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Thanks for the link! I fully agree that banning is an important tool, though oftentimes a softer approach is more effective. Like a polite, firm warning, for disruptive people who aren't trolling for entertainment nor complete "assholes". And you should request people not to feed trolls; pointing out that if they find themselves feeling a strong emotional urge to respond, it's a sign they're dealing with a troll.

(Being a civil moderator is important because it sets an example — you won't overreact over some tiny irritant. And of course, recreational trolls want you to overrespond; that's their entire game.)

If you do encounter truly disruptive people, then aggressively removing them from the forum is important, like you'd remove a harasser from a meeting.

I like this case study of how a feminist forum had to deal with conflicting internal forces keeping them from maintaining a useful forum. (http://inkido.indiana.edu/research/onlinemanu/papers/herring...)

One problem I've found with banning: the rare troll on things like IRC who will take the act of banning as an act of agression and engagement in a war of "how many of my IPs can you ban while I harass your channel."

Those same people, ignored or hugged will often just find harassing your channel boring and move on.

I agree. Different communication mediums require different tactics. In the case of IRC though, I think it's due to a lack of good banning tools.

One of the reasons I love Freenode is because they have good banning tools. For example, /mode #channel_under_attack +r will prevent people from joining if they aren't identified with nickserv. Once the attacker gets bored, you can remove the restriction.

> Those same people, ignored or hugged will often just find harassing your channel boring and move on.

I wonder if an "invisible ban" would work with trolls? What I mean is that their messages appear to them, butr not to any other user. So the troll isn't aware they've been banned. Has anyone used this?

Invisible bans only work so well; trolls figure it out pretty quick. I've used it on forums.

I run an active forum and the best tool has been to automatically compare the IP addresses of banned users (registration IP and all post IPs) against any future registration/post IP addresses and disable the subject when a match is found.

Trolls will eventually forget to use a proxy and will immediately find themselves autobanned again. And all the IPs they used are added to the blacklist.

It's pretty funny. My forum would've been unmanageable without this.

This of course also punish innocent users on the same set of dynamic IPs that the troll uses.

That would be a problem for a forum with a huge audience, but if there are only a few hundred active users, the probability of punishing the wrong person should be acceptably low.

The script publishes a message in a Moderator-only subforum that looks something like "Troll555 appears to be evading his ban on usernames: TrollMan, TrollDude, TrollSmith."

A few thousand members log in every day and I've rarely had a problem.

You'd think that, except invisible banning is used on hacker news and if you turn show-dead on in your profile and then go to the profile of someone who is 'dead' then you'll more than likely see months and months of them posting as an invisible person.

Those who stay on a hellbanned account tend to be the moderately clueless who got a false positive hellban after a tone-deaf first comment rather than trolls.

There's a variant on the hellban where you hide them but show their posts to other hellbanned people to them means they might get counter-flamed and think they're still posting for real.

That's a neat idea.

But it worked wonderfully on me. I kept using my account[1] for a whole month before noticing 2 days ago, and finding the cause[2] yesterday. My second account, altran, got killed on the 1st submission. This is my 3rd account.

  [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ranit8
  [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3903705

"hell bans" are described by CodingHorror.

Try turning "showdead" on (in your profile) - you'll start to see a few people who have been hellbanned. Some of those people know that but continue posting anyway. Some of those people just made a mistake and got hellbanned and could probably be unbanned.

This is done very poorly here on HN. I got hellbanned on my first account. I have no idea why, and there was no warning of any kind. I have not changed my behaviour in any way as a result, I simply made a new account. I don't see how that helps the quality of discourse. Hell banning needs to be restricted to people who are obviously just being offensive for the sake of offensiveness. People who may be just trying to contribute but break some un-spoken rule should be warned that what they are doing isn't acceptable, otherwise they have no way to adjust their behaviour.

> After reading Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism[1], I am convinced that banning is vastly underused. Many of us are professionals. Our time is valuable; our communities, even more-so. There are so many fools with so many maladaptive behaviors. Considering what else we could be working on, correcting them all simply isn't worthwhile. The opportunity cost is too high.

Let's take it a step further. I don't think any of us would object to paying a nominal fee (say, $2/month) to obtain voting/posting privileges on HN. Although this would drastically reduce the amount of activity on the site, it would undoubtedly increase the quality of whatever activity remained. Not because a lot of people wouldn't be able to afford it, but because a troll wouldn't enter his credit card information and other personal details just to obtain the ability to flame someone on the internet.

> Not because a lot of people wouldn't be able to afford it, but because a troll wouldn't enter his credit card information and other personal details just to obtain the ability to flame someone on the internet.

Patently incorrect. People have been paying for the privilege of abusing others at least since the days of Ultima Online (just to name one example). So-called "griefers" have a presence in every online community, even the paying ones.

