On Trolls. | Hacker News Reader

On Trolls.

parislemon.com

13 pointslyime23 comments

The picture of a toy troll indicates to me, as does the text, that you don't know what trolling is. Here is the appropriate metaphor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(angling)

The word's meaning has expanded beyond the original Usenet sense.

I agree that the author's understanding of the term is imprecise but rather than refer him to an etymology of the term, I think this wiki would be more appropriate to convey the term's common usage:

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

Personally I ignore the blatant trolls but I get more and more disheartened by the people who are more or less two-faced.

The kind who spout vitriolic comments about people or products via their online identity, but wouldn't have the guts to say this kind of stuff in person.

I've noticed this a lot lately with comments aimed at Michael Arrington. Many people love to leave anonymous persona comments about how much of an asshole Arrington appears to be, yet I'd wager a significant portion of those wouldn't dare say it to his face.

It really says a lot about a person who hasn't got those kinds of balls.

Disclosure #1: While I do think Michael Arrington can be over the top sometimes, I do find him to be a fairly credible kind of guy.

Disclosure #2: I don't post anonymously, my contact details are in my profile and I would definitely like the opportunity to tell the following people how much I dislike them in person. Paris Hilton, Eddie Mcguire & Dick Cheney.

Techcrunch needs to hire a dedicated community manager, like Boing Boing. The low quality of the Techcrunch comments drag down the perceived quality of the rest of the site.

Well, to be perfectly honest, BB's "community management" hasn't been all that great (remember when Big Brother decided that Violet Blue needed to be erased from the interwebs?)...

Yes, that was weird. I'm pretty sure the unspoken explanation had to do with being able to get more advertisers or better relations with their advertisers if their site had no links to pictures of naked women.

My point is that sites beyond a certain size need to have a system of moderated comments or the comments cease to function. The individual decisions of the moderator (and the moderator's bosses) shouldn't factor in here -- what do you suggest as a superior alternative? Community moderation in the style of Hacker News and reddit?

Would anyone be up for designing an actual method to punch people in the face (or some other equivalent action) over the Internet? And requiring that you have it active and targeted at you in order to have your computer on? ;)

Actually, I think the most interesting method of eliminating trolling would be to have a sort of escrow service that takes your money away if people downvote you enough. To put it another way: establish a currency-to-Whuffie exchange. Sort of like buying gold in WoW, except that you don't spend it on weapons to fight monsters, but rather invest it in your own comments.

I really can't wait until I can cash in my Hacker News karma. I'm optimistic that the online reputational economy will emerge in the next 5 years.

I'd probably trade my account right now for 15 hours of python uber-hacking or $2000 to the EFF.

I think a "put your money where your mouth is" site is actually a good idea. Have it by invite only. Make registration a pain in the butt, require credit card, and require that people go by their real names.

I remember seeing several sites try one or more these strategies, the only notable success that I know of is smallworld.net which caters to a market that used to be known as the jet set, rich, well-connected and privacy conscious individuals who want the exclusivity.

But this (validated identity) is the sort of thing that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft keep trying to push out the door (now joined by twitter "verified identities"); and it keeps falling flat.

This is basically what Amazon's "Real Name" system is.

I am confused as to how a "tech" site such as t/c doesn't have any sort of community comment moderation features. It makes sense to let your readers vote down the trollish comments.

On slashdot and reddit and even on digg, if you set your comment threshold to +5, what's left behind is pretty good conversation. On HN, trollish comments are grayed out almost immediately. What's most disappointing is that slashdot has had a comment karma system since '97.

Instead of complaining about the trolls, I'd prefer if they actually did something about it.

Slashdot, reddit, digg and HN are homebrewed software - TechCrunch is a Wordpress install, a little bit of a different kettle of fish.

But regardless, I think that with a significant number of people who just troll the comments at techcrunch, any kind voting system will just be gamed anyway and in doing so, will dilute it's effectiveness.

> TechCrunch is a Wordpress install, a little bit of a different kettle of fish.

Which is opensource and can be customized. TC isn't a toy blog, so they should hire someone to work on the feature, or use 3-rd part comment system, like Intense Debate or Disqus.

I kinda like the HN system of only allowing downvotes if you maintain a comment karma above a certain level. That, or something like that, makes a lot of sense and it can't really be "gamed" by the comment trolls on techcrunch.

Again, my belief is simply that this is not a new problem. The word "troll" has existed since the BBS days and over the last 10 years other sites have come up with clever ways (that work) to filter the trollish comments out. I don't think any of them are perfect, but it seems a bit cynical and overstated to say "any" voting system would be gamed if other sites have managed. Even digg.

Great post htsh. Slashdot-style community-based moderation is clearly the way forward. Even reading at +2 is quite reasonable and certainly allows you to avoid the trash you get on TC or YouTube (reading the comments there surely brings anyone to doubt the mental capacity of their fellow humans).

Perhaps I'm an old man but it seems really retarded for folks like this to be wasting time with a problem that had been solved over a decade ago. And it doesn't have to be exactly the same -- but something is better than anything. Also, the retail site Amazon has also had community review moderation for the better part of a decade.

Even if there's only a "like" button that brings more liked comments up, it'd be something. No system is perfect, but all of them work well enough to bring useful content up and push trollish content out or invisible. And if trolls want to fight amongst themselves, they can still do it (either at the bottom of the page or by turning their threshold off).

You simply cannot have folks pick and choose which comments to keep and which to censor. That definitely will not make for good discussion, as evidenced by their efforts to date.

And even if its wordpress, as someone pointed out its open source and I bet there are multiple plugins that setup such functionality. I simply don't believe that these "tech" people in Silicon Valley would have a problem finding someone to do a little coding for them. Seems lazy more than anything else.

Maybe I took http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html too much to heart, but "holds people accountable for what they say" is rather sinister. I've long since stopped saying anything even slightly controversial without an alias. Isn't there some way of making a reputation valuable enough to build and keep, without tying it to my True Name and hurting my career?

That is an excellent question. Perhaps what we need is a way to make money off of maintaining reputation info for online accounts. Then there would be a good incentive for someone to figure out how to do it (and also to do it).

http://xkcd.com/137/

That's stirring and all, but notice that Munroe is not in the habit of pissing off his fans/customers (nor should he).

Me, I like having business guys drop tough problems and big checks in my lap, and it's worth being nonthreatening to have that. Flying my freak flag just means I'd have to be self-employed, which involves spending a lot of time not coding.

Has anyone tried using statistical filters to detect unwanted comments? If you could get the volume of stupid comments low enough, the users could vote down the more cleverly written trolls. Alternatively one could try to automatically give high ranks to good comments.

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