If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault (2011)

https://anildash.com/2011/07/20/if_your_websites_full_of_assholes_its_your_fault-2/

by Tomte • 7 years ago

96 115 7 years ago

anildash.com

jcroll• 7 years ago

What's an example of a major site with a good community?

SethTro2• 7 years ago

free karma answer: "Hacker news"

knolax3• 7 years ago

Yeah no, when's the last time you've actually seen the rules enforced?

luckylion4• 7 years ago

"Major". Hacker news is a small, heavily user-policed special interest site.

hvs• 7 years ago

It's honestly the only site (excepting certain subreddits) where after 10 years I still read the comments.

enraged_camel2• 7 years ago

Hacker News is a small niche site.

avip2• 7 years ago

Github?

theDoug• 7 years ago

'Major' is up to personal definition and will distract people here no doubt. Metafiter has been my long-time lighthouse for this kind of gauge, though obviously not as big as its peak.

https://www.metafilter.com/newuser.mefi

- Anyone can view the site and its content

- Very clearly putting their rules of the road up (link above) before you can 'join'

- Commenting/posting/membership is a $5, one time fee

- A one-week wait before you can post

- Paid moderation

And it works.

scarejunba• 7 years ago

Metafilter.

Instagram has a pretty positive feeling too.

codinghorror4• 7 years ago

Instagram is the future of Facebook. Probably the most important tech acquisition since YouTube.

dlphn___xyz• 7 years ago

lobster is pretty good platform but the content could be better

wpietri4• 7 years ago

Depends on what you mean by "major", but Metafilter is one example that comes to mind.

Honestly, though, I think "major site" and "good community" are in conflict. Facebook's revenue is something like $0.12 per user-day. Twitter's is circa $0.07. It is at best extremely difficult to do effective policing of users with that kind of money to spend.

You can use ML, etc, to do the first cut. But real anti-abuse work basically requires humans. (Or not-yet-existant strong AI.) So my general take is that ad-supported social media is a dead end as far as real community goes. Doing it right takes either real money or dedicated volunteers. And probably both.

x0x02• 7 years ago

You seem to have thought about this, and you're generally insightful, but I have to disagree. The problem with twitter and fb isn't the low revenues per user-day. The problem is the behavior they've cultivated and incentivized from the beginning.

For example, had twitter not created a culture of basically brigading, they would be in a different place. But they at minimum allowed and probably incentivized that to become part of the twitter experience, and I don't think it can be recovered from.

As for facebook, if it took you until 2019 to say Alex Jones can't build his business on your platform, you haven't even started to think in any serious way about what behavior you want on fb. Well actually they have: mark wants dollars and doesn't give a shit about anything else.

You may find this interview with former Reddit pm Dan McComas fascinating: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/04/dan-mccomas-reddit-pr...

DoreenMichele2• 7 years ago

Multiple people here have said Metafilter in response to you. My experience is that it was a toxic, classist cesspit where open misandry was embraced as some kind of cheap substitute for feminism.

In other words, it didn't actually empower women. It just tolerated women venting about how very, very angry they were at men and, to some degree, taking it out on male members in AskMe who dared to ask questions about their love life. One particularly ugly incident involved a man asking for support resources for himself to cope with his wife having been raped. He was basically told he was an asshole for asking.

I wrote a long reply with actual suggestions which was deleted by the mods as "tangential" and "not answering the question." I posted it to my blog, where he soon found it and private messaged me and thanked me profusely and told me how traumatic it had been to basically be told he was an asshole for seeking support, a comment that got favorited at least 70 times.

There are no perfect communities and a good community experience is partly up to you to craft for yourself. Some Reddits seem to be decent places with a sense of community. I've been on email lists that worked for me for a time.

Hacker News had a genuine sense of community when I first joined. It seems to have less of that these days, partly a product of scale. It's grown a lot and it's hard to keep a sense of community at scale.

Even in IRL communities, large cities rely more on formality to help make up for the inability to know everyone.

The human mind seems able to have a sense of community with a group of up to 150 people. I had access to information from an internal study of one community that suggested that only 20 percent of members were 'active' participants, either regularly or occasionally. Another ten percent participated once or rarely and the rest lurked. This seems to fit with what I have observed elsewhere.

