5 ms·

Inside the mind of the anonymous online poster

32 points by freejoe76 16y ago

lotharbot 16y ago
Single page (printer format) link: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/magazine/articles/2010/06/20/inside_the_mind_of_the_anonymous_online_poster?mode=PF http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/magazine/articles/2010/06/...
- RevRal 16y ago
  It appears the print page can't be linked to. I've seen this in a few other places as well. Link to the "single page" instead: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/magazine/articles/2010/06/20/inside_the_mind_of_the_anonymous_online_poster/?page=full http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/magazine/articles/2010/06/...
lotharbot 16y ago
> "The comments sections on many general-interest news sites lack both the carrot and the stick for encouraging responsible behavior. The carrot is the cohesion of a group you don’t want to disappoint, like Yoshimi25’s Front Burner community. The stick is the shame associated with having your real name publicly attached to embarrassing behavior. Without these two levers, the social contract breaks down." They need to expand their definition to include other types of carrots and sticks. HN has a simple but effective system of upvotes, downvotes, display by ranking, and flagging/deleting. Other sites have similarly effective systems of varying types. I hope eventually "Old Media" will catch on.
- skymt 16y ago
  Other sites applied similar comment systems with less effectiveness: Reddit, YouTube, Digg. HN's civility seems to be mostly a result of its community. I doubt this system would be a silver bullet for a newspaper site, which by nature has a large, broad user base discussing heavily controversial issues.
- _delirium 16y ago
  What's strange is that they seem to not really be making any effort. It's as if Slashdot launched in 1996, noticed that the discussions were kind of lame, and never did anything about it. Never introduced threading, or moderation, or karma, or meta-moderation, or manual deletion/banning, or any of the other measures they've experimented with. Not that Slashdot is an example of an ideal discussion site, but its S/N ratio is miles ahead of, say, boston.com's, and part of the reason is that they've made some nonzero effort to think about how to run a discussion site.
  - ladyada 16y ago
    Slashdot should be nuked from orbit & put out of its misery. Its more painful to watch it because (at least) I expect better from geeks. Especially old-skool geeks. I've seen entire article comment threads that were completely technically wrong & ignorant. There's one person wading in there trying to explain but he's drowned out. (PS. I am still trying to think of the word that describes the feeling of seeing an article on /. about something you or someone you know did and knowing you really shouldn't read the comments but you just can't help yourself and then you are disappointed in humanity. If you know what it is, plz email.)
    - _delirium 16y ago
      I dunno, I find a lot of useful things in its discussion, and I've gotten a good reception on occasion when I've corrected some error that was within my area of expertise. If nothing else, it's a good way to engage in discussion with a broad range of tech people, many of whom seem genuinely interested in pointers to better information or explanations if you can give them one. One trick is to not come across as, "ugh, I can't believe u stupid n00bs, move aside for me, the expert" when writing posts with those kinds of corrections. Imo, HN is better in some areas, but they tend to be more specific ones. It doesn't have the same breadth of posters as Slashdot, for one thing: here it's mostly young people, and almost all startup-culture-oriented. And on non-technical topics, I find the discussions here often actually more unbalanced and not always that well informed (in particular, there's a lot more hardline libertarianism, and sometimes a kind of unpleasant looking down at anyone who isn't a hacker).
- lmkg 16y ago
  By why does karma matter? Why should I care about an integer assigned to an anonymous online pseudonym? It doesn't change that your fundamental carrot is being a valued member of a community. It gives an objective measurement of that, as opposed to reading (and potentially misinterpreting) what the community view of your contribution. Attaching the notion of a score is useful for manipulating behavior, but people aren't going to try for that high score unless it's associated with something they already find valuable. The karma system helps and reinforces the community aspect, but a karma system will not in and of itself grant quality of discourse.
  - lotharbot 16y ago
