Kottke: Does the broken windows theory hold online?

This is why I'll actually complain about off-topic postings and such, despite the utterly inevitable complaints about the complaint. (At least nobody's babbled about how it's their free-speech right to post whatever crud they want to a social site in a while, and you just have to suck it up...) Community standards don't maintain themselves.

Case in point: Hacker News comments vs. Reddit comments vs. Digg comments.

Sure, there's a population bias. But Reddit used to have mostly intelligent comments. Not anymore.

One way you could test this is to datamine Google's or Microsoft's usenet archive. You could track if users behaved in less social ways in more troll-tolerant newsgroup (i.e. track say a million users and compare their behaviour across different newsgroups). It could also be done across time for individual newsgroups to remove any bias inherent in the topic of the group.

This problem is framed in a way that is subtly different from another way of looking at it that may offer different solutions.

Looking at a given comment as a "broken window" would seem to me to lend itself to specific treatments (i.e. a "flag" or "report" option), but you could also look at each comment as a contribution to the community that should be considered as a whole.

I think if you treat every comment (exclusing illegal content or obvious spam/vandalism) as though it has value, even if that value is negative, it might lead to tools that highlight comments, demonstrating that they're unacceptable. HN (and now Engadget?) have shaded negative comments that are along the lines of what I'm thinking of.

What's interesting about online comments is that the comments themselves become a part of the "landscape" of a site. So a site could be aesthetically pleasing and designed well (i.e. no apparent "broken windows" as Kottke would define them), but if the comments are full of expletives and "roflmao" type messages, then they effectively become the broken windows.

If I were to apply the broken windows theory online, I'd consider "bad" comments as graffiti and "good" comments as public art. The broken windows would be more an analogy of a community misusing what's been made available to them as opposed to a designer purposely or accidentally creating something ugly.

slightly off topic but still on broken windows theory

do you normally clean up your code 'aesthetic' ?

like the commented:

old code (to make it unactive) -> ;(define bla)

return value -> ;returns '(1 2 3)

debugging print statements -> ;(print bla)

hacks -> ;quick hack for x, buggy but good enough for now

what's the better practices? thx