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Hacker News suffers from the same problem. We have folks like dang (God bless him) manually dealing with assholes. Seems like we could solve these problems with

Hacker News suffers from the same problem. We have folks like dang (God bless him) manually dealing with assholes. Seems like we could solve these problems with technology, but here we are two decades into the 21st century and we still have humans cleaning the pools. I'd be interested to know if actual forum moderators think that we could solve the bad actor problem with algorithms...

bredren 6y ago
As I was typing this, I was thinking about moderation of HN and but was cautious to comment on meta. Speaking generally, without real-world consequences for violating community TOS on a service there are no teeth in tracking bad actors, banning them, etc. For a long time, I loathed Facebook's real-name policy. However, to some extent I suspect the amount of identity validation and attribution of comments to actions does have a limiting impact on casual trolling and harassment on that service.
- staycoolboy 6y ago
  I would like to hear what LinkedIn moderators deal with. I wonder if it is easier/harder/same as Facebook or Reddit. There might be some interesting data here supporting real-name policies. I don't say anything on LinkedIn because I'm scared anything I say can and will be used against me when job hunting. Also: thanks for modding /r/portland. I love PDX. Just wish it was sunnier: it would be the perfect city.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  Facebook's real name policy is a complete failure. And professional PR, "influencing", and astroturfing are endemic, especially on political groups. It seems to be trivial for bad actors to hack/farm unused accounts and impersonate people almost at will. Meanwhile nation state-level and/or corporate bad actors have the resources to bypass or subvert the id validation and create fake identities and accounts at industrial scale. I don't think real ID is a solution. Not even if it's linked to some kind of robust physical key - which is obviously going to have privacy implications anyway. AI or automated searching for troll-like activity, most likely followed by manual oversight, is more likely to be successful. But there's the lingering question of whether FB is really interested in pursuing this with any effectiveness or enthusiasm. Given FB's resources and its lack of success to date, the answer seems to be "no."
- paganel 6y ago
  Don't think the real-name policy helps that much, to be honest. Just in the last couple of days of me commenting on FB I've been called a "retard" (sorry for the word, but that's what the lady used to describe me) and a "troll" (presumably Russian), this latter description accompanied by said commenter saying how I only write down dumb stuff which shows that I don't think before writing (but not saying where and especially why he thought I was wrong in my statements). Compared to all that commenting almost anonymously on HN seems like a breeze of fresh air. Of course in the many years I have been commenting in here there have been ups and downs (a couple of very down points for me were the reactions after the Boston marathon and the endless banana references after the Fukushima disaster), but other than that when one is told that he/she is wrong the person saying it usually comes with his/her own reasons which helps move the conversation forward.
botolo 6y ago
This was my same thought. We should understand the size of the problem and whether technology can help. If tech can’t help moderating, maybe tech can help in other ways. For example, establishing an anonymous unique internet ID that allows you to be online: if you get three strikes, your ID is suspended and you can’t spend time online for the duration of the suspension. Of course the system should be built so that you can’t bypass the one person-one ID and so that it’s completely anonymous. Also, the ID should not be transferable.
- soylentcola 6y ago
  I can't think of a world where I would trust such a system (or trust anyone to create/run such a system). Is this just for websites? Or does it encompass all use of the Internet? At least as far as websites or individual platforms go, this is exactly what accounts, moderation, and "banning" already attempt to do. We've seen how difficult and expensive this is to scale when your site gets as big as Facebook or Reddit. I can't fathom a sufficiently "benevolent dictator" that I would trust to act as a gatekeeper for the entire Internet at large.
  - e2le 6y ago
    Perhaps a potential solution is POW based registration, registration is slow and CPU heavy. I don't think it's likely there is going to be a perfect solution to this and might be that it's better to slow down bad users and make it expensive to ban evade.
    - ChainOfFools 6y ago
      This will just end up promoting the interests of already wealthy bad actors, and fomenting user cartelification behind a screen of anonymity. See also: Bitcoin
    - Zaak 6y ago
      That's a very interesting idea, though it wouldn't significantly affect people with vast resources such as botnet owners, corporations, and governments. It would certainly slow down the garden-variety troll, however the determined troll would just keep a core burning to create a steady stream of sock puppet accounts.
snazz 6y ago
