10 ms·

Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism

182 points by llambda 14y ago

greggman 14y ago
downvoting is just as much a problem with fools as well. A good downvote is when a post/comment is abusive or pointless. A bad downvote is when the voter disagrees with the opinion expressed. Mention Microsoft on slashdot you'll get downvoted, period. Mention VisualBasic on any tech forum you'll get downvotes regardless of the point you're trying to make. Eventually you learn to stop trying to present alternative points of view and just go with the flow or leave because the "fools" are now in charge of the downvoting.
- DanBC2 14y ago
  With luck many silent but wise people will downvote the one or two noisy fools. There's a strong temptation to interact, even with someone you suspect is a fool. Resist that temptation, and carefully use a downvote. There's a great article called "Why We Banned Legos" which covers some of the weird problems that online communities get into. (A small group of children get control of the lego, and decide who can have what pieces, etc.) (http://www.rethinkingschools.org/restrict.asp?path=archive/21_02/lego212.shtml http://www.rethinkingschools.org/restrict.asp?path=archive/2...) Meatball wiki covers lots of these concepts. I've posted it before. Here it is again. (http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/ http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/)
  - billpatrianakos 14y ago
    You're probably right about the silent but wise but unfortunately on HN you cannot be silent and have downvote privileges. Edit: To be clear, it's not unfortunate that the silent probably won't be downvoting, it's the wise we're missing out on.
- spindritf 14y ago
  > A good downvote is when a post/comment is abusive or pointless. A bad downvote is when the voter disagrees with the opinion expressed. A downvote is also justified when a comment is misleading, contains a fallacious argument, or misrepresents contents of other comments or the article. Sometimes even when it's just incorrect. Unless the particular misconception is somewhat popular or difficult to spot. Basically, anything that could be removed without loss of value, should be downvoted.
  - Karunamon 14y ago
    My only disagreement with this comes in when some kind of censorship is enacted once you pass a certain number of down votes. And no, the fact that you can disable that censorship doesn't ameliorate the issue - the majority will still be unable to see the comment. Reddit is particularly bad at this, as once you hit -2, your comment might as well have never been posted. Any idiot with a bot and a grudge can make anything you do invisible. FWIW I like the way HN has chosen to handle this. You can't even downvote until you go past a certain karma threshold (eliminates sock puppetry and calling for backup), and even if you are down voted into oblivion, your words are still visible (if a little harder to see). Now if they'd just lighten up on the hell bans. I've seen a number of valid comments here which were dead on arrival.
- jseliger 14y ago
  Great comment—and the problem your describing completely true. Still, I think the post is a useful reminder because I've noticed a general deterioration in the HN comments over the past six months or so (and I even wrote a post about that: http://jseliger.com/2012/01/15/commenting-community-deterioration-and-hacker-news/ http://jseliger.com/2012/01/15/commenting-community-deterior... ; see also this discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3469453 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3469453 ). For me, a comment like this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4034170 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4034170 exemplifies some of the deterioration. The commenter asks for substantiation of a claim that refers back to the original article that was submitted. If he'd read the article, he'd know that. Now, it's easy to argue that this is a one-time example, and alone that's true. But I'm noticing these kinds of comments more and more—ones in which people comment without knowing anything, or without reading the original article, or even without closely reading the person who they're replying to. Unfortunately, I don't have a solution.
  - AncientPC 14y ago
    No one has found a good solution to this problem. As an open community grows it will inevitably experience Eternal September and content quality will decrease. It happened with Usenet, Slashdot, Reddit, and Hacker News is following their footsteps. The upper echelon will migrate, others will follow. Perhaps closed communities with a curated member list is the answer[1][2]. Closed communities are not without its own drawbacks, but the trade off may be acceptable to some. Open communities allows for anyone's input, but you also get drama like arguing about Javascript semicolons or GitHub's commit messages. However, closed communities are susceptible to group think. How do you judge a minority opinion's validity? [1]: http://svbtle.com/ http://svbtle.com/ [2]: http://www.behance.net/ http://www.behance.net/
    - einhverfr 14y ago
      HN probably slower than the others for the same reason that PostgreSQL seems to be perpetually getting better.... I think the decay you note is specific to communities who are not coming in with any sort of common self-interest at stake. In essence they are what I might call "intellectual entertainment" communities. People read and argue on Slashdot primarily because it's fun. People argue on PostgreSQL email lists because they all want PostgreSQL to be as good as it can be. In the former, a troll can stir up a lot of argument, but in the latter, the most that can be hoped for is a collegial discussion on the merits of a specific approach. HN leans towards the former. I am betting most commenters are mostly interested in fun conversations. However, the fact is that it is also an integral part of a VC ecosystem and so presents an aspect of common economic interest as well.
- tokenadult 14y ago
  A good downvote is when a post/comment is abusive or pointless. A bad downvote is when the voter disagrees with the opinion expressed. At least 1568 days ago, the site founder pg was of a different opinion. He wrote, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 "I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness. "It only becomes abuse when people resort to karma bombing: downvoting a lot of comments by one user without reading them in order to subtract maximum karma. Fortunately we now have several levels of software to protect against that." My own analysis of the issue is that if I receive a downvote, I'm curious about why I received it. I understand that not everyone shares all of my opinions, but perhaps if one of my comments is downvoted, I can learn something about how to express my opinions so that they are allowed to stand, without people feeling they have to go out of their way to vote them down. Any time I have a comment with negative karma (which is a rare occurrence), I look back on what I said, and think about what I can learn from the other comments in the same thread and how I might express myself better the next time. I try to learn from the people who disagree with me as well as from the people who agree with me.
  - sounds 14y ago
    Thank you for quoting the comment more fully. I've seen it paraphrased too succinctly as "pg says downvotes can mean disagree." Although pg hasn't implemented a change to this effect, I believe he would agree that -- "people feeling they have to go out of their way to vote them down" -- implies a downvote should be more work than an upvote. I think a downvote should require a response to the parent comment that: 1. contains at least 15 English words, excluding quoted phrases 2. quotes at least min(25% of entire comment, 5 consecutive words) of the parent comment 3. meets current downvote requirements (karma and downvote bombing protections spring to mind immediately) For the sake of argument, such a "required downvote comment" could contribute almost nothing -- but it would still reduce downvotes. An example of a really bad downvote comment on this comment might be: > a change to this effect This is HN, not reddit. Um, did you read the article? I down voted you. The 15 English word requirement sort of requires some sort of explanation. Does anyone think this would help?
- makecheck 14y ago
  I think upvotes and downvotes should be harder to do. An example of what would make a vote "harder" would be to require reason-words. When you click down-arrow a box might pop up where you must select (or better still, type out in full) at least two words justifying the vote such as "Abusive" or "Pointless". This would also help to prevent fat-fingered downvotes that I've accidentally done on my iPad because the arrows are too close together and irreversible.
  - unimpressive 14y ago
    I don't think making it mandatory is necessarily a good idea. But I would love to be able to have people give me a short reason for an down vote so that I can hopefully see what I'm doing wrong. Anonymously of course. One issue I could see happening would be people abusing the feature to send hateful messages. Some solutions may be to allow users to delete messages or block the ability to give them text feedback along with a down or up vote. Another problem might be causing a sort of hugfest where users try to get upvotes by upvoting someone else, creating an upvote ring. (Eg: Including their name in the feedback and asking for upvotes.) One countermeasure would be to block the user from putting in their unabridged unedited name into the feedback box. (Of course, this could be circumvented in the way that almost all other online censor systems are circumvented. Obfuscation.) Thoughts?
