10 ms·

PG on trolls

137 points by sharpshoot 19y ago

edw519 19y ago
Another way to keep signal to noise higher is to treat debates about languages the same as those about politics and religion. Maybe it's just best to agree to disagree. I generally tend to avoid the "language war" threads for 3 reasons: 1. No one is really right or wrong. 2. Not much gets accomplished. and 3. It really doesn't make that much difference anyway. Debates about favorite colors, on the other hand, should be strongly encouraged. Blue is definitely the best one.
- curi 19y ago
  While I agree with you that avoiding those discussions is a reasonable general policy, it's not the case that "no one is really right or wrong" in debates about computer languages, politics, or religion. There is a truth of the matter. Your point that not much is accomplished by such discussions is definitely what usually happens. But it isn't what must happen. There are rational ways of discussing these subjects which can lead to knowledge creation and agreement. The reason I'm posting is basically that I think people are a little too quick to give up, and if they tried to discuss seriously a bit more, they might find it sometimes works. Especially if they are careful to ignore the bad replies they get and only reply to the other people who are also taking the discussion seriously.
  - dfranke 19y ago
    it's not the case that "no one is really right or wrong" in debates about computer languages, politics, or religion. There is a truth of the matter. Well, yes and no. There's only a truth to the matter if you can get people to agree on a premise. Two libertarians who adopt the same premises can have a meaningful debate with each other. They'll agree that there can only be one consistent position -- so if they disagree on what it is then one of them must be mistaken -- and set about trying to figure out which of them holds the fallacy. But if you pit a libertarian with the premise of self-ownership against a communist with the premise of "property is theft", nobody is going to accomplish anything because neither will view the other's argument as relevant.
    - curi 19y ago
      There's only a truth to the matter if you can get people to agree on a premise. Two libertarians who adopt the same premises can have a meaningful debate This is the myth of the framework. See Popper's book by that name: http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Framework-Defence-Science-Rationality/dp/0415135559/ http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Framework-Defence-Science-Rationa... Besides the issue of whether productive debate is possible across frameworks, there is also your (possibly accidental) assertion that what premises people believe affects what statements about reality are true (beyond statements about who believes what). That's solipsism.
      - dfranke 19y ago
        your (possibly accidental) assertion that what premises people believe affects what statements about reality are true None of the statements in question have to do with reality, only with abstract ideas. Libertarians believe that property ownership is a right; communists believe that it is an offense. Neither of these assertions is empirically testable. If the debate is about what policies will make us wealthier rather than what policies are ethical, then that's a different matter. But in that case, both sides are sharing the common framework of utilitarianism.
        curi 19y ago
        You give a good example: which policies towards the market create more wealth (on average, various things being equal) is a matter of fact. But I think this sort of non-arbitrary approach to thinking has much wider applicability, and indeed that all interesting subjects can be approached in a careful, meaningful way not based on personal taste. Which policies are ethical, with "ethics" rightly construed, is also a matter of fact. Morality is about how to live, and it's not a religious concept. The notion that morality is (and must be) religious is unfortunately a bad, religious idea, that (oddly) most atheists still believe. Just to get started, we can consider which lifestyles do and do not accomplish their own internal goals. Lifestyles that do not are bad ways to live -- they are "immoral". We don't have to use moral terminology; that isn't important. But whatever you call it, there are objective facts about how we should or shouldn't live. And there's better than that. You can take a very wide variety of goals, and examine how to achieve them. And you can find common points -- certain ways of life are good for achieving many goals, while others are not. These common points, which make people powerful and able to accomplish things in general, are an important, useful, and objective find the field of morality.
dfranke 19y ago
Like graffiti, trolling can be impressive when it's done especially well. My favorite troll of all time is the guy from comp.compression last August: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.compression/browse_thread/thread/63db3f711c83d4c0/a0f09c085ce4aa7f http://groups.google.com/group/comp.compression/browse_threa... followed by the famous "Is Your Son a Computer Hacker?" troll from adequacy.org: http://adequacy.org/public/stories/2001.12.2.42056.2147.html http://adequacy.org/public/stories/2001.12.2.42056.2147.html
- curi 19y ago
  reminds me of the physicist who wrote a fake post-modernist paper and submitted it to a journal and got it published.
  - dfranke 19y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_Affair http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_Affair
    - cousin_it 19y ago
      Also, a couple of French TV show hosts pulled the same trick with physics instead of postmodernism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_Affair http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_Affair
  - pg 19y ago
    He was doing more than trolling though. That was an experiment to show how low their filters were set.
  - simen 19y ago
    I'm not sure I'd regard the Sokal affair as trolling. It's hardly being an asshole, unless you consider exposing idiots being an ass, and it's hardly fishing for controversy, unless exposing any kind of potentially controversial stuff is trolling (was Watergate trolling?).
    - 19y ago
bhb 19y ago
Very small nitpick, but I think "It an old one, as old as forums" should be "It _is_ an old one, as old as forums". Update: this has been corrected.
- pg 19y ago
  Thanks, fixed.
curi 19y ago
it's not clear to me that nastiness is more common at hacker forums. a certain kind is. but i've seen much nastier stuff on parenting forums (which i've been to a lot). on parenting forums, you don't find so many jerks. when people are mean, they tend to be a bit more subtle (or passive aggressive) about it. but they make it emotional and personal, and i think that does a more effective job of actually hurting anyone.
DarrenStuart 19y ago
I think news.yc has a 5th troll behavior and it's down modding a comment because they disagree with it. I have been down modded a number of times not for saying something rude or stupid just something that others don't agree with. I tend to down mod rude and aggressive people on here and I also up mod people who I think have been down modded unfairly. I am not sure if I am alone with my way of thinking.
- immad 19y ago
  We shouldn't down mod things we disagree with?
  - cawel 19y ago
    I guess it's a matter of pertinence. Comments supporting a constructive conversation should be uppmodded (which does not mean it's comments you agree with). Or comments you want others to pay attention to (diluting uninteresting ones by extension). Like in this thread, we can note the irony (and worshiping) of the community, with the top comment (11 points so far) done by anewaccountname, deliberately taking a piss out of PG's essay.
    - aston 19y ago
      Actually, there's no way a comment like anewaccountname's would get upmodded to that extent were it not a verbatim reference to pg's previous article. The fact that people here upmod/downmod based on whether they agree rather than whether it's insightful really bothers me. I think it's the wrong incentive structure.
      - timr 19y ago
        The first comment was funny, though. Yes, if you want to pick it apart, it was funny because it was a verbatim reference to the earlier article, but it was funny nonetheless. Likewise, it was funny that the "Funny..." comment was modded to -1. At least, I found it funny. Point being, I don't think these were rewards for groupthink, so much as rewards for geeks being clever.
boredguy8 19y ago
My experience on forums is that -size matters-. A pond with ten fish gets far less trollers than a pond with ten thousand. As for solutions: there have to be consequences. Either losing the ability to post or losing the ability to have your posts seen. Certainly banning accounts is an option, but then you have to fight with the crapflood, if and when it comes.
- davidw 19y ago
  I think the community size bit is important (see 'monkey number'). I also wonder if that means that sites should somehow attempt to break people into smaller groups in some way in order to maintain that 'small town feel'.
- rms 19y ago
  >losing the ability to have your posts seen. That's how it works on this forum. I leave "showdead" on just to see what the trolls and spammers are up to.
anewaccountname 19y ago
Who is this guy and what authority does he have to write about these topics? I haven't read the essay, but there's no way anything so short and written in such an informal style could have anything useful to say about such and such topic, when people with degrees in the subject have already written many thick books about it.
- shafqat 19y ago
  Funny...
- dfranke 19y ago
  Where can I get a degree in trolling?
  - jcwentz 19y ago
    I'd try Hampshire College, UC Santa Cruz, or the New School.
    - nostrademons 19y ago
      If you do go to Hampshire, take International Relations. Fun times.
    - johnnowak 19y ago
      As a New School student, I can only say... well... okay yes, you're probably right. It's great fun though. I can't imagine hating school anywhere else.
