9 ms·

And then...silence

117 points by wallflower 15y ago

bittermang 15y ago
We marveled with wonder at the free and open channel of communication that was the Internet. What unparalleled discussion it would bring. The truly free exchange of ideas, thoughts, and opinion. Soon some of us soon found that we didn't actually want to hear any of it.
- jgrahamc 15y ago
  You clearly weren't on Usenet in the late 1980s.
  - bittermang 15y ago
    I was, but I was also just around 12 years old. Admittedly one of the aforementioned persons who were a "waste of flesh, bone, and dangerously limited brain function" starting flame wars about trivial topics because I had a long distance phone connection I wasn't paying for and a keyboard in front of me. Though some might say that the more things change... but I digress.
- gerggerg 15y ago
  I think you mean we soon found ourselves overwhelmed. He still takes discussion from people over email, twitter and facebook linked directly on the site.
- YooLi 15y ago
  Interesting stance you have. Based on your romanticized description: "The truly free exchange of ideas, thoughts, and opinion." and what you admit the actuality was: "I was... one of the aforementioned persons who were... starting flame wars about trivial topics..." you come to the conclusion that if people don't want to hear/read your flame war, they must not want any communication. "Soon some of us soon found that we didn't actually want to hear any of it."
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
Argorak 15y ago
Interesting. The internet finally held its promise of effortless, direct communication. And suddenly, some people realize thats not what they want. And yet, when it comes to person-to-person-communication, putting some effort into it (by writing an email and waiting for a reply, etc.) seems to improve affairs for some people... Well, just a train of thought.
nickolai 15y ago
I think we need some sort of captcha system that keeps not only spammers, but also the kind of people he refers to out. The one Quantum Random Bit Generator had set up comes to mind[1]. [1] http://random.irb.hr/signup.php http://random.irb.hr/signup.php . seems to be down atm, see http://web.archive.org/web/20110304151851/http://random.irb.hr/signup.php http://web.archive.org/web/20110304151851/http://random.irb....
- SoftwareMaven 15y ago
  The sets of people who can do calculus and people who are trolls are far from disjoint. Until there is strong AI, I don't think that a "content value" filtering mechanism is really possible. Even people have a hard time differentiating irony from stupidity in comments.
  - wvenable 15y ago
    Yes, the effort that people will go to troll far exceeds the effort average positive posters will go through.
  - icebraining 15y ago
    people who can do calculus Or who can plug some characters in Wolfram|Alpha and get the result.
- AmazingBytecode 15y ago
  If it works well for them that's awesome, but that signup stinks of elitism for me. "You can't do some simple calculus? You must have nothing to add to the discussion."
  - merijnv 15y ago
    To be fair, if you can't do calculus you have no business consuming bandwidth of their quantum random bit generator. It is a limited resource (they have a fixed bandwidth at which the random data is produced), so it makes sense to limit the availability. And if you get a problem that is too hard you can refresh a few times until you get an easy one.
SMrF 15y ago
I think sites like hacker news and slashdot have a pretty good handle on this problem but only in their own communities. A good start to a more generalized solution would be to make these currently siloed reputation systems portable.
- chimeracoder 15y ago
  The problem is that reputation is relative. You may have high reputation on HackerNews, which could be linked to high reputation on ServerFault, but has absolutely no bearing your reputation on a board for writers and essayists. To borrow a concept, it's a bit like Whuffie in Doctrow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.
  - SMrF 15y ago
    High karma on hacker news may not translate to a high reputation on a writer's blog, but it would pretty much guarantee a civil, thoughtful comment. In this way karma is pretty portable, you just have to give everyone karma somehow. Maybe start off by trusting friends of people with high karma.
    - ufo 15y ago
      I don't think your argument would transfer to circlejerk.reddit or hypothetical 4chan karma though.
    - chimeracoder 15y ago
      That may be what you look for on HN, but that's not true of all forums (I trust that you can think of one obvious counterexample). Even look at Reddit - trolls are usually downvoted, sure, but a lot of people with high reputation are really just novelty accounts. That's not bad for Reddit, but that's not what I would associate with high reputation on HN. And finally, look at one of the comments below about gaming the system - that's the problem with having a (displayed) numeric value associated with one's reputation.
    - chimeracoder 15y ago
Qiasfah 15y ago
I would guess that the need to "root out" the people who do not have constructive things to say will ultimately hurt the site more than it helps it. The editor shouldn't feel any need to moderate the posts through deletion but rather should focus on using comments to build the community. Stressing on the negative misses the points to the positive.
