5 ms·

EDIT: Zed just addressed this with some basic plans: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=974744 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=974744 Overall it looks nic

by rufo 17y ago

EDIT: Zed just addressed this with some basic plans: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=974744 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=974744 Overall it looks nice. The most interesting/controversial bit to me is the following (taken from librelist.com): Nobody Can Be Taken Off The “libre” in the name means freedom for everyone to discuss their opinions, so nobody will have the right to boot you off or enforce arbitrary “list Nazi” rules simply because you disagree with them. That of course doesn’t mean you should act like a jerk, but the librelist.com philosophy is that healthy communities can survive and need “trolls”.

nollidge 17y ago
So it's freedom, just not for the list manager. Can anyone provide a defense (from Zed or anyone) for the idea that a healthy community needs trolls? I can understand the need for dissent and argument, but it seems to me that trolling is categorically different from those.
- gloob 17y ago
  A not-very-good-but-still-fun argument: Trolls are the predators of internet communities. They prey on the sick, the weak, and the perennially outraged (mostly this last group) and, if they are successful, drive them away from the community. A community without perennially outraged people is better than a community with them. The question is whether this benefit is worth the potential cost, which is probably something that almost entirely dependent on the nature of the community and the personalities of the trolls involved. Edit: By "perennially outraged", I am referring to people who are constantly angry or miserable for no reason other than that such an emotional state is "what they do". They aren't trolls themselves, any more than a particularly unpleasant customer is a troll. They're just constantly unhappy and vocal about it.
  - petervandijck 17y ago
    Trolls drive away the GOOD people, not the weak/sick ones. They're more like a fungus infection than like a predator.
    - gloob 17y ago
      I think who they end up driving away is mostly determined by the kind of community and the kind of trolls. Most of the places on the Internet where I hang out, the trolls like the community they are a part of and are rather uninterested in destroying it. They do their thing primarily to get an emotional reaction out of people, and the easiest people to get an emotional reaction out of are the people who are constantly emotional. Because the overlap between permanently unhappy people and the "good" people (the latter group consisting of, e.g., core devs, or mods, or various other "central" members of the community) is (for most types of communities that I'm interested in) pretty small, that's not really a problem. On the other hand, turning 4chan loose on a Neopets mailing list would probably end badly for the community, yes.
      - Perceval 17y ago
        4chan users are not trolls. They're griefers and sociopaths. Like you said, trolls are generally part of a community, or make an attempt to get a rise out of people through détournement, not through outright antagonism. Over at kuro5hin.org we experienced a 'trollocaust' as it were, wherein the trolls successfully drove all the emotional beautiful souls off to another site (hulver.com). If the critical mass of trolls grows too large, community can't really be sustained.
  - zedshaw 17y ago
    No, not hardly at all. Generally there's three classes of trolls (this is just my opinion): Griefers are what you describe. People who are more interested in gaming the implied social norms of the community in order to destroy it. These people suck, but totally blocking them eliminates the second class: Dissenters are people who just disagree with you, and considering nearly every open source project is started by opinionated dissenters it's just bound to happen. I believe that without these people though your project dies because your ideas stagnate and you never really deal with actual criticism until it's too late. Also, they may just be the vocal part of your user base that wants something you don't. Finally, moderators who use their moderation powers to "indirectly troll". By this I mean people who unilaterally deny people's communications because it would interfere with their hidden agendas. If you go look at nearly every failed community, at the heart is someone like this. What I think, and what we'll find out, is that what really drives people away is not the presence of all of these, but the dominance of one of these types of "trolls". My idea is to just balance them out and give the community a real vote on what is what.
    - scott_s 17y ago
      We have different definitions of "troll." Your second category does not fit into mine; I do not consider someone who is genuinely trying to communicate to be a troll. Your assumption is that it's impossible to differentiate category one from category two. I see no reason for that to be true.
      - zedshaw 17y ago
        Nope, I never said it was impossible to differentiate, I just said that the differentiation shouldn't be controlled by a few people who potentially won't understand the difference. Here's a question for you: If you moderate a list, do you let subscribers see what you've moderated and why? If it's for the benefit of the mailing list community, then why not?
        scott_s 17y ago
        You should make this clear on librelist.com; right now, it appears that there will be no mechanism to deal with trolls. If I did moderate a list (which I don't), and there was an ability for subscribers to see the raw feed, I'd allow that. I am curious if your approach will work. It's similar to how things operate here, but I wonder if it can work with no moderators. (HN does have editors who monitor flagged articles and comments.)