  - serhei 19y ago
    Not very many places give out diplomas, but if you want to get a job at a trolling company, you can just practice on pretty much any forum. Eventually hundreds of people will know you're a troll, giving you hundreds of references to take to a potential employer. Just make sure you don't ever accidentally post anything that actually contributes to the discussion.
  - anupamkapoor 19y ago
aswanson 19y ago
About what size was reddit (in uniques) before it jumped the shark?
- pg 19y ago
  Off the top of my head, maybe 40-50,000. The fascinating thing is, all the data is still there. You can go and look at the old comments and stories and see what the site used to be like. If you could find a good proxy for stupidity, like comment length or spelling mistakes, you could graph the change as the site grew.
  - Spyckie 19y ago
    Is there a way to grab a reddit comment corpus (a large set of reddit's comments)? I don't browse reddit but I think it would be a fun thing to play around with.
    - Tichy 19y ago
      wget perhaps?
  - jedberg 19y ago
    Are you sure about that? reddit hit 50k uniques about 6 months after it launched. I'd say the discourse was very similar to what it is here at that point in the game.
deleted 19y ago
[deleted]
prakash 19y ago
"Hackers can be abrupt even in person. Put them on an anonymous forum, and the problem gets worse." I am sure everyone on this forum is on some kind of social network. If we can get every user's handle to link to their flavor-du-jour social network's public profile, verify via email -- that should at least cut down on some of the noise. PG: What do you think?
- curi 19y ago
  I don't use any social networks. I do have my email and website (with real name) in my profile, though.
- yters 19y ago
  If chains of trust could be widely and rigorously established online, most (maybe all?) of the big problems we have today would be gone.
  - pg 19y ago
    It would be a good thing. If anyone wants to apply to YC with that kind of idea, we'd be into it.
    - yters 19y ago
      I had thought facebook would be the beginning of this, but it seems to be a flash in the pan, and too locked in to really be effective.
    - sspencer 19y ago
      I actually thought long and hard the other day about how such a system might be implemented, and came up with a few interesting ideas. Perhaps this encouragement will make me apply! EDIT: I even wrote about it a long time ago, when I still updated my blog with any semblance of regularity. Weebly seems to be down for approximately the millionth time in the last month or so, though. I'll post the article if Weebly gets righted within the edit window.
      - 19y ago
hollerith 19y ago
I wish comments remained deletable longer. My last comment is 3 hr old (and has no replies) and it has already become undeletable whereas when I made an insensitive comment, it continued to be downmodded for about 24 hr. By "become undeletable", I mean there is no "edit" or "delete" link on the comment.
cawel 19y ago
Regarding the future of communities while they grow and "technical tweaks", eBay recently adjusted its policies to improve its community quality, restricting sellers from leaving negative feedback to buyers: http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2008/02/crowd_control.php http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2008/02/crowd_control.php
Alex3917 19y ago
"Often users have second thoughts and delete such comments." @PG, I've always wondered, are you able to see all the comments that I've posted and then deleted two minutes later? And if so, is this an acceptable way to send you semi-private messages?
- davidw 19y ago
  "Paul Graham sees all the comments anyone has posted anywhere. What's more, he knows all the comments they will post in the future, too."
  - tyler 19y ago
    "...and has already categorized them using Bayesian filtering."
ButtSexMcMuffin 19y ago
Buttz
willchang 19y ago
I think what PG called "incompetence" is really just rampant emotionalism. "Incompetence" is inaccurate because it suggests that people of all levels of experience can't happily share a forum, which I think they can. But what happens at Reddit nowadays is that anyone who posts an inane comment with a phrase like "why the fuck" will get lots of upvotes. (Case in point: Search for "fuck" in the comments for the top article at Reddit, and get: "That fucking cunt is going to get what she deserves," 15 points.) I think in the early days of Reddit, the fact that everything including comments could be voted on was intimidating to trolls, so they were kept at bay. But some time later every primal scream was rewarded, and trolls started posting in droves. It never helped that a really low-scoring post with a high-scoring rejoinder tended to be highly ranked. That's just begging for the sort of you-got-served culture that excites trolls.
Tichy 19y ago
On news.yc it is not so extreme, but on german tech news site heise.de, there is also a modding system. Good threads become green, bad ones red. I have often wondered if people are more likely to start flaming away in the red threads. Sort of like beating up somebody who is already down on the floor (comments on the line of "you suck"). At heise.de I often had the impression that it is the case - not so much on news.yc, but it might be interesting to look at the statistics?
- pg 19y ago
  News.YC users are definitely influenced by the prevailing trend, in both directions. I.e. people are more willing to vote something up as its score rises, and more prone to attack something as its score falls. It's not too bad yet here, but it got to be such a problem on Reddit that about a year ago they switched to not showing how many points a submission has till it's an hour old.
  - deleted 19y ago
    [deleted]
  - ced 19y ago
    Ever thought about doing a controlled experiment about it? I.e.: showing high points for a post to half the users, and low points to the other half.
deleted 19y ago
[deleted]
akkartik 19y ago
PG's essays are getting shorter. I like that -- no matter what Steve Yegge says. (http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/01/blogging-theory-201-size-does-matter.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/01/blogging-theory-201-...)
smithfield 19y ago
The simplest troll test. A troll (person or point of view) is incapable of introspection. This does not mean that trolls won't try to introspect, just that they cannot succeed at it. This can also be used to show why trolls have trouble with recursion and irony.
DTanner 19y ago
I'm not convinced that you'll be able to deal with the Eternal September problem. It's all well and good that anti-trolling is built into the rules, but as more and more people join less and less of them will have read the rules.
ChaitanyaSai 19y ago
It doesn't have much to do with hacker personalities. Unless you want to argue that Youtube denizens are hackers of some sort too.
- bishopdante 18y ago
  Forums used to be the province of the technorati. Not no more they ain't.
ChaitanyaSai 19y ago
I wonder if trolls can be categorized automatically. Caveats and all, trolls are characterized by their participation in negative-karma two-person conversations and down-voting of their comments by a diverse and changing set of users. A simple learning algorithm should zap the predictable ones. Trolls are nourished by attention and early detection and removal should nip that behavior in the bud.
- pg 19y ago
  I've thought a lot about that. I wouldn't be surprised if current spam filters would work unchanged. There are not enough trolls on News.YC to make it worth investing time in such countermeasures, but it would be an interesting experiment to see if you could use statistical filtering techniques to detect trolls in some large public corpus like Digg or Reddit or Slashdot comment threads.
  - thaumaturgy 19y ago
    I don't think that would work; you would essentially require a filter that could actually understand the subject matter, in order to determine whether the purpose of the stated opinion was to bait people's responses. For example: "I've thought a lot about that. I would be surprised if current spam filters could work unchanged. There are not enough trolls on News.YC to make it worth investing time in trying to write it in Lisp, but it would be an interesting experiment to see if you could use C++ programming techniques to detect trolls in some large public corpus like Digg or Reddit or Slashdot's comment threads."
    - iamelgringo 19y ago
      Not necessarily. Spam filters routinely filter out emails based on a common set of words that are used without understanding the subject matter. For example, if an email contains the words viagara and store, the probability of that email being spam go up tremendously. Paul's "A plan for Spam" essay explains a lot more. And, from what I understand, Bayesian filtering is at the root of most spam blockers out there. I'd be willing to wager that Bayesian filtering would be pretty powerful in filtering out trolls on social sites, as well. For example, if a post contains the words "asshole" and "fucktard" the probability of that post coming from a troll goes up exponentially. If you trained a Bayesian filter, or spam algorithm well enough, it should be able to flag trollish posts fairly easily.
ken 19y ago
I don't think "distance" is the primary cause of asshole behavior by automobile drivers, though it does sound like a convenient first approximation. If I was walking down the street with a $20,000 ming vase, and you were running around nearly hitting me, I'd probably swear at you. Likewise, if you were running around on the street wielding a sharp katana, I'd probably swear at you. A car is both as expensive as a ming vase, and as deadly as a sword. The idea that a rational person would not get highly upset when somebody threatened both their life and the most expensive thing they own is absurd. "Distance" has little to do with it.
- sarosh 19y ago
  Aside: The elegant symmetry with which this metaphor crosses three cultures is absurd, baffling, and truly humbling. What lead you to conjure that up? What is it that you are reading?