    On HN, high karma comments are more visible than low-karma comments. Instead of giving everyone the same soapbox regardless of quality, HN gives quality comments a better soapbox. I don't mean to imply that Boston.com could simply copy the HN system and be successful. Merely that the concept of "carrots" and "sticks" they present in the concluding section is too limited. Being a valued member of the community is one type of carrot that encourages quality contributions; having high visibility for your comments is a different carrot that encourages fast and aggressive posting. Being embarrassed by having your real name associated with stupidity is one stick; having your comments removed and therefore not influencing people is another. The article touched on this ("a more basic question needs to be answered first: Who are these people who spend so much of their days posting anonymous comments, and what is motivating them?"), but didn't really follow through by identifying appropriate carrots and sticks to encourage good comments.
- huhtenberg 16y ago
  > HN has a simple but effective system You must be new here :) HN has an obvious problem with favouritism. Posts by some users are getting more upvotes regardless of what they post. The same goes for submissions. Blogs not really worthy of any attention are constantly floating on the front page simply because they are darlings of a part of the HN crowd. Though HN manages the maintain reasonably good comment quality with few simple measures. That's indeed an impressive achievement.
  - lotharbot 16y ago
    effective =/= perfect > "HN manages the maintain reasonably good comment quality with few simple measures." That's really the point -- the system works to maintain good comment quality. Different sites will require different measures; the key is figuring out which ones you need. The original article's comment on carrots and sticks displayed a surprising lack of understanding of this principle; it seemed to suggest that the lack of one particular type of carrot/stick makes creating a quality online comment system an intractable problem.
    - doron 16y ago
      The key phrase here is "general-interest" cohesion of the group is harder to achieve when the range of topics is very wide. Most of the sites that maintain a good discourse revolve around specific subjects, often to a specialized degree. HN is a group that discusses technology and its implications, this framework gives the group a cohesive context. The scale is different.
freejoe76 16y ago
This part at the end -- particularly the last graf -- caught my eye: "With all of our identifying information getting sliced, diced, and sold, by everyone from credit card companies to Facebook, is there really such a thing as the anonymous Web anymore? Consider this demonstration from the late ’90s by Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor Latanya Sweeney. She took three commonly available data points: sex (male), ZIP code (02138), and date of birth (July 31, 1945). Those seemingly anonymous attributes could have described lots of people, right? Actually, no. She proved they could belong to just one person: former governor William Weld. She tells me that 87 percent of Americans can now be identified with just these three data points."
- astrange 16y ago
  I don't see what that has to do with an "anonymous Web" at all. Nobody on Facebook thinks they're an anonymous forum poster, and I doubt anyone goes around mentioning their zip code and date of birth on forums anyway. (Although many profile pages do have city and year of birth, which might be enough…) Besides, if it was an anonymous forum (http://wakaba.c3.cx/shii/ http://wakaba.c3.cx/shii/), nobody could tie your separate posts together even if you put some identifying information in them. On the other hand, people on Facebook are happy to put their real names on angry political statements. So maybe this article shouldn't have bothered confusing "anonymous" and "uses pseudonyms" to make its point.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- sesqu 16y ago
  Your birthdate alone is something like 14 bits of information. I've never understood why some ask for it, and always tend to just make sure my age shows up as at least 18. And I would never put my zip code on anything purportedly anonymous. I bet if you collected statistics on internet users, you'd find out a lot of people were born on January 1. 1980.
Zak 16y ago
I wonder how effective a text classifier could be in assisting moderators in these situations. I've written a rather good text classifier and I'm in search of commercially useful non-evil applications for it. Assisted moderation for high-volume discussions has come to mind. If anybody's interested in arranging a test of such a system, let me know.
- ronnier 16y ago
  Isn't that what http://adaptivesemantics.com/ http://adaptivesemantics.com/ does? I remember reading about them on HN a couple of days ago.
  - Zak 16y ago
    It looks like they are. I'm not sure if I want to compete with them, or go after a different market. My classifier is good at author identification, and it seems like there might be a market for catching students paying other people to write their papers.

