Trolls (2008)

http://www.paulgraham.com/trolls.html

by evo_9 • 15 years ago

360 303 15 years ago

oacgnol• 15 years ago

When it comes down to it, many trolls feel the need to bash another language, OS, etc. because it's a form of self-validation: your choice says something about you. You'll see the same kind of thing with the "wars" over PC/Mac, Xbox/PS3, Emacs/vim, etc., even if the person doesn't really understand the differences: picking sides just seems to be natural.

Unfortunately, as the article says, the anonymity of the Internet allows these thoughts to rapidly bubble to the surface, where in most cases there's little repercussions for posting whatever the hell you want. I've encountered very little of this attitude when it comes to meeting people in real life. For most people, it's hard to be a dick in front of a real life person.

ericingram3• 15 years ago

I would say "fortunately" rather than "unfortunately", because it is the very mechanism that allows these ideas to bubble up that also allow very good ideas to bubble up rapidly.

We don't need repercussions for posting bad content, as we will evolve powerful judgment to filter it. This is a natural market mechanism I think.

mindstab• 15 years ago

Do we have any more recent stats about the viewership of HN now for 2011? How big is it, and more subjectively, how do people feel we are doing with trolls?

I for one think on the whole conversation is still good and worthwhile checking out :)

libraryatnight8• 15 years ago

I'd love to read something like "Trolls: A followup" and hear PG's thoughts and stats three years later :)

karlzt• 15 years ago

http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html#5oct2011

"Also, a traffic update: HN now gets over 120k unique ips on a weekday, and serves over 1.3 million page views."

sambeau2• 15 years ago

I wonder how much worse road etiquette would be if we had no license plates? I suspect there is a reasonable argument against net anonymity hidden in the history of the motor car.

Does anyone know what the tipping point for license plates was?

imgabe• 15 years ago

I think license plates are roughly equivalent to an IP address. It gives you no incentive to be polite, but authorities can use it to track you down if you break the law.

cobrausn2• 15 years ago

License plates came into existence in the early 1900s in Massachusetts when they needed a way to tax people to repair and maintain their roadways, and vehicle registration was the way they decided to accomplish it. It was also proposed as a way of linking drivers with actions, as there was a rapid increase in the number of roadway accidents about that time.

http://www.mass.gov/rmv/history/

sambeau2• 15 years ago

The French had them long before that (in fact they had them before the automobile). But I suspect you are right: it was tax to maintain the roads that required each automobile to be numbered and registered.

omarchowdhury• 15 years ago

Road etiquette would be worse if it weren't for the chance of death for messing up.

tikhonj• 15 years ago

I doubt it would be any different. Do you remember the license (gah, for some reason I hate spelling that word) plate of the last car that cut you off? If so, you are in the minority. Even if you knew the number, how would you correlate it with a face?

I don't think the license plate number gives much in the way of identity. In fact, it gives less identity than your average username--it is usually completely random, created with no input on the part of the driver.

oscilloscope• 15 years ago

That's 8,000 unique visitors per day? Didn't realize HN readership was so small. I catch people in San Francisco scanning new articles, but it must be location bias.

http://www.google.com/trends?q=hacker+news%2C+reddit

Edit: That number was from 2008

fferen• 15 years ago

Keep in mind that this was in 2008.

bennyfreshness• 15 years ago

That number is from 2008, when PG wrote the post. Today I bet its much higher, although still far below reddit. But like PG said, much better quality.

Abundnce10• 15 years ago

I wonder how many unique visitors per day HN is getting now. Is there any place I can find this info?

memset• 15 years ago

This essay was written 3 years ago; readership has soared tremendously since then, to the point that sometimes PG's innocuous comments on the site are spun into Techcrunch headlines.

jdp23• 15 years ago

In October, there were 120,000 unique IPs/day.

Roedou• 15 years ago

As well as just search volume, Google has a surprisingly good handle on unique visitors to websites:

http://trends.google.com/websites?q=reddit.com%2C+news.ycomb...

angersock4• 15 years ago

Good post, but as someone who dabbles in trolling as a hobby, I'd like to suggest the following:

Trolls are important.