  - ken 19y ago
    Hagakure.
- FatBastard 19y ago
  False. People have impunity in their car. They holler things out the window they would never say to your face because they would receive a right cross in the snout. Your assertion that you would swear at me if I were running around with a sharp katana fails the common sense test in a big way. Speaking of incompetence, there is a third type of troll. These trolls manner of speaking is seen as hostile by those who come from a more genteel social milieu. For example, in person as on the internet, they might tell you to STFU, or use words like shitpump, yet be trying to make a point in a friendly and helpful (perhaps playful) way. You need not be an egghead to be abrupt. For an insight into this social milieu, see an episode of Trailer Park Boys. People need to learn to function differently on a forum, because it is a different social environment.
- bishopdante 18y ago
  The quality which we are looking at is that of unassailable power. That's what makes people behave in an assertive an non-compliant way. Cars give people that, guns give people that, web skills give people that.
michaelneale 19y ago
"The sites's guidelines explicitly ask people not to say things they wouldn't say face to face." Interesting, I know quite a few people that would in fact all but troll in person, to your face. Although in their case, its more to do with them having no outbound tact filter: http://www.mit.edu/~jcb/tact.html http://www.mit.edu/~jcb/tact.html
rms 19y ago
The Reddit thread is kind of sad. http://reddit.com/info/68zz4/comments/ http://reddit.com/info/68zz4/comments/
- initself 19y ago
  It's more than kind of sad, it's pathetic.
  - dcurtis 19y ago
    My favorite (upmodded 26 points as of 9pst): Regarding News.YC: "Your ancient ritual has summoned me to News.YC so those tight-assed holier-than-thou fucktards can be shown the error of their ways. Maybe the reason there aren't trolls is because NOBODY FUCKING VISITS THEIR SHITTY SITE."-- terwin, Reddit
    - vsingh 19y ago
      It surprises me that people can indict others with the adjective "holier-than-thou" and not feel ashamed of themselves. The word screams, "I'm going to bring you down to my level!"
      - Goladus 19y ago
        Self-righteousness is often misplaced and is very unbecoming.
    - Erikk 19y ago
      THIS IS A GREAT SITE!!!! but it's got some kind of anti-troll field protecting it. The most perfect trolling oppertunities always seem to degenerate into civilized rational discussion.
      - iamelgringo 19y ago
        I think what Paul said about "Hacker News readers feel about trolls the way exiles from Cuba or Eastern Europe feel about dictators" is right on the money. sic semper tyrannis It's actually rather amazing that we are fairly unanimous in down-modding trollishness, without having community guidelines or a big discussion about it.
serhei 19y ago
One of the main contributing factors to the abundance of trolling on forums is indeed that text is a much less expressive medium than face-to-face communication, meaning that you very often end up trapped into voicing your opinion in a trollish manner due to just carelessly throwing your initial thoughts into the text box. You can give up, though, and perpetrate the crapstorm, or you can remind yourself that being good at communicating your ideas and opinions is an important part of being a well-rounded hacker; then you can view the posting of only coherent and non-inflammatory replies on fora as practice for when you'll have to communicate about programs you are writing.
Trollbert 19y ago
This is bad. Anyone should be able to say anything. That way everyone can see what is being said - good, bad, sad, left, right, or wrong. Remember, a democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding whats for dinner. Fuck lamb for dinner!
- FatBastard 19y ago
  For those who aren't gun nuts, the parable goes: Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what's for dinner. Liberty is a well-armed lamb prepared to contest the vote. Here is a good example of a reasonable point poorly made. Seems off topic because not all the premises are stated, but in his meatspace, everybody can fill in the blanks with common knowledge. Also, in his world, everybody uses small, old, anglo-saxon words to add poetry to their speech, he may not realize (or care) that it offends some delicate sensibilities. This is the graffitti of which PG spoke. And surprisingly, it is art. Not art in the beautiful sense, but art in the message sense. Imagine yourself in China and you wrote on the wall "Fuck Tiananmen". This is not pretty, but it is not spam.
systems 19y ago
PG misses an important perspective, cyberbullies! People who bully other people because they have better computer knowledge, mainly the two areas of administration and programming The thing is learning, working ... are both hard, and many ppl got screwed or unlucky over their lives, they either learned useless crap at school or university, or work at non interesting jobs with bad bosses or collegues And sometimes, we are humans, we are attracked to certain aspects of what we try to learn to escape, or trying to improve upon our bad lack And sometimes the cyberbullies call us trolls. It's okay, thought, better be a troll than a bully, the thing is, in time we will learn, and on that road we will have fun, and, the road will not end, and it will meet plenty of bullies, and overtime we will learn to be quiet, for the next person we talk to, and dare to show to them that we don't know, might just be, the next bully ... who will accuse me of being troll ... or that other word incompetent. But the bully don't see, just like the one in the school yard, its just a school yard, don't take yourself too seriously, its just a forum or irc! I am reading chatting and enjoying my time, until you came and changed the game, ... thou shall not speak! and now the book seller might have won, for you know, thought can't do teach! And most of the blogs I read were just trolls!
tac-tics 19y ago
I just want to point out an issue with a small point Paul brings up, and that issue is how Karma works on YC versus Reddit. I'm not saying one is better than the other, but there is a tradeoff. On Reddit, you can be rude, and people can downmod you, and it doesn't matter once the post sinks. Here, if you act like an asshole, you get downmodded, and your karma suffers. But even if you make a well reasoned, but controversial comment, you often do still get downmodded because of your unpopular views. Not that I comment here often, but I'm at four down from seven at one point, and it's really the logical consequence of such a system. It seems to work here, but I do wonder, as Paul expresses near the end of his article here, does this technique scale?
Kolibri 19y ago
>One might worry this would prevent people from expressing controversial ideas, but empirically that doesn't seem to be what happens. When people say something substantial that gets modded down, they stubbornly leave it up. What people delete are wisecracks, because they have less invested in them. How would you know? How would you know it does not stiffle unpopular opinions? I think that I would personally practice self-censoring if I would lose karma by expressing unpopular opinions that are likely to be down-voted. I know that I already do on reddit, and there the down-votes are at least only temporary. Not wanting to lose karma may seem a foolish reason for not expressing your opinions, and at first I din't mind. I kept writing my unpopular opinions on reddit, the down-votes made me put even more effort into them so that they would be above approach. But they' still only get a handful of points whereas one-liners expressing the popular opinion would get much more. So eventually I gave up. Now I mostly just read a couple of stories a day, and occassionally write the one-liner comment. As a final comment, I've always been disgusting by the way that people on reddit would constantly compare themselves, always favorable, to their bigger, would-be rival: Digg. Now you do the same thing towards reddit, and I can only shake my head in disgust. Learn to value your site in itself, not as the compare to other sites. It does not need to be a competition.
- aston 19y ago
  On your final comment, it's a pretty universal truth that every community will eventually find a common enemy. It's part of feeling like you're part of something.
hillbilly1 19y ago
Is there any fundamental difference in how karma is awarded in News.YC compared with Slashdot?
- Tichy 19y ago
  It's been a while since I've been on slashdot, but back then their system was quite sophisticated. You could not always vote on stories, only when temporary moderator status was assigned to you by a random process. Additionally, sometimes you would be assigned meta-moderator status and get to vote on the quality of moderators ratings. Those meta-moderations would in turn influence the likelihood of the rated moderators to become moderators again in the future. Also, they have categories for the votes ("funny", "insightful", "troll", ...).
wololoooo 19y ago
pfft, you're just bitter about the way arc was recieved
jazj 19y ago
I suspect that this article is a direct consequence of Arc's sceptical reception on Slashdot, Digg, and Reddit.
jonthewayne 19y ago
I think this might be the exact kind of situation that an advanced http://phoenomi.com/2008/02/13/the-rise-of-social-governance/ http://phoenomi.com/2008/02/13/the-rise-of-social-governance... system could solve.
Spyckie 19y ago