djtriptych 15y ago
The current state of forums and comments is pathetic on the internet. Most group attempting to engage in open discussion are defenseless against the combination of spam, Eternal September, flame wars, etc. There ARE technical solutions to this problem - I don't buy that people just don't want to hear open discourse.
- jlarocco 15y ago
  I somewhat agree, but I don't think it's as dire as your comment makes it sound. Going by sheer numbers, there are probably a million crappy, spammy forums for every good one. But, I've found that most topics have at least one or two really good, (mostly) spam free forums where real discussions take place and the signal to noise ratio is really good. Comments for articles and blog posts do seem to be more hit or miss, though.
  - djtriptych 15y ago
    yeah it's frustrating to me because discussion forums really are the best place on the web for detailed thoughtful conversation. avsforums is an unbelievable repository of information, for instance. However, actually extracting that information from a 3,000 page avsforum post is nearly impossible - that's the problem with most good forums. That and the moderation efforts are extraordinarily high even in very good forums where people generally agree on what they want to read. I suppose I'm just saying that we nerds need to provide better tools to automate some of the moderation cost.
philwelch 15y ago
Unless you're willing to carefully curate a healthy community, allowing and reading comments from any idiot with a web browser is a losing proposition. The comments section on your local newspaper or TV station's website, or on YouTube, or on any site with high readership and low moderation is just a waste of time that does little than fuel one's misanthrophy. Does this mean there's no such thing as open discourse on the web? Nonsense. But if you're not willing to set up an account or set up your own blog to back up your discourse with some sort of identity, your discourse is worthless.
gerggerg 15y ago
I think a lot of the sentiment here comes from people wanting to have their cake and eat it too. What people want: Everyone 'good' for the discussion. No one 'bad' for the discussion. No manual labor. Unlimited growth while maintaining a perfect community. What you have to do: Grow slowly Restrict Signups Moderate The internet is clearly still an incredible communication platform, but it is by no means a human utopia, or even an opportunity for one. If you want to build a good community, you have to do just that. Build it. The internet is rarely going to just give it too you. And your community will without a doubt rot as time goes on if you don't pay attention.
- joebadmo 15y ago
  Yes, what I find most interesting about listening to the Stack Exchange podcast is how much attention and conscious effort they put into constructing the community, and in a continuous fashion (i.e. it's never finished). That said, it seems to me that we haven't reached the limits of the machine part of the human-machine moderation team. Voting up and down (here on HN, on Stack Exchange, Slashdot, etc.) is fine, but pretty rudimentary, for example. I'm wondering if there are any others experimenting with more heavily algorithmic moderation.
  - DanBC 15y ago
    I love the attitude of "meta == death" that stack exchange has. They have just enough meta to get the job done. The absence of social networking stuff is pleasing too. Compared to, for example, Wikipedia which has gigabytes of useless meta trollery and weird social norms.
    - squeed 15y ago
      I agree. I've lurked on StackOverflow for a long time now, and I watched the rise of 'meta' style questions as they polluted the question space. This lead to the establishment of the Meta-StackExchange site, which was not an obvious choice at the time. I love how the product they've created provides a very strict structure within which a community can take place. I wonder what approach, if any, Quora will take to the potential of meta-pollution.
ahi 15y ago
My favorite approach is the approach taken by exiledonline.com. Trolls and Ron Paul fanatics get their comments "improved", often with sarcasm highlighting the stupidity of the underlying comment and poster. Guts that particular troll so other posters aren't tempted to reply and serves as a disincentive for future trolling. Even subpar comments are discouraged since the consequences of not meeting standards are a little bit greater than if they were simply not approved.
seltzered_ 15y ago
Just a thought, you may want to look at Tynan's sett comment system coming soon, it seems to be introducing some type of comment moderation system http://sett.com/ http://sett.com/
- ChrisNorstrom 15y ago
  Well, that is the worst designed page I have ever seen. Color and layout wise it's beautiful. Content wise, where on earth is the "contact us" link? "About" link? copyright info? Sign up for beta? Etc... The logo is huge, but I don't care about the logo, I care about the product. And all the screenshots of the product are TINY. And I can't click on them. And why are they checker boarded all over the place, just have images on the left, text on the right. Checker boarding images is terrible practice. It looks like such a good product and I want to know more but they're hiding everything from me. And that just stresses me out to the point where I hope their product fails. Call me a dick but I never would have guessed visiting a web page would piss me off so much. Why? Because I feel like they're teasing me, showing me something good and keeping me from getting to it. The equivalent of waving food in front of my face when I'm hungry but never giving it to me. Design like that is just beyond unforgivable. That's the perfect example of what not to do when launching a web app. What am I suppose to do, dig around in the who-is info for their contact info?