So that means that about 750 accounts gets you about 150 active participants. Anything beyond that and you see challenges in fostering a sense of community.

I've long speculated that HN's leader board ought to be 150 names instead of 100 to help foster some sense of community here, but it's a completely untested hypothesis and not anything I feel strongly enough about to actively campaign for.

Causality12• 7 years ago

Most places benefit from having strong and effectively enforced moderation policies. However, I also think there's significant value in having some places that don't, that serve as content-neutral platforms, the social media equivalent of the post office.

tlholaday2• 7 years ago

I also think there's significant value in having some places that [...] serve as content-neutral platforms.

You may be right about the value of such places, and Anil Dash's prediction that such places will be full of assholes may right, too.

Causality12• 7 years ago

Oh certainly. I just disagree with his point that ALL websites have a "moral responsibility" to police their users.

To remove illegal content and conduct? Sure, but not to prevent assholery.

uniformlyrandom2• 7 years ago

Well, duh. The problem is applying these policies - because blindly applying policies usually leads to mixed results (innocents banned, trolls using a loophole in policy and proliferating). But to quote the author -

we have a way to prevent gangs of humans from acting like savage packs of animals. In fact, we’ve developed entire disciplines based around this goal over thousands of years.

We 'just' need to introduce institutes of online courts, judges, lawyers, and presumption of innocence (good thing that enforcement can be automated, so we do not need the execution squad). Also, you kinda need someone to write these policies, and approve them. Maybe an elected group of people - maybe even two groups, to balance the democracy/influence?

If you are not already doing it for your website, you are obviously an irresponsible moron.

codinghorror4• 7 years ago

Did you see this: a random jury of your online peers https://www.minds.com/minds/blog/power-to-the-people-the-min...

I support this kind of stuff in theory but it is incredibly difficult to get to scenarios where this actually happens. You need to be massive scale for it to occur with any regularity.

uniformlyrandom2• 7 years ago

Yes, - and a lot of online communities on the internet has reached that scale. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit...

In case of reddit, the problem is even more interesting. There are subreddits, so it is naturally segregated, and moderators and community are local. The communities can use downvotes to 'stone' an offender, and local elected moderators can enforce a ban. In case moderator or community mishandles the process, 'federal' admins can intervene. So we are pretty much at medieval level of justice there (much better than whatever constitutional dictatorship facebook and twitter have).

Macross8299• 7 years ago

I get that you're being sarcastic, but to further emphasize your point:

As I understand it, Riot Games had something similar implemented -- a jury of peers called the tribunal to render decisions in order to punish bad player behaviour (griefing, hate speech, etc) and it still didn't scale to the amount of incidents and abuse reports they were getting nor did it filter out frivolous reports. They ended up switching to automated systems as a first line of defense against obvious bad actors anyways.

ve552• 7 years ago

This post is more reasonable for smaller curated communities, but as we can see from, well, every large social website that exists currently, it can be difficult to scale. I'm curious what the other thinks the solution would be to an obvious example like Twitter. When a website consists of so many groups of users that everyone's definition of 'assholes' contradicts the others, you find that banning them gets to be pretty difficult, not to mention the amount of humans that are required to moderate.

edit: Even if you have a policy that seems perfect to you, it will not be executed perfectly in practice when there are 1,000 different people attempting to enforce it as moderators.

Nextgrid• 7 years ago

Posting on a website should be a right, not a privilege. Having trouble moderating so much content? Limit the amount of content that can be posted, and make users earn ranks to be able to post more (so there’s an incentive to play by the rules as to not lose the high-ranking account).

Speaking of standards of “asshole” being different between communities, well, the website should have a set of rules/guidelines defining what “asshole” means, and those who aren’t happy are free to go to a different website or make their own.

zzo38computer5• 7 years ago

That is their right, to make the service (not necessarily a website) limit the amount of content, require or not require registrations, have guidelines or not, to determine who gets to post. But if you do it badly, it can get obstructive.