Creating more selective communities with stricter guidelines seems to be the wrong approach to dealing with trolls, especially based on the scenario pg lays out. As pg says, the larger a community grows, the easier it is for trolls to be accepted and the harder it is to mod (prune) the community. It seems that critical mass is just when the pruning community becomes smaller than the trolling community, and that by creating new communities with more stringent rules, you are just delaying the date (hopefully indefinitely) when trolls come in. I understand that the yc community is special, but even the comments here show that it won't work for much longer as the community grows beyond yc. To answer the question of "Will it scale?", I think its already a no. If you've ever hung out with a lot of girls (from a guy's perspective), you can beging to understand the trolling community. 1 on 1 with a girl and you can get intellectual conversation, but the minute 3 or 4 girls get together, they start talking about clothes, guys, dramas, and all other stuff that just isn't interesting. I bet girls see it the same with guys too (5 guys together = WoW, DOTA, girls or crude jokes). Solutions? Keep it small. This fails to keep in line with the existing goals of news.yc (advertising for existing startups, attracting smart people, etc). Another solution? Maybe try to preserve the small community feel as the site gets bigger. One way to do this would be to use user upvotes and downvotes as community boundaries for each user - ie: making their community presence only to those who rate them up, and to make their personal community those who they rate up. This is speculative at best, though.
domnit 19y ago
Another model for keeping out trolls is Metafilter's. They require a $5 donation when an account is created, and kick out assholes. Of course, this keeps out a whole lot more than trolls. It's certainly the wrong way to do it for most sites, but it works for them, and perhaps for others.
yelsgib 19y ago
Perhaps the reason that people troll (or take part in any sort of asshole behavior, really) is that they don't have anything better to do. Hear me out. Hacker News is a "forum" whose main purpose is getting people to talk about/think about/post links to information related to startups. It has a very explicit purpose and to this end I would not expect it to be "infested" to the extent of a lot of other forums. For instance, would we expect to see a lot of trolls on a forum devoted to advanced topics in theoretical math? "Orbifold cohomology is so much better than Hopfschild cohomology!" No. No, we wouldn't. A serious, well-defined, topic begets serious discussion. This is the real problem with reddit, digg, etc. - there's no clear GOAL. Like, there's no -reason- that people shouldn't be assholes. What are they getting in the way of? It's like if you opened the doors to your house and just held a "general forum." At first, discussion would be great (it's just your friends). Later, discussion would get worse (it's your friends' friends). Eventually it would degrade into the biggest losers who have nowhere to go sitting around and making fun of all the fun they're not having out in the real world (outside the house). I agree with pg's sentiments that the architecture/rules of hacker news make it a much more intelligent, even (gasp) friendly forum, but I also think it's the community. They keep coming back because they have active interest. They have active interest because hacker news has established as its goal the provision of things of interest. As always, I might just be woefully naive about human nature; but things seem so simple!
valda 19y ago
Maybe this is interesting idea: http://lemurcatta.org/ http://lemurcatta.org/
dysmas 19y ago
... and with this post i register.
sammyo 19y ago
Observing just the length of this thread, my initial thought is that pg has executed quite an exceptional troll himself...
jdueck 19y ago
Regarding News.YC, I fear that it may eventually suffer the same fate as Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, etc. Trolling is a minor problem compared to self-promoting. The challenge is that there's no scarcity on the internet, so you have to create artificial scarcity. It may be that the best way to fix the problem (i.e. to create scarcity) is through fees. For example, a $1.00 (rising with demand) fee per submission would keep a lot of junk out of any discussion site. And any serious content producer or blogger wouldn't blink at the notion of a small fee. The assumption that everything should be free is what kills many of these sites.
typicalpg 19y ago
Pretty typical paul graham post. He doesn't provide any evidence and he shows very little understanding of the problem. He doesn't even understand he is being trolled because he is wrong. No one cares about 4000 lines of macros for PLT Scheme. All of his arc hype led to some dumb macros. We listened to years of essays about how to program and what makes productive programmers only to find he takes R5RS and adds some macros. Wow. Amazing LISP revolution. Paul you are being "trolled" because people disagree with you. You haven't seen real trolls.
jondo 19y ago
I saw this on Metafilter. I am not a member but I enjoy almost daily reading on the site. I would offer than you have an unaddressed aspect in regard to those than are called trolls. Specifically Forum members who try to end a debate by labeling someone a troll. I am a member of Syracuse.com and DailyKos. I started posting maybe 7 years ago on Syracuse,com after RWers brought God to the defense an UNJUST war. I am a Catholic who marched against the Vietnam War and for black rights and anti-poverty programs. Since I started posting I have tried to distinguish between what Jesus would support in the positions of the Republicans and the Democrats. To the Right Wingers on Syracuse.com I am a troll because I call them to account concerning unjust wars, the death penalty and their continuing efforts to strangle social programs in a bathtub. On Daily Kos I am called a troll for not supporting "gay rights" or abortion. My views are consistent with my religion. Moreover when I was younger I developed a great appreciation for the Amish and Mennonites who view things in a similar manner but maybe to a greater extent and with greater consistency than the Catholics, I am civil and stay well within the site posting rules. I have had my posts and user name constantly deleted on Syracuse.com and that is fairly easily done there by any poster hitting the "Inappropriate Post" button. The modest size gay friendly community within DailyKos are very hostile to any posts that are in opposition to their goals.
achoi02 19y ago
i feel like fox news has moved trolling to television. its a good thing i stopped watching tv years ago
cnf 19y ago
I actually like trolls of the 1st kind. You know, the practical jokers, the original trolls, the ones that have no real bad intentions but just like to be silly once in a while. The second kind, well, I just call them "people"
researchdcs 19y ago
Give George Carlin The Asshole Theory(~): "The amount of an asshole a person is is directly proportional to the distance they are away from you at the time you discover this fault. Someone on TV is REALLY AN ASSHOLE! Someone in the car next to you is Pretty Much of an Asshole. A guy standing next to you on line: <whispers> 'this guy's a real asshole here'"
irrevenant 19y ago
Paul, have you considered personalising as a method of minimising trolling? As you pointed out, people do things on forums that they wouldn't do in person. IMO, this is partly because they're hiding behind a handle and partly because their target is. I'm not sure how you'd go about making accounts have more personality and identity, but IMO that would be considerably more effective than just instructing people to behave like they're face-to-face. They know they're not.
gopher 19y ago
Some people troll because they know better but they are tired of explaining it. They say the truth(tm) when the crowd does not want to here it. I like them.
- parsifal 19y ago
  I'm of the opinion that if you can't explain something without being exasperated, then why are you bothering to explain it? Go do something else.
parsifal 19y ago
This is a fantastic post on a topic that's been a problem with the web since day one. Very insightful. The Four Reasons feel very accurate. Thanks, Paul!
steveballmer 18y ago
I hate those sub-humans, I just put out a bounty on them! http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
kitty_pineapple 19y ago
I totally agree. Seeing that most forums are started with something stupid like 'Everyone who uses this forum are woodheads', it sets a series of replies such as 'i am NOT a woodhead!' or "I agree, you are a woodhead or you wouldn't be here'. Especially when I don't know all those shortcuts that eliminate these posts, I find it terribly disturbing to have to read through all those 'comments'. And I hope this isn't spam, please tell me if it is. I am only 11 years old.
afreshvegetable 18y ago
I LOVE how the first response is a Troll comment! My only thought to add is an interaction I had recently with a programmer/hacker/entrepreneur who had made a macro program to automate mining in Eve Online. The program is explicitly contrary to the EULA and so constitutes a hack. The programmer/owner had an elaborate feedback password system, so I had to IM him directly to activate my copy of the program once I paid my fee. He was wildly rude--just throwing off flippant and rude remarks like a vagrant dog throws fleas. After the third or fourth example I started to call him on it--to his, and my great frustration. He did not like being called on his nasty tone at all and denied having one at all. I got so heated that I almost ditched the whole project, but finally calmed down enough to get the transaction done. Later I spoke to a friend in-game who had an identical experience. My point is that this article on how hackers and some programmers tend towards this behavior as a culture explains a lot. My programmer provocateur thought his nastiness was somehow normal, acceptable, and utterly justifiable on the basis of some sense of his own personal superiority. I suppose this is what happens when people take their coding/hacking acumen as a license for megalomania and a total disregard of social graces. Great essay.
bishopdante 18y ago
It's simple, trolls prey on people's inner asshole. It's like a form of bullying, if you rise to the bait, then you're done. There's no technical fix, there's a mentality fix. The act is as old as the hills, and they provide balance to the debate. Trolls are a form of court jester. I am therefore pro-troll and anti troll-victim.