32 points by freejoe76 16y ago

Single page (printer format) link: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/magazine/articles/2010/06/20/inside_the_mind_of_the_anonymous_online_poster?mode=PF http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/magazine/articles/2010/06/...

RevRal 16y ago
It appears the print page can't be linked to. I've seen this in a few other places as well. Link to the "single page" instead: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/magazine/articles/2010/06/20/inside_the_mind_of_the_anonymous_online_poster/?page=full http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/magazine/articles/2010/06/...

lotharbot 16y ago

> "The comments sections on many general-interest news sites lack both the carrot and the stick for encouraging responsible behavior. The carrot is the cohesion of a group you don’t want to disappoint, like Yoshimi25’s Front Burner community. The stick is the shame associated with having your real name publicly attached to embarrassing behavior. Without these two levers, the social contract breaks down." They need to expand their definition to include other types of carrots and sticks. HN has a simple but effective system of upvotes, downvotes, display by ranking, and flagging/deleting. Other sites have similarly effective systems of varying types. I hope eventually "Old Media" will catch on.

skymt 16y ago
Other sites applied similar comment systems with less effectiveness: Reddit, YouTube, Digg. HN's civility seems to be mostly a result of its community. I doubt this system would be a silver bullet for a newspaper site, which by nature has a large, broad user base discussing heavily controversial issues.
_delirium 16y ago
What's strange is that they seem to not really be making any effort. It's as if Slashdot launched in 1996, noticed that the discussions were kind of lame, and never did anything about it. Never introduced threading, or moderation, or karma, or meta-moderation, or manual deletion/banning, or any of the other measures they've experimented with. Not that Slashdot is an example of an ideal discussion site, but its S/N ratio is miles ahead of, say, boston.com's, and part of the reason is that they've made some nonzero effort to think about how to run a discussion site.
- ladyada 16y ago
  Slashdot should be nuked from orbit & put out of its misery. Its more painful to watch it because (at least) I expect better from geeks. Especially old-skool geeks. I've seen entire article comment threads that were completely technically wrong & ignorant. There's one person wading in there trying to explain but he's drowned out. (PS. I am still trying to think of the word that describes the feeling of seeing an article on /. about something you or someone you know did and knowing you really shouldn't read the comments but you just can't help yourself and then you are disappointed in humanity. If you know what it is, plz email.)
  - _delirium 16y ago
    I dunno, I find a lot of useful things in its discussion, and I've gotten a good reception on occasion when I've corrected some error that was within my area of expertise. If nothing else, it's a good way to engage in discussion with a broad range of tech people, many of whom seem genuinely interested in pointers to better information or explanations if you can give them one. One trick is to not come across as, "ugh, I can't believe u stupid n00bs, move aside for me, the expert" when writing posts with those kinds of corrections. Imo, HN is better in some areas, but they tend to be more specific ones. It doesn't have the same breadth of posters as Slashdot, for one thing: here it's mostly young people, and almost all startup-culture-oriented. And on non-technical topics, I find the discussions here often actually more unbalanced and not always that well informed (in particular, there's a lot more hardline libertarianism, and sometimes a kind of unpleasant looking down at anyone who isn't a hacker).
lmkg 16y ago
By why does karma matter? Why should I care about an integer assigned to an anonymous online pseudonym? It doesn't change that your fundamental carrot is being a valued member of a community. It gives an objective measurement of that, as opposed to reading (and potentially misinterpreting) what the community view of your contribution. Attaching the notion of a score is useful for manipulating behavior, but people aren't going to try for that high score unless it's associated with something they already find valuable. The karma system helps and reinforces the community aspect, but a karma system will not in and of itself grant quality of discourse.
- lotharbot 16y ago
  On HN, high karma comments are more visible than low-karma comments. Instead of giving everyone the same soapbox regardless of quality, HN gives quality comments a better soapbox. I don't mean to imply that Boston.com could simply copy the HN system and be successful. Merely that the concept of "carrots" and "sticks" they present in the concluding section is too limited. Being a valued member of the community is one type of carrot that encourages quality contributions; having high visibility for your comments is a different carrot that encourages fast and aggressive posting. Being embarrassed by having your real name associated with stupidity is one stick; having your comments removed and therefore not influencing people is another. The article touched on this ("a more basic question needs to be answered first: Who are these people who spend so much of their days posting anonymous comments, and what is motivating them?"), but didn't really follow through by identifying appropriate carrots and sticks to encourage good comments.
huhtenberg 16y ago
> HN has a simple but effective system You must be new here :) HN has an obvious problem with favouritism. Posts by some users are getting more upvotes regardless of what they post. The same goes for submissions. Blogs not really worthy of any attention are constantly floating on the front page simply because they are darlings of a part of the HN crowd. Though HN manages the maintain reasonably good comment quality with few simple measures. That's indeed an impressive achievement.
- lotharbot 16y ago
  effective =/= perfect > "HN manages the maintain reasonably good comment quality with few simple measures." That's really the point -- the system works to maintain good comment quality. Different sites will require different measures; the key is figuring out which ones you need. The original article's comment on carrots and sticks displayed a surprising lack of understanding of this principle; it seemed to suggest that the lack of one particular type of carrot/stick makes creating a quality online comment system an intractable problem.
  - doron 16y ago
    The key phrase here is "general-interest" cohesion of the group is harder to achieve when the range of topics is very wide. Most of the sites that maintain a good discourse revolve around specific subjects, often to a specialized degree. HN is a group that discusses technology and its implications, this framework gives the group a cohesive context. The scale is different.