  - ryanwaggoner 15y ago
    You're definitely the right amount of upset about this. Maybe, just maybe, the lack of all the things you mentioned is an indication that this is not intended for you at this point? Are you trying to do an ironic troll thing on a thread about trolling? If so, you got me :)
    - libraryatnight 15y ago
      I felt the same way about the site actually. It may be it's not intended for us at this point, but the person posted that site as if it would offer some clarification. He's not trolling -- at least, I don't think he is -- it's just not a helpful website. I realize the initial comment said 'coming soon,' but linking it seemed to imply that there would be something, some shred, of useful information that would make the site relevant to the discussion.
kenrik 15y ago
Welcome to the internet! I love this quote From "How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie" <quote> "I will speak ill of no man," he said, "...and speak all the good I know of everybody." ~ (Benjamin Franklin) Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain - and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving. </quote> I say do you part, and ignore everyone else and your world will be a better place. You can't hope to control other people, however you can control how you react to them. ~Kenrik
kenrik 15y ago
Welcome to the internet! I love this quote From "How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie" <quote> "I will speak ill of no man," he said, "...and speak all the good I know of everybody." ~ (Benjamin Franklin) Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain - and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving. </quote> I say do you part, and ignore everyone else and your world will be a better place. You can't hope to control other people, however you can control how you react to them. ~Kenrik
kmfrk 15y ago
You can't manage comments in a site that doesn't have a sense of community. Letters of Note's blog post usually get traffic from random links and e-mails by other people - just look at the recent letter from a former American slave - which just brings together all these random people. For a site with as much traffic as LoN, it would take hiring someone to moderate all the comments to reach a decent level of discussion.
doorty 15y ago
Use Facebook-authenticated comments. Requiring people to use their real names usually alleviates this kind of problem.
- AndrewDucker 15y ago
  Google announced recently that it didn't. They thought it would, but it turns out that people are perfectly happy to behave awfully under their real name (or, in some cases, throwaway accounts).
- simonsarris 15y ago
  This stopped 90% of the insane comments on my local newspaper (they moved from disqus to facebook). It also cut the average comments for an article in half or more.
  - finnw 15y ago
    Interesting - are Facebook users really better-behaved than average blog commenters? Or was it just that the lazier trolls gave up when their old cookies stopped working?
- DanBC 15y ago
  Look at sensationalist TV (eg, Jerry Springer or Jeremy Kyle or similar) to see people who are more than happy to have their real world identity tied to extremes of behaviour.
- ugh 15y ago
  Facebook comments are incredibly boring and meaningless. There is little trolling or flame wars but there is equally little meaningful content. I’m not sure why everyone is obsessed with somehow finding a way to enable comments. Many websites are much better without them.
- nsxwolf 15y ago
  I have not found this to be the case at all. I just read a story yesterday about a pilot who chopped his head off trying to hand-prop his plane. There were many terrible comments, one from a man laughing at his predicament and nominating the pilot for the Darwin Award and such, and mocking family and friends who were commenting to pay their respects. The commenter's first, middle, and last name appeared right next to a picture of himself with his kids.
clebio 15y ago
In related news, this just now: http://www.bgr.com/2012/02/01/commenting-on-bgr/ http://www.bgr.com/2012/02/01/commenting-on-bgr/ "I’m disabling comments for a bit, though. I’m tired of reading nonsense and of interacting with people that solely troll this site just to get a rise out of other commenters and start a holy war in the comments section. I’m tired of having to delete crap and I’m tired of people complaining that a few thousand people ruin it for millions." [edit: adding quote from the article]
dpcan 15y ago
All I could think the whole time I read this was: What a MIRACLE it would be if I woke up one morning, opened my Android Developer Console and saw an option to disable comments on my apps. Permanently.
- megamark16 15y ago