137 points by sharpshoot 19y ago

Another way to keep signal to noise higher is to treat debates about languages the same as those about politics and religion. Maybe it's just best to agree to disagree. I generally tend to avoid the "language war" threads for 3 reasons: 1. No one is really right or wrong. 2. Not much gets accomplished. and 3. It really doesn't make that much difference anyway. Debates about favorite colors, on the other hand, should be strongly encouraged. Blue is definitely the best one.

curi 19y ago
While I agree with you that avoiding those discussions is a reasonable general policy, it's not the case that "no one is really right or wrong" in debates about computer languages, politics, or religion. There is a truth of the matter. Your point that not much is accomplished by such discussions is definitely what usually happens. But it isn't what must happen. There are rational ways of discussing these subjects which can lead to knowledge creation and agreement. The reason I'm posting is basically that I think people are a little too quick to give up, and if they tried to discuss seriously a bit more, they might find it sometimes works. Especially if they are careful to ignore the bad replies they get and only reply to the other people who are also taking the discussion seriously.
- dfranke 19y ago
  it's not the case that "no one is really right or wrong" in debates about computer languages, politics, or religion. There is a truth of the matter. Well, yes and no. There's only a truth to the matter if you can get people to agree on a premise. Two libertarians who adopt the same premises can have a meaningful debate with each other. They'll agree that there can only be one consistent position -- so if they disagree on what it is then one of them must be mistaken -- and set about trying to figure out which of them holds the fallacy. But if you pit a libertarian with the premise of self-ownership against a communist with the premise of "property is theft", nobody is going to accomplish anything because neither will view the other's argument as relevant.
  - curi 19y ago
    There's only a truth to the matter if you can get people to agree on a premise. Two libertarians who adopt the same premises can have a meaningful debate This is the myth of the framework. See Popper's book by that name: http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Framework-Defence-Science-Rationality/dp/0415135559/ http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Framework-Defence-Science-Rationa... Besides the issue of whether productive debate is possible across frameworks, there is also your (possibly accidental) assertion that what premises people believe affects what statements about reality are true (beyond statements about who believes what). That's solipsism.
    - dfranke 19y ago
      your (possibly accidental) assertion that what premises people believe affects what statements about reality are true None of the statements in question have to do with reality, only with abstract ideas. Libertarians believe that property ownership is a right; communists believe that it is an offense. Neither of these assertions is empirically testable. If the debate is about what policies will make us wealthier rather than what policies are ethical, then that's a different matter. But in that case, both sides are sharing the common framework of utilitarianism.
      - curi 19y ago
        You give a good example: which policies towards the market create more wealth (on average, various things being equal) is a matter of fact. But I think this sort of non-arbitrary approach to thinking has much wider applicability, and indeed that all interesting subjects can be approached in a careful, meaningful way not based on personal taste. Which policies are ethical, with "ethics" rightly construed, is also a matter of fact. Morality is about how to live, and it's not a religious concept. The notion that morality is (and must be) religious is unfortunately a bad, religious idea, that (oddly) most atheists still believe. Just to get started, we can consider which lifestyles do and do not accomplish their own internal goals. Lifestyles that do not are bad ways to live -- they are "immoral". We don't have to use moral terminology; that isn't important. But whatever you call it, there are objective facts about how we should or shouldn't live. And there's better than that. You can take a very wide variety of goals, and examine how to achieve them. And you can find common points -- certain ways of life are good for achieving many goals, while others are not. These common points, which make people powerful and able to accomplish things in general, are an important, useful, and objective find the field of morality.

dfranke 19y ago

Like graffiti, trolling can be impressive when it's done especially well. My favorite troll of all time is the guy from comp.compression last August: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.compression/browse_thread/thread/63db3f711c83d4c0/a0f09c085ce4aa7f http://groups.google.com/group/comp.compression/browse_threa... followed by the famous "Is Your Son a Computer Hacker?" troll from adequacy.org: http://adequacy.org/public/stories/2001.12.2.42056.2147.html http://adequacy.org/public/stories/2001.12.2.42056.2147.html

curi 19y ago
reminds me of the physicist who wrote a fake post-modernist paper and submitted it to a journal and got it published.
- dfranke 19y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_Affair http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_Affair
  - cousin_it 19y ago
    Also, a couple of French TV show hosts pulled the same trick with physics instead of postmodernism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_Affair http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_Affair
- pg 19y ago
  He was doing more than trolling though. That was an experiment to show how low their filters were set.
- simen 19y ago
  I'm not sure I'd regard the Sokal affair as trolling. It's hardly being an asshole, unless you consider exposing idiots being an ass, and it's hardly fishing for controversy, unless exposing any kind of potentially controversial stuff is trolling (was Watergate trolling?).
  - 19y ago

bhb 19y ago

Very small nitpick, but I think "It an old one, as old as forums" should be "It _is_ an old one, as old as forums". Update: this has been corrected.

pg 19y ago
Thanks, fixed.

curi 19y ago

it's not clear to me that nastiness is more common at hacker forums. a certain kind is. but i've seen much nastier stuff on parenting forums (which i've been to a lot). on parenting forums, you don't find so many jerks. when people are mean, they tend to be a bit more subtle (or passive aggressive) about it. but they make it emotional and personal, and i think that does a more effective job of actually hurting anyone.

DarrenStuart 19y ago

I think news.yc has a 5th troll behavior and it's down modding a comment because they disagree with it. I have been down modded a number of times not for saying something rude or stupid just something that others don't agree with. I tend to down mod rude and aggressive people on here and I also up mod people who I think have been down modded unfairly. I am not sure if I am alone with my way of thinking.

immad 19y ago
We shouldn't down mod things we disagree with?
- cawel 19y ago
  I guess it's a matter of pertinence. Comments supporting a constructive conversation should be uppmodded (which does not mean it's comments you agree with). Or comments you want others to pay attention to (diluting uninteresting ones by extension). Like in this thread, we can note the irony (and worshiping) of the community, with the top comment (11 points so far) done by anewaccountname, deliberately taking a piss out of PG's essay.
  - aston 19y ago
    Actually, there's no way a comment like anewaccountname's would get upmodded to that extent were it not a verbatim reference to pg's previous article. The fact that people here upmod/downmod based on whether they agree rather than whether it's insightful really bothers me. I think it's the wrong incentive structure.
    - timr 19y ago
      The first comment was funny, though. Yes, if you want to pick it apart, it was funny because it was a verbatim reference to the earlier article, but it was funny nonetheless. Likewise, it was funny that the "Funny..." comment was modded to -1. At least, I found it funny. Point being, I don't think these were rewards for groupthink, so much as rewards for geeks being clever.

boredguy8 19y ago

My experience on forums is that -size matters-. A pond with ten fish gets far less trollers than a pond with ten thousand. As for solutions: there have to be consequences. Either losing the ability to post or losing the ability to have your posts seen. Certainly banning accounts is an option, but then you have to fight with the crapflood, if and when it comes.

davidw 19y ago
I think the community size bit is important (see 'monkey number'). I also wonder if that means that sites should somehow attempt to break people into smaller groups in some way in order to maintain that 'small town feel'.
rms 19y ago
>losing the ability to have your posts seen. That's how it works on this forum. I leave "showdead" on just to see what the trolls and spammers are up to.

anewaccountname 19y ago

Who is this guy and what authority does he have to write about these topics? I haven't read the essay, but there's no way anything so short and written in such an informal style could have anything useful to say about such and such topic, when people with degrees in the subject have already written many thick books about it.

shafqat 19y ago
Funny...
dfranke 19y ago
Where can I get a degree in trolling?
- jcwentz 19y ago
  I'd try Hampshire College, UC Santa Cruz, or the New School.
  - nostrademons 19y ago
    If you do go to Hampshire, take International Relations. Fun times.
  - johnnowak 19y ago
    As a New School student, I can only say... well... okay yes, you're probably right. It's great fun though. I can't imagine hating school anywhere else.
- serhei 19y ago
  Not very many places give out diplomas, but if you want to get a job at a trolling company, you can just practice on pretty much any forum. Eventually hundreds of people will know you're a troll, giving you hundreds of references to take to a potential employer. Just make sure you don't ever accidentally post anything that actually contributes to the discussion.
- anupamkapoor 19y ago

aswanson 19y ago

About what size was reddit (in uniques) before it jumped the shark?