Thankfully the HN moderators are paid employees--I can't imagine doing that kind of work for free.
- tptacek 6y ago
  Dan has better things to be doing than this; he runs the entire site. It's not like individually dealing with jerks is meant as his whole job.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
staycoolboy 6y ago
Hello, bad actor here. I only use Hacker News and Reddit. And I always manage to get banned every few months, so I guess I'm a "bad actor". Usually I start off OK. I can rank up 1000 points on HN or 20k karma on Reddit quickly because some of the discussions are interesting and non-inflammatory and I have interesting things to say. But then some topics veer into domains that make me angry (hello politics), or I find a comment inappropriate or unfair, or mod behavior hypocritical. And I share that in a post that gets flagged or downvoted, and I get banned. It is hard to detect because I think anyone has potential to become a bad actor in the eyes of a mod. There is no such thing as an unbiased mod. They will rub some people the wrong way with their comments or actions. Some personality type's are just not compatible with what mods want to see in their well-tended gardens. I've never stalked or hounded anyone, and I've disagreed with dang's assessment of my posts once or twice, (FYI DanG is a paid mod, not a volunteer, which is probably why he's so calm about it, even though he get's riled too: read the New Yorker article about him) but this appears to be a problem techies cannot solve. Why do I say this? Because it's been going on since the 80's with Usenet. Almost 40 years of trolls, and tech hasn't solved it, but it has created some systems that have worked to keep the weeds out of the gardens. But gardens still need weeding.
- jlg23 6y ago
  > But then some topics veer into domains that make me angry (hello politics), or I find a comment inappropriate or unfair, or mod behavior hypocritical. And I share that in a post that gets flagged or downvoted, and I get banned. Kurt Tucholsky gave great advice on how to write a letter to a government agency that is applicable to all potentially heated discussions: * write letter. * put letter in drawer. * wait three days. don't look at letter in drawer, write a new letter and send that one.
  - staycoolboy 6y ago
    Hey, that's a great idea! Instead of getting warned or banned, a user is placed in a timeout box where all of their posts get a three day lag and remain editable, and when the user logs in, they must re-read their posts before proceeding to the site. Kind of an 'in-your-face' reminder not to be a troll. It wouldn't stop the insane trolls, but maybe it would give the borderline trolls time to think.
oarsinsync 6y ago
Google, Facebook and Twitter are all trying moderation by algorithm. See regular posts on this very forum about algorithms running amok, banning people without clear reasons, and accounts only becoming reinstated by being famous enough to get enough traction to get a human to review your false positive.
valuearb 6y ago
The problem is the “assholes” never get told they are assholes, just mysteriously rate limited for some offense never explained to them, such as having an unpopular opinion. That sense of powerlessness doesn’t mitigate things, it sometimes escalates them.
3pt14159 6y ago
This problem is really easy to solve. Make your forum invite-only and have a ban on a user revoke the ability of the person that invited you to invite new users. Do not make the links between who invited whom public. It's for moderation only. You can still have throwaway accounts for commenting on things and the overall community will be increasingly more civil.
- SlowRobotAhead 6y ago
  The fact that so many people have the need for throwaway counts entirely disputes the concept that this problem is easy to solve. The upvote/downvote system is designed to reinforce echo chambers and create a chilling effect for your “real” opinion if you know it doesn’t agree with the hive. That system is already trying to solve the problem and instead creating a different one. All you can do with an invite system is to make sure the echo chamber is even more structured. That “those people” aren’t even allowed to join. Hello country club.
  - hundchenkatze 6y ago
    In this system you could still have throwaways, but the throwaway has to be invited/created from another account. This way you can create as many throwaways as needed but if you behave badly with your throwaway and it gets banned, then your main account is prevented from inviting new users and creating throwaways. Trolls could create new, primary, accounts but someone would still need to invite them back in. I definitely don't think that this would eliminate them, but it could potentially slow them down.
    - 3pt14159 6y ago
      And because the moderators have the tree of invites it's pretty easy to determine which branches are yielding troll accounts and prune further up if necessary.
- ohazi 6y ago
  > Make your forum invite-only > You can still have throwaway accounts How can both of these things be simultaneously true?
shuntress 6y ago
To beleaguer your "cleaning the pools" analogy: It is not as simple as just cleaning the pool of grime brought in through normal use. The shit-peddlers outside the building are constantly convincing pool-goers to join a shit-peddling pyramid scheme so that they bring boxes of shit in to the pool. And besides that, some people just want to trash the pool for their own enjoyment.