  Interesting idea, that. I might be less likely to download an app from the app store if the author had disabled comments/ratings, but that seems like the kind of call that the app author should be allowed to make. I recall reading about someone who uploaded a test hello world app to the Android Market and started getting lots of reviews and ratings (both good and bad) from trolls and idiots.
- masonlee 15y ago
  Could they tie Android Market comments to Google+ identities? Would that fix anything?
draggnar 15y ago
I understand that every site is not necessarily a forum. What will be lost from having to have the conversation on the site you got the link from?
nym 15y ago
BoingBoing went through the same thing... they closed down comments completely, and then some time later brought them back with a community moderator, who ironically privately censored posts by "disemvoweling", as well as completely censoring posts related to Violet Blue (or anyone referencing that fiasco). http://sfist.com/2008/07/01/boing_boing_responds_to_violet_blue.php http://sfist.com/2008/07/01/boing_boing_responds_to_violet_b...
- jgarmon 15y ago
  We had a more subtle approach at a forum for IT pros I used to moderate. We called it the Crazy Cafe. Known trolls wouldn't be banned -- they'd just create a new login and start trolling again, leading to a metagame amongst our community of guessing which of the old trolls the new troll really was. Instead, we'd simply flag the troll as a member of the Crazy Cafe, and their posts would be invisible except to other members of the Crazy Cafe (and to mods, if we so chose). The trolls didn't know they'd been made invisible; all they saw was that no one (save other trolls) responded to their flame bait, and thus they lost interest. It worked shockingly well.
  - scott_s 15y ago
    The same thing is done here, and it's called a "hellban." The difference being that anyone can see hellbanned posts if they turn "showdead" to on - which implies that most of the time, other hellbanned people won't see each other.
- starwed 15y ago
  I don't understand why the "disemvoweling" was ironic? That was something that she was already well known for doing on her own blog. I actually stopped reading boingboing after the Violet Blue thing, because their response to it seemed so fundamentally dishonest.
Supermighty 15y ago
Derek Powazek said it best in Design for Community, create barriers to entry. The harder it is to leave a comment the better the comments will be. Shutting off comments is a knee-jerk reaction.
pvarangot 15y ago
I wonder how this would affect traffic on a heavily trolled site, since usually trolls remain anxiously refreshing the page to engage in further discussion. I was under the assumption most newspapers kept their flaming comment sections open because they know they engage banner-viewing ad-clicking eyeballs.
tnicola 15y ago
One of the people I admire as a mentor of my avocation (writing) has the following rule on her blog: >>My website and my weblog are an extension of my living room. You are an invited guest. Have a seat, settle in, and enjoy talking to the amazing group of guests who are already here. >>If you cease to act like an invited guest, which I define as someone who is here to enjoy the give and take of intelligent conversation, I’ll mark your post as spam, delete it, and block you from posting again. I am under no obligation to leave garbage on my site. The First Amendment mandate for Freedom of Speech protects your right to say what you want without government intervention. Private speech, which is what you have here, is not a right, but a privilege, and you earn it with every coherent, intelligent, reasoned post you write. For the full list of her rules, here is the link http://hollylisle.com/blog-rules/ http://hollylisle.com/blog-rules/ I think that analogy of your blog to your living room is powerful. It creates a powerful visual. Not many people (even if they do so on the internet) would walk into someone's living room and say what they have no quams of leaving in comments sections of people's blogs.
ck2 15y ago
This is what moderators are for.
dredmorbius 15y ago
This, and the empirical experiences of many, many, many other online forums dating to Usenet days, are a direct refutation of Metcalfe's law: the value of a network does not scale with the number of nodes, all nodes do not contribute equally to the value of a network, and many nodes are in fact a net negative in terms of contribution to the network. Interactions between negative nodes can further degrade network value (e.g.: flamewars, retaliatory attacks, etc.). There's a modification to Metcalfe's law which suggests that the value of additional nodes degrades with time (Odlyzko &Tilly, "A Refutation of Metcalfe's Law" http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.ps http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.ps) I'd argue that Odlyzko and Tilly are optimists. And that any comments architecture which relies on Metcalfe's Law is fundamentally flawed. You can either arbitrarily restrict who has access to your network (Usenet and ARPANET worked well when they were limited to defense, edu, and a handful of tech companies), or find a scalable and subversion-resistant moderation system which leverages your community to enact filtering. Scaling slowly means you've got a better chance of maintaining community cohesion ("September effect" & "Eternal September"). And remember Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap. (Sturgeon was also an optimist).

