PG on trolls

by sharpshoot • 18 years ago

137 183 18 years ago

edw519• 18 years ago

Another way to keep signal to noise higher is to treat debates about languages the same as those about politics and religion. Maybe it's just best to agree to disagree.

I generally tend to avoid the "language war" threads for 3 reasons: 1. No one is really right or wrong. 2. Not much gets accomplished. and 3. It really doesn't make that much difference anyway.

Debates about favorite colors, on the other hand, should be strongly encouraged. Blue is definitely the best one.

curi22• 18 years ago

While I agree with you that avoiding those discussions is a reasonable general policy, it's not the case that "no one is really right or wrong" in debates about computer languages, politics, or religion. There is a truth of the matter.

Your point that not much is accomplished by such discussions is definitely what usually happens. But it isn't what must happen. There are rational ways of discussing these subjects which can lead to knowledge creation and agreement.

The reason I'm posting is basically that I think people are a little too quick to give up, and if they tried to discuss seriously a bit more, they might find it sometimes works. Especially if they are careful to ignore the bad replies they get and only reply to the other people who are also taking the discussion seriously.

dfranke6• 18 years ago

it's not the case that "no one is really right or wrong" in debates about computer languages, politics, or religion. There is a truth of the matter.

Well, yes and no. There's only a truth to the matter if you can get people to agree on a premise. Two libertarians who adopt the same premises can have a meaningful debate with each other. They'll agree that there can only be one consistent position -- so if they disagree on what it is then one of them must be mistaken -- and set about trying to figure out which of them holds the fallacy. But if you pit a libertarian with the premise of self-ownership against a communist with the premise of "property is theft", nobody is going to accomplish anything because neither will view the other's argument as relevant.

dfranke6• 18 years ago

Like graffiti, trolling can be impressive when it's done especially well. My favorite troll of all time is the guy from comp.compression last August:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.compression/browse_threa...

followed by the famous "Is Your Son a Computer Hacker?" troll from adequacy.org:

http://adequacy.org/public/stories/2001.12.2.42056.2147.html

curi22• 18 years ago

reminds me of the physicist who wrote a fake post-modernist paper and submitted it to a journal and got it published.

dfranke6• 18 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_Affair

pg7• 18 years ago

He was doing more than trolling though. That was an experiment to show how low their filters were set.

simen• 18 years ago

I'm not sure I'd regard the Sokal affair as trolling. It's hardly being an asshole, unless you consider exposing idiots being an ass, and it's hardly fishing for controversy, unless exposing any kind of potentially controversial stuff is trolling (was Watergate trolling?).

boredguy83• 18 years ago

The "Commie Day Care" Adequacy troll was far superior, imho. And it was all much better when it was at k5.

dfranke6• 18 years ago

I wasn't impressed by that one. The Hacker troll strikes a nerve because it's frightening. It's all too easy to imagine somebody really being that stupid, and too easy to imagine them becoming influential. The Daycare troll reads like just another ineffectual wingnut.

bishopdante12• 18 years ago

HAHAHA! I know the adequacy.org one. That had me in stitches for weeks.

bhb• 18 years ago

Very small nitpick, but I think "It an old one, as old as forums" should be "It _is_ an old one, as old as forums".

Update: this has been corrected.

pg7• 18 years ago

Thanks, fixed.

curi22• 18 years ago

it's not clear to me that nastiness is more common at hacker forums. a certain kind is. but i've seen much nastier stuff on parenting forums (which i've been to a lot).

on parenting forums, you don't find so many jerks. when people are mean, they tend to be a bit more subtle (or passive aggressive) about it. but they make it emotional and personal, and i think that does a more effective job of actually hurting anyone.

DarrenStuart4• 18 years ago

I think news.yc has a 5th troll behavior and it's down modding a comment because they disagree with it. I have been down modded a number of times not for saying something rude or stupid just something that others don't agree with.

I tend to down mod rude and aggressive people on here and I also up mod people who I think have been down modded unfairly.

I am not sure if I am alone with my way of thinking.

immad• 18 years ago

We shouldn't down mod things we disagree with?

cawel2• 18 years ago

I guess it's a matter of pertinence. Comments supporting a constructive conversation should be uppmodded (which does not mean it's comments you agree with). Or comments you want others to pay attention to (diluting uninteresting ones by extension).

Like in this thread, we can note the irony (and worshiping) of the community, with the top comment (11 points so far) done by anewaccountname, deliberately taking a piss out of PG's essay.

curi22• 18 years ago

You should refute mistaken ideas with better ideas.

If you want to downmod, it's no big deal. But there seems to be some proportion of the audience that feels vindicated in their views just because the opposite view was downmodded. Downmodding does not make opposing positions less legitimate.

These people seem to be different than the ones who write replies. I've had multiple lengthy threads where I hardly get any mods either way while discussing, and then when I wake up the next day I have -20 karma, but no new replies.

jey• 18 years ago

I think karma should be used as an indicator of the quality of the post, not as a reward for groupthink.