    - makecheck 14y ago
      Yes, an open text channel could be abused and it is only unlikely to be abused if it's public; e.g. everything reads "makecheck said X" and not just "X". Maybe the right thing is for downvotes to always list voter IDs (but probably not long upvote lists). If I downvote something for "the right reasons" I don't really care if anyone knows it because I expect most people will agree with me. The opposite would be true for someone doing a lot of petty downvoting; he or she would probably be embarrassed and discouraged once everyone can see that the same person has downvoted a bunch of comments for no reason. One way to find a "reason" for a personal downvote, then, would be to look at everything else your downvoters have downvoted. One of two patterns would probably form: either these people are in the habit of downvoting lots of stuff for no reason, or they seem to be downvoting comments that have common themes.
- JoachimSchipper 14y ago
  I don't agree. First, the people complaining about downvotes often really did write a comment worth being downvoted (I didn't look at your history). Second, HN is still very valuable if the top comments are all good - it's much less necessary that all good comments are on the top. And despite what people say, the key source of groupthink on HN is not the voting system (rather, the homogeneity of the user base.)
- taw 14y ago
  My experience with multiple subreddits is that subreddits which disabled downvote button (by custom CSS style, it's still there if you really need it) tend to have much more friendly and polite discussion, very much like HN. Subreddits of comparable size and/or field which keep downvote button tend to be extremely argumentative and full of flames. Getting downvoted turns off your reason and you start seeing the thing not as a friendly argument but as a fight. And so does the other side. The result is ugly.
Karunamon 14y ago
I would give this 50 up votes if I possibly could, mostly because it struck very close to home. I've been in a leadership role in a couple of smallish online communities that, on further reflection, died just because of what this article is talking about. Fear of doing anything because of not wanting to be labeled another mod abusing their powers, or what have you. I've been members of communities that died or were damaged due to outright mod abuse - figure the converse is better, right? Death through inaction and allowance is better than death through action and disallowance, right? Intent doesn't even begin to enter into it.. right? Not so sure anymore. So like most things in life, it's a balancing act. As a commenter on the article said, 9 times out of 10, your guess that a comment is crap, will be correct. Don't start second guessing yourself. You probably have a very finely tuned crap sensor.
- einhverfr 14y ago
  If you have a couple people in a leadership role that you share power with, you can make sure everyone acts together and that sticky situations are discussed beforehand. That helps manage both the impression of abuse of power and issues in application.
thebooktocome 14y ago
Ironically LessWrong is going through a phase of struggling with increasingly meddlesome trolls, without terribly much moderation in evidence.
- nohat 14y ago
  A community is going through exactly what he was warning about? That's not irony.
  - thebooktocome 14y ago
    Not just any community; the community the author was trying to establish by writing this essay (along with the others). That's tragic irony.
    - drostie 14y ago
      It perhaps also fulfills that story-role, yes. Nonetheless, it shouldn't be contrary to your expectations, if you apply a little wisdom. I find in my own case that the things which bug me about others are things which deeply bug me about myself. Whenever I find my heart beating a little harder and my brow a little furrowed, I try to relax, and take a deep breath, and see what it is within me which resonates so strongly against the error that I have seen. I am normally quite patient with error, and this usually causes my impatience. Personally, I feel this "what is wrong with me" redirection is a much deeper lesson than the fact that harsh moderation can help keep a community together. First off, it is a discipline which can help keep us together, as opposed to the communities we moderate. And second, because the original lesson comes embedded in a much deeper truth, which Eliezer doesn't seem to acknowledge. I would like to spend a moment on this: The deeper truth is that love is transformative, that to love is to change both yourself and your beloved. The original post just notes that if a moderator isn't moderating, they aren't loving their community. True enough. It is important, however, to understand that transformation is not sufficient for love: that we all know people who do use their authority too far. Well-kept gardens don't die due to pacifism. That's stupid -- if they did, then they weren't "well-kept". But they die because they don't get the love that they need. It doesn't matter how much you pull the weeds if you forget to water the roots and fertilise the soil. To any of you who wish to know whether they love their job, I will simply add the poignant questions: when did you last transform it? And when did it last transform you?
grourk 14y ago
The problem is you might identify as "fool" someone who simply doesn't agree with you or the established groupthink. Re-read the first few paragraphs and replace the word "fool" with "person who doesn't agree with you" -- now it says something very different.
- jamesaguilar 14y ago
  Now replace fool with dragon. Says something different again. Whoa! Good mods can tell the difference between people who have other views and idiots. If the moderators in your community of choice can't, you should probably choose another community. But your equivocation between silencing other viewpoints and eliminating unhealthy voices is not useful.
  - grourk 14y ago
    I upvoted you before you added the second paragraph because I thought your joke was funny. "But your equivocation between silencing other viewpoints and eliminating unhealthy voices is not useful." Why not? I was making the point that it's often not easy to tell the difference.
    - jamesaguilar 14y ago
      I mean, the body of the blog post you're responding to is claiming a) that it is, and b) that even when it isn't, you can just leave a poorly modded community. In the face of that, I don't find "replace-the-word" rhetoric very compelling.
      - stcredzero 14y ago
        What are the factors that would make it compelling?
        jamesaguilar 14y ago
        If it were shown that even in good communities with solid mods, a primary use of moderating power was to silence dissent. For example, in this community, anti-startup articles get posted occasionally. I'd expect to see far more dead comments from people who post agreement with such articles. But I browse with showdead on, and I see no such thing. Basically, the rhetoric needs to line up with the evidence at hand. If it doesn't, it's unsound.
nohat 14y ago
The large number of people willing to take Brian Hamacheck's word (without response or evidence) on the "who's here" versus "who's near me" dispute seems relevant to me. The number of people offering to donate is even more disturbing.
- freshnote 14y ago
  I said much the same thing about the Megaupload debacle: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4047683 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4047683 I see it here all the time, by users with extremely high karma.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- Alex3917 14y ago
  What's even more disturbing is reading the comments of the arrest section on local newspapers. 95% of the people commenting seem to make up these elaborate fantasy scenarios of what happened in their heads and then decide people's guilt or innocence based on that.
  - stcredzero 14y ago
    Welcome to the human condition. Evidently, the human imagination predicts well in the context of small family groups in the wilderness. Have a society with enough complexity to merit laws, and the imagination isn't so finely tuned.
    - Eliezer 14y ago
      What makes you think it works on small family groups? All we can conclude from ev-psych is that making stuff up didn't cost the imaginers much reproductive success personally - we have no idea what it did to the actual victims having stories made up about them.
      - 14y ago
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
mmanfrin 14y ago
Things just haven't been the same since September '93.
kijin 14y ago