Trolling, especially as seen on places like slashdot/4chan/somethingawful/etc., can oftentimes be a mechanism of critique for ideas and rhetorical styles.

One of the best things about the 'net is that, frankly, none of this really matters. None of it. It's a big joke. My twitters and my wikis and my posts don't mean anything. They're bits in the stream. My karma is an int on a server somewhere, incremented and decremented by the whims of my fellow users.

Trolls can help remind all of us that hey, this is all light-hearted. They say outrageous things, they stir up trouble, they cause annoyance, they sully the pristine conditions of these high-minded realms of discourse.

In short, folks, they keep us all honest. They call us on our bullshit. And when a community takes itself so seriously that it becomes a habitat for trolls, it usually is a sign that that community needs to be dispersed, cleaned, and reformed elsewhere.

HN is a pretty cool place, and I hope it lasts a long while before ossifying and becoming infested with trolls.

kghose• 15 years ago

But how do we know the real trolls from the assholes? Emoticons help, but we can't see their FACE, so it's hard to tell.

cobrausn2• 15 years ago

I'd imagine that those two are not a mutually exclusive set.

Besides, if a troll makes a reasonable point, does it matter that he was actually trolling? Truthfully it's snark that bothers me most - I can deal with someone being playful or contrary for the sake of it, but too much snark just triggers a very primal part of my brain that makes we want to start cracking skulls, and that's not very conducive to continuing the discussion.

angersock4• 15 years ago

That's part of being a human, right?

I am presented with another person's responses to my inputs in the form of communications, and I build a model of the person. Sometimes this model is correct, sometimes this model is incorrect. I might misjudge a person who is kind to my face as being decent, when behind my back they spread rumors and gossip. Similarly, I might have a coworker who always criticizes my approaches to problems, but is the first to stick up for me in meetings.

Sometimes you judge rightly, other times wrongly, and in either event life goes on (real or virtual). This is just part of the human condition--and trolls remind us of this fact and the fact that sometimes you can't tell.

aidenn02• 15 years ago

My bank account is just an int in a server somewhere, but that doesn't make it unimportant. Obviously my karma isn't important, but that's because it has little effect on my outside of HN. Being bits on a server somewhere doesn't make it unimportant.

Similarly, when someone posted a fake obit of Steve Jobs (well before he died), it caused quite an impact despite none of it mattering.

figgles4• 15 years ago

I hope your bank account isn't stored as just an int(!)

But seriously, it is a representation of something physical. Money. Money which can in turn be used for other physical things. Reputation "karma" isn't. It /is/ meaningless in this context, because you can never log into HN again and your life will go on.

I don't think the argument was "anything digital is pointless."

jarin2• 15 years ago

Honestly, your karma doesn't have much impact inside of HN either. It's just a number that lets you know you are a reasonable fit with the community.

scott_s8• 15 years ago

I think your view of trolling is colored by your participation in it.

I would like to participate in and read honest discussion. Trolls poison honest discussion. The "none of this matters" line of thought is a red-herring. Trolls get in the way of what I, personally, get out of forums.

_delirium6• 15 years ago

I like honest discussion also, but also enjoy discussion that's "playful" in various ways, especially when it's on the gray-area border between serious and trollish. You can get interesting sides of people when they have something of an alibi because they aren't "really" saying something (but aren't "really" not doing so, either).

I do think it's probably better if it's in areas where there's at least tacit agreement that those are the local discussion norms, though. If you post somewhere like SomethingAwful's FYAD (though I haven't taken a look in a few years), or 4chan, you can hardly claim to be surprised or misled by the conversational norms. On HN, the local culture prefers a different style of discussion, and I like that in its own way as well. Though I also liked some subset of Slashdot trolls in their heyday, even though they weren't officially welcome at Slashdot: OGG THE CAVEMAN, the BSD Troll, and a few others were some of the more interesting posters, some mixture of net-art and actual discussion.

jtreminio• 15 years ago

I haven't visited the SA forums in over 6 years, but last I remember, trolling in non-troll forums (FYAD) was usually met with a ban, resulting in a loss of your :10bux:. This was loosened a bit with the introduction of the... what's it called? Prison? Time out? that prevents a user from posting for X number of hours.

