my theory is that trolls are toxic not (only) because they pollute the signal to noise ratio, but because they cause thoughtful contributors to feel less valued.

Exactly. Would anyone who posts here willingly visit 4chan?

Slashdot may be one exception though. Trolling increased there until Digg and Reddit became popular. I think many of the slashdot trolls left for Digg and Reddit, and the amount of trolling on slashdot has subjectively decreased.

Thoughtful posters go where the feel like they are heard and appreciated. Trolls go where the system permits them to do the most damage.

Unfortunately, on of my good friends started to visit 4chan regularly, and he's been harder and harder to deal with, of late...

/b/ is somewhat interesting from the perspective of trying to make a community that is NOT like /b/. Kind of like the smelly cave woman in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy who gives out a list of every choice she's made in life and tells Arthur that if he makes the opposite choices maybe he won't end up nearly as bad off as her.

It's been a while since I read HHGTTG, but I don't remember this. Was it in one of the many other mediums? Time to buckle down and read (listen, watch) the rest of the stuff DA produced in the HHGTTG non-canon canon.

It was in the book I had. (Which was the "Trilogy in 5 parts" one..) Was probably in one of the last 2 books..

I'm not sure, but this sounds like something from "Mostly Harmless," which was the HHGTTG novel I only read once. That novel had a side plot about Arthur's "immortality" and how his choices impacted a character that was introduced in "Life, The Universe, and Everything."

Yes, I willingly visit /b/ (4chan), and I enjoy it a lot. It never fails to make me laugh. Sometimes, when the moon is right, I even giggle. Like a schoolgirl, sometimes. A schoolgirl in the noodly grip of thousands upon thousands of tentacles.

I also have over 2K karma, if that matters to some people.

I refute that /b/ is "supposed to be" a serious community. It just is what it is. And as far as I can tell, its sole purpose is hilarity. You should visit it sometime, when nobody's looking, and when the moon is right.

I saw the translation first-hand over a number of years. There used to be a forum community I was a part of (it was regarded by some as a spin-off of the Something Awful forums, but that's another story). Many moons ago (roughly 4-5 years or so) it was a great community full of intelligent, witty, fun people. There was almost never a thread that wasn't worth reading in any number of forums there and the moderators took their jobs quite seriously. Basically, good people and good content were everywhere.

Then, as time went on, things started going down hill. It's impossible to attribute this to a single event, but a series of circumstances changed that caused the site to lose its quality, both in members and content. There was some serious alienation of Moderators caused by the site owner, the board started becoming more popular via Google and drew many, for lack of a better term, "Publics," etc. Due to these and other events, the best moderators jumped ship or just stopped caring (likely influenced by the owner's lack of involvement, too). The members who contributed the most worthwhile content started leaving as they noticed the boards being overrun with worthless posts.

And so it went, until a few months ago when the original owner sold off the site to somebody new who promptly shut the whole place down (after saying he had no plans to change things, or so I heard). It started as a place to make friends, share ideas, create witty banter, etc. Hell, it even lead to a few in-person meet-ups (if you've never attended a party held in another state by some random person you've never met in real life, I highly recommend it). It eventually degraded into "just another forum community" where the few people who still worked to make it a place worth coming to were drowned out by the masses of peasants clamoring "LOL!"

There's a 5-year experiment for you ;)

> if you've never attended a party held in another state by some random person you've never met in real life, I highly recommend it

This somewhat off-topic, but I'd highly recommend this as well. In general, I've been a member of a few Internet (IRC, forums, mailing lists) communities that would organize real-life events and made good friends and formed important associations through this.

I've also seen several degrade into "just another $medium community". In many cases they would be forked many times into smaller/more selective communities that'd would maintain the feel of the older days (you could say reddit this with news.y.c and programming.reddit).

Does a similar effect apply to code?

Perhaps technical debt comes with punitive interest rates, making maintainers add more cruft than they otherwise would.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt

It does indeed.

Things like amount of unit tests and comments are influenced heavily by this effect.

It's elaborated further in The Pragmatic Programmer (http://pragprog.com/titles/tpp/the-pragmatic-programmer), which actually introduced me to the concept some time back.

I've often wondered about this issue in regards to tax code. Does a massive, labyrinthine system encourage legislators to add still more layers of complexity?

I read something else into that. You can't be half-hearted, only perfection will do. It isn't enough to repaint the wall, a handful of candy wrappers will undo all your good work.

Corollary: litter-precursors (the things that most often get dropped, like cans and cigarette filters) might need to be banned or somehow forced into low-litter forms, their cumulative downside looks like it might be harsh enough to outweigh the property-rights case.

"... litter-precursors (the things that most often get dropped, like cans and cigarette filters) might need to be banned or somehow forced into low-litter forms ..."

It seems more beneficial to keep arbitrary restrictions to a minimum. It's more efficient in the long run to achieve that goal by changing culture, not by introducing legislation.

The trouble here is that there seems to be feedback - anti-civilized behavior promotes itself. While they haven't looked at cultural side effects, I would expect a behavior's prevalence to influence its acceptability.

Where can the loop be interrupted? Probably easiest at the point where no minds are involved, it's merely physical mess. So, aggressive cleaning. But for that to be realistic, the spigot has to be closed a little. Hence, bans on litter precursors.

It is far easier to put garbage cans on streetcorners than change how people behave or ban common packaging.

Reminds of the Just-noticeable-difference concept (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_noticeable_difference) from psychophysics. If disorder is evaluated as a general aggregate of cleanliness, crime etc. An increased baseline of disorder will mean that any personal transgressions that were perceived as "wrong" before would now be perceived as lesser wrongs in comparison.

They probably accounted for this, but is it possible that graffiti is resulting in bikers park elsewhere, implying that it isn't individual behavior that is being modified, but group make-up.

Downright scary to me:

13% to 27% of people were willing to steal €5 from a mailbox. In a first world, affluent country.

Better to take it than allow it to fall into the hands of some hoodlum/criminal. Seriously I think that would be some people's mindset/excuse. Especially in the 'Broken Window' case.

If that was the rationale, it would be better to just push it into the mail box completely.

Apart from HN, another community which has handled trolls quite well is MetaFilter.

An interesting paper on MeFi: http://www.noor.bz/pdf/ali-hasan_metafilter.pdf [pdf] I wonder how much the $5 joining fee is responsible for that.

Not to be confused with the Broken Window Fallacy:

http://freedomkeys.com/window.htm

Disgusting.

  * The Economist (more often than not missing the point and failing on preditions.)
  * No link to original research.
  * Lack of signs of peer-reviewed research
  * Missing analysis of opposing view.

This isn't science or unbiased journalism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixing_Broken_Windows#Critics_o...

The article was about the research Dr Keizer has just published in Science. How is that research not original or peer reviewed ?

Somehow I missed that paragraph, sorry. My bad.

Still... The Economist.. Against graffiti... I don't know.

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