I've seen this article posted here multiple times, and every time a few people seem to misunderstand the conclusion of this article. As far as I can tell, Yudkowsky's point is not that online communities need strong moderators. His main conclusion is that people should make judicious use of downvotes. > But that was not a karma system, actually. > Here—you must trust yourselves. > You have the downvote. Use it or USENET. In old BBS systems, a handful of moderators were given the task of sorting out good posts from bad posts. We might say that those were the days of benevolent dictators. But of course, this raises the question of how people can trust those dictators to be benevolent all the time. In most cases, moderators do act in the best interest of the community, but sometimes they go on power trips, and when they do, it makes everyone question whether it was a good idea to give all those powers to moderators in the first place. That's exactly what happens in real-world politics, too, whenever you give a lot of power to a person or institution. Nowadays, virtually every Internet community allows users to vote on everything. One might say that this is more "democratic" than relying on moderators alone to sort out good posts from bad posts, because now everyone participates in the task of moderation. This can also be more efficient, because really bad posts will often be downvoted into oblivion even before a mod has had a chance to look at it. But like any real-world democracy, a voting system has its limits. There will have to be mechanisms to prevent circlejerks, and communities will still need moderators to carry out certain tasks. The difficult question, as usual, is how to design a fair, effective, and transparent division of labor between participatory democracy (upvotes/downvotes) and top-down administration (mods). Whenever mods in a subreddit come up with plans to clean up what they perceive to be a mess, there are always people who argue that such measures are unnecessary because people can just downvote what they don't want to see in that subreddit. But you can't rely on either method alone. Strong moderation will be futile if people keep upvoting pun threads in a science subreddit. Downvoting will have limited efficacy in the absence of a mechanism to kick out the most egregious offenders. Fortunately, some kind of balance between the two extremes is what most subreddits eventually settle with. An efficient democracy is neither fully managed by elites nor completely dependent on every shift of public opinion. It's all about checks and balances. Moderators need to be kept accountable to ordinary users who can call out when they see a power trip. Ordinary users need to be kept accountable, too, by means of a fair and consistent enforcement of forum rules. None of this, of course, invalidates Yudkowsky's arguments. > Waiting until the last resort of absolute, blatent, undeniable egregiousness ... waiting until you can be certain you are in the right, and fear no questioning looks ... is waiting far too late. Science can never reach absolute certainty, right? Only hypotheses that have yet to be falsified. But the lack of absolute certainty does not, and should not, prevent people from making judgments on the basis of the best available evidence. You can act even if you're not certain -- as long as you leave the door open to correcting yourself once you have access to better evidence.
n-ion 14y ago
That's one way to look at it... Another is just the phenomena of fads. No matter how well-kept the garden of slashdot/digg/reddit/HN they all have a time horizon. Just enjoy it while it lasts.
- stinkytaco 14y ago
  We all have the desire to analyze the things in our life (groups of friends, clubs, companies, communities) that have died. I do it all the time. I wonder what happened to community "x" that I was a part of and really enjoyed and miss. You look around at your neighborhood or city and see permanence and figure your community must have had something wrong with it. Of course, the barriers to entry and exit for an online community are very low. People change, the time they have available changes, their interests change, whatever. They exit the community as easily as they entered it. Soon the community dies. Your town or neighborhood isn't so easily left or entered so the stakes are much higher. Sometimes communities just get old and people leave. Pretty soon they're gone.
unimpressive 14y ago
>It's just one fool, and if we can't tolerate just one fool, well, we must not be very tolerant. Repeat after me: 100 times I’ve sworn this oath: 100 years I’d rather languish in a dungeon, 100 mountains I’d rather grind to dust, If only I don’t have to make a fool to see the truth. – Bakhvalan Machmud Now, the problem arises when that fool is you.
- mahyarm 14y ago
  That kind of attitude leads to not being able to take any sort of challenging by anyone who you label fool or inferior, be it by smarts, knowledge, experience or other things.
  - unimpressive 14y ago
    The quote is a translation as far as I know. (The only reference to it I can find is in a book translated from Russian about Russia.) So subtle nuances are likely missing. To me at least; "to make" a fool to see the truth implies that you will try and try until you succeed. This approach is ineffective because a large portion of people are never satisfied. (See: Pretty much any Internet drama or argument.) And if you adopt the attitude of winning every argument, you will almost inevitably flood communication channels with your discourse. (See: Any HN thread where the whole page is a few outlying comments and a majority in a threaded argument about a topic. Or a forum thread that goes on for pages where people argue about something.) Such discourse also costs you time to participate in and prevents you from doing more useful work. (Before writing this comment I could have sworn that Newton wrote a letter to this effect explaining why he stopped publishing his works. But I couldn't source it (I spent around 20 minutes trying.) so I decided that if it exists including this comment will likely make it appear from the depths of the Internet, if it doesn't it doesn't.) There comes a point where the best way to resolve an argument is to either cut it short or not have it. EDIT: A large portion of this is how one defines the word "fool" if everyone who disagrees with you is a fool in your mind by default, then I doubt you're going to listen to anyone who expresses disagreement. Regardless of weather or not you engage them in conversation. People as a general rule don't let the people they consider fools change their mind. Unless by proxy when they learn from their actions.
MrVitaliy 14y ago
Interestingly, the story strikes as a completely opposite of 4chan.org/sci/ where among army of trolls many intellectuals for many years discuss interesting ideas. Maybe it's the community size, maybe it's new technology (comment voting, bans and such) but I have a hunch that fools are not a problem.
- stcredzero 14y ago
  Are the trolls used as furniture in that setting?
- hollerith 14y ago
  Does 4chan.org/sci/ have comment voting? If not, I cannot make sense out of your comment. EDIT: replaced period with question mark in my first sentence.
  - MrVitaliy 14y ago
    Maybe it's due to 4chan's huge community size that fools are not a problem as they seem in smaller communities. Additionally, there is a whole slew of tools to identify (and punish) fools such as karma, comment voting, etc which perhaps weren't as widely available in the past. 4chan has mods who routinely remove child-porn and other questionable, non-related material. http://www.4chan.org/faq#whomod http://www.4chan.org/faq#whomod
ralfd 14y ago
That is also the reason why /r/askscience is one of the better subreddits: http://imgur.com/JGqhf.png http://imgur.com/JGqhf.png
- dfc 14y ago
  For those of us unfamiliar with reddit and /r/askscience in particular can you elaborate?
  - repsilat 14y ago
    Posts in reddit are partitioned into "subreddits". Each submission is made to one subreddit, though multiple submissions can be made to spread items to different communities. Each subreddit is essentially like Hacker News, a list of ranked links with comments all flavoured by some common theme. The front page of reddit aggregates posts from your preferred subreddits (or a default list of popular subs for users who aren't logged in). /r/askscience is a subreddit in which users can ask real scientists questions about science. It's a less-structured StackOverflow, essentially. Submissions are somewhat moderated, comments are more heavily moderated. Top-level comments are not allowed to be jokes, and offending comments are removed. On-topic jokes in other places are allowed, but too much joking around in a thread will often lead to all of the comments in the thread being removed. Deleted comments are replaced by "Comment removed" tombstones, and seeing whole trees of these tombstones is a decent reminder to stay on-topic. The CSS of the subreddit also encourages the community to maintain their standards. When upvoting, downvoting, commenting etc, users are reminded what those actions represent in the community. There is also an informal hierarchy of posters, with experts' comments being identified with short descriptions of their specialisations. The posts of these users are given more weight by the community, but the posters are held to somewhat higher standards.
  - ceph_ 14y ago
    /r/askscience is a heavily moderated subreddit where there are many rules for posting/commenting beyond those of other subreddits. Top level replies that don't site verifiable sources or contain layman's speculation are deleted. Comments that are off topic or do not comply with the rules are also promptly moderated.
Porter_423 14y ago
The question is, do people think that this is the nature of community? There is a possible universe (possible with respect to my current logical uncertainty) in which communities are necessarily reliant on vigilance to survive. There is also a possible universe where there are fundamentally stable solutions to this problem. In such a universe, a community can survive the introduction of many malicious or misguided users because its dynamics are good rather than because its moderator is vigilant. I strongly, strongly suspect that we live in the second universe. If we do, I think trying to solve this problem is important (fostering intelligent discourse is more important than the sum of all existing online communities). I don't mean saying "lets try and change karma in this way and see what happens;" I mean saying, "lets try and describe some properties that would be desirable for the dynamics of the community to satisfy and then try and implement a system which provably satisfies them."
stcredzero 14y ago