pg 19y ago
Off the top of my head, maybe 40-50,000. The fascinating thing is, all the data is still there. You can go and look at the old comments and stories and see what the site used to be like. If you could find a good proxy for stupidity, like comment length or spelling mistakes, you could graph the change as the site grew.
- Spyckie 19y ago
  Is there a way to grab a reddit comment corpus (a large set of reddit's comments)? I don't browse reddit but I think it would be a fun thing to play around with.
  - Tichy 19y ago
    wget perhaps?
- jedberg 19y ago
  Are you sure about that? reddit hit 50k uniques about 6 months after it launched. I'd say the discourse was very similar to what it is here at that point in the game.

deleted 19y ago

[deleted]

prakash 19y ago

"Hackers can be abrupt even in person. Put them on an anonymous forum, and the problem gets worse." I am sure everyone on this forum is on some kind of social network. If we can get every user's handle to link to their flavor-du-jour social network's public profile, verify via email -- that should at least cut down on some of the noise. PG: What do you think?

curi 19y ago
I don't use any social networks. I do have my email and website (with real name) in my profile, though.
yters 19y ago
If chains of trust could be widely and rigorously established online, most (maybe all?) of the big problems we have today would be gone.
- pg 19y ago
  It would be a good thing. If anyone wants to apply to YC with that kind of idea, we'd be into it.
  - yters 19y ago
    I had thought facebook would be the beginning of this, but it seems to be a flash in the pan, and too locked in to really be effective.
  - sspencer 19y ago
    I actually thought long and hard the other day about how such a system might be implemented, and came up with a few interesting ideas. Perhaps this encouragement will make me apply! EDIT: I even wrote about it a long time ago, when I still updated my blog with any semblance of regularity. Weebly seems to be down for approximately the millionth time in the last month or so, though. I'll post the article if Weebly gets righted within the edit window.
    - 19y ago

hollerith 19y ago

I wish comments remained deletable longer. My last comment is 3 hr old (and has no replies) and it has already become undeletable whereas when I made an insensitive comment, it continued to be downmodded for about 24 hr. By "become undeletable", I mean there is no "edit" or "delete" link on the comment.

cawel 19y ago

Regarding the future of communities while they grow and "technical tweaks", eBay recently adjusted its policies to improve its community quality, restricting sellers from leaving negative feedback to buyers: http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2008/02/crowd_control.php http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2008/02/crowd_control.php

Alex3917 19y ago

"Often users have second thoughts and delete such comments." @PG, I've always wondered, are you able to see all the comments that I've posted and then deleted two minutes later? And if so, is this an acceptable way to send you semi-private messages?

davidw 19y ago
"Paul Graham sees all the comments anyone has posted anywhere. What's more, he knows all the comments they will post in the future, too."
- tyler 19y ago
  "...and has already categorized them using Bayesian filtering."

ButtSexMcMuffin 19y ago

Buttz

willchang 19y ago

I think what PG called "incompetence" is really just rampant emotionalism. "Incompetence" is inaccurate because it suggests that people of all levels of experience can't happily share a forum, which I think they can. But what happens at Reddit nowadays is that anyone who posts an inane comment with a phrase like "why the fuck" will get lots of upvotes. (Case in point: Search for "fuck" in the comments for the top article at Reddit, and get: "That fucking cunt is going to get what she deserves," 15 points.) I think in the early days of Reddit, the fact that everything including comments could be voted on was intimidating to trolls, so they were kept at bay. But some time later every primal scream was rewarded, and trolls started posting in droves. It never helped that a really low-scoring post with a high-scoring rejoinder tended to be highly ranked. That's just begging for the sort of you-got-served culture that excites trolls.

Tichy 19y ago

On news.yc it is not so extreme, but on german tech news site heise.de, there is also a modding system. Good threads become green, bad ones red. I have often wondered if people are more likely to start flaming away in the red threads. Sort of like beating up somebody who is already down on the floor (comments on the line of "you suck"). At heise.de I often had the impression that it is the case - not so much on news.yc, but it might be interesting to look at the statistics?

pg 19y ago
News.YC users are definitely influenced by the prevailing trend, in both directions. I.e. people are more willing to vote something up as its score rises, and more prone to attack something as its score falls. It's not too bad yet here, but it got to be such a problem on Reddit that about a year ago they switched to not showing how many points a submission has till it's an hour old.
- deleted 19y ago
  [deleted]
- ced 19y ago
  Ever thought about doing a controlled experiment about it? I.e.: showing high points for a post to half the users, and low points to the other half.

deleted 19y ago

[deleted]

akkartik 19y ago

PG's essays are getting shorter. I like that -- no matter what Steve Yegge says. (http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/01/blogging-theory-201-size-does-matter.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/01/blogging-theory-201-...)

smithfield 19y ago

The simplest troll test. A troll (person or point of view) is incapable of introspection. This does not mean that trolls won't try to introspect, just that they cannot succeed at it. This can also be used to show why trolls have trouble with recursion and irony.

DTanner 19y ago

I'm not convinced that you'll be able to deal with the Eternal September problem. It's all well and good that anti-trolling is built into the rules, but as more and more people join less and less of them will have read the rules.

ChaitanyaSai 19y ago

It doesn't have much to do with hacker personalities. Unless you want to argue that Youtube denizens are hackers of some sort too.

bishopdante 18y ago
Forums used to be the province of the technorati. Not no more they ain't.

ChaitanyaSai 19y ago

I wonder if trolls can be categorized automatically. Caveats and all, trolls are characterized by their participation in negative-karma two-person conversations and down-voting of their comments by a diverse and changing set of users. A simple learning algorithm should zap the predictable ones. Trolls are nourished by attention and early detection and removal should nip that behavior in the bud.

pg 19y ago
I've thought a lot about that. I wouldn't be surprised if current spam filters would work unchanged. There are not enough trolls on News.YC to make it worth investing time in such countermeasures, but it would be an interesting experiment to see if you could use statistical filtering techniques to detect trolls in some large public corpus like Digg or Reddit or Slashdot comment threads.
- thaumaturgy 19y ago
  I don't think that would work; you would essentially require a filter that could actually understand the subject matter, in order to determine whether the purpose of the stated opinion was to bait people's responses. For example: "I've thought a lot about that. I would be surprised if current spam filters could work unchanged. There are not enough trolls on News.YC to make it worth investing time in trying to write it in Lisp, but it would be an interesting experiment to see if you could use C++ programming techniques to detect trolls in some large public corpus like Digg or Reddit or Slashdot's comment threads."
  - iamelgringo 19y ago
    Not necessarily. Spam filters routinely filter out emails based on a common set of words that are used without understanding the subject matter. For example, if an email contains the words viagara and store, the probability of that email being spam go up tremendously. Paul's "A plan for Spam" essay explains a lot more. And, from what I understand, Bayesian filtering is at the root of most spam blockers out there. I'd be willing to wager that Bayesian filtering would be pretty powerful in filtering out trolls on social sites, as well. For example, if a post contains the words "asshole" and "fucktard" the probability of that post coming from a troll goes up exponentially. If you trained a Bayesian filter, or spam algorithm well enough, it should be able to flag trollish posts fairly easily.

ken 19y ago

I don't think "distance" is the primary cause of asshole behavior by automobile drivers, though it does sound like a convenient first approximation. If I was walking down the street with a $20,000 ming vase, and you were running around nearly hitting me, I'd probably swear at you. Likewise, if you were running around on the street wielding a sharp katana, I'd probably swear at you. A car is both as expensive as a ming vase, and as deadly as a sword. The idea that a rational person would not get highly upset when somebody threatened both their life and the most expensive thing they own is absurd. "Distance" has little to do with it.