Karunamon• 15 years ago

Probation, with the time choosable via mod.

pnathan• 15 years ago

Your interpretation is that trolls are court jesters.

_delirium6• 15 years ago

That's an interesting take, though it'd be only certain kinds of trolls imo. Some trolls inflame negative situations: the guy who shows up at comp.lang.lisp and restarts one of the many canonical flamewars is doing sort of the opposite of what a court jester is supposed to do. But I think comp.lang.lisp might actually benefit from a real court jester; there's a certain stifling, vaguely bitter seriousness that could use disruption.

1273• 15 years ago

Trolling also wastes valuable time from reasonable and constructive arguments. You may not value your time, but I do, greatly. If ones goal is to achieve nothing intellectually on the Internet, then trolling is fine, but if ones goal is to learn and debate, then (given, only very skilled, non-obvious) trolling is destructive.

figgles4• 15 years ago

People who bitch about trolling might as well bitch about cold weather or inconsiderate drivers. Yeah, it's not always fun, but it is just the way things are and will be. You can't remove the human factor.

hyperbovine• 15 years ago

> One of the best things about the 'net is that, frankly, none of this really matters.

I disagree. I think the shift from personal to electronic interaction is largely to blame for the level of shrill nastiness that pervades our present-day culture. It's okay to express yourself in ways that would have been completely socially unacceptable, or just plain embarrassing, in past times. Social norms can be stifling, and self expression is good, but it's possible to take it too far. And on the internet, it frequently is. (Although this problem predates the internet. Talk radio in the 80s and 90s comes to mind.)

Nowhere is this more evident to me than in the realm of politics, where things really do matter. The process is seemingly held hostage to whoever can scream the loudest. The result is the sort of do-nothing congressional bitchfest which is currently pleasing to a whopping 8% of Americans. I read accounts of the way things used to work (30+ years back) in Washington and am amazed--it's like studying a lost civilization.

_delirium6• 15 years ago

One of my hobbies is reading a lot of history, and I don't see much support for this narrative. American politics has long been really nasty. Take a look at the 19th century presidential campaigns: there is some pretty shrill stuff in there. The 1828 election in particular was really nasty. And people regularly fought duels---actually shot each other---over politics. Political brawls were not uncommon. A Congressman beat one of his colleagues with a cane on the floor of Congress itself!

Even today, offline culture somehow seems more nasty/violent to me than online culture. It's not only in movies that people get into bar fights over stupid things. They not only yell at each other, but actually punch each other, and occasionally stab or smash bottles over each others' heads. It's a crazy world out there.

r00fus2• 15 years ago

> The process is seemingly held hostage to whoever can scream the loudest.

Some might say that the kabuki theater of American politics is now exposed for the facade that it is given how corrupt and captured our system really is... in fact, the corporatist coup happened a long time ago, and only with the Internet (ie, electronic interaction) is this layer peeled back and exposed.

brador• 15 years ago

I'd suggest there's two types of trolls:

First there are the discourse enhancing trolls, those who provide value to a discussion by suggesting alternative, usually taboo points of view.

Then there's the troll trolls. You know the type. The ones who spew racist or derogatory comments just for the hell of it.

Many people commonly mix the two into a single bucket, which I think is wrong to do, since one is a ++ for a forum, the other a -------.

Anyway, that's my take on the situation as someone who has ran 3 mid size forums in the past.

libraryatnight8• 15 years ago

"None of it really matters." That's your opinion. For some people finding a place, a community, with people disciplined enough to keep conversation interesting, to call people on BS without using troll tactics, that annoy and disparage, matters very much.

PG in his article, 3 years ago, describes the second kind of troll in more broad terms and notes, "Now when people talk about trolls they usually mean this broader sense of the word." 3 years ago. The first definition of troll is, in my opinion, near dead. The broad, asshole, troll reigns. They don't just 'sully the pristine conditions of these high-minded realms of discourse,' they break it down, and erode it.