117 points by wallflower 15y ago

We marveled with wonder at the free and open channel of communication that was the Internet. What unparalleled discussion it would bring. The truly free exchange of ideas, thoughts, and opinion. Soon some of us soon found that we didn't actually want to hear any of it.

jgrahamc 15y ago
You clearly weren't on Usenet in the late 1980s.
- bittermang 15y ago
  I was, but I was also just around 12 years old. Admittedly one of the aforementioned persons who were a "waste of flesh, bone, and dangerously limited brain function" starting flame wars about trivial topics because I had a long distance phone connection I wasn't paying for and a keyboard in front of me. Though some might say that the more things change... but I digress.
gerggerg 15y ago
I think you mean we soon found ourselves overwhelmed. He still takes discussion from people over email, twitter and facebook linked directly on the site.
YooLi 15y ago
Interesting stance you have. Based on your romanticized description: "The truly free exchange of ideas, thoughts, and opinion." and what you admit the actuality was: "I was... one of the aforementioned persons who were... starting flame wars about trivial topics..." you come to the conclusion that if people don't want to hear/read your flame war, they must not want any communication. "Soon some of us soon found that we didn't actually want to hear any of it."

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

Argorak 15y ago

Interesting. The internet finally held its promise of effortless, direct communication. And suddenly, some people realize thats not what they want. And yet, when it comes to person-to-person-communication, putting some effort into it (by writing an email and waiting for a reply, etc.) seems to improve affairs for some people... Well, just a train of thought.

nickolai 15y ago

I think we need some sort of captcha system that keeps not only spammers, but also the kind of people he refers to out. The one Quantum Random Bit Generator had set up comes to mind[1]. [1] http://random.irb.hr/signup.php http://random.irb.hr/signup.php . seems to be down atm, see http://web.archive.org/web/20110304151851/http://random.irb.hr/signup.php http://web.archive.org/web/20110304151851/http://random.irb....

SoftwareMaven 15y ago
The sets of people who can do calculus and people who are trolls are far from disjoint. Until there is strong AI, I don't think that a "content value" filtering mechanism is really possible. Even people have a hard time differentiating irony from stupidity in comments.
- wvenable 15y ago
  Yes, the effort that people will go to troll far exceeds the effort average positive posters will go through.
- icebraining 15y ago
  people who can do calculus Or who can plug some characters in Wolfram|Alpha and get the result.
AmazingBytecode 15y ago
If it works well for them that's awesome, but that signup stinks of elitism for me. "You can't do some simple calculus? You must have nothing to add to the discussion."
- merijnv 15y ago
  To be fair, if you can't do calculus you have no business consuming bandwidth of their quantum random bit generator. It is a limited resource (they have a fixed bandwidth at which the random data is produced), so it makes sense to limit the availability. And if you get a problem that is too hard you can refresh a few times until you get an easy one.

SMrF 15y ago

I think sites like hacker news and slashdot have a pretty good handle on this problem but only in their own communities. A good start to a more generalized solution would be to make these currently siloed reputation systems portable.

chimeracoder 15y ago
The problem is that reputation is relative. You may have high reputation on HackerNews, which could be linked to high reputation on ServerFault, but has absolutely no bearing your reputation on a board for writers and essayists. To borrow a concept, it's a bit like Whuffie in Doctrow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.
- SMrF 15y ago
  High karma on hacker news may not translate to a high reputation on a writer's blog, but it would pretty much guarantee a civil, thoughtful comment. In this way karma is pretty portable, you just have to give everyone karma somehow. Maybe start off by trusting friends of people with high karma.
  - ufo 15y ago
    I don't think your argument would transfer to circlejerk.reddit or hypothetical 4chan karma though.
  - chimeracoder 15y ago
    That may be what you look for on HN, but that's not true of all forums (I trust that you can think of one obvious counterexample). Even look at Reddit - trolls are usually downvoted, sure, but a lot of people with high reputation are really just novelty accounts. That's not bad for Reddit, but that's not what I would associate with high reputation on HN. And finally, look at one of the comments below about gaming the system - that's the problem with having a (displayed) numeric value associated with one's reputation.
  - chimeracoder 15y ago