sarosh 19y ago
Aside: The elegant symmetry with which this metaphor crosses three cultures is absurd, baffling, and truly humbling. What lead you to conjure that up? What is it that you are reading?
- ken 19y ago
  Hagakure.
FatBastard 19y ago
False. People have impunity in their car. They holler things out the window they would never say to your face because they would receive a right cross in the snout. Your assertion that you would swear at me if I were running around with a sharp katana fails the common sense test in a big way. Speaking of incompetence, there is a third type of troll. These trolls manner of speaking is seen as hostile by those who come from a more genteel social milieu. For example, in person as on the internet, they might tell you to STFU, or use words like shitpump, yet be trying to make a point in a friendly and helpful (perhaps playful) way. You need not be an egghead to be abrupt. For an insight into this social milieu, see an episode of Trailer Park Boys. People need to learn to function differently on a forum, because it is a different social environment.
bishopdante 18y ago
The quality which we are looking at is that of unassailable power. That's what makes people behave in an assertive an non-compliant way. Cars give people that, guns give people that, web skills give people that.

michaelneale 19y ago

"The sites's guidelines explicitly ask people not to say things they wouldn't say face to face." Interesting, I know quite a few people that would in fact all but troll in person, to your face. Although in their case, its more to do with them having no outbound tact filter: http://www.mit.edu/~jcb/tact.html http://www.mit.edu/~jcb/tact.html

rms 19y ago

The Reddit thread is kind of sad. http://reddit.com/info/68zz4/comments/ http://reddit.com/info/68zz4/comments/

initself 19y ago
It's more than kind of sad, it's pathetic.
- dcurtis 19y ago
  My favorite (upmodded 26 points as of 9pst): Regarding News.YC: "Your ancient ritual has summoned me to News.YC so those tight-assed holier-than-thou fucktards can be shown the error of their ways. Maybe the reason there aren't trolls is because NOBODY FUCKING VISITS THEIR SHITTY SITE."-- terwin, Reddit
  - vsingh 19y ago
    It surprises me that people can indict others with the adjective "holier-than-thou" and not feel ashamed of themselves. The word screams, "I'm going to bring you down to my level!"
    - Goladus 19y ago
      Self-righteousness is often misplaced and is very unbecoming.
  - Erikk 19y ago
    THIS IS A GREAT SITE!!!! but it's got some kind of anti-troll field protecting it. The most perfect trolling oppertunities always seem to degenerate into civilized rational discussion.
    - iamelgringo 19y ago
      I think what Paul said about "Hacker News readers feel about trolls the way exiles from Cuba or Eastern Europe feel about dictators" is right on the money. sic semper tyrannis It's actually rather amazing that we are fairly unanimous in down-modding trollishness, without having community guidelines or a big discussion about it.

serhei 19y ago

One of the main contributing factors to the abundance of trolling on forums is indeed that text is a much less expressive medium than face-to-face communication, meaning that you very often end up trapped into voicing your opinion in a trollish manner due to just carelessly throwing your initial thoughts into the text box. You can give up, though, and perpetrate the crapstorm, or you can remind yourself that being good at communicating your ideas and opinions is an important part of being a well-rounded hacker; then you can view the posting of only coherent and non-inflammatory replies on fora as practice for when you'll have to communicate about programs you are writing.

Trollbert 19y ago

This is bad. Anyone should be able to say anything. That way everyone can see what is being said - good, bad, sad, left, right, or wrong. Remember, a democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding whats for dinner. Fuck lamb for dinner!

FatBastard 19y ago
For those who aren't gun nuts, the parable goes: Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what's for dinner. Liberty is a well-armed lamb prepared to contest the vote. Here is a good example of a reasonable point poorly made. Seems off topic because not all the premises are stated, but in his meatspace, everybody can fill in the blanks with common knowledge. Also, in his world, everybody uses small, old, anglo-saxon words to add poetry to their speech, he may not realize (or care) that it offends some delicate sensibilities. This is the graffitti of which PG spoke. And surprisingly, it is art. Not art in the beautiful sense, but art in the message sense. Imagine yourself in China and you wrote on the wall "Fuck Tiananmen". This is not pretty, but it is not spam.

systems 19y ago

PG misses an important perspective, cyberbullies! People who bully other people because they have better computer knowledge, mainly the two areas of administration and programming The thing is learning, working ... are both hard, and many ppl got screwed or unlucky over their lives, they either learned useless crap at school or university, or work at non interesting jobs with bad bosses or collegues And sometimes, we are humans, we are attracked to certain aspects of what we try to learn to escape, or trying to improve upon our bad lack And sometimes the cyberbullies call us trolls. It's okay, thought, better be a troll than a bully, the thing is, in time we will learn, and on that road we will have fun, and, the road will not end, and it will meet plenty of bullies, and overtime we will learn to be quiet, for the next person we talk to, and dare to show to them that we don't know, might just be, the next bully ... who will accuse me of being troll ... or that other word incompetent. But the bully don't see, just like the one in the school yard, its just a school yard, don't take yourself too seriously, its just a forum or irc! I am reading chatting and enjoying my time, until you came and changed the game, ... thou shall not speak! and now the book seller might have won, for you know, thought can't do teach! And most of the blogs I read were just trolls!

tac-tics 19y ago

I just want to point out an issue with a small point Paul brings up, and that issue is how Karma works on YC versus Reddit. I'm not saying one is better than the other, but there is a tradeoff. On Reddit, you can be rude, and people can downmod you, and it doesn't matter once the post sinks. Here, if you act like an asshole, you get downmodded, and your karma suffers. But even if you make a well reasoned, but controversial comment, you often do still get downmodded because of your unpopular views. Not that I comment here often, but I'm at four down from seven at one point, and it's really the logical consequence of such a system. It seems to work here, but I do wonder, as Paul expresses near the end of his article here, does this technique scale?

Kolibri 19y ago

>One might worry this would prevent people from expressing controversial ideas, but empirically that doesn't seem to be what happens. When people say something substantial that gets modded down, they stubbornly leave it up. What people delete are wisecracks, because they have less invested in them. How would you know? How would you know it does not stiffle unpopular opinions? I think that I would personally practice self-censoring if I would lose karma by expressing unpopular opinions that are likely to be down-voted. I know that I already do on reddit, and there the down-votes are at least only temporary. Not wanting to lose karma may seem a foolish reason for not expressing your opinions, and at first I din't mind. I kept writing my unpopular opinions on reddit, the down-votes made me put even more effort into them so that they would be above approach. But they' still only get a handful of points whereas one-liners expressing the popular opinion would get much more. So eventually I gave up. Now I mostly just read a couple of stories a day, and occassionally write the one-liner comment. As a final comment, I've always been disgusting by the way that people on reddit would constantly compare themselves, always favorable, to their bigger, would-be rival: Digg. Now you do the same thing towards reddit, and I can only shake my head in disgust. Learn to value your site in itself, not as the compare to other sites. It does not need to be a competition.

aston 19y ago
On your final comment, it's a pretty universal truth that every community will eventually find a common enemy. It's part of feeling like you're part of something.

hillbilly1 19y ago

Is there any fundamental difference in how karma is awarded in News.YC compared with Slashdot?

Tichy 19y ago
It's been a while since I've been on slashdot, but back then their system was quite sophisticated. You could not always vote on stories, only when temporary moderator status was assigned to you by a random process. Additionally, sometimes you would be assigned meta-moderator status and get to vote on the quality of moderators ratings. Those meta-moderations would in turn influence the likelihood of the rated moderators to become moderators again in the future. Also, they have categories for the votes ("funny", "insightful", "troll", ...).

wololoooo 19y ago

pfft, you're just bitter about the way arc was recieved

jazj 19y ago

I suspect that this article is a direct consequence of Arc's sceptical reception on Slashdot, Digg, and Reddit.

jonthewayne 19y ago

I think this might be the exact kind of situation that an advanced http://phoenomi.com/2008/02/13/the-rise-of-social-governance/ http://phoenomi.com/2008/02/13/the-rise-of-social-governance... system could solve.