bredren 6y ago

As I was typing this, I was thinking about moderation of HN and but was cautious to comment on meta. Speaking generally, without real-world consequences for violating community TOS on a service there are no teeth in tracking bad actors, banning them, etc. For a long time, I loathed Facebook's real-name policy. However, to some extent I suspect the amount of identity validation and attribution of comments to actions does have a limiting impact on casual trolling and harassment on that service.

staycoolboy 6y ago
I would like to hear what LinkedIn moderators deal with. I wonder if it is easier/harder/same as Facebook or Reddit. There might be some interesting data here supporting real-name policies. I don't say anything on LinkedIn because I'm scared anything I say can and will be used against me when job hunting. Also: thanks for modding /r/portland. I love PDX. Just wish it was sunnier: it would be the perfect city.
TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
Facebook's real name policy is a complete failure. And professional PR, "influencing", and astroturfing are endemic, especially on political groups. It seems to be trivial for bad actors to hack/farm unused accounts and impersonate people almost at will. Meanwhile nation state-level and/or corporate bad actors have the resources to bypass or subvert the id validation and create fake identities and accounts at industrial scale. I don't think real ID is a solution. Not even if it's linked to some kind of robust physical key - which is obviously going to have privacy implications anyway. AI or automated searching for troll-like activity, most likely followed by manual oversight, is more likely to be successful. But there's the lingering question of whether FB is really interested in pursuing this with any effectiveness or enthusiasm. Given FB's resources and its lack of success to date, the answer seems to be "no."
paganel 6y ago
Don't think the real-name policy helps that much, to be honest. Just in the last couple of days of me commenting on FB I've been called a "retard" (sorry for the word, but that's what the lady used to describe me) and a "troll" (presumably Russian), this latter description accompanied by said commenter saying how I only write down dumb stuff which shows that I don't think before writing (but not saying where and especially why he thought I was wrong in my statements). Compared to all that commenting almost anonymously on HN seems like a breeze of fresh air. Of course in the many years I have been commenting in here there have been ups and downs (a couple of very down points for me were the reactions after the Boston marathon and the endless banana references after the Fukushima disaster), but other than that when one is told that he/she is wrong the person saying it usually comes with his/her own reasons which helps move the conversation forward.

botolo 6y ago

This was my same thought. We should understand the size of the problem and whether technology can help. If tech can’t help moderating, maybe tech can help in other ways. For example, establishing an anonymous unique internet ID that allows you to be online: if you get three strikes, your ID is suspended and you can’t spend time online for the duration of the suspension. Of course the system should be built so that you can’t bypass the one person-one ID and so that it’s completely anonymous. Also, the ID should not be transferable.

soylentcola 6y ago
I can't think of a world where I would trust such a system (or trust anyone to create/run such a system). Is this just for websites? Or does it encompass all use of the Internet? At least as far as websites or individual platforms go, this is exactly what accounts, moderation, and "banning" already attempt to do. We've seen how difficult and expensive this is to scale when your site gets as big as Facebook or Reddit. I can't fathom a sufficiently "benevolent dictator" that I would trust to act as a gatekeeper for the entire Internet at large.
- e2le 6y ago
  Perhaps a potential solution is POW based registration, registration is slow and CPU heavy. I don't think it's likely there is going to be a perfect solution to this and might be that it's better to slow down bad users and make it expensive to ban evade.
  - ChainOfFools 6y ago
    This will just end up promoting the interests of already wealthy bad actors, and fomenting user cartelification behind a screen of anonymity. See also: Bitcoin
  - Zaak 6y ago
    That's a very interesting idea, though it wouldn't significantly affect people with vast resources such as botnet owners, corporations, and governments. It would certainly slow down the garden-variety troll, however the determined troll would just keep a core burning to create a steady stream of sock puppet accounts.

snazz 6y ago

Thankfully the HN moderators are paid employees--I can't imagine doing that kind of work for free.