Qiasfah 15y ago

I would guess that the need to "root out" the people who do not have constructive things to say will ultimately hurt the site more than it helps it. The editor shouldn't feel any need to moderate the posts through deletion but rather should focus on using comments to build the community. Stressing on the negative misses the points to the positive.

djtriptych 15y ago

The current state of forums and comments is pathetic on the internet. Most group attempting to engage in open discussion are defenseless against the combination of spam, Eternal September, flame wars, etc. There ARE technical solutions to this problem - I don't buy that people just don't want to hear open discourse.

jlarocco 15y ago
I somewhat agree, but I don't think it's as dire as your comment makes it sound. Going by sheer numbers, there are probably a million crappy, spammy forums for every good one. But, I've found that most topics have at least one or two really good, (mostly) spam free forums where real discussions take place and the signal to noise ratio is really good. Comments for articles and blog posts do seem to be more hit or miss, though.
- djtriptych 15y ago
  yeah it's frustrating to me because discussion forums really are the best place on the web for detailed thoughtful conversation. avsforums is an unbelievable repository of information, for instance. However, actually extracting that information from a 3,000 page avsforum post is nearly impossible - that's the problem with most good forums. That and the moderation efforts are extraordinarily high even in very good forums where people generally agree on what they want to read. I suppose I'm just saying that we nerds need to provide better tools to automate some of the moderation cost.

philwelch 15y ago

Unless you're willing to carefully curate a healthy community, allowing and reading comments from any idiot with a web browser is a losing proposition. The comments section on your local newspaper or TV station's website, or on YouTube, or on any site with high readership and low moderation is just a waste of time that does little than fuel one's misanthrophy. Does this mean there's no such thing as open discourse on the web? Nonsense. But if you're not willing to set up an account or set up your own blog to back up your discourse with some sort of identity, your discourse is worthless.

gerggerg 15y ago

I think a lot of the sentiment here comes from people wanting to have their cake and eat it too. What people want: Everyone 'good' for the discussion. No one 'bad' for the discussion. No manual labor. Unlimited growth while maintaining a perfect community. What you have to do: Grow slowly Restrict Signups Moderate The internet is clearly still an incredible communication platform, but it is by no means a human utopia, or even an opportunity for one. If you want to build a good community, you have to do just that. Build it. The internet is rarely going to just give it too you. And your community will without a doubt rot as time goes on if you don't pay attention.

joebadmo 15y ago
Yes, what I find most interesting about listening to the Stack Exchange podcast is how much attention and conscious effort they put into constructing the community, and in a continuous fashion (i.e. it's never finished). That said, it seems to me that we haven't reached the limits of the machine part of the human-machine moderation team. Voting up and down (here on HN, on Stack Exchange, Slashdot, etc.) is fine, but pretty rudimentary, for example. I'm wondering if there are any others experimenting with more heavily algorithmic moderation.
- DanBC 15y ago
  I love the attitude of "meta == death" that stack exchange has. They have just enough meta to get the job done. The absence of social networking stuff is pleasing too. Compared to, for example, Wikipedia which has gigabytes of useless meta trollery and weird social norms.
  - squeed 15y ago
    I agree. I've lurked on StackOverflow for a long time now, and I watched the rise of 'meta' style questions as they polluted the question space. This lead to the establishment of the Meta-StackExchange site, which was not an obvious choice at the time. I love how the product they've created provides a very strict structure within which a community can take place. I wonder what approach, if any, Quora will take to the potential of meta-pollution.

ahi 15y ago

My favorite approach is the approach taken by exiledonline.com. Trolls and Ron Paul fanatics get their comments "improved", often with sarcasm highlighting the stupidity of the underlying comment and poster. Guts that particular troll so other posters aren't tempted to reply and serves as a disincentive for future trolling. Even subpar comments are discouraged since the consequences of not meeting standards are a little bit greater than if they were simply not approved.

seltzered_ 15y ago

Just a thought, you may want to look at Tynan's sett comment system coming soon, it seems to be introducing some type of comment moderation system http://sett.com/ http://sett.com/