DanielBMarkham2• 18 years ago

Because nobody cares whether you agree or disagree with anything. I'm expecting the score to represent _my_ feelings about the article after I read it, not yours.

I could go down a longer list: because mob rules is a not-so-good policy for quality reading material, because if one group votes on agreement and another group votes on quality then the agreement group "drowns out" the quality group, because it takes about 2 seconds to determine whether you agree with something, whereas determining if something is worth reading takes a lot longer (and is more valuable information), etc.

Note that I upmodded you, even though I take issue with your position. That's because you asked a good question. In another world, I'd just downmod you because I thought you were mistaken and for most readers the question would never have been asked (or answered)

pg7• 18 years ago

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.

DarrenStuart4• 18 years ago

very true but I have seen valid responses down modded because of fanboyism and blindness to other views.

I guess we don't always behave in a grown up way online. I am as guilty of that as the next guy.

gojomo• 18 years ago

It might be interesting to experiment with two axes of rating: one signifying agreement/disagreement, the other quality/abuse.

Whether it's worth the added complexity, I'm not sure, but it would resolve an ambiguity in the signals sent to commenters.

(To squeeze into the existing UI and mental model of this sort of site, I might make the current up/down mean quality -- should more people see this or should it recede from view? -- and add a right/left for agreement, giving posts tiny little inline spot polls, of a sort. Maybe it could even be a sparkline or two-tone percentage-bar.)

mixmax2• 18 years ago

I don't entirely agree.

I have seen quite a few comments that were extremely insightful, and/or interesting that got downmodded due to an unpopular opinion. The reason this is unfortunate is not only that you tend to miss these (assuming that there is a higher probability that you read or think about comments that are rated higher, which I am surely not the only one that is guilty of) but also that it tends to promote groupthink . This is especially important on a forum like this where we are here to learn and share our thoughts, ideas and experiences for a very particular niche: Starting startups.

I have noted that comments that don't promote the "build it and they will come" view tend to be voted down. Since this site is primarily populated with hackers this is entirely understandable - it is human nature to think that your part of the project is the most important. But the reason we all come here is (I presume) to learn. And the things about which we know the least are the things where we have most to learn.

It is not only a question of abuse, but also a question of opening peoples eyes to issues, problems and points of views that lie outside their expertise, but which they will probably encounter in a startup. And this includes such diverse fields as marketing, financing and sales.

I am here to learn about stuff I didn't know already, and that is often outside my field. In return for this I will offfer my opinions in the fields where I may have something to contribute.

At the end of the day this makes us all better entrepreneurs. Because as anyone who has ever done a startup will tell you - you have to get everything right. Hacking, finance, sales, PR, marketing, hiring, etc.

So I think that the up and down arrows should not express agreement, but insightfullness or truth. Not opinion. That way I will be able to judge the validity of a comment in a field that I do not know well by its points. And hopefully learn something.

brent• 18 years ago

The only problem is such a system will tend to award popular ideas (or humor) as opposed to unique, albeit possibly controversial ideas. When I go digging into the comments I generally look for two things... a large thread of comments and particular users whose opinions I regard. These are not necessarily, although they often are, the posts with the highest points. Occasionally I find gems near the bottom.

DanielBMarkham2• 18 years ago

Count me in the people that don't agree as well. I used one of my very few down-mods on you, pg! Seemed appropriate given your comment. I very rarely downmod.

The karma system should predict how good I am going to feel after consuming the media -- nothing more. The problem is that for a simple question, the solution ain't so simple. I believe there is one, and I believe we've danced around this subject long enough for those paying attention to have figured it out.

Also -- thanks for the term "karma bombing". I've been a victim in the past, now I have a cool geeky name to describe it.

benmathes• 18 years ago

The curt abruptness of hackers coupled with a tendency to mod down things that are perceived as wrong probably causes this.

mynameishere• 18 years ago

I think news.yc has a 5th troll behavior and it's down modding a comment because they disagree with it

That's not a troll behavior ("troll" comes from the fishing term), and it's much less common here than on reddit or digg or (god help you) dailykos, where intelligent but unfashionable opinions get sunk hard.

There are only a few fashionable subjects around here (the importance of lisp, for example), whereas on other sites almost every question has a boilerplate answer, against which all opposition is "trolling". At any rate, no amount of actual "trolling" is as bad as groupthink. I'd rather a whole parliament of disagreeable colicky horseradish farmers than one unipartisan politburo.

ADDENDUM: Just thought I'd tack this on. Near the top of digg right now is this:

http://digg.com/business_finance/What_1_Million_Buys_In_Home...

That's sort of an interesting subject, but look at the comments. At the top with 9 diggs:

I dugg the story, but I refuse to click on anything with Forbes magazine. They force a full-screen ad (that you can skip) but in my efforts to help stop obnoxious advertising, I boycott Forbes.