If you have many different ones then you can see what is who like to post on what, I suppose.

goldcd11• 7 years ago

WTF??!?! - It's not "a right"

Every site you type something into and press 'submit' has a complete choice as to what happens with your submission.

My take is that our current 'problems' are down to everybody wanting to record your interaction and take no responsibility for it.

wpietri4• 7 years ago

Having worked at Twitter on abuse, I think that Twitter could do far more. They've gotten better, but it's still trivially easy to evade bans, the moderation decisions are frequently terrible, and there are a zillion other things wrong.

That said, I think an ad-funded global discussion is impossible. You can't do good user moderation with that little money (~$0.10 per user per day total revenue, with a tiny fraction of that going to abuse prevention). I think Twitter should allow people to create semi-private spaces, zones for discussion where users can be much more firm about moderation. It should also make collaborative blocking and muting much more effective.

bigred100• 7 years ago

Why don’t the US or someone just use government funding to set up some sort of distributed protocol that lets people talk

wazanator• 7 years ago

Thats kinda of what Mastodon is isn't? People are free to spin up their own communities with their own rules.

Everyone complains about Twitter but when alternatives are presented that gives them the power to do what they are asking for no one wants to try them.

smacktoward• 7 years ago

This post is more reasonable for smaller curated communities, but as we can see from, well, every large social website that exists currently, it can be difficult to scale. I'm curious what the other thinks the solution would be to an obvious example like Twitter.

One solution would be to not jam the entire world's conversations into a couple of gigantic, one-size-fits-all platforms.

You ask what solution would work for a platform like Twitter. Consider that the problem may simply be that Twitter exists at all.

codinghorror4• 7 years ago

Ironically Facebook’s original design around “only a list of approved friends see any of your content” may have been more correct in the long term. Randos do not scale, particularly when like Twitter you are not particularly competent at evolving your product.

mayneack• 7 years ago

This argument doesn't exclude "too big to moderate" sites. Huge social networks chose to scale at the cost of making it impossible to control the assholes. It seems that's a good financial decision to running a profitable company, but it doesn't make it not their fault.

makomk3• 7 years ago

There is a belief, shared by many of the folks who make arguments like this, that there is some obvious definition of "assholes" shared by every decent person, and that anyone who claims not to be able to see it is actively siding with the assholes. I'm pretty sure most of them don't actually have the same definition, but somehow they never realise this.

You can see a hint of this in the final paragraph of this blog post: "Because if your website is full of assholes, it’s your fault. And if you have the power to fix it and don’t do something about it, you’re one of them." Either you purge the people he thinks are assholes, or you're one of the assholes who needs to be purged.

brenschluss3• 7 years ago

Assholery can be relative, but this argument is still true.

I.E. you could say, “my website is full of people, who I think are assholes, but I don’t know what to do!” and this could be a problem.

In addition, I find that “people who don’t care when they are told that their actions might be harming others” is a pretty easy way to define an internet asshole.

zzo38computer5• 7 years ago

It is your fault, but, nevertheless I disagree that it is bad to not do stuff about it (although of course you can do it anyways if you want to). I prefer not to have such stuff; I allow any except that I do not have unlimited bandwidth ahd disk space, so there is that consideration only. Clients can use kill files and other filters (if accessing them by NNTP) to avoid messages they do not like. Messages can also be copied on other servers, which may have different policies; I do not policy your server that copies the messages, but only not to overly flood the bandwidth. My software, called "sqlnetnews", deliberately does not support control messages (you can still post messages with a "Supersedes" header, since it can still be useful sometimes, but it won't result in the old version deleted; it does, however, reject any messages with a "Approved" header). Maybe you hate me for it, but Dave Hayes has "Freedom Knights" and it is like that (but in my case, for Unusenet rather than Usenet). While cancels can be posted (as long as the "Approved" header is omitted), they are not processed. I will not force anyone to use these services and will not disallow others from making echo services (a feature of Unusenet, designed to enforce that you have freedom globally even if not locally (local policies are up to the server administrator, not me)).

malvosenior6• 7 years ago

I feel like Anil Dash is pretty much the last person who should be talking about internet “assholes”. He’s very often on the front lines of Twitter mobs and is generally extremely caustic. He should reflect on his own behavior online before preaching to anyone else.

tlholaday2• 7 years ago

I feel like Anil Dash is pretty much the last person who should be talking about internet “assholes”.