A troll might think everything is a big joke, but many people deal with problems communicating in person: they don't have groups interested in the things they are near them, they have social and personality issues, they feel passionately about their views and enjoy expressing them but don't feel confident face to face or in a room of people. Connecting and communicating can happen legitimately on the internet, to say it's all a joke devalues that connection and that communication, which is how trolls hurt communities and people.

Tossrock• 15 years ago

Ahhh. I missed the date on the article and couldn't believe that HN was only getting 8k uniques/day.

baddox2• 15 years ago

> "None of it really matters." That's your opinion.

Actually, it's more of a deliberate choice than an opinion, and I think it's clearly the correct choice based on the nature of anonymous online communities. Other people can choose to take anonymous trolling seriously, as if it were a person insulting them or being inappropriate face-to-face. But to do so is to misunderstand the idea of anonymity and online communities. I would argue that anonymous online communities really don't matter, in the sense that it's foolish to even be invested enough to be offended by insults or inappropriate behavior. I think people who choose to invest themselves personally in an anonymous online community are failing to understand the nature of the community, analogous to someone who misinterprets a work of parody or farce as sincere and is thus offended.

Obviously, there are exceptions, namely when people aren't acting anonymously online. No one is suggesting for example that an entrepreneur or a VC shouldn't be held accountable for things they post on twitter or their blog. When you're not anonymous, then online communication is essentially equivalent to face-to-face communication, with full liability.

Also, I'm not necessarily arguing against moderation in online communities. It's fine for admins to be restrictive in who they allow in a community, or to remove "troll posts." I'm just arguing that to invest yourself personally or emotionally in an anonymous online community is to misunderstand the nature of such communities, and is objectively unwise.

ImprovedSilence• 15 years ago

The one big thing from Slashdot that I miss the most on HN are the "funny" comments. I know it's hard to separate the funny from the malicious sometimes, but there were/are some GOOOOD, and often creative, senses of humor over there. This seems to be largely suppressed here in HN, for better or worse...

brk• 15 years ago

In some ways I do too, having been an early /. user.

However, I think HN supports truly funny comments, but they have to be original, creative, and slightly non-obvious. I've made a few valueless pithy comments that got a decent amount of up-votes, and I've seen others do the same thing.

But, repeated and reused jokes aren't met with much enthusiasm here, so you don't get the same memes developing like you did on /. There is practically no spin on "a beowulf cluster of these" (or similar) that would ever fly here.

Overall, I'm pleased with HN's handling of humor-based comments.

mooism2• 15 years ago

There are plenty of places where it does matter, very much. e.g. support groups for abuse survivors, terminal disease patients, etc.

And even when it does not matter very much, trolls deny others the right to be serious, derail discussions, and spew bullshit. By insisting on turning everything into a joke, trolls are selfish.

namityadav• 15 years ago

They're bits in the stream. My karma is an int on a server somewhere

Like your bank account is just a database entry somewhere, like a dollar bill is just a paper, like all of your life's memories are just some information stored in your brain -- again just a few cells. In the end, everything is just some atoms anyway, right?

as someone who dabbles in trolling as a hobby

Oh wait, I fell for it! :)

libraryatnight8• 15 years ago

"I fell for it!"

I wondered on that myself ;)

Vivtek• 15 years ago

They call us on our bullshit.

It's recursive, then.

wpeterson2• 15 years ago

There are obviously people who don't add any value and instigate vitriol that should be banned.

On the other hand, you have people like Ted Dziuba who often provoke controversy and critique popular ideas/products. I find those critiques both entertaining and legitimate in their content.

I worry you lose a lot in a community when you rule out both types of Trolling.

seles• 15 years ago

I think PG only aims to keep the "asshole" kind of trolls out not the ones that say controversial things, as he gave examples of how people tend to be stubborn and not delete their own comments that are being downvoted for controversy, but do delete their asshole comments.

jpk• 15 years ago

I would argue that all of positives you cite can be accomplished without trolling. What distinguishes a thoughtful but contrary comment from a trolling comment is that the troll wants to force other users into negative behavior. Trolls win when somebody blows up, or somebody's self-image is toppled, or whatever. That attitude adds zero value to a conversation.