ChrisNorstrom 15y ago
Well, that is the worst designed page I have ever seen. Color and layout wise it's beautiful. Content wise, where on earth is the "contact us" link? "About" link? copyright info? Sign up for beta? Etc... The logo is huge, but I don't care about the logo, I care about the product. And all the screenshots of the product are TINY. And I can't click on them. And why are they checker boarded all over the place, just have images on the left, text on the right. Checker boarding images is terrible practice. It looks like such a good product and I want to know more but they're hiding everything from me. And that just stresses me out to the point where I hope their product fails. Call me a dick but I never would have guessed visiting a web page would piss me off so much. Why? Because I feel like they're teasing me, showing me something good and keeping me from getting to it. The equivalent of waving food in front of my face when I'm hungry but never giving it to me. Design like that is just beyond unforgivable. That's the perfect example of what not to do when launching a web app. What am I suppose to do, dig around in the who-is info for their contact info?
- ryanwaggoner 15y ago
  You're definitely the right amount of upset about this. Maybe, just maybe, the lack of all the things you mentioned is an indication that this is not intended for you at this point? Are you trying to do an ironic troll thing on a thread about trolling? If so, you got me :)
  - libraryatnight 15y ago
    I felt the same way about the site actually. It may be it's not intended for us at this point, but the person posted that site as if it would offer some clarification. He's not trolling -- at least, I don't think he is -- it's just not a helpful website. I realize the initial comment said 'coming soon,' but linking it seemed to imply that there would be something, some shred, of useful information that would make the site relevant to the discussion.

kenrik 15y ago

Welcome to the internet! I love this quote From "How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie" <quote> "I will speak ill of no man," he said, "...and speak all the good I know of everybody." ~ (Benjamin Franklin) Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain - and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving. </quote> I say do you part, and ignore everyone else and your world will be a better place. You can't hope to control other people, however you can control how you react to them. ~Kenrik

kenrik 15y ago

kmfrk 15y ago

You can't manage comments in a site that doesn't have a sense of community. Letters of Note's blog post usually get traffic from random links and e-mails by other people - just look at the recent letter from a former American slave - which just brings together all these random people. For a site with as much traffic as LoN, it would take hiring someone to moderate all the comments to reach a decent level of discussion.

doorty 15y ago

Use Facebook-authenticated comments. Requiring people to use their real names usually alleviates this kind of problem.

AndrewDucker 15y ago
Google announced recently that it didn't. They thought it would, but it turns out that people are perfectly happy to behave awfully under their real name (or, in some cases, throwaway accounts).
simonsarris 15y ago
This stopped 90% of the insane comments on my local newspaper (they moved from disqus to facebook). It also cut the average comments for an article in half or more.
- finnw 15y ago
  Interesting - are Facebook users really better-behaved than average blog commenters? Or was it just that the lazier trolls gave up when their old cookies stopped working?
DanBC 15y ago
Look at sensationalist TV (eg, Jerry Springer or Jeremy Kyle or similar) to see people who are more than happy to have their real world identity tied to extremes of behaviour.
ugh 15y ago
Facebook comments are incredibly boring and meaningless. There is little trolling or flame wars but there is equally little meaningful content. I’m not sure why everyone is obsessed with somehow finding a way to enable comments. Many websites are much better without them.
nsxwolf 15y ago
I have not found this to be the case at all. I just read a story yesterday about a pilot who chopped his head off trying to hand-prop his plane. There were many terrible comments, one from a man laughing at his predicament and nominating the pilot for the Darwin Award and such, and mocking family and friends who were commenting to pay their respects. The commenter's first, middle, and last name appeared right next to a picture of himself with his kids.

clebio 15y ago

In related news, this just now: http://www.bgr.com/2012/02/01/commenting-on-bgr/ http://www.bgr.com/2012/02/01/commenting-on-bgr/ "I’m disabling comments for a bit, though. I’m tired of reading nonsense and of interacting with people that solely troll this site just to get a rise out of other commenters and start a holy war in the comments section. I’m tired of having to delete crap and I’m tired of people complaining that a few thousand people ruin it for millions." [edit: adding quote from the article]

dpcan 15y ago

All I could think the whole time I read this was: What a MIRACLE it would be if I woke up one morning, opened my Android Developer Console and saw an option to disable comments on my apps. Permanently.