Spyckie 19y ago

Creating more selective communities with stricter guidelines seems to be the wrong approach to dealing with trolls, especially based on the scenario pg lays out. As pg says, the larger a community grows, the easier it is for trolls to be accepted and the harder it is to mod (prune) the community. It seems that critical mass is just when the pruning community becomes smaller than the trolling community, and that by creating new communities with more stringent rules, you are just delaying the date (hopefully indefinitely) when trolls come in. I understand that the yc community is special, but even the comments here show that it won't work for much longer as the community grows beyond yc. To answer the question of "Will it scale?", I think its already a no. If you've ever hung out with a lot of girls (from a guy's perspective), you can beging to understand the trolling community. 1 on 1 with a girl and you can get intellectual conversation, but the minute 3 or 4 girls get together, they start talking about clothes, guys, dramas, and all other stuff that just isn't interesting. I bet girls see it the same with guys too (5 guys together = WoW, DOTA, girls or crude jokes). Solutions? Keep it small. This fails to keep in line with the existing goals of news.yc (advertising for existing startups, attracting smart people, etc). Another solution? Maybe try to preserve the small community feel as the site gets bigger. One way to do this would be to use user upvotes and downvotes as community boundaries for each user - ie: making their community presence only to those who rate them up, and to make their personal community those who they rate up. This is speculative at best, though.

domnit 19y ago

Another model for keeping out trolls is Metafilter's. They require a $5 donation when an account is created, and kick out assholes. Of course, this keeps out a whole lot more than trolls. It's certainly the wrong way to do it for most sites, but it works for them, and perhaps for others.

yelsgib 19y ago

Perhaps the reason that people troll (or take part in any sort of asshole behavior, really) is that they don't have anything better to do. Hear me out. Hacker News is a "forum" whose main purpose is getting people to talk about/think about/post links to information related to startups. It has a very explicit purpose and to this end I would not expect it to be "infested" to the extent of a lot of other forums. For instance, would we expect to see a lot of trolls on a forum devoted to advanced topics in theoretical math? "Orbifold cohomology is so much better than Hopfschild cohomology!" No. No, we wouldn't. A serious, well-defined, topic begets serious discussion. This is the real problem with reddit, digg, etc. - there's no clear GOAL. Like, there's no -reason- that people shouldn't be assholes. What are they getting in the way of? It's like if you opened the doors to your house and just held a "general forum." At first, discussion would be great (it's just your friends). Later, discussion would get worse (it's your friends' friends). Eventually it would degrade into the biggest losers who have nowhere to go sitting around and making fun of all the fun they're not having out in the real world (outside the house). I agree with pg's sentiments that the architecture/rules of hacker news make it a much more intelligent, even (gasp) friendly forum, but I also think it's the community. They keep coming back because they have active interest. They have active interest because hacker news has established as its goal the provision of things of interest. As always, I might just be woefully naive about human nature; but things seem so simple!

valda 19y ago

Maybe this is interesting idea: http://lemurcatta.org/ http://lemurcatta.org/

dysmas 19y ago

... and with this post i register.

sammyo 19y ago

Observing just the length of this thread, my initial thought is that pg has executed quite an exceptional troll himself...

jdueck 19y ago

Regarding News.YC, I fear that it may eventually suffer the same fate as Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, etc. Trolling is a minor problem compared to self-promoting. The challenge is that there's no scarcity on the internet, so you have to create artificial scarcity. It may be that the best way to fix the problem (i.e. to create scarcity) is through fees. For example, a $1.00 (rising with demand) fee per submission would keep a lot of junk out of any discussion site. And any serious content producer or blogger wouldn't blink at the notion of a small fee. The assumption that everything should be free is what kills many of these sites.

typicalpg 19y ago

Pretty typical paul graham post. He doesn't provide any evidence and he shows very little understanding of the problem. He doesn't even understand he is being trolled because he is wrong. No one cares about 4000 lines of macros for PLT Scheme. All of his arc hype led to some dumb macros. We listened to years of essays about how to program and what makes productive programmers only to find he takes R5RS and adds some macros. Wow. Amazing LISP revolution. Paul you are being "trolled" because people disagree with you. You haven't seen real trolls.

jondo 19y ago

I saw this on Metafilter. I am not a member but I enjoy almost daily reading on the site. I would offer than you have an unaddressed aspect in regard to those than are called trolls. Specifically Forum members who try to end a debate by labeling someone a troll. I am a member of Syracuse.com and DailyKos. I started posting maybe 7 years ago on Syracuse,com after RWers brought God to the defense an UNJUST war. I am a Catholic who marched against the Vietnam War and for black rights and anti-poverty programs. Since I started posting I have tried to distinguish between what Jesus would support in the positions of the Republicans and the Democrats. To the Right Wingers on Syracuse.com I am a troll because I call them to account concerning unjust wars, the death penalty and their continuing efforts to strangle social programs in a bathtub. On Daily Kos I am called a troll for not supporting "gay rights" or abortion. My views are consistent with my religion. Moreover when I was younger I developed a great appreciation for the Amish and Mennonites who view things in a similar manner but maybe to a greater extent and with greater consistency than the Catholics, I am civil and stay well within the site posting rules. I have had my posts and user name constantly deleted on Syracuse.com and that is fairly easily done there by any poster hitting the "Inappropriate Post" button. The modest size gay friendly community within DailyKos are very hostile to any posts that are in opposition to their goals.

achoi02 19y ago

i feel like fox news has moved trolling to television. its a good thing i stopped watching tv years ago

cnf 19y ago

I actually like trolls of the 1st kind. You know, the practical jokers, the original trolls, the ones that have no real bad intentions but just like to be silly once in a while. The second kind, well, I just call them "people"

researchdcs 19y ago

Give George Carlin The Asshole Theory(~): "The amount of an asshole a person is is directly proportional to the distance they are away from you at the time you discover this fault. Someone on TV is REALLY AN ASSHOLE! Someone in the car next to you is Pretty Much of an Asshole. A guy standing next to you on line: <whispers> 'this guy's a real asshole here'"

irrevenant 19y ago

Paul, have you considered personalising as a method of minimising trolling? As you pointed out, people do things on forums that they wouldn't do in person. IMO, this is partly because they're hiding behind a handle and partly because their target is. I'm not sure how you'd go about making accounts have more personality and identity, but IMO that would be considerably more effective than just instructing people to behave like they're face-to-face. They know they're not.

gopher 19y ago

Some people troll because they know better but they are tired of explaining it. They say the truth(tm) when the crowd does not want to here it. I like them.

parsifal 19y ago
I'm of the opinion that if you can't explain something without being exasperated, then why are you bothering to explain it? Go do something else.

parsifal 19y ago

This is a fantastic post on a topic that's been a problem with the web since day one. Very insightful. The Four Reasons feel very accurate. Thanks, Paul!

steveballmer 18y ago

I hate those sub-humans, I just put out a bounty on them! http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com

kitty_pineapple 19y ago

I totally agree. Seeing that most forums are started with something stupid like 'Everyone who uses this forum are woodheads', it sets a series of replies such as 'i am NOT a woodhead!' or "I agree, you are a woodhead or you wouldn't be here'. Especially when I don't know all those shortcuts that eliminate these posts, I find it terribly disturbing to have to read through all those 'comments'. And I hope this isn't spam, please tell me if it is. I am only 11 years old.

afreshvegetable 18y ago

I LOVE how the first response is a Troll comment! My only thought to add is an interaction I had recently with a programmer/hacker/entrepreneur who had made a macro program to automate mining in Eve Online. The program is explicitly contrary to the EULA and so constitutes a hack. The programmer/owner had an elaborate feedback password system, so I had to IM him directly to activate my copy of the program once I paid my fee. He was wildly rude--just throwing off flippant and rude remarks like a vagrant dog throws fleas. After the third or fourth example I started to call him on it--to his, and my great frustration. He did not like being called on his nasty tone at all and denied having one at all. I got so heated that I almost ditched the whole project, but finally calmed down enough to get the transaction done. Later I spoke to a friend in-game who had an identical experience. My point is that this article on how hackers and some programmers tend towards this behavior as a culture explains a lot. My programmer provocateur thought his nastiness was somehow normal, acceptable, and utterly justifiable on the basis of some sense of his own personal superiority. I suppose this is what happens when people take their coding/hacking acumen as a license for megalomania and a total disregard of social graces. Great essay.

bishopdante 18y ago

It's simple, trolls prey on people's inner asshole. It's like a form of bullying, if you rise to the bait, then you're done. There's no technical fix, there's a mentality fix. The act is as old as the hills, and they provide balance to the debate. Trolls are a form of court jester. I am therefore pro-troll and anti troll-victim.