Your feelings may have tempted you into making this off-topic post. The linked essay concerns comment section protocols, not personalities.

kinkrtyavimoodh2• 7 years ago

And the post you replied to is also talking about how Anil Dash behaves on Twitter (== comment section of an online community), and I agree with them that though he might not agree with this assessment, Dash's behavior is more likely to fall on the asshole side than not.

This isn't about the ad-hominem. The general point Dash is trying to make is fine. But it's easy to preach about not allowing assholes when you don't consider yourself to be one. The day the zeitgeist shifts considerably in the favor of assessing him as an asshole, I suspect Dash might sing a very different tune about site moderation policies.

braythwayt6• 7 years ago

This is a fairly classic ad hominem comment.

What difference does it make who makes this argument, if the argument itself is sound? On the other hand, if the man is 50% saint, 50% angel, and 50% genius, what difference would that make, if the argument itself was terrible?

Comments suggesting that he shouldn't make this argument do not actually address the argument itself. In the best case, they are a distraction from the subject being discussed.

In the worst case, they are a form of tone policing, which is a tactic for silencing sound arguments by complaining that they are not being made by the right people, or in the right way. Example:

A man murders another man. The police torture him into a confession. He complains about the torture. Is he the last person that should be complaining about violence? But if not him, who? Must we wait for the perfect angel of an innocent victim of police brutality, before we act on it?

kinkrtyavimoodh2• 7 years ago

It does make a difference when you believe that the reason Dash is making this kind of argument is because of his life experiences (or lack thereof).

The general point Dash is trying to make about moderating communities is fine. But it's easy to preach about not allowing assholes when you don't consider yourself to be one. The day the zeitgeist shifts considerably in the favor of assessing him as an asshole, I suspect Dash might sing a very different tune about site moderation policies.

zzo38computer5• 7 years ago

I agree with you that it does not matter who makes this argument (even though I do not entirely agree with the argument being made, but that has nothing to do with who makes such argument).

(Even if someone write a computer program or book or movie or whatever but they are murderer and whatever, if the program/book/movie is good then it is good, anyways. And if it is no good, then it is no good, anyways.)

asfarley2• 7 years ago

This might be a case where there's overlap between ad-hominem attacks and a relevant critique of the argument itself.

I interpret the comment as: "if the author can't follow his own guidance, or if the author's own compliance with this guidance is subjective, the guidance may not be given in good faith". The comment is not just saying asshole=wrong. It's saying that Anil Dash may be a hypocrite, and thus unable to propose good social policies.

The discussion (to me) seems more moral or social rather than technical. In cases of moral or social judgements, are you sure you completely reject ad-hominem points?

It seems to me that a fully Bayesian perspective requires considering ad-hominem attacks; if the source emitting the message is considered untrustworthy, should we discard that information?

makomk3• 7 years ago

It makes all the difference in the world who's making this argument. He relies heavily on the idea that there's some universal category of "assholes" that websites should ban, and that if any website doesn't it's their fault and everyone should pressure them to fall in line. There is no such universal category that everyone agrees on. So what he's really arguing is that people who he considers assholes should be banned by every decent website that wants to receive advertising money, and it's impossible to seperate that argument from his specific moral values and actions.

padobson• 7 years ago

I like what he says here, but I note that this particular version of his blog doesn't have comments on it. My guess is that the site has changed since 2011.

He makes a really good point that there are lessons to be learned from, "disciplines like urban planning, zoning regulations, crowd control, effective and humane policing, and the simple practices it takes to stage an effective public event".

But I think what he's leaving out is hierarchy. In 2011, I think a "moderator class" and a "commenter class" was all you needed. But if you want people to treat each other well online, you need something more than that. There needs to be stakes. There needs to be value in building up your standing in the community, there needs to be something to be gained and lost in exchange for the community policing itself.