  - jerf 17y ago
    If we define the emotional state of a person relative to the sort of messages they send to the list, rather than their "true" emotional state, which is more relevant to the list, the the trolls create "perennially outraged" people. I don't think that argument works.
- Quarrelsome 17y ago
  I guess the premise is that they are (objectively speaking) a valid part of any community. Perhaps in some way it is better to have "troll trolls" than people who appear to be normal but are actually very trollish. I remember a community where a bunch of people would just answer all questions with: "OMG WTF? NOT THIS AGAIN. Use the search FFS." Now this was more or less encouraged behaviour as Admins and Mods did this but these guys took it too far. So it eventually was trolling all but in name. To be honest i'm not sure I believe all that but at least he has a "troll rating" system.
  - zedshaw 17y ago
    Look at my previous reply on the subject, but I'm hoping tons of really smart people can think of a solution that is not so binary as: moderation=="list nazi moderates all dissenting opinion away" OR troll=="full frontal goatse porn for all!". In other words, with the librelist code, it IS possible to have a middle land where the community can voice their opinion of what's spam or troll without eliminating real dissenting opinions and debate.
    - Quarrelsome 17y ago
      As my name suggests I am a bit trollish myself as I am a fan of swears, passion and strong opinions. I certainly look forward to a community where the "owner" is less able to control people's input according to their own tastes. Stackoverflow has recently banned swearing.... because. This the kind of thing that pisses me off.
      - count 17y ago
        It's like the new War on Swearing. Fucking nazis!
FraaJad 17y ago
All is not lost. FTA: Nothing to allow tyranny of the minority or majority. It’s all about free speech and open communication. However, this is balanced with the above spam marking, and potentially a “troll rating” that’s similar to a spam rating.
- zedshaw 17y ago
  Additionally, keep in mind that if done right this could make it easier to have a moderated list. Rather than put some small set of brains in charge of keeping it clean, we just get the users to help keep it clean. Then you have a list system that is designed for a community to debate and argue while having what they want for communication without needed too much blocking human intervention.
almost 17y ago
This worries me a little too. What about the guy who posts several messages an hour all consisting of only of swear words or who posts answers to newbie questions with links to Goatse or any of the infinite other ways I'm sure exist to totally disrupt a list if there's no way to control anything. Of course presumably there will still be people with the authority to remove really bad examples like that. But will they have the time to look after the many many lists which will probably soon exist?
- zedshaw 17y ago
  The plan is to do it craigslist style. Each email will have a "hate" link you can hit to go mark it as spam or troll. Too many of these and the sender is blocked (for spam) or throttled (for trolls). On the inverse side, I think I'll also track your voting rates, and if you tend to rate too many people as trolls or spam then your voting will also be throttled. But, it's also just a plan. The goal is to create something that lets communities moderate themselves without too much tyranny of the majority of minority. That's why the code is open, so that people with ideas about how to do that can help make it happen.
  - almost 17y ago
    Ok, that makes a bit more sense. It's not that no one can be censored, it's just that the power to do so doesn't rest with a small group of admins. That sounds much better, hope it works out!
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - Smirlouf 17y ago
    That "hate" thing comes from your Utu project, I guess. While I like the idea, I'm not sure it's a good idea to label it as such in the interface. You might also have a hard time figuring out the genuine flaggings from the ones made by spambots...
  - jdunck 17y ago
    A big difference between craigslist flagging and inbox flagging is that by the time a user can flag a message in email, the message has been delivered to everybody. You can't have a few people remove crap messages from everybody's inbox (right?), so if I can post without reputation, and/or signup in some automated way, the whole thing melts down. Maybe deliver to people in a reputation order and slight delay to allow the damage to be minimized?
philwelch 17y ago
Sounds just like "free software" to me--you're free from the constraints of commercialization, but not from the constraints of the programmers' social ideologies. I'm not saying this to troll, I can just imagine lots of situations where I may want to set up a mailing list, but few where I want that list to become some sort of anarchic debating society where someone else's software handles the moderation for me.
- zedshaw 17y ago
  Well, the code's right there, so if you don't trust anyone else's moderation software, then you are free to grab it and run your own show. In fact, I'll even put up docs on how to get your own going. Maybe I'll call it the "tin foil hat" release of Librelist. :-)

by rufo 17y ago

nollidge 17y ago

So it's freedom, just not for the list manager. Can anyone provide a defense (from Zed or anyone) for the idea that a healthy community needs trolls? I can understand the need for dissent and argument, but it seems to me that trolling is categorically different from those.