megamark16 15y ago
Interesting idea, that. I might be less likely to download an app from the app store if the author had disabled comments/ratings, but that seems like the kind of call that the app author should be allowed to make. I recall reading about someone who uploaded a test hello world app to the Android Market and started getting lots of reviews and ratings (both good and bad) from trolls and idiots.
masonlee 15y ago
Could they tie Android Market comments to Google+ identities? Would that fix anything?

draggnar 15y ago

I understand that every site is not necessarily a forum. What will be lost from having to have the conversation on the site you got the link from?

nym 15y ago

BoingBoing went through the same thing... they closed down comments completely, and then some time later brought them back with a community moderator, who ironically privately censored posts by "disemvoweling", as well as completely censoring posts related to Violet Blue (or anyone referencing that fiasco). http://sfist.com/2008/07/01/boing_boing_responds_to_violet_blue.php http://sfist.com/2008/07/01/boing_boing_responds_to_violet_b...

jgarmon 15y ago
We had a more subtle approach at a forum for IT pros I used to moderate. We called it the Crazy Cafe. Known trolls wouldn't be banned -- they'd just create a new login and start trolling again, leading to a metagame amongst our community of guessing which of the old trolls the new troll really was. Instead, we'd simply flag the troll as a member of the Crazy Cafe, and their posts would be invisible except to other members of the Crazy Cafe (and to mods, if we so chose). The trolls didn't know they'd been made invisible; all they saw was that no one (save other trolls) responded to their flame bait, and thus they lost interest. It worked shockingly well.
- scott_s 15y ago
  The same thing is done here, and it's called a "hellban." The difference being that anyone can see hellbanned posts if they turn "showdead" to on - which implies that most of the time, other hellbanned people won't see each other.
starwed 15y ago
I don't understand why the "disemvoweling" was ironic? That was something that she was already well known for doing on her own blog. I actually stopped reading boingboing after the Violet Blue thing, because their response to it seemed so fundamentally dishonest.

Supermighty 15y ago

Derek Powazek said it best in Design for Community, create barriers to entry. The harder it is to leave a comment the better the comments will be. Shutting off comments is a knee-jerk reaction.

pvarangot 15y ago

I wonder how this would affect traffic on a heavily trolled site, since usually trolls remain anxiously refreshing the page to engage in further discussion. I was under the assumption most newspapers kept their flaming comment sections open because they know they engage banner-viewing ad-clicking eyeballs.

tnicola 15y ago

One of the people I admire as a mentor of my avocation (writing) has the following rule on her blog: >>My website and my weblog are an extension of my living room. You are an invited guest. Have a seat, settle in, and enjoy talking to the amazing group of guests who are already here. >>If you cease to act like an invited guest, which I define as someone who is here to enjoy the give and take of intelligent conversation, I’ll mark your post as spam, delete it, and block you from posting again. I am under no obligation to leave garbage on my site. The First Amendment mandate for Freedom of Speech protects your right to say what you want without government intervention. Private speech, which is what you have here, is not a right, but a privilege, and you earn it with every coherent, intelligent, reasoned post you write. For the full list of her rules, here is the link http://hollylisle.com/blog-rules/ http://hollylisle.com/blog-rules/ I think that analogy of your blog to your living room is powerful. It creates a powerful visual. Not many people (even if they do so on the internet) would walk into someone's living room and say what they have no quams of leaving in comments sections of people's blogs.

ck2 15y ago

This is what moderators are for.

dredmorbius 15y ago

This, and the empirical experiences of many, many, many other online forums dating to Usenet days, are a direct refutation of Metcalfe's law: the value of a network does not scale with the number of nodes, all nodes do not contribute equally to the value of a network, and many nodes are in fact a net negative in terms of contribution to the network. Interactions between negative nodes can further degrade network value (e.g.: flamewars, retaliatory attacks, etc.). There's a modification to Metcalfe's law which suggests that the value of additional nodes degrades with time (Odlyzko &Tilly, "A Refutation of Metcalfe's Law" http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.ps http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.ps) I'd argue that Odlyzko and Tilly are optimists. And that any comments architecture which relies on Metcalfe's Law is fundamentally flawed. You can either arbitrarily restrict who has access to your network (Usenet and ARPANET worked well when they were limited to defense, edu, and a handful of tech companies), or find a scalable and subversion-resistant moderation system which leverages your community to enact filtering. Scaling slowly means you've got a better chance of maintaining community cohesion ("September effect" & "Eternal September"). And remember Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap. (Sturgeon was also an optimist).