Okay, there you have a 15-year-old combining 1) his irrational dislike of full-page ads (perhaps he thinks Forbes survives on government grants), with 2) his irrational proclivity to upmod things without looking at them, with 3) his belief that Forbes cares whether a 15-year-old looks at its slideshows. This sort of sad lameness is actually what kills online discussions, not "trolling".

theoneill• 18 years ago

I'd rather a whole parliament of disagreeable colicky horseradish farmers than one unipartisan politburo.

Wow. That is the best sentence I have ever read in a comment thread.

zoltz• 18 years ago

Arc

boredguy83• 18 years ago

My experience on forums is that -size matters-. A pond with ten fish gets far less trollers than a pond with ten thousand.

As for solutions: there have to be consequences. Either losing the ability to post or losing the ability to have your posts seen. Certainly banning accounts is an option, but then you have to fight with the crapflood, if and when it comes.

davidw2• 18 years ago

I think the community size bit is important (see 'monkey number'). I also wonder if that means that sites should somehow attempt to break people into smaller groups in some way in order to maintain that 'small town feel'.

rms2• 18 years ago

>losing the ability to have your posts seen.

That's how it works on this forum. I leave "showdead" on just to see what the trolls and spammers are up to.

anewaccountname• 18 years ago

Who is this guy and what authority does he have to write about these topics? I haven't read the essay, but there's no way anything so short and written in such an informal style could have anything useful to say about such and such topic, when people with degrees in the subject have already written many thick books about it.

shafqat• 18 years ago

Funny...

dfranke6• 18 years ago

Where can I get a degree in trolling?

jcwentz• 18 years ago

I'd try Hampshire College, UC Santa Cruz, or the New School.

serhei2• 18 years ago

Not very many places give out diplomas, but if you want to get a job at a trolling company, you can just practice on pretty much any forum. Eventually hundreds of people will know you're a troll, giving you hundreds of references to take to a potential employer. Just make sure you don't ever accidentally post anything that actually contributes to the discussion.

anupamkapoor• 18 years ago

devry ?

bishopdante12• 18 years ago

Now that gives me a business idea...

The university of troll. A website where should you supply enough bogus posts, you get posted a certificate... of course you have to pay a course fee. $100 should do it.

dcurtis2• 18 years ago

So apparently Paul can't keep trolling from happening on News.YC afterall.

But, as anewaccountname shows, at least the trolls here do it with style. Well played, anewaccountname.

baddox• 18 years ago

Common sense speaks for itself. The article really isn't about stating empirical observations and citing sources. i find it to be a well-worded summary of the thought of me and probably many members of online communities.

fiaz3• 18 years ago

I also wonder how much of a contributing factor people's attempts at humor would spin the dynamics of group discussions out of control. The main reason why I went Slashdot -> Digg -> Reddit -> YCNews (and most likely YCNews -> ? within the next 18 months) was because of all the one-liners I kept reading over and over again of people attempting to be funny.

My thinking is along the lines of UserXYZ posts something humorous and gets 150 points. This causes others who feel they have a funny bone as well to pile in and attempt similarly witty remarks (which are initially harmless or contribute positively); but then you have an avalanche of users who become aspiring comedians on the message boards they frequent. I sometimes feel that these types tend to herd together and give each other a reason to continue with their behaviour by giving one another a few up-votes out of sympathy...

I would also say that the competitive nature of men in general (I'm a dude, and I won't assume anything on behalf of the women here) would contribute to certain sub-groups within this population with an increasing need to out-do one another. Thus a majority of the discussion devolves to one-liners and people trying to be funny, when all they do is come across as cynical while at the same time contributing little value.

In addition, attempts to be funny on a message board are somewhat akin to guessing on questions on your SAT exam: there is no penalty for trying. Whereas weakly setup arguments can carry a penalty of getting a barrage of refutations making yourself look (or perhaps more closer to the truth - FEEL) intellectually weaker.

foonamefoo2• 18 years ago

I think that Slashdot overall still has the highest quality comments. You just have to sort by score, and do a -2 funny modifier. The site instantly becomes much much better. Stay away from the new ajaxy score slider system.

fiaz3• 18 years ago

This thread is two days old, but I wanted to put some content in relation to the behaviour of "trolling" to my comment above. I would add being quick to judge as yet another dynamic that adds little value and can cause positive dynamics to devolve. I volunteer myself as an example in the following link:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=119120

I put forth a great deal of skepticism regarding a product and actually got a response from one of the founding members of the company. It turns out that they actually had a real product that shows a great deal of promise...

This just goes to show that sometimes being quick to judge can have drastic consequences for others. I would argue that this is a form of trolling when a great deal of skepticism mixed with anecdotal information from the past (which has nothing to do with the present as things are more mutually exclusive than we would otherwise like to believe) leads to quick karma points and increased skepticism on behalf of other members.