Right now, a community like Twitter has a sort of chaotic hierarchy. There is the average user, the influencer, the blue checkmark, and the Twitter employee/algorithm doing moderation. Who is answerable to who? How does one climb up the hierarchy? What value does a blue checkmark have in moderating an influencer? Can they? Are average users ultimately incentivized to be dicks in order to get the attention of influencers and blue checkmarks?

Maybe it's time for communities as big as Twitter to make some decisions about this and tame their userbase with more rigid and well-defined hierarchies.

j2kun2• 7 years ago

Are there other disciplines in which hierarchies have helped improve discourse?

goldcd11• 7 years ago

I think it depends on the website you're wanting to run..

I was part of a now-dead "threaded message board", which had a somewhat cliquey view of what should/shouldn't be posted. In the evening when the moderators were away, the discussion became more interesting as it strayed off-topic.

Eventually the community wanted 'to fork' so I decided to build something myself. I'm not IT trained, so first version was PL/SQL on Oracle - all I knew. v2 was the product of me buying an O'Reilly PHP/MySQL book (I still have 'platypus' somewhere).

People came.

First few years were a mess. The more technically literate people used to hack me for fun - but then would confess and provide security tips.

As the mood took me I'd add features, and then if they became troublesome fixed/killed them.

The odd person would arrive and cause trouble, and I'd have fun working out how to make them stop. (correlate logins with emails, password, IPs, browser fingerprints etc). Then maybe experiment with hiding troll-posts from the other users, whilst displaying it to the troll, who thought they'd been ignored - etc etc. Or maybe auto-embed some very dodgy zero-sized images in their feed, if I know they were going through a company/university proxy.

After a while it just all got quiet and relatively happy, and it's been puttering along since 2003.

It's currently got over 9 Million posts, a load of marriages and children - and a few deaths with some 'best-of posts' for the departed.

I'm fully aware this isn't impressive as a potential unicorn, but I feel there's a bazillion other little sites, like mine, happily puttering along out there that are overlooked.

seisvelas• 7 years ago

This is a lovely comment, and now I'm super curious to see what the site is.

goldcd11• 7 years ago

I now realize, I didn't add a conclusion.

My little site is 'local' - I don't have to deal with the world turning up.

I don't need admins, I don't need a TOS, I don't need arbitration systems etc etc.

There's a good community of people who just get along. Rough edges were knocked off a long time ago.

We're a little niche ignored by the world - and we like it that way.

Issues with 'toxic' influx come when you're trying to drive people in/draw attention.

gtirloni2• 7 years ago

If you don't mind the question, what's the niche?

barbecue_sauce• 7 years ago

You're not IT trained but you knew Oracle PL/SQL?

Edit: I know it's gauche to complain about downvotes, so I'll explain my question further. I find his situation extremely interesting as I associate Oracle with the "IT-iest" of "IT" things.

goldcd11• 7 years ago

Sortof...

Always loved computers, but unlike maybe most people here, for what I could do with them (not the beauty of their logic blah).

Did a Masters in Bioinformatics, that came with a few Oracle lectures... and then as this was in 2000 was enough to get a job.. and well I was given some problems and there was a shelf of books. shrugs

goldcd11• 7 years ago

I've no idea why you'd get a down-vote either - whoever that was, "Hang your head in shame and reverse that click"

RugnirViking• 7 years ago

I love these kinds of sites, and they always leave an impression on me, even when I only spend a day or two lurking the recent posts. Especially ones designed for niche interests such as old and long-dead games.

I genuinely think you should feel proud for making the world just a little bit better and more like it's ideal self

goldcd11• 7 years ago

This is a 'full on brag' (not some humble-brag) - I'm really proud of the site.

Every f'in part of it I built from scratch. It's me, for better or for worse.

More pragmatically, it helped shape what I like doing for my job (I'm currently a Product Owner - a job I think fits me)

Animats2• 7 years ago

"You should have real humans dedicated to monitoring and responding to your community."

If you're a for-profit company, you have to pay them. At least minimum wage. See Hallissey v. America Online, Inc. They're employees.

shearskill• 7 years ago

Reddit moderators are volunteers, it’s an unpaid position.