tptacek 6y ago
Dan has better things to be doing than this; he runs the entire site. It's not like individually dealing with jerks is meant as his whole job.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

staycoolboy 6y ago

Hello, bad actor here. I only use Hacker News and Reddit. And I always manage to get banned every few months, so I guess I'm a "bad actor". Usually I start off OK. I can rank up 1000 points on HN or 20k karma on Reddit quickly because some of the discussions are interesting and non-inflammatory and I have interesting things to say. But then some topics veer into domains that make me angry (hello politics), or I find a comment inappropriate or unfair, or mod behavior hypocritical. And I share that in a post that gets flagged or downvoted, and I get banned. It is hard to detect because I think anyone has potential to become a bad actor in the eyes of a mod. There is no such thing as an unbiased mod. They will rub some people the wrong way with their comments or actions. Some personality type's are just not compatible with what mods want to see in their well-tended gardens. I've never stalked or hounded anyone, and I've disagreed with dang's assessment of my posts once or twice, (FYI DanG is a paid mod, not a volunteer, which is probably why he's so calm about it, even though he get's riled too: read the New Yorker article about him) but this appears to be a problem techies cannot solve. Why do I say this? Because it's been going on since the 80's with Usenet. Almost 40 years of trolls, and tech hasn't solved it, but it has created some systems that have worked to keep the weeds out of the gardens. But gardens still need weeding.

jlg23 6y ago
> But then some topics veer into domains that make me angry (hello politics), or I find a comment inappropriate or unfair, or mod behavior hypocritical. And I share that in a post that gets flagged or downvoted, and I get banned. Kurt Tucholsky gave great advice on how to write a letter to a government agency that is applicable to all potentially heated discussions: * write letter. * put letter in drawer. * wait three days. don't look at letter in drawer, write a new letter and send that one.
- staycoolboy 6y ago
  Hey, that's a great idea! Instead of getting warned or banned, a user is placed in a timeout box where all of their posts get a three day lag and remain editable, and when the user logs in, they must re-read their posts before proceeding to the site. Kind of an 'in-your-face' reminder not to be a troll. It wouldn't stop the insane trolls, but maybe it would give the borderline trolls time to think.

oarsinsync 6y ago

Google, Facebook and Twitter are all trying moderation by algorithm. See regular posts on this very forum about algorithms running amok, banning people without clear reasons, and accounts only becoming reinstated by being famous enough to get enough traction to get a human to review your false positive.

valuearb 6y ago

The problem is the “assholes” never get told they are assholes, just mysteriously rate limited for some offense never explained to them, such as having an unpopular opinion. That sense of powerlessness doesn’t mitigate things, it sometimes escalates them.

3pt14159 6y ago

This problem is really easy to solve. Make your forum invite-only and have a ban on a user revoke the ability of the person that invited you to invite new users. Do not make the links between who invited whom public. It's for moderation only. You can still have throwaway accounts for commenting on things and the overall community will be increasingly more civil.

SlowRobotAhead 6y ago
The fact that so many people have the need for throwaway counts entirely disputes the concept that this problem is easy to solve. The upvote/downvote system is designed to reinforce echo chambers and create a chilling effect for your “real” opinion if you know it doesn’t agree with the hive. That system is already trying to solve the problem and instead creating a different one. All you can do with an invite system is to make sure the echo chamber is even more structured. That “those people” aren’t even allowed to join. Hello country club.
- hundchenkatze 6y ago
  In this system you could still have throwaways, but the throwaway has to be invited/created from another account. This way you can create as many throwaways as needed but if you behave badly with your throwaway and it gets banned, then your main account is prevented from inviting new users and creating throwaways. Trolls could create new, primary, accounts but someone would still need to invite them back in. I definitely don't think that this would eliminate them, but it could potentially slow them down.
  - 3pt14159 6y ago
    And because the moderators have the tree of invites it's pretty easy to determine which branches are yielding troll accounts and prune further up if necessary.
ohazi 6y ago
> Make your forum invite-only > You can still have throwaway accounts How can both of these things be simultaneously true?

shuntress 6y ago

To beleaguer your "cleaning the pools" analogy: It is not as simple as just cleaning the pool of grime brought in through normal use. The shit-peddlers outside the building are constantly convincing pool-goers to join a shit-peddling pyramid scheme so that they bring boxes of shit in to the pool. And besides that, some people just want to trash the pool for their own enjoyment.