"I for one welcome our new overlords". Oops wait, wrong context. What I meant to say is that being quick to judge is in many ways similar to the reactionary "comedic lashing out" I was citing in the comedic trolling above and can often times lead to making yourself look foolish at no cost to nobody but yourself (as immortalized by Kent Brockman in the above opening sentence of this paragraph!).

Like the comedic attempts above, this is not something that can be easily controlled. Rather this requires restraint exercised on behalf of the author of any given comment. One thing that I feel works against this all is the fact that the anonymity of the internet often affords people to keep doing what they are doing.

The fact that I'm using my real name online (for the first time mind you) is causing me to respond more deeply to this issue and to the open (and unfair) skepticism I was voicing in another thread. Definitely a tougher thing to do...definitely worth it.

aswanson• 18 years ago

About what size was reddit (in uniques) before it jumped the shark?

pg7• 18 years ago

Off the top of my head, maybe 40-50,000.

The fascinating thing is, all the data is still there. You can go and look at the old comments and stories and see what the site used to be like. If you could find a good proxy for stupidity, like comment length or spelling mistakes, you could graph the change as the site grew.

Spyckie2• 18 years ago

Is there a way to grab a reddit comment corpus (a large set of reddit's comments)? I don't browse reddit but I think it would be a fun thing to play around with.

jedberg• 18 years ago

Are you sure about that? reddit hit 50k uniques about 6 months after it launched. I'd say the discourse was very similar to what it is here at that point in the game.

prakash• 18 years ago

"Hackers can be abrupt even in person. Put them on an anonymous forum, and the problem gets worse."

I am sure everyone on this forum is on some kind of social network. If we can get every user's handle to link to their flavor-du-jour social network's public profile, verify via email -- that should at least cut down on some of the noise.

PG: What do you think?

curi22• 18 years ago

I don't use any social networks.

I do have my email and website (with real name) in my profile, though.

yters11• 18 years ago

If chains of trust could be widely and rigorously established online, most (maybe all?) of the big problems we have today would be gone.

pg7• 18 years ago

It would be a good thing. If anyone wants to apply to YC with that kind of idea, we'd be into it.

bishopdante12• 18 years ago

That would indicate that people would have to become widely trustworthy and rigorous.

hollerith• 18 years ago

I wish comments remained deletable longer. My last comment is 3 hr old (and has no replies) and it has already become undeletable whereas when I made an insensitive comment, it continued to be downmodded for about 24 hr.

By "become undeletable", I mean there is no "edit" or "delete" link on the comment.

cawel2• 18 years ago

Regarding the future of communities while they grow and "technical tweaks", eBay recently adjusted its policies to improve its community quality, restricting sellers from leaving negative feedback to buyers: http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2008/02/crowd_control.php

Alex3917• 18 years ago

"Often users have second thoughts and delete such comments."

@PG, I've always wondered, are you able to see all the comments that I've posted and then deleted two minutes later? And if so, is this an acceptable way to send you semi-private messages?

davidw2• 18 years ago

"Paul Graham sees all the comments anyone has posted anywhere. What's more, he knows all the comments they will post in the future, too."

tyler• 18 years ago

"...and has already categorized them using Bayesian filtering."

willchang• 18 years ago

I think what PG called "incompetence" is really just rampant emotionalism. "Incompetence" is inaccurate because it suggests that people of all levels of experience can't happily share a forum, which I think they can. But what happens at Reddit nowadays is that anyone who posts an inane comment with a phrase like "why the fuck" will get lots of upvotes. (Case in point: Search for "fuck" in the comments for the top article at Reddit, and get: "That fucking cunt is going to get what she deserves," 15 points.)

I think in the early days of Reddit, the fact that everything including comments could be voted on was intimidating to trolls, so they were kept at bay. But some time later every primal scream was rewarded, and trolls started posting in droves.

It never helped that a really low-scoring post with a high-scoring rejoinder tended to be highly ranked. That's just begging for the sort of you-got-served culture that excites trolls.

Tichy3• 18 years ago

On news.yc it is not so extreme, but on german tech news site heise.de, there is also a modding system. Good threads become green, bad ones red. I have often wondered if people are more likely to start flaming away in the red threads. Sort of like beating up somebody who is already down on the floor (comments on the line of "you suck"). At heise.de I often had the impression that it is the case - not so much on news.yc, but it might be interesting to look at the statistics?

pg7• 18 years ago

News.YC users are definitely influenced by the prevailing trend, in both directions. I.e. people are more willing to vote something up as its score rises, and more prone to attack something as its score falls. It's not too bad yet here, but it got to be such a problem on Reddit that about a year ago they switched to not showing how many points a submission has till it's an hour old.

ced• 18 years ago

Ever thought about doing a controlled experiment about it? I.e.: showing high points for a post to half the users, and low points to the other half.

akkartik• 18 years ago

PG's essays are getting shorter. I like that -- no matter what Steve Yegge says. (http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/01/blogging-theory-201-...)

smithfield• 18 years ago

The simplest troll test. A troll (person or point of view) is incapable of introspection. This does not mean that trolls won't try to introspect, just that they cannot succeed at it. This can also be used to show why trolls have trouble with recursion and irony.