Animats2• 7 years ago

If the U.S. Department of Labor wasn't out to lunch, Reddit would be in trouble.

yesforwhat• 7 years ago

Does this guy have a significant investment in Facebook?

doc_gunthrop• 7 years ago

The first site to come to mind is voat.co. I explored it out of curiosity a while after the "purging of intolerable subreddits" a couple years back. The impression I got was that of a seedy underbelly of aggregate news sites like reddit, populated by a mass of displaced misanthropes. It didn't take long to nope out of there.

Zak• 7 years ago

I wonder if it's possible to be the less moderated alternative to a popular platform without just becoming the platform for horrible people.

To give an example, in its FOSTA-related policy updates, reddit also banned exchanges of heavily-regulated products like alcohol and firearms. There was no mandate to do so, as safe-harbor provisions are very much intact in case, for example, a reddit user sells a gallon of homebrewed beer to a 20 year old. Such changes might provide motivation for people who aren't at all horrible to move elsewhere.

lifeisstillgood• 7 years ago

>> Advertisers, hold sites accountable if your advertising appears next to this hateful stuff.

This.

One thing that could be very effective is screenshotting genuine brand ad next to vile screed.

How long would it take for a 'bot to look like a white sheet wearing moron to YouTube, and then a little bit of sentiment analysis and you could automate this. Just publish the "daily worst brand fuck" on FB or YouTube.

(Alongside the "monitor tweet feed of politicians for death threats and pass to the cops" idea I have when I get the time I am really honestly going to ...)

Deimorz• 7 years ago

It's not quite that simple either, and going through the advertisers can cause other negative side effects.

This just happened recently on YouTube: there was a big uproar about sexual-ish comments being posted on videos of children, such as linking to timestamps with upskirt glimpses or similar. Advertisers got contacted about it, and some of them said they would stop doing any advertising on YouTube until it was addressed somehow.

In response, YouTube completely disabled all comments on videos featuring children, and deleted all existing comments. Now there are legitimate channels related to children that had completely reasonable comments (which they moderated) that no longer have any ability to have discussions on their videos. Their ability to interact with their viewers/communities was destroyed because YouTube decided to go scorched-earth to make sure they'd satisfy the advertisers.

goldcd11• 7 years ago

Yes...

..and??

Putting myself in YouTube's shoes, I've no idea how I could easily stamp out these links/comments.

What's maybe more interesting to consider is that there's been no blocks linking a URL to a particular time in a video - so it can still be done, just not from a site with a google domain in the browser-bar.

j2kun2• 7 years ago

YouTube completely disabled all comments on videos featuring children, and deleted all existing comments.

This sounds like a good mitigation step to me, considering that we're talking about child predators. The incentives are aligned properly here.

davedx• 7 years ago

One thing that could be very effective is screenshotting genuine brand ad next to vile screed.

This is what Sleeping Giants have been doing for a while. They started with Breitbart... some of Milo's earlier articles were fantastic for this purpose.

https://twitter.com/slpng_giants

tus87• 7 years ago

Thank God for free speech and God Bless President Trump.

cozuya2• 7 years ago

I've been grappling with this for a while. I run a site/app that is a popular team based hidden roles indie board game. Apparently its full of assholes. I mean I get it, the theme and dynamics don't lend itself to happy players really but I got nothing - I've put hundreds of hours into volunteer moderator tools and they work great, the site itself does not have a griefing/racism/hate speech problem, but it does still have an asshole problem. Not sure what else I can do, other than take credit for it. =/

cannonedhamster4• 7 years ago

I mean, the game itself sounds like the type that would draw people who wanted to prove to others how smart or good they are from your description(PvP). I find that community/coop based games (PvE) tend to draw less assholes because of the type of people who enjoy those games.

cozuya2• 7 years ago

Yeah it is the hardest of hardcore PvP games - it involves people having to lie to other people, every game. Throw in internet strangers and an ELO system and yeah it becomes an impossible thing to moderate other than "don't use hate speech or get banned". I just wish I knew what I could do better. Things like this get me down a bit. https://old.reddit.com/r/SecretHitler/comments/b9l1kv/secret...

If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault (2011)

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