gloob 17y ago
A not-very-good-but-still-fun argument: Trolls are the predators of internet communities. They prey on the sick, the weak, and the perennially outraged (mostly this last group) and, if they are successful, drive them away from the community. A community without perennially outraged people is better than a community with them. The question is whether this benefit is worth the potential cost, which is probably something that almost entirely dependent on the nature of the community and the personalities of the trolls involved. Edit: By "perennially outraged", I am referring to people who are constantly angry or miserable for no reason other than that such an emotional state is "what they do". They aren't trolls themselves, any more than a particularly unpleasant customer is a troll. They're just constantly unhappy and vocal about it.
- petervandijck 17y ago
  Trolls drive away the GOOD people, not the weak/sick ones. They're more like a fungus infection than like a predator.
  - gloob 17y ago
    I think who they end up driving away is mostly determined by the kind of community and the kind of trolls. Most of the places on the Internet where I hang out, the trolls like the community they are a part of and are rather uninterested in destroying it. They do their thing primarily to get an emotional reaction out of people, and the easiest people to get an emotional reaction out of are the people who are constantly emotional. Because the overlap between permanently unhappy people and the "good" people (the latter group consisting of, e.g., core devs, or mods, or various other "central" members of the community) is (for most types of communities that I'm interested in) pretty small, that's not really a problem. On the other hand, turning 4chan loose on a Neopets mailing list would probably end badly for the community, yes.
    - Perceval 17y ago
      4chan users are not trolls. They're griefers and sociopaths. Like you said, trolls are generally part of a community, or make an attempt to get a rise out of people through détournement, not through outright antagonism. Over at kuro5hin.org we experienced a 'trollocaust' as it were, wherein the trolls successfully drove all the emotional beautiful souls off to another site (hulver.com). If the critical mass of trolls grows too large, community can't really be sustained.
- zedshaw 17y ago
  No, not hardly at all. Generally there's three classes of trolls (this is just my opinion): Griefers are what you describe. People who are more interested in gaming the implied social norms of the community in order to destroy it. These people suck, but totally blocking them eliminates the second class: Dissenters are people who just disagree with you, and considering nearly every open source project is started by opinionated dissenters it's just bound to happen. I believe that without these people though your project dies because your ideas stagnate and you never really deal with actual criticism until it's too late. Also, they may just be the vocal part of your user base that wants something you don't. Finally, moderators who use their moderation powers to "indirectly troll". By this I mean people who unilaterally deny people's communications because it would interfere with their hidden agendas. If you go look at nearly every failed community, at the heart is someone like this. What I think, and what we'll find out, is that what really drives people away is not the presence of all of these, but the dominance of one of these types of "trolls". My idea is to just balance them out and give the community a real vote on what is what.
  - scott_s 17y ago
    We have different definitions of "troll." Your second category does not fit into mine; I do not consider someone who is genuinely trying to communicate to be a troll. Your assumption is that it's impossible to differentiate category one from category two. I see no reason for that to be true.
    - zedshaw 17y ago
      Nope, I never said it was impossible to differentiate, I just said that the differentiation shouldn't be controlled by a few people who potentially won't understand the difference. Here's a question for you: If you moderate a list, do you let subscribers see what you've moderated and why? If it's for the benefit of the mailing list community, then why not?
      - scott_s 17y ago
        You should make this clear on librelist.com; right now, it appears that there will be no mechanism to deal with trolls. If I did moderate a list (which I don't), and there was an ability for subscribers to see the raw feed, I'd allow that. I am curious if your approach will work. It's similar to how things operate here, but I wonder if it can work with no moderators. (HN does have editors who monitor flagged articles and comments.)
- jerf 17y ago
  If we define the emotional state of a person relative to the sort of messages they send to the list, rather than their "true" emotional state, which is more relevant to the list, the the trolls create "perennially outraged" people. I don't think that argument works.
Quarrelsome 17y ago
I guess the premise is that they are (objectively speaking) a valid part of any community. Perhaps in some way it is better to have "troll trolls" than people who appear to be normal but are actually very trollish. I remember a community where a bunch of people would just answer all questions with: "OMG WTF? NOT THIS AGAIN. Use the search FFS." Now this was more or less encouraged behaviour as Admins and Mods did this but these guys took it too far. So it eventually was trolling all but in name. To be honest i'm not sure I believe all that but at least he has a "troll rating" system.
- zedshaw 17y ago
  Look at my previous reply on the subject, but I'm hoping tons of really smart people can think of a solution that is not so binary as: moderation=="list nazi moderates all dissenting opinion away" OR troll=="full frontal goatse porn for all!". In other words, with the librelist code, it IS possible to have a middle land where the community can voice their opinion of what's spam or troll without eliminating real dissenting opinions and debate.
  - Quarrelsome 17y ago
    As my name suggests I am a bit trollish myself as I am a fan of swears, passion and strong opinions. I certainly look forward to a community where the "owner" is less able to control people's input according to their own tastes. Stackoverflow has recently banned swearing.... because. This the kind of thing that pisses me off.
    - count 17y ago
      It's like the new War on Swearing. Fucking nazis!