DTanner• 18 years ago

I'm not convinced that you'll be able to deal with the Eternal September problem. It's all well and good that anti-trolling is built into the rules, but as more and more people join less and less of them will have read the rules.

ChaitanyaSai2• 18 years ago

It doesn't have much to do with hacker personalities. Unless you want to argue that Youtube denizens are hackers of some sort too.

bishopdante12• 18 years ago

Forums used to be the province of the technorati. Not no more they ain't.

ChaitanyaSai2• 18 years ago

I wonder if trolls can be categorized automatically. Caveats and all, trolls are characterized by their participation in negative-karma two-person conversations and down-voting of their comments by a diverse and changing set of users. A simple learning algorithm should zap the predictable ones. Trolls are nourished by attention and early detection and removal should nip that behavior in the bud.

pg7• 18 years ago

I've thought a lot about that. I wouldn't be surprised if current spam filters would work unchanged. There are not enough trolls on News.YC to make it worth investing time in such countermeasures, but it would be an interesting experiment to see if you could use statistical filtering techniques to detect trolls in some large public corpus like Digg or Reddit or Slashdot comment threads.

thaumaturgy3• 18 years ago

I don't think that would work; you would essentially require a filter that could actually understand the subject matter, in order to determine whether the purpose of the stated opinion was to bait people's responses. For example:

"I've thought a lot about that. I would be surprised if current spam filters could work unchanged. There are not enough trolls on News.YC to make it worth investing time in trying to write it in Lisp, but it would be an interesting experiment to see if you could use C++ programming techniques to detect trolls in some large public corpus like Digg or Reddit or Slashdot's comment threads."

jbert• 18 years ago

I think the hardest problem with that approach would be avoiding a false-positive of detecting people who hold controversial opinions as trolls.

The moderation graph between users and comments would be really interesting. There's a lot of information in there to be mined.

bishopdante12• 18 years ago

There is no automatic 100% defense against any tactic.

ken2• 18 years ago

I don't think "distance" is the primary cause of asshole behavior by automobile drivers, though it does sound like a convenient first approximation.

If I was walking down the street with a $20,000 ming vase, and you were running around nearly hitting me, I'd probably swear at you. Likewise, if you were running around on the street wielding a sharp katana, I'd probably swear at you.

A car is both as expensive as a ming vase, and as deadly as a sword. The idea that a rational person would not get highly upset when somebody threatened both their life and the most expensive thing they own is absurd. "Distance" has little to do with it.

sarosh• 18 years ago

Aside: The elegant symmetry with which this metaphor crosses three cultures is absurd, baffling, and truly humbling. What lead you to conjure that up? What is it that you are reading?

ken2• 18 years ago

Hagakure.

FatBastard2• 18 years ago

False. People have impunity in their car. They holler things out the window they would never say to your face because they would receive a right cross in the snout. Your assertion that you would swear at me if I were running around with a sharp katana fails the common sense test in a big way.

Speaking of incompetence, there is a third type of troll. These trolls manner of speaking is seen as hostile by those who come from a more genteel social milieu. For example, in person as on the internet, they might tell you to STFU, or use words like shitpump, yet be trying to make a point in a friendly and helpful (perhaps playful) way. You need not be an egghead to be abrupt. For an insight into this social milieu, see an episode of Trailer Park Boys. People need to learn to function differently on a forum, because it is a different social environment.

bishopdante12• 18 years ago

The quality which we are looking at is that of unassailable power. That's what makes people behave in an assertive an non-compliant way.

Cars give people that, guns give people that, web skills give people that.

michaelneale• 18 years ago

"The sites's guidelines explicitly ask people not to say things they wouldn't say face to face."

Interesting, I know quite a few people that would in fact all but troll in person, to your face.

Although in their case, its more to do with them having no outbound tact filter: http://www.mit.edu/~jcb/tact.html

rms2• 18 years ago

The Reddit thread is kind of sad.

http://reddit.com/info/68zz4/comments/

initself• 18 years ago

It's more than kind of sad, it's pathetic.

dcurtis2• 18 years ago

My favorite (upmodded 26 points as of 9pst):

Regarding News.YC: "Your ancient ritual has summoned me to News.YC so those tight-assed holier-than-thou fucktards can be shown the error of their ways. Maybe the reason there aren't trolls is because NOBODY FUCKING VISITS THEIR SHITTY SITE."-- terwin, Reddit

nostrademons2• 18 years ago

On a possibly-explanatory note, the article did call them all trolls...