This is a two-edged sword. Also keep in mind, "Who watches the Watchmen?" The power to ban can also be used to turn a group into a personal fief. As in many things, the optimum path is a middle one. Checks and balances are needed. Sometimes the ban hammer is wielded by those with troll ethics.
- Zakharov 14y ago
  The article addresses this. Basically, it's better to risk the small chance of an abusive mod than the large chance of a gradual decay.
1123581321 14y ago
I think he meant that unkempt gardens die. Well-kept gardens are curated or moderated.
losethos 14y ago
homo reality is broken--angels want it that way. Fuck em. Stupid conversation. God says... an oath betwixt us, even betwixt us and thee, and let us make a covenant with thee; 26:29 That thou wilt do us no hurt, as we have not touched thee, and as we have done unto thee nothing but good, and have sent thee away in peace: thou art now the blessed of the LORD. 26:30 And he made them a feast, and they did eat and drink. 26:31 And they rose up betimes in the morning, and sware one to another: and Isaac sent them away, and they departed from him in peace. 26:32 And it came to pass the same day, that Isaac's servants came, and told him concerning the well which they had digged, and said unto him, We have found water. 26:33 And he called it Shebah: therefore the name of the city is Beersheba unto this day.
batista 14y ago
Clay Shirky's "A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy" is also a very good read on the matter: http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
itsnotlupus 14y ago
The tension between maintaining the original quality and growing the size of the community by several orders of magnitude is, in my opinion, an unsolvable problem. No amount of arrow-clicking, ignore list or banning can solve this. The easiest way to control the quality of the community is to control its growth. Pay-wall, invites, etc. will all be vastly more useful than after-the-fact approaches. When the barbarians are in the walls, you've already lost.
dfc 14y ago
The only online community I can think of that this does not apply to is advogato.
einhverfr 14y ago
As a permaculture fan, I say well kept gardens die by being too homogeneous and rigidly ordered, rather than alive, organic, and vital. Layer plants in space and time and select them appropriately, and you can leave them unattended for months on end. Well-layered gardens (like food forests but also my own flower gardens which never get weeded) also better support their members as each plant fills functions which help the other plants. We need well-layered on-line communities, ones where each layer supports all others in an interdependent web. In such a community, trolls just simply don't show up. There is no room for them. As the permaculturists say, all of life's problems can be solved in a garden. Lest you doubt my bit about troll-free communities, six years in, I have yet to have to take action against trolls in the LedgerSMB community. I have also never seen trolls on the PostgreSQL email lists.
- JoachimSchipper 14y ago
  I'm confused - tightly focused groups with high entry requirements may be able to get away with less moderation, but how would you create something more general-purpose, like HN?
  - einhverfr 14y ago
    I think the question isn't general-purpose but "what is the purpose?" If the purpose is collective economic advancement through developing awesome software, all you have to do is support new members of the community in getting going. If the purpose is having fun, spirited debates, then this becomes harder. However the same rules apply. These are: 1) Stratify the community so not everyone has an equal voice in everything. 2) Every strata has an obligation to help every other strata stay civil and grow the community and norms together.
- Revisor 14y ago
  I like the metaphors in your comment but cannot imagine anything specific. What do you mean with the layers that support each other?
  - einhverfr 14y ago
laughinghan 14y ago
Is it just me, or does this reek of elitism? ...into this garden comes a fool...Then another fool joins, and the two fools begin talking to each other, and at that point some of the old members, those with the highest standards and the best opportunities elsewhere, leave... It reads to me like the fool is somehow intrinsically, immutably subhuman compared to the "knowledgeable and interested folk". It's as if we weren't all once not knowledgeable, as if the non-knowledgeable fool can never become knowledgeable. I'd say that compared to a disinterested fool, a non-knowledgeable fool who's interested and is attracted to this garden of "high quality speech" is easier to fix. The conclusion seems to go against everything Less Wrong is about. It reads to me like, "biases? Nah, I bet nine times out of ten you're not biased at all. Downvote away!"
- JulianMorrison 14y ago
  In this context, "fool" is an action not an immutable nature - it's the action of talking about topics that are either well below the intellectual level of the ongoing discussion, or a distraction from it. It doesn't matter why a person does this, it matters that they do it at all. Up to a certain rate of inflow of well meaning fools, the group can absorb and socialize them. If there is a fire-hose of them, you get an Eternal September and the forum dies.
- dazmax 14y ago
  Yes, it is elitist, but judging someone as being not up to the standards of a community is not the same as calling them subhuman. As for the conclusion, the argument he's making is that he has seen evidence of a bias against making these harsh judgements, and it has led to the destruction of valuable internet communities.
- tomjen3 14y ago
  So what if it is elitism? Elitism is a great thing provided that the elites become elites not by reason of birth, but because they are the most skilled or knowledgeable. You don't have an issue with elitism when it comes to doctors, do you? No forum I know of has lasted long enough to a second generation of users.
- barry-cotter 14y ago
galfarragem 14y ago
I'm new here. In my opinion HN has the most advanced online community control system that I know. For example I cannot downvote. That's great. I didn't contribute enough to have that previlege yet, I'm still adapting to community standards. I don't want my mistakes to weaken the community standards, the same standards that made me want to join. If the core members don't think I'm contributing I agree that they should have the power to weaken me. Some control in one website is not censorship. It WAS MY CHOICE to join this community, I didn't create it. If I'm not happy at any moment I'm free to go. I'm just being banned from a community, I'm not being banned from internet, that would be censorship. There are still thousands of other communities to belong or even start a new one. This is different from censorship in one country. There you have right to belong cause you borned there, it WASN'T YOUR CHOICE to join. You are already a core member. You have the same rights as everybody else to establish the standards. You need a place to exist. edit: I think we can use this "logic" to analyze immigration problem.
mischov 14y ago
> It was once a well-kept garden of intelligent discussion .... But into this garden comes a fool [quoted from the original article] Assuming this isn't a community of those who come out of the womb enlightened, aren't most of us living in some state of foolishness? I suppose it might be possible to sustain a community by continuously attracting new enlightened individuals, but wouldn't it be more practical to do what most societies do and teach (at least some of) the fools until they aren't fools any longer?
DenisM 14y ago
In FIDO.net the problems were largely solved, and they remained solved for a long time. It worked like this: 1. Each forum has a list of rules. Not reading rules -> penalty. Breaking the rules -> penalty. 2. Each forum forum has a FAQ. Asking a question from FAQ -> penalty. Unless you can show you read FAQ and there is still something to be discussed. 3. Each forum has regularly updated off-topic list. Bringing up a topic from this list -> penalty. Moderator keeps the offtopics up to date, adding/removing things as needed to maintain calm. 4. Arguing with moderator or comoderators in public -> penalty. All arguments should go into private messages. 5. Telling others what they can and cannot say (usurping moderator's power) -> penalty. All complains should go into private mail. 6. Moderator is usually elected (if public forum) or self-appointed (if he owns the forum). The former can be impeached. The latter can be ignored by creating an alternative forum. 7. Moderator appoints co-moderators. If comoderators misbehave, moderator alone can overrule. 8. Penalties accumulate, yielding bannination. The system worked well because bannination was real - most people on FIDO had real identities. No reason one can't do the same with facebook logins now.
- DrJokepu 14y ago
  FidoNet was network governed by a group petty, power-hungry and insecure moderators posing as lords of the manor. It was really, really sad. It worked well in the sense a prison colony could work well. It's a good thing that the whole thing has pretty much died and replaced by the much bigger and more diverse Web.
  - DenisM 14y ago
    In my corner of the FIDO moderators were harsh but just. I find it that generally people appreciate tyranny when it leads to excellent result where it matters, in this case quality discussion on various topics.
j1o1h1n 14y ago
These little localised gardens, their upvotes and downvotes have lost the ancient pure glory of USENET and the killfile. "This means all your question, comments, or pleas for help will go unheard... or, even worse, answered by idiots."