FraaJad 17y ago

All is not lost. FTA: Nothing to allow tyranny of the minority or majority. It’s all about free speech and open communication. However, this is balanced with the above spam marking, and potentially a “troll rating” that’s similar to a spam rating.

zedshaw 17y ago
Additionally, keep in mind that if done right this could make it easier to have a moderated list. Rather than put some small set of brains in charge of keeping it clean, we just get the users to help keep it clean. Then you have a list system that is designed for a community to debate and argue while having what they want for communication without needed too much blocking human intervention.

almost 17y ago

This worries me a little too. What about the guy who posts several messages an hour all consisting of only of swear words or who posts answers to newbie questions with links to Goatse or any of the infinite other ways I'm sure exist to totally disrupt a list if there's no way to control anything. Of course presumably there will still be people with the authority to remove really bad examples like that. But will they have the time to look after the many many lists which will probably soon exist?

zedshaw 17y ago
The plan is to do it craigslist style. Each email will have a "hate" link you can hit to go mark it as spam or troll. Too many of these and the sender is blocked (for spam) or throttled (for trolls). On the inverse side, I think I'll also track your voting rates, and if you tend to rate too many people as trolls or spam then your voting will also be throttled. But, it's also just a plan. The goal is to create something that lets communities moderate themselves without too much tyranny of the majority of minority. That's why the code is open, so that people with ideas about how to do that can help make it happen.
- almost 17y ago
  Ok, that makes a bit more sense. It's not that no one can be censored, it's just that the power to do so doesn't rest with a small group of admins. That sounds much better, hope it works out!
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- Smirlouf 17y ago
  That "hate" thing comes from your Utu project, I guess. While I like the idea, I'm not sure it's a good idea to label it as such in the interface. You might also have a hard time figuring out the genuine flaggings from the ones made by spambots...
- jdunck 17y ago
  A big difference between craigslist flagging and inbox flagging is that by the time a user can flag a message in email, the message has been delivered to everybody. You can't have a few people remove crap messages from everybody's inbox (right?), so if I can post without reputation, and/or signup in some automated way, the whole thing melts down. Maybe deliver to people in a reputation order and slight delay to allow the damage to be minimized?

philwelch 17y ago

Sounds just like "free software" to me--you're free from the constraints of commercialization, but not from the constraints of the programmers' social ideologies. I'm not saying this to troll, I can just imagine lots of situations where I may want to set up a mailing list, but few where I want that list to become some sort of anarchic debating society where someone else's software handles the moderation for me.

zedshaw 17y ago
Well, the code's right there, so if you don't trust anyone else's moderation software, then you are free to grab it and run your own show. In fact, I'll even put up docs on how to get your own going. Maybe I'll call it the "tin foil hat" release of Librelist. :-)