(And on a recursive note, a comment on the Reddit thread now links to the parent comment, which links back to the Reddit thread, and so on...yay stack overflow!)

ntoshev• 18 years ago

People who tend to like pg's line of thinking also tend to migrate from Reddit to here... so in Reddit remain the people who mostly disagree with pg.

iamelgringo3• 18 years ago

I haven't looked at Reddit comments in months. But... Wow. I'm just speechless.

earthboundkid• 18 years ago

Programming.reddit is still mostly OK.

serhei2• 18 years ago

One of the main contributing factors to the abundance of trolling on forums is indeed that text is a much less expressive medium than face-to-face communication, meaning that you very often end up trapped into voicing your opinion in a trollish manner due to just carelessly throwing your initial thoughts into the text box.

You can give up, though, and perpetrate the crapstorm, or you can remind yourself that being good at communicating your ideas and opinions is an important part of being a well-rounded hacker; then you can view the posting of only coherent and non-inflammatory replies on fora as practice for when you'll have to communicate about programs you are writing.

Trollbert• 18 years ago

This is bad. Anyone should be able to say anything. That way everyone can see what is being said - good, bad, sad, left, right, or wrong. Remember, a democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding whats for dinner. Fuck lamb for dinner!

FatBastard2• 18 years ago

For those who aren't gun nuts, the parable goes: Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what's for dinner. Liberty is a well-armed lamb prepared to contest the vote. Here is a good example of a reasonable point poorly made. Seems off topic because not all the premises are stated, but in his meatspace, everybody can fill in the blanks with common knowledge. Also, in his world, everybody uses small, old, anglo-saxon words to add poetry to their speech, he may not realize (or care) that it offends some delicate sensibilities. This is the graffitti of which PG spoke. And surprisingly, it is art. Not art in the beautiful sense, but art in the message sense. Imagine yourself in China and you wrote on the wall "Fuck Tiananmen". This is not pretty, but it is not spam.

systems• 18 years ago

PG misses an important perspective, cyberbullies!

People who bully other people because they have better computer knowledge, mainly the two areas of administration and programming

The thing is learning, working ... are both hard, and many ppl got screwed or unlucky over their lives, they either learned useless crap at school or university, or work at non interesting jobs with bad bosses or collegues

And sometimes, we are humans, we are attracked to certain aspects of what we try to learn to escape, or trying to improve upon our bad lack

And sometimes the cyberbullies call us trolls. It's okay, thought, better be a troll than a bully, the thing is, in time we will learn, and on that road we will have fun, and, the road will not end, and it will meet plenty of bullies, and overtime we will learn to be quiet, for the next person we talk to, and dare to show to them that we don't know, might just be, the next bully ... who will accuse me of being troll ... or that other word incompetent.

But the bully don't see, just like the one in the school yard, its just a school yard, don't take yourself too seriously, its just a forum or irc!

I am reading chatting and enjoying my time, until you came and changed the game, ... thou shall not speak! and now the book seller might have won, for you know, thought can't do teach! And most of the blogs I read were just trolls!

tac-tics• 18 years ago

I just want to point out an issue with a small point Paul brings up, and that issue is how Karma works on YC versus Reddit.

I'm not saying one is better than the other, but there is a tradeoff. On Reddit, you can be rude, and people can downmod you, and it doesn't matter once the post sinks. Here, if you act like an asshole, you get downmodded, and your karma suffers. But even if you make a well reasoned, but controversial comment, you often do still get downmodded because of your unpopular views.

Not that I comment here often, but I'm at four down from seven at one point, and it's really the logical consequence of such a system. It seems to work here, but I do wonder, as Paul expresses near the end of his article here, does this technique scale?

Kolibri• 18 years ago

>One might worry this would prevent people from expressing controversial ideas, but empirically that doesn't seem to be what happens. When people say something substantial that gets modded down, they stubbornly leave it up. What people delete are wisecracks, because they have less invested in them.

How would you know? How would you know it does not stiffle unpopular opinions?

I think that I would personally practice self-censoring if I would lose karma by expressing unpopular opinions that are likely to be down-voted. I know that I already do on reddit, and there the down-votes are at least only temporary.

Not wanting to lose karma may seem a foolish reason for not expressing your opinions, and at first I din't mind. I kept writing my unpopular opinions on reddit, the down-votes made me put even more effort into them so that they would be above approach. But they' still only get a handful of points whereas one-liners expressing the popular opinion would get much more. So eventually I gave up.

Now I mostly just read a couple of stories a day, and occassionally write the one-liner comment.

As a final comment, I've always been disgusting by the way that people on reddit would constantly compare themselves, always favorable, to their bigger, would-be rival: Digg. Now you do the same thing towards reddit, and I can only shake my head in disgust. Learn to value your site in itself, not as the compare to other sites. It does not need to be a competition.

aston2• 18 years ago

On your final comment, it's a pretty universal truth that every community will eventually find a common enemy. It's part of feeling like you're part of something.

hillbilly1• 18 years ago

Is there any fundamental difference in how karma is awarded in News.YC compared with Slashdot?