182 points by llambda 14y ago

downvoting is just as much a problem with fools as well. A good downvote is when a post/comment is abusive or pointless. A bad downvote is when the voter disagrees with the opinion expressed. Mention Microsoft on slashdot you'll get downvoted, period. Mention VisualBasic on any tech forum you'll get downvotes regardless of the point you're trying to make. Eventually you learn to stop trying to present alternative points of view and just go with the flow or leave because the "fools" are now in charge of the downvoting.

DanBC2 14y ago
With luck many silent but wise people will downvote the one or two noisy fools. There's a strong temptation to interact, even with someone you suspect is a fool. Resist that temptation, and carefully use a downvote. There's a great article called "Why We Banned Legos" which covers some of the weird problems that online communities get into. (A small group of children get control of the lego, and decide who can have what pieces, etc.) (http://www.rethinkingschools.org/restrict.asp?path=archive/21_02/lego212.shtml http://www.rethinkingschools.org/restrict.asp?path=archive/2...) Meatball wiki covers lots of these concepts. I've posted it before. Here it is again. (http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/ http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/)
- billpatrianakos 14y ago
  You're probably right about the silent but wise but unfortunately on HN you cannot be silent and have downvote privileges. Edit: To be clear, it's not unfortunate that the silent probably won't be downvoting, it's the wise we're missing out on.
spindritf 14y ago
> A good downvote is when a post/comment is abusive or pointless. A bad downvote is when the voter disagrees with the opinion expressed. A downvote is also justified when a comment is misleading, contains a fallacious argument, or misrepresents contents of other comments or the article. Sometimes even when it's just incorrect. Unless the particular misconception is somewhat popular or difficult to spot. Basically, anything that could be removed without loss of value, should be downvoted.
- Karunamon 14y ago
  My only disagreement with this comes in when some kind of censorship is enacted once you pass a certain number of down votes. And no, the fact that you can disable that censorship doesn't ameliorate the issue - the majority will still be unable to see the comment. Reddit is particularly bad at this, as once you hit -2, your comment might as well have never been posted. Any idiot with a bot and a grudge can make anything you do invisible. FWIW I like the way HN has chosen to handle this. You can't even downvote until you go past a certain karma threshold (eliminates sock puppetry and calling for backup), and even if you are down voted into oblivion, your words are still visible (if a little harder to see). Now if they'd just lighten up on the hell bans. I've seen a number of valid comments here which were dead on arrival.
jseliger 14y ago
Great comment—and the problem your describing completely true. Still, I think the post is a useful reminder because I've noticed a general deterioration in the HN comments over the past six months or so (and I even wrote a post about that: http://jseliger.com/2012/01/15/commenting-community-deterioration-and-hacker-news/ http://jseliger.com/2012/01/15/commenting-community-deterior... ; see also this discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3469453 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3469453 ). For me, a comment like this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4034170 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4034170 exemplifies some of the deterioration. The commenter asks for substantiation of a claim that refers back to the original article that was submitted. If he'd read the article, he'd know that. Now, it's easy to argue that this is a one-time example, and alone that's true. But I'm noticing these kinds of comments more and more—ones in which people comment without knowing anything, or without reading the original article, or even without closely reading the person who they're replying to. Unfortunately, I don't have a solution.
- AncientPC 14y ago
  No one has found a good solution to this problem. As an open community grows it will inevitably experience Eternal September and content quality will decrease. It happened with Usenet, Slashdot, Reddit, and Hacker News is following their footsteps. The upper echelon will migrate, others will follow. Perhaps closed communities with a curated member list is the answer[1][2]. Closed communities are not without its own drawbacks, but the trade off may be acceptable to some. Open communities allows for anyone's input, but you also get drama like arguing about Javascript semicolons or GitHub's commit messages. However, closed communities are susceptible to group think. How do you judge a minority opinion's validity? [1]: http://svbtle.com/ http://svbtle.com/ [2]: http://www.behance.net/ http://www.behance.net/
  - einhverfr 14y ago
    HN probably slower than the others for the same reason that PostgreSQL seems to be perpetually getting better.... I think the decay you note is specific to communities who are not coming in with any sort of common self-interest at stake. In essence they are what I might call "intellectual entertainment" communities. People read and argue on Slashdot primarily because it's fun. People argue on PostgreSQL email lists because they all want PostgreSQL to be as good as it can be. In the former, a troll can stir up a lot of argument, but in the latter, the most that can be hoped for is a collegial discussion on the merits of a specific approach. HN leans towards the former. I am betting most commenters are mostly interested in fun conversations. However, the fact is that it is also an integral part of a VC ecosystem and so presents an aspect of common economic interest as well.
tokenadult 14y ago
A good downvote is when a post/comment is abusive or pointless. A bad downvote is when the voter disagrees with the opinion expressed. At least 1568 days ago, the site founder pg was of a different opinion. He wrote, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 "I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness. "It only becomes abuse when people resort to karma bombing: downvoting a lot of comments by one user without reading them in order to subtract maximum karma. Fortunately we now have several levels of software to protect against that." My own analysis of the issue is that if I receive a downvote, I'm curious about why I received it. I understand that not everyone shares all of my opinions, but perhaps if one of my comments is downvoted, I can learn something about how to express my opinions so that they are allowed to stand, without people feeling they have to go out of their way to vote them down. Any time I have a comment with negative karma (which is a rare occurrence), I look back on what I said, and think about what I can learn from the other comments in the same thread and how I might express myself better the next time. I try to learn from the people who disagree with me as well as from the people who agree with me.
- sounds 14y ago
  Thank you for quoting the comment more fully. I've seen it paraphrased too succinctly as "pg says downvotes can mean disagree." Although pg hasn't implemented a change to this effect, I believe he would agree that -- "people feeling they have to go out of their way to vote them down" -- implies a downvote should be more work than an upvote. I think a downvote should require a response to the parent comment that: 1. contains at least 15 English words, excluding quoted phrases 2. quotes at least min(25% of entire comment, 5 consecutive words) of the parent comment 3. meets current downvote requirements (karma and downvote bombing protections spring to mind immediately) For the sake of argument, such a "required downvote comment" could contribute almost nothing -- but it would still reduce downvotes. An example of a really bad downvote comment on this comment might be: > a change to this effect This is HN, not reddit. Um, did you read the article? I down voted you. The 15 English word requirement sort of requires some sort of explanation. Does anyone think this would help?
makecheck 14y ago
I think upvotes and downvotes should be harder to do. An example of what would make a vote "harder" would be to require reason-words. When you click down-arrow a box might pop up where you must select (or better still, type out in full) at least two words justifying the vote such as "Abusive" or "Pointless". This would also help to prevent fat-fingered downvotes that I've accidentally done on my iPad because the arrows are too close together and irreversible.
- unimpressive 14y ago
  I don't think making it mandatory is necessarily a good idea. But I would love to be able to have people give me a short reason for an down vote so that I can hopefully see what I'm doing wrong. Anonymously of course. One issue I could see happening would be people abusing the feature to send hateful messages. Some solutions may be to allow users to delete messages or block the ability to give them text feedback along with a down or up vote. Another problem might be causing a sort of hugfest where users try to get upvotes by upvoting someone else, creating an upvote ring. (Eg: Including their name in the feedback and asking for upvotes.) One countermeasure would be to block the user from putting in their unabridged unedited name into the feedback box. (Of course, this could be circumvented in the way that almost all other online censor systems are circumvented. Obfuscation.) Thoughts?
  - makecheck 14y ago
    Yes, an open text channel could be abused and it is only unlikely to be abused if it's public; e.g. everything reads "makecheck said X" and not just "X". Maybe the right thing is for downvotes to always list voter IDs (but probably not long upvote lists). If I downvote something for "the right reasons" I don't really care if anyone knows it because I expect most people will agree with me. The opposite would be true for someone doing a lot of petty downvoting; he or she would probably be embarrassed and discouraged once everyone can see that the same person has downvoted a bunch of comments for no reason. One way to find a "reason" for a personal downvote, then, would be to look at everything else your downvoters have downvoted. One of two patterns would probably form: either these people are in the habit of downvoting lots of stuff for no reason, or they seem to be downvoting comments that have common themes.
JoachimSchipper 14y ago
I don't agree. First, the people complaining about downvotes often really did write a comment worth being downvoted (I didn't look at your history). Second, HN is still very valuable if the top comments are all good - it's much less necessary that all good comments are on the top. And despite what people say, the key source of groupthink on HN is not the voting system (rather, the homogeneity of the user base.)
taw 14y ago
My experience with multiple subreddits is that subreddits which disabled downvote button (by custom CSS style, it's still there if you really need it) tend to have much more friendly and polite discussion, very much like HN. Subreddits of comparable size and/or field which keep downvote button tend to be extremely argumentative and full of flames. Getting downvoted turns off your reason and you start seeing the thing not as a friendly argument but as a fight. And so does the other side. The result is ugly.

