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> It was invented by Disqus, a company whose discussion software handles the threads at 90,000 blogs worldwide (including mine). In this paradigm, if a comment
by chollida1 17y ago
> It was invented by Disqus, a company whose discussion software handles the threads at 90,000 blogs worldwide (including mine). In this paradigm, if a comment gets a lot of negative ratings, it goes invisible. No one can see it—except, crucially, the person who posted it. "So the troll just thinks that everyone has learned to ignore him, and he gets discouraged and goes away," chuckles Disqus cofounder Daniel Ha.
This is just a lack of fact checking. This technique hsa been in use for many years now.
I've used it on my discussion groups since 2001/2002, I can't remember the exact year. Joel of Joel on software describes a similar technique that he uses.
- smhinsey 17y agoI'm not sure when it was introduced but I understand that reddit does this as well. It's a pretty clever idea, but it really hasn't helped much there so far.
- whughes 17y agoReddit isn't very strict with its moderation, unlike HN. My understanding is that reddit attempts to only block out-and-out spam / crapflooding / malicious links. There are ways to circumvent it or at least check to see if you've been banned as well, so it's not a perfect defense against a tenacious troll.
- smhinsey 17y agoGood point. There is definitely a distinction of intent that is reflected in the tenor of the two sites.
- aston 17y agoIn the most recent WIRED (magazine), the errata section acknowledges that the technique wasn't invented by Disqus. Not sure how it slipped past the initial fact check, but they figured it out eventually. You do have to wonder how that didn't get corrected in the very mutable online version of the story, though...