Tichy3• 18 years ago

It's been a while since I've been on slashdot, but back then their system was quite sophisticated. You could not always vote on stories, only when temporary moderator status was assigned to you by a random process. Additionally, sometimes you would be assigned meta-moderator status and get to vote on the quality of moderators ratings. Those meta-moderations would in turn influence the likelihood of the rated moderators to become moderators again in the future. Also, they have categories for the votes ("funny", "insightful", "troll", ...).

wololoooo• 18 years ago

pfft, you're just bitter about the way arc was recieved

jazj• 18 years ago

I suspect that this article is a direct consequence of Arc's sceptical reception on Slashdot, Digg, and Reddit.

jonthewayne• 18 years ago

I think this might be the exact kind of situation that an advanced http://phoenomi.com/2008/02/13/the-rise-of-social-governance... system could solve.

Spyckie2• 18 years ago

Creating more selective communities with stricter guidelines seems to be the wrong approach to dealing with trolls, especially based on the scenario pg lays out. As pg says, the larger a community grows, the easier it is for trolls to be accepted and the harder it is to mod (prune) the community. It seems that critical mass is just when the pruning community becomes smaller than the trolling community, and that by creating new communities with more stringent rules, you are just delaying the date (hopefully indefinitely) when trolls come in. I understand that the yc community is special, but even the comments here show that it won't work for much longer as the community grows beyond yc. To answer the question of "Will it scale?", I think its already a no.

If you've ever hung out with a lot of girls (from a guy's perspective), you can beging to understand the trolling community. 1 on 1 with a girl and you can get intellectual conversation, but the minute 3 or 4 girls get together, they start talking about clothes, guys, dramas, and all other stuff that just isn't interesting. I bet girls see it the same with guys too (5 guys together = WoW, DOTA, girls or crude jokes).

Solutions? Keep it small. This fails to keep in line with the existing goals of news.yc (advertising for existing startups, attracting smart people, etc). Another solution? Maybe try to preserve the small community feel as the site gets bigger. One way to do this would be to use user upvotes and downvotes as community boundaries for each user - ie: making their community presence only to those who rate them up, and to make their personal community those who they rate up. This is speculative at best, though.

domnit• 18 years ago

Another model for keeping out trolls is Metafilter's. They require a $5 donation when an account is created, and kick out assholes. Of course, this keeps out a whole lot more than trolls. It's certainly the wrong way to do it for most sites, but it works for them, and perhaps for others.

yelsgib• 18 years ago

Perhaps the reason that people troll (or take part in any sort of asshole behavior, really) is that they don't have anything better to do. Hear me out.

Hacker News is a "forum" whose main purpose is getting people to talk about/think about/post links to information related to startups. It has a very explicit purpose and to this end I would not expect it to be "infested" to the extent of a lot of other forums.

For instance, would we expect to see a lot of trolls on a forum devoted to advanced topics in theoretical math? "Orbifold cohomology is so much better than Hopfschild cohomology!" No. No, we wouldn't. A serious, well-defined, topic begets serious discussion.

This is the real problem with reddit, digg, etc. - there's no clear GOAL. Like, there's no -reason- that people shouldn't be assholes. What are they getting in the way of?

It's like if you opened the doors to your house and just held a "general forum." At first, discussion would be great (it's just your friends). Later, discussion would get worse (it's your friends' friends). Eventually it would degrade into the biggest losers who have nowhere to go sitting around and making fun of all the fun they're not having out in the real world (outside the house).

I agree with pg's sentiments that the architecture/rules of hacker news make it a much more intelligent, even (gasp) friendly forum, but I also think it's the community. They keep coming back because they have active interest. They have active interest because hacker news has established as its goal the provision of things of interest.

As always, I might just be woefully naive about human nature; but things seem so simple!

valda• 18 years ago

Maybe this is interesting idea: http://lemurcatta.org/

dysmas• 18 years ago

... and with this post i register.

sammyo• 18 years ago

Observing just the length of this thread, my initial thought is that pg has executed quite an exceptional troll himself...

jdueck• 18 years ago

Regarding News.YC, I fear that it may eventually suffer the same fate as Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, etc. Trolling is a minor problem compared to self-promoting. The challenge is that there's no scarcity on the internet, so you have to create artificial scarcity. It may be that the best way to fix the problem (i.e. to create scarcity) is through fees. For example, a $1.00 (rising with demand) fee per submission would keep a lot of junk out of any discussion site. And any serious content producer or blogger wouldn't blink at the notion of a small fee. The assumption that everything should be free is what kills many of these sites.

typicalpg• 18 years ago

Pretty typical paul graham post. He doesn't provide any evidence and he shows very little understanding of the problem. He doesn't even understand he is being trolled because he is wrong. No one cares about 4000 lines of macros for PLT Scheme. All of his arc hype led to some dumb macros. We listened to years of essays about how to program and what makes productive programmers only to find he takes R5RS and adds some macros. Wow. Amazing LISP revolution.