Karunamon 14y ago

I would give this 50 up votes if I possibly could, mostly because it struck very close to home. I've been in a leadership role in a couple of smallish online communities that, on further reflection, died just because of what this article is talking about. Fear of doing anything because of not wanting to be labeled another mod abusing their powers, or what have you. I've been members of communities that died or were damaged due to outright mod abuse - figure the converse is better, right? Death through inaction and allowance is better than death through action and disallowance, right? Intent doesn't even begin to enter into it.. right? Not so sure anymore. So like most things in life, it's a balancing act. As a commenter on the article said, 9 times out of 10, your guess that a comment is crap, will be correct. Don't start second guessing yourself. You probably have a very finely tuned crap sensor.

einhverfr 14y ago
If you have a couple people in a leadership role that you share power with, you can make sure everyone acts together and that sticky situations are discussed beforehand. That helps manage both the impression of abuse of power and issues in application.

thebooktocome 14y ago

Ironically LessWrong is going through a phase of struggling with increasingly meddlesome trolls, without terribly much moderation in evidence.

nohat 14y ago
A community is going through exactly what he was warning about? That's not irony.
- thebooktocome 14y ago
  Not just any community; the community the author was trying to establish by writing this essay (along with the others). That's tragic irony.
  - drostie 14y ago
    It perhaps also fulfills that story-role, yes. Nonetheless, it shouldn't be contrary to your expectations, if you apply a little wisdom. I find in my own case that the things which bug me about others are things which deeply bug me about myself. Whenever I find my heart beating a little harder and my brow a little furrowed, I try to relax, and take a deep breath, and see what it is within me which resonates so strongly against the error that I have seen. I am normally quite patient with error, and this usually causes my impatience. Personally, I feel this "what is wrong with me" redirection is a much deeper lesson than the fact that harsh moderation can help keep a community together. First off, it is a discipline which can help keep us together, as opposed to the communities we moderate. And second, because the original lesson comes embedded in a much deeper truth, which Eliezer doesn't seem to acknowledge. I would like to spend a moment on this: The deeper truth is that love is transformative, that to love is to change both yourself and your beloved. The original post just notes that if a moderator isn't moderating, they aren't loving their community. True enough. It is important, however, to understand that transformation is not sufficient for love: that we all know people who do use their authority too far. Well-kept gardens don't die due to pacifism. That's stupid -- if they did, then they weren't "well-kept". But they die because they don't get the love that they need. It doesn't matter how much you pull the weeds if you forget to water the roots and fertilise the soil. To any of you who wish to know whether they love their job, I will simply add the poignant questions: when did you last transform it? And when did it last transform you?

grourk 14y ago

The problem is you might identify as "fool" someone who simply doesn't agree with you or the established groupthink. Re-read the first few paragraphs and replace the word "fool" with "person who doesn't agree with you" -- now it says something very different.

jamesaguilar 14y ago
Now replace fool with dragon. Says something different again. Whoa! Good mods can tell the difference between people who have other views and idiots. If the moderators in your community of choice can't, you should probably choose another community. But your equivocation between silencing other viewpoints and eliminating unhealthy voices is not useful.
- grourk 14y ago
  I upvoted you before you added the second paragraph because I thought your joke was funny. "But your equivocation between silencing other viewpoints and eliminating unhealthy voices is not useful." Why not? I was making the point that it's often not easy to tell the difference.
  - jamesaguilar 14y ago
    I mean, the body of the blog post you're responding to is claiming a) that it is, and b) that even when it isn't, you can just leave a poorly modded community. In the face of that, I don't find "replace-the-word" rhetoric very compelling.
    - stcredzero 14y ago
      What are the factors that would make it compelling?
      - jamesaguilar 14y ago
        If it were shown that even in good communities with solid mods, a primary use of moderating power was to silence dissent. For example, in this community, anti-startup articles get posted occasionally. I'd expect to see far more dead comments from people who post agreement with such articles. But I browse with showdead on, and I see no such thing. Basically, the rhetoric needs to line up with the evidence at hand. If it doesn't, it's unsound.

nohat 14y ago

The large number of people willing to take Brian Hamacheck's word (without response or evidence) on the "who's here" versus "who's near me" dispute seems relevant to me. The number of people offering to donate is even more disturbing.

freshnote 14y ago
I said much the same thing about the Megaupload debacle: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4047683 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4047683 I see it here all the time, by users with extremely high karma.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
Alex3917 14y ago
What's even more disturbing is reading the comments of the arrest section on local newspapers. 95% of the people commenting seem to make up these elaborate fantasy scenarios of what happened in their heads and then decide people's guilt or innocence based on that.
- stcredzero 14y ago
  Welcome to the human condition. Evidently, the human imagination predicts well in the context of small family groups in the wilderness. Have a society with enough complexity to merit laws, and the imagination isn't so finely tuned.
  - Eliezer 14y ago
    What makes you think it works on small family groups? All we can conclude from ev-psych is that making stuff up didn't cost the imaginers much reproductive success personally - we have no idea what it did to the actual victims having stories made up about them.
    - 14y ago

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

mmanfrin 14y ago

Things just haven't been the same since September '93.