Though I agree with the spirit of what you're proposing - erect a barrier to entry to make people decide how serious they are - in all likelihood it will only deter a few trolls and will almost certainly keep out future valuable contributors.

IMHO, I think the best way to keep trolls out is to not respond to them, and to continue writing quality HN contributions. At times I've been discouraged over the last year that "HN was on the decline". Each time, I've been encouraged by the fact that the elders of the community seem to come back and raise the tone again.

I think if you stick around long enough and learn to use your karma score as a barometer for what type of discourse is valuable and which is not, you can eventually become a good contributing member.

Trolls and malcontents have infinitely more time and will put infinitely more effort into abusing a community than good standing members will in participating. Trolls will jump through every hoop. I've seen serious trolls not care if their personal details are known; they're unafraid. But I've seen honest valuable members work extremely hard to keep their information provide.

I would have agreed with you until reading Freakonomics.

By charging trolls, you are essentially validating their behaviour - "I'm paying for this, so I'm your customer! The customer is always right!"

Even worse, you warp the social structure into one where those willing to pay get to make the rules, removing the sense of community and pushing people away.

If you haven't read Freakonomics, I believe he's referring to the case of a nursery school that decided to fine parents if they were late in picking up their children. Instead of starting to be on time, the parents actually came later, as they were willing to pay to be late.

That I am.

Finishing the story: when the nursery stopped fining parents, the behaviour didn't improve. The parents saw this as a paid service that became free.

It's an extremely common mistake to think that the pop psychology we pick up by sheer experience is a sufficient measure to understand what works. It's entirely too easy to forget that we, personally, are largely unaware of any proven methods for cultivating gardens. We're running off the anecdotal data that just happens to stick to our brains like burrs on a fur coat.

As others have duly stated, there are many people who are more than willing to pay for the privilege of trolling. It might not even start that way: I paid $40/mo to play a particular online game, and maintained my subscription as my play dwindled and my forum trolling increased. I eventually cancelled, but that was not an altruistic action: I simply needed to stop posting, and to stop paying for a game I didn't enjoy anymore. If someone has a similar experience with HN, you're relying on their self-control to end their own privileges.

Quite frankly, no one knows how to police a community perfectly. This is why religion was invented, after all, why politics exists. And see how that turned out, a few thousand years later. We're struggling damn hard, despite all the progress.

You never know what people will do. Every action, every ban, every harsh or kind word, every (pay)wall around the garden, every disincentive, carrot, stick, every reputation system, every voting system... you're going off your gut, at the end of the day, because there is no unified theory of sociology you can tap to actually justify it.

I think that the biggest complication in this is the fact that the people who want to police others are usually the same people who want to abuse others.

I gently disagree with your post.

But I would agree that the meta anguish[1] that some forums go through is often driven by people who just don't know any better and who probably shouldn't be given any power.

[1] they start small and really good; they get popular; someone decides that something must be done; there are long and bitter threads about moderation; mods get appointed; and then there's a slew of stickied threads and rules and closed threads and bizarre restriction.

How about this: the need to police others often comes from the same root as the need to abuse them.

SomethingAwful is a great example of how poorly the "require payment to deter trolls" method works. It completely warped the user base into a pseudo-facist circle jerk.

MetaFilter does symbolic payments for a different purpose (controlled community growth) and that is working out well.

Sadly, that tenant has to be balanced by a problem you can accidentally cause by following the premise of that article that was demonstrated in another article by the same author.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/lr/evaporative_cooling_of_group_beli...

s/tenant/tenet/

It is positively shameful how many communities are filled with insults, trolls, snark, and incivility.

The net is full of people who subscribe to ideologies that hold:

    1) It's always ok to f^ck with people
    2) If they're not cool with it, they are wrong/evil/inferior

Actually, I hold that not being f^cked with non-consensually is actually a human right. It should fit into the Maslow need hierarchy. Rejection by a group is a terrible experience for a social animal like a human being, and being emotionally abused while others in the group stand by is tantamount to this.

After reading Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism[1], I am convinced that banning is vastly underused.

I think the "blue pill" tactic is more economical. It is often possible to put the trollers with the trollers and make the trollers effectively invisible to the civil members. In the long run, I think that is cheaper than playing whack-a-mole with banned trolls coming back.

A certain quote seems appropriate here: "Don't believe in yourself! Believe that I believe in you!"

Eliezer Yudkowsky, folks, always ready to cite Kamina-sama on matters of sociopolitical philosophy.

> People who met me in person were often shocked at how much my in-person impression departed from the picture they had in their minds. I think this mostly had to do with imagining me as being the sort of actor who would be chosen to play me in the movie version of my life—they imagined way too much dignity. That forms a large part of the reason why I occasionally toss in the deliberate anime reference, which does seem to have fixed the divergence a bit.

-- http://lesswrong.com/lw/4y/on_things_that_are_awesome/

I am always surprised, looking at pictures of him, how much he looks just like a total Haredi.