Paul you are being "trolled" because people disagree with you. You haven't seen real trolls.

jondo• 18 years ago

I saw this on Metafilter. I am not a member but I enjoy almost daily reading on the site. I would offer than you have an unaddressed aspect in regard to those than are called trolls. Specifically Forum members who try to end a debate by labeling someone a troll. I am a member of Syracuse.com and DailyKos. I started posting maybe 7 years ago on Syracuse,com after RWers brought God to the defense an UNJUST war. I am a Catholic who marched against the Vietnam War and for black rights and anti-poverty programs. Since I started posting I have tried to distinguish between what Jesus would support in the positions of the Republicans and the Democrats. To the Right Wingers on Syracuse.com I am a troll because I call them to account concerning unjust wars, the death penalty and their continuing efforts to strangle social programs in a bathtub. On Daily Kos I am called a troll for not supporting "gay rights" or abortion. My views are consistent with my religion. Moreover when I was younger I developed a great appreciation for the Amish and Mennonites who view things in a similar manner but maybe to a greater extent and with greater consistency than the Catholics, I am civil and stay well within the site posting rules. I have had my posts and user name constantly deleted on Syracuse.com and that is fairly easily done there by any poster hitting the "Inappropriate Post" button. The modest size gay friendly community within DailyKos are very hostile to any posts that are in opposition to their goals.

achoi02• 18 years ago

i feel like fox news has moved trolling to television. its a good thing i stopped watching tv years ago

cnf• 18 years ago

I actually like trolls of the 1st kind. You know, the practical jokers, the original trolls, the ones that have no real bad intentions but just like to be silly once in a while. The second kind, well, I just call them "people"

researchdcs• 18 years ago

Give George Carlin The Asshole Theory(~):

"The amount of an asshole a person is is directly proportional to the distance they are away from you at the time you discover this fault. Someone on TV is REALLY AN ASSHOLE! Someone in the car next to you is Pretty Much of an Asshole. A guy standing next to you on line: <whispers> 'this guy's a real asshole here'"

irrevenant• 18 years ago

Paul, have you considered personalising as a method of minimising trolling?

As you pointed out, people do things on forums that they wouldn't do in person. IMO, this is partly because they're hiding behind a handle and partly because their target is.

I'm not sure how you'd go about making accounts have more personality and identity, but IMO that would be considerably more effective than just instructing people to behave like they're face-to-face. They know they're not.

gopher• 18 years ago

Some people troll because they know better but they are tired of explaining it. They say the truth(tm) when the crowd does not want to here it. I like them.

parsifal2• 18 years ago

I'm of the opinion that if you can't explain something without being exasperated, then why are you bothering to explain it? Go do something else.

parsifal2• 18 years ago

This is a fantastic post on a topic that's been a problem with the web since day one.

Very insightful. The Four Reasons feel very accurate.

Thanks, Paul!

kitty_pineapple• 18 years ago

I totally agree. Seeing that most forums are started with something stupid like 'Everyone who uses this forum are woodheads', it sets a series of replies such as 'i am NOT a woodhead!' or "I agree, you are a woodhead or you wouldn't be here'. Especially when I don't know all those shortcuts that eliminate these posts, I find it terribly disturbing to have to read through all those 'comments'. And I hope this isn't spam, please tell me if it is. I am only 11 years old.

afreshvegetable• 18 years ago

I LOVE how the first response is a Troll comment! My only thought to add is an interaction I had recently with a programmer/hacker/entrepreneur who had made a macro program to automate mining in Eve Online. The program is explicitly contrary to the EULA and so constitutes a hack. The programmer/owner had an elaborate feedback password system, so I had to IM him directly to activate my copy of the program once I paid my fee. He was wildly rude--just throwing off flippant and rude remarks like a vagrant dog throws fleas. After the third or fourth example I started to call him on it--to his, and my great frustration. He did not like being called on his nasty tone at all and denied having one at all. I got so heated that I almost ditched the whole project, but finally calmed down enough to get the transaction done. Later I spoke to a friend in-game who had an identical experience. My point is that this article on how hackers and some programmers tend towards this behavior as a culture explains a lot. My programmer provocateur thought his nastiness was somehow normal, acceptable, and utterly justifiable on the basis of some sense of his own personal superiority. I suppose this is what happens when people take their coding/hacking acumen as a license for megalomania and a total disregard of social graces.

Great essay.

bishopdante12• 18 years ago

It's simple, trolls prey on people's inner asshole. It's like a form of bullying, if you rise to the bait, then you're done. There's no technical fix, there's a mentality fix. The act is as old as the hills, and they provide balance to the debate. Trolls are a form of court jester.

I am therefore pro-troll and anti troll-victim.

PG on trolls

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