kijin 14y ago

I've seen this article posted here multiple times, and every time a few people seem to misunderstand the conclusion of this article. As far as I can tell, Yudkowsky's point is not that online communities need strong moderators. His main conclusion is that people should make judicious use of downvotes. > But that was not a karma system, actually. > Here—you must trust yourselves. > You have the downvote. Use it or USENET. In old BBS systems, a handful of moderators were given the task of sorting out good posts from bad posts. We might say that those were the days of benevolent dictators. But of course, this raises the question of how people can trust those dictators to be benevolent all the time. In most cases, moderators do act in the best interest of the community, but sometimes they go on power trips, and when they do, it makes everyone question whether it was a good idea to give all those powers to moderators in the first place. That's exactly what happens in real-world politics, too, whenever you give a lot of power to a person or institution. Nowadays, virtually every Internet community allows users to vote on everything. One might say that this is more "democratic" than relying on moderators alone to sort out good posts from bad posts, because now everyone participates in the task of moderation. This can also be more efficient, because really bad posts will often be downvoted into oblivion even before a mod has had a chance to look at it. But like any real-world democracy, a voting system has its limits. There will have to be mechanisms to prevent circlejerks, and communities will still need moderators to carry out certain tasks. The difficult question, as usual, is how to design a fair, effective, and transparent division of labor between participatory democracy (upvotes/downvotes) and top-down administration (mods). Whenever mods in a subreddit come up with plans to clean up what they perceive to be a mess, there are always people who argue that such measures are unnecessary because people can just downvote what they don't want to see in that subreddit. But you can't rely on either method alone. Strong moderation will be futile if people keep upvoting pun threads in a science subreddit. Downvoting will have limited efficacy in the absence of a mechanism to kick out the most egregious offenders. Fortunately, some kind of balance between the two extremes is what most subreddits eventually settle with. An efficient democracy is neither fully managed by elites nor completely dependent on every shift of public opinion. It's all about checks and balances. Moderators need to be kept accountable to ordinary users who can call out when they see a power trip. Ordinary users need to be kept accountable, too, by means of a fair and consistent enforcement of forum rules. None of this, of course, invalidates Yudkowsky's arguments. > Waiting until the last resort of absolute, blatent, undeniable egregiousness ... waiting until you can be certain you are in the right, and fear no questioning looks ... is waiting far too late. Science can never reach absolute certainty, right? Only hypotheses that have yet to be falsified. But the lack of absolute certainty does not, and should not, prevent people from making judgments on the basis of the best available evidence. You can act even if you're not certain -- as long as you leave the door open to correcting yourself once you have access to better evidence.

n-ion 14y ago

That's one way to look at it... Another is just the phenomena of fads. No matter how well-kept the garden of slashdot/digg/reddit/HN they all have a time horizon. Just enjoy it while it lasts.

stinkytaco 14y ago
We all have the desire to analyze the things in our life (groups of friends, clubs, companies, communities) that have died. I do it all the time. I wonder what happened to community "x" that I was a part of and really enjoyed and miss. You look around at your neighborhood or city and see permanence and figure your community must have had something wrong with it. Of course, the barriers to entry and exit for an online community are very low. People change, the time they have available changes, their interests change, whatever. They exit the community as easily as they entered it. Soon the community dies. Your town or neighborhood isn't so easily left or entered so the stakes are much higher. Sometimes communities just get old and people leave. Pretty soon they're gone.

unimpressive 14y ago

>It's just one fool, and if we can't tolerate just one fool, well, we must not be very tolerant. Repeat after me: 100 times I’ve sworn this oath: 100 years I’d rather languish in a dungeon, 100 mountains I’d rather grind to dust, If only I don’t have to make a fool to see the truth. – Bakhvalan Machmud Now, the problem arises when that fool is you.

mahyarm 14y ago
That kind of attitude leads to not being able to take any sort of challenging by anyone who you label fool or inferior, be it by smarts, knowledge, experience or other things.
- unimpressive 14y ago
  The quote is a translation as far as I know. (The only reference to it I can find is in a book translated from Russian about Russia.) So subtle nuances are likely missing. To me at least; "to make" a fool to see the truth implies that you will try and try until you succeed. This approach is ineffective because a large portion of people are never satisfied. (See: Pretty much any Internet drama or argument.) And if you adopt the attitude of winning every argument, you will almost inevitably flood communication channels with your discourse. (See: Any HN thread where the whole page is a few outlying comments and a majority in a threaded argument about a topic. Or a forum thread that goes on for pages where people argue about something.) Such discourse also costs you time to participate in and prevents you from doing more useful work. (Before writing this comment I could have sworn that Newton wrote a letter to this effect explaining why he stopped publishing his works. But I couldn't source it (I spent around 20 minutes trying.) so I decided that if it exists including this comment will likely make it appear from the depths of the Internet, if it doesn't it doesn't.) There comes a point where the best way to resolve an argument is to either cut it short or not have it. EDIT: A large portion of this is how one defines the word "fool" if everyone who disagrees with you is a fool in your mind by default, then I doubt you're going to listen to anyone who expresses disagreement. Regardless of weather or not you engage them in conversation. People as a general rule don't let the people they consider fools change their mind. Unless by proxy when they learn from their actions.

MrVitaliy 14y ago

Interestingly, the story strikes as a completely opposite of 4chan.org/sci/ where among army of trolls many intellectuals for many years discuss interesting ideas. Maybe it's the community size, maybe it's new technology (comment voting, bans and such) but I have a hunch that fools are not a problem.

stcredzero 14y ago
Are the trolls used as furniture in that setting?
hollerith 14y ago
Does 4chan.org/sci/ have comment voting? If not, I cannot make sense out of your comment. EDIT: replaced period with question mark in my first sentence.
- MrVitaliy 14y ago
  Maybe it's due to 4chan's huge community size that fools are not a problem as they seem in smaller communities. Additionally, there is a whole slew of tools to identify (and punish) fools such as karma, comment voting, etc which perhaps weren't as widely available in the past. 4chan has mods who routinely remove child-porn and other questionable, non-related material. http://www.4chan.org/faq#whomod http://www.4chan.org/faq#whomod

ralfd 14y ago

That is also the reason why /r/askscience is one of the better subreddits: http://imgur.com/JGqhf.png http://imgur.com/JGqhf.png

dfc 14y ago
For those of us unfamiliar with reddit and /r/askscience in particular can you elaborate?
- repsilat 14y ago
  Posts in reddit are partitioned into "subreddits". Each submission is made to one subreddit, though multiple submissions can be made to spread items to different communities. Each subreddit is essentially like Hacker News, a list of ranked links with comments all flavoured by some common theme. The front page of reddit aggregates posts from your preferred subreddits (or a default list of popular subs for users who aren't logged in). /r/askscience is a subreddit in which users can ask real scientists questions about science. It's a less-structured StackOverflow, essentially. Submissions are somewhat moderated, comments are more heavily moderated. Top-level comments are not allowed to be jokes, and offending comments are removed. On-topic jokes in other places are allowed, but too much joking around in a thread will often lead to all of the comments in the thread being removed. Deleted comments are replaced by "Comment removed" tombstones, and seeing whole trees of these tombstones is a decent reminder to stay on-topic. The CSS of the subreddit also encourages the community to maintain their standards. When upvoting, downvoting, commenting etc, users are reminded what those actions represent in the community. There is also an informal hierarchy of posters, with experts' comments being identified with short descriptions of their specialisations. The posts of these users are given more weight by the community, but the posters are held to somewhat higher standards.
- ceph_ 14y ago
  /r/askscience is a heavily moderated subreddit where there are many rules for posting/commenting beyond those of other subreddits. Top level replies that don't site verifiable sources or contain layman's speculation are deleted. Comments that are off topic or do not comply with the rules are also promptly moderated.

Porter_423 14y ago

The question is, do people think that this is the nature of community? There is a possible universe (possible with respect to my current logical uncertainty) in which communities are necessarily reliant on vigilance to survive. There is also a possible universe where there are fundamentally stable solutions to this problem. In such a universe, a community can survive the introduction of many malicious or misguided users because its dynamics are good rather than because its moderator is vigilant. I strongly, strongly suspect that we live in the second universe. If we do, I think trying to solve this problem is important (fostering intelligent discourse is more important than the sum of all existing online communities). I don't mean saying "lets try and change karma in this way and see what happens;" I mean saying, "lets try and describe some properties that would be desirable for the dynamics of the community to satisfy and then try and implement a system which provably satisfies them."

stcredzero 14y ago

This is a two-edged sword. Also keep in mind, "Who watches the Watchmen?" The power to ban can also be used to turn a group into a personal fief. As in many things, the optimum path is a middle one. Checks and balances are needed. Sometimes the ban hammer is wielded by those with troll ethics.

