4 ms·

Kottke: Does the broken windows theory hold online?

13 points by hernan7 18y ago

tvchurch 18y ago
Case in point: Hacker News comments vs. Reddit comments vs. Digg comments. Sure, there's a population bias. But Reddit used to have mostly intelligent comments. Not anymore.
- ars 18y ago
  And even stronger: digg is now better than reddit. Digg is somewhat moderated, reddit isn't at all.
  - unalone 18y ago
    Subreddits have moderators. Some of them have really excellent communities. Digg is still an absolute wreck. Reddit is actually pretty good once you're away from /reddit.com and /politics and /economics.
- atlbeer 18y ago
  4chan
  - unalone 18y ago
    4chan is brighter than it lets on. But recently it's become a parody of itself. What once began hilarious and meme-laden has become a bunch of people repeating memes, which aren't funny unless they're clever.
  - iigs 18y ago
    I honestly think that 4chan has some of the highest comment standards of any board I can think of, particularly for initial posts (comments can be fairly vacuous). A lot of people go to /b for the trolling, and a lot of trolls go completely ignored or get called out almost immediately. Sure the board isn't first-order intelligent, but intelligence (along with timing and a certain type of wit) certainly helps when trying to get people riled up.
jerf 18y ago
This is why I'll actually complain about off-topic postings and such, despite the utterly inevitable complaints about the complaint. (At least nobody's babbled about how it's their free-speech right to post whatever crud they want to a social site in a while, and you just have to suck it up...) Community standards don't maintain themselves.
foulmouthboy 18y ago
What's interesting about online comments is that the comments themselves become a part of the "landscape" of a site. So a site could be aesthetically pleasing and designed well (i.e. no apparent "broken windows" as Kottke would define them), but if the comments are full of expletives and "roflmao" type messages, then they effectively become the broken windows. If I were to apply the broken windows theory online, I'd consider "bad" comments as graffiti and "good" comments as public art. The broken windows would be more an analogy of a community misusing what's been made available to them as opposed to a designer purposely or accidentally creating something ugly.
hs 18y ago
slightly off topic but still on broken windows theory do you normally clean up your code 'aesthetic' ? like the commented: old code (to make it unactive) -> ;(define bla) return value -> ;returns '(1 2 3) debugging print statements -> ;(print bla) hacks -> ;quick hack for x, buggy but good enough for now what's the better practices? thx
ig1 18y ago
One way you could test this is to datamine Google's or Microsoft's usenet archive. You could track if users behaved in less social ways in more troll-tolerant newsgroup (i.e. track say a million users and compare their behaviour across different newsgroups). It could also be done across time for individual newsgroups to remove any bias inherent in the topic of the group.
iigs 18y ago
This problem is framed in a way that is subtly different from another way of looking at it that may offer different solutions. Looking at a given comment as a "broken window" would seem to me to lend itself to specific treatments (i.e. a "flag" or "report" option), but you could also look at each comment as a contribution to the community that should be considered as a whole. I think if you treat every comment (exclusing illegal content or obvious spam/vandalism) as though it has value, even if that value is negative, it might lead to tools that highlight comments, demonstrating that they're unacceptable. HN (and now Engadget?) have shaded negative comments that are along the lines of what I'm thinking of.

13 points by hernan7 18y ago

Case in point: Hacker News comments vs. Reddit comments vs. Digg comments. Sure, there's a population bias. But Reddit used to have mostly intelligent comments. Not anymore.

ars 18y ago
And even stronger: digg is now better than reddit. Digg is somewhat moderated, reddit isn't at all.
- unalone 18y ago
  Subreddits have moderators. Some of them have really excellent communities. Digg is still an absolute wreck. Reddit is actually pretty good once you're away from /reddit.com and /politics and /economics.
atlbeer 18y ago
4chan
- unalone 18y ago
  4chan is brighter than it lets on. But recently it's become a parody of itself. What once began hilarious and meme-laden has become a bunch of people repeating memes, which aren't funny unless they're clever.
- iigs 18y ago
  I honestly think that 4chan has some of the highest comment standards of any board I can think of, particularly for initial posts (comments can be fairly vacuous). A lot of people go to /b for the trolling, and a lot of trolls go completely ignored or get called out almost immediately. Sure the board isn't first-order intelligent, but intelligence (along with timing and a certain type of wit) certainly helps when trying to get people riled up.

jerf 18y ago

This is why I'll actually complain about off-topic postings and such, despite the utterly inevitable complaints about the complaint. (At least nobody's babbled about how it's their free-speech right to post whatever crud they want to a social site in a while, and you just have to suck it up...) Community standards don't maintain themselves.

foulmouthboy 18y ago

What's interesting about online comments is that the comments themselves become a part of the "landscape" of a site. So a site could be aesthetically pleasing and designed well (i.e. no apparent "broken windows" as Kottke would define them), but if the comments are full of expletives and "roflmao" type messages, then they effectively become the broken windows. If I were to apply the broken windows theory online, I'd consider "bad" comments as graffiti and "good" comments as public art. The broken windows would be more an analogy of a community misusing what's been made available to them as opposed to a designer purposely or accidentally creating something ugly.

hs 18y ago

slightly off topic but still on broken windows theory do you normally clean up your code 'aesthetic' ? like the commented: old code (to make it unactive) -> ;(define bla) return value -> ;returns '(1 2 3) debugging print statements -> ;(print bla) hacks -> ;quick hack for x, buggy but good enough for now what's the better practices? thx

ig1 18y ago

One way you could test this is to datamine Google's or Microsoft's usenet archive. You could track if users behaved in less social ways in more troll-tolerant newsgroup (i.e. track say a million users and compare their behaviour across different newsgroups). It could also be done across time for individual newsgroups to remove any bias inherent in the topic of the group.

iigs 18y ago

This problem is framed in a way that is subtly different from another way of looking at it that may offer different solutions. Looking at a given comment as a "broken window" would seem to me to lend itself to specific treatments (i.e. a "flag" or "report" option), but you could also look at each comment as a contribution to the community that should be considered as a whole. I think if you treat every comment (exclusing illegal content or obvious spam/vandalism) as though it has value, even if that value is negative, it might lead to tools that highlight comments, demonstrating that they're unacceptable. HN (and now Engadget?) have shaded negative comments that are along the lines of what I'm thinking of.