freejoe76 16y ago

This part at the end -- particularly the last graf -- caught my eye: "With all of our identifying information getting sliced, diced, and sold, by everyone from credit card companies to Facebook, is there really such a thing as the anonymous Web anymore? Consider this demonstration from the late ’90s by Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor Latanya Sweeney. She took three commonly available data points: sex (male), ZIP code (02138), and date of birth (July 31, 1945). Those seemingly anonymous attributes could have described lots of people, right? Actually, no. She proved they could belong to just one person: former governor William Weld. She tells me that 87 percent of Americans can now be identified with just these three data points."

astrange 16y ago
I don't see what that has to do with an "anonymous Web" at all. Nobody on Facebook thinks they're an anonymous forum poster, and I doubt anyone goes around mentioning their zip code and date of birth on forums anyway. (Although many profile pages do have city and year of birth, which might be enough…) Besides, if it was an anonymous forum (http://wakaba.c3.cx/shii/ http://wakaba.c3.cx/shii/), nobody could tie your separate posts together even if you put some identifying information in them. On the other hand, people on Facebook are happy to put their real names on angry political statements. So maybe this article shouldn't have bothered confusing "anonymous" and "uses pseudonyms" to make its point.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
sesqu 16y ago
Your birthdate alone is something like 14 bits of information. I've never understood why some ask for it, and always tend to just make sure my age shows up as at least 18. And I would never put my zip code on anything purportedly anonymous. I bet if you collected statistics on internet users, you'd find out a lot of people were born on January 1. 1980.

Zak 16y ago

I wonder how effective a text classifier could be in assisting moderators in these situations. I've written a rather good text classifier and I'm in search of commercially useful non-evil applications for it. Assisted moderation for high-volume discussions has come to mind. If anybody's interested in arranging a test of such a system, let me know.

ronnier 16y ago
Isn't that what http://adaptivesemantics.com/ http://adaptivesemantics.com/ does? I remember reading about them on HN a couple of days ago.
- Zak 16y ago
  It looks like they are. I'm not sure if I want to compete with them, or go after a different market. My classifier is good at author identification, and it seems like there might be a market for catching students paying other people to write their papers.