Zakharov 14y ago
The article addresses this. Basically, it's better to risk the small chance of an abusive mod than the large chance of a gradual decay.

1123581321 14y ago

I think he meant that unkempt gardens die. Well-kept gardens are curated or moderated.

losethos 14y ago

homo reality is broken--angels want it that way. Fuck em. Stupid conversation. God says... an oath betwixt us, even betwixt us and thee, and let us make a covenant with thee; 26:29 That thou wilt do us no hurt, as we have not touched thee, and as we have done unto thee nothing but good, and have sent thee away in peace: thou art now the blessed of the LORD. 26:30 And he made them a feast, and they did eat and drink. 26:31 And they rose up betimes in the morning, and sware one to another: and Isaac sent them away, and they departed from him in peace. 26:32 And it came to pass the same day, that Isaac's servants came, and told him concerning the well which they had digged, and said unto him, We have found water. 26:33 And he called it Shebah: therefore the name of the city is Beersheba unto this day.

batista 14y ago

Clay Shirky's "A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy" is also a very good read on the matter: http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

itsnotlupus 14y ago

The tension between maintaining the original quality and growing the size of the community by several orders of magnitude is, in my opinion, an unsolvable problem. No amount of arrow-clicking, ignore list or banning can solve this. The easiest way to control the quality of the community is to control its growth. Pay-wall, invites, etc. will all be vastly more useful than after-the-fact approaches. When the barbarians are in the walls, you've already lost.

dfc 14y ago

The only online community I can think of that this does not apply to is advogato.

einhverfr 14y ago

As a permaculture fan, I say well kept gardens die by being too homogeneous and rigidly ordered, rather than alive, organic, and vital. Layer plants in space and time and select them appropriately, and you can leave them unattended for months on end. Well-layered gardens (like food forests but also my own flower gardens which never get weeded) also better support their members as each plant fills functions which help the other plants. We need well-layered on-line communities, ones where each layer supports all others in an interdependent web. In such a community, trolls just simply don't show up. There is no room for them. As the permaculturists say, all of life's problems can be solved in a garden. Lest you doubt my bit about troll-free communities, six years in, I have yet to have to take action against trolls in the LedgerSMB community. I have also never seen trolls on the PostgreSQL email lists.

JoachimSchipper 14y ago
I'm confused - tightly focused groups with high entry requirements may be able to get away with less moderation, but how would you create something more general-purpose, like HN?
- einhverfr 14y ago
  I think the question isn't general-purpose but "what is the purpose?" If the purpose is collective economic advancement through developing awesome software, all you have to do is support new members of the community in getting going. If the purpose is having fun, spirited debates, then this becomes harder. However the same rules apply. These are: 1) Stratify the community so not everyone has an equal voice in everything. 2) Every strata has an obligation to help every other strata stay civil and grow the community and norms together.
Revisor 14y ago
I like the metaphors in your comment but cannot imagine anything specific. What do you mean with the layers that support each other?
- einhverfr 14y ago

laughinghan 14y ago

Is it just me, or does this reek of elitism? ...into this garden comes a fool...Then another fool joins, and the two fools begin talking to each other, and at that point some of the old members, those with the highest standards and the best opportunities elsewhere, leave... It reads to me like the fool is somehow intrinsically, immutably subhuman compared to the "knowledgeable and interested folk". It's as if we weren't all once not knowledgeable, as if the non-knowledgeable fool can never become knowledgeable. I'd say that compared to a disinterested fool, a non-knowledgeable fool who's interested and is attracted to this garden of "high quality speech" is easier to fix. The conclusion seems to go against everything Less Wrong is about. It reads to me like, "biases? Nah, I bet nine times out of ten you're not biased at all. Downvote away!"

JulianMorrison 14y ago
In this context, "fool" is an action not an immutable nature - it's the action of talking about topics that are either well below the intellectual level of the ongoing discussion, or a distraction from it. It doesn't matter why a person does this, it matters that they do it at all. Up to a certain rate of inflow of well meaning fools, the group can absorb and socialize them. If there is a fire-hose of them, you get an Eternal September and the forum dies.
dazmax 14y ago
Yes, it is elitist, but judging someone as being not up to the standards of a community is not the same as calling them subhuman. As for the conclusion, the argument he's making is that he has seen evidence of a bias against making these harsh judgements, and it has led to the destruction of valuable internet communities.
tomjen3 14y ago
So what if it is elitism? Elitism is a great thing provided that the elites become elites not by reason of birth, but because they are the most skilled or knowledgeable. You don't have an issue with elitism when it comes to doctors, do you? No forum I know of has lasted long enough to a second generation of users.
barry-cotter 14y ago

galfarragem 14y ago

I'm new here. In my opinion HN has the most advanced online community control system that I know. For example I cannot downvote. That's great. I didn't contribute enough to have that previlege yet, I'm still adapting to community standards. I don't want my mistakes to weaken the community standards, the same standards that made me want to join. If the core members don't think I'm contributing I agree that they should have the power to weaken me. Some control in one website is not censorship. It WAS MY CHOICE to join this community, I didn't create it. If I'm not happy at any moment I'm free to go. I'm just being banned from a community, I'm not being banned from internet, that would be censorship. There are still thousands of other communities to belong or even start a new one. This is different from censorship in one country. There you have right to belong cause you borned there, it WASN'T YOUR CHOICE to join. You are already a core member. You have the same rights as everybody else to establish the standards. You need a place to exist. edit: I think we can use this "logic" to analyze immigration problem.

mischov 14y ago

> It was once a well-kept garden of intelligent discussion .... But into this garden comes a fool [quoted from the original article] Assuming this isn't a community of those who come out of the womb enlightened, aren't most of us living in some state of foolishness? I suppose it might be possible to sustain a community by continuously attracting new enlightened individuals, but wouldn't it be more practical to do what most societies do and teach (at least some of) the fools until they aren't fools any longer?

DenisM 14y ago

In FIDO.net the problems were largely solved, and they remained solved for a long time. It worked like this: 1. Each forum has a list of rules. Not reading rules -> penalty. Breaking the rules -> penalty. 2. Each forum forum has a FAQ. Asking a question from FAQ -> penalty. Unless you can show you read FAQ and there is still something to be discussed. 3. Each forum has regularly updated off-topic list. Bringing up a topic from this list -> penalty. Moderator keeps the offtopics up to date, adding/removing things as needed to maintain calm. 4. Arguing with moderator or comoderators in public -> penalty. All arguments should go into private messages. 5. Telling others what they can and cannot say (usurping moderator's power) -> penalty. All complains should go into private mail. 6. Moderator is usually elected (if public forum) or self-appointed (if he owns the forum). The former can be impeached. The latter can be ignored by creating an alternative forum. 7. Moderator appoints co-moderators. If comoderators misbehave, moderator alone can overrule. 8. Penalties accumulate, yielding bannination. The system worked well because bannination was real - most people on FIDO had real identities. No reason one can't do the same with facebook logins now.

DrJokepu 14y ago
FidoNet was network governed by a group petty, power-hungry and insecure moderators posing as lords of the manor. It was really, really sad. It worked well in the sense a prison colony could work well. It's a good thing that the whole thing has pretty much died and replaced by the much bigger and more diverse Web.
- DenisM 14y ago
  In my corner of the FIDO moderators were harsh but just. I find it that generally people appreciate tyranny when it leads to excellent result where it matters, in this case quality discussion on various topics.

j1o1h1n 14y ago

These little localised gardens, their upvotes and downvotes have lost the ancient pure glory of USENET and the killfile. "This means all your question, comments, or pleas for help will go unheard... or, even worse, answered by idiots."