Whether any of this matters or not is immaterial. If someone thinks it matters and you want to convince them otherwise, pushing them to drop the banhammer in anger isn't the way to do it.

einhverfr6• 15 years ago

One thing I have seen a lot of people do when teaching is to troll. You come up with a crazy hypothetical that is obviously wrong but hard to show why, assert it, and watch your students try hard to prove you wrong. Things like:

"There is no consistent legal principle that prevents an attempted murder charge from being prosecuted against someone for the use of voodoo dolls."

"I think it's perfectly Constitutional to require that parents, if necessary, donate kidneys to their children."

Both are classic trolls. However, they are fun, and they are hard to grapple with.

sukuriant• 15 years ago

Personally, I "troll" in real life. It's usually among friends and just taunting them, lying to them, etc, for the purpose of teasing them. They're trolls too, and it's a bit of a game between us.

Really, in communities I frequent, there are so many trolls, we troll them back. Perhaps we're using the term differently from how pg is?

re_todd• 15 years ago

I went camping with a group of lawyers once, and they were a lot like this too. They wanted to constantly argue and debate. They would even assert things that I knew they personally disagreed with, just to start an argument. If nobody was arguing, they'd get kind of tense and nervous as if some calamity was about to happen, and then starting a debate seemed to relieve everyone's tension. Seemed strange to me.

ericingram3• 15 years ago

That sounds like fun, I love debating

peter_l_downs• 15 years ago

Top sentence according to bookshrink [1]:

> There's a sort of Gresham's Law of trolls: trolls are willing to use a forum with a lot of thoughtful people in it, but thoughtful people aren't willing to use a forum with a lot of trolls in it.

I think that pretty much sums it up. Trolls are attracted to the forums with the most interesting/intelligent users (the "best" forums). I think that news.yc has been very successful in terms of the amount of trolling that takes place, especially since:

> The core users of News.YC are mostly refugees from other sites that were overrun by trolls.

[1] http://bookshrink.com

chrishenn2• 15 years ago

I hope that trolling can be kept out of HN by the simple goodwill of the people using the site. I can't think of many forum systems that can effectively remove the incentive to troll.

I put up a forum online for people in my journalism class. They're nice people, but something about the fact that the conversation was online turned the discussion into something pretty dumb.

My hope is that people who grow up with the internet their whole lives will realize that you still have to be civil online. It's no different than real life, yet no one is teaching you manners online.

watmough• 15 years ago

I've seen some relatives' kids accounts on Facebook. I'm not sure I can be as optimistic as your last paragraph. If anything, I'm pessimistic that many kids are writing utter utter trollish garbage online that may never ever go away.

Of course, there will be kids that are smart and don't do this, but kids that want to 'fit in' or 'be popular' may well end up rolling with the crowd and posting things that will hurt them later on.

As parents, we should be looking out for our kids, both in real life, and online.

chrishenn2• 15 years ago

This may fit into the same category of way too optimistic, but I think it should be something that's in school, from an early age. My high school has a mandatory computer literacy test, but it only tests a few skills like MS Office or "What is an ethernet port?"

It'd be nice if it taught stuff like "how not to be an idiot on the internet."

mcrittenden• 15 years ago

OP, you might want to change the title to show that this article is from 2008. That was confusing to me, and a few other people in this thread.

scrrr• 15 years ago

Interesting post.

I find unsubstantial / uninteresting / obvious / superfluous comments (like "I love it!" <send>) worse than very controversial or insulting comments. As long as the general information in the forum stay interesting and enjoyable.

Also isn't the "naughtiness" (some pg essay used that word I think) part of what some of the best contributors here have in common? And aren't entrepreneurs trolls, too, according to the OP's definition?

They disagree with something, they choose a path that is more fun than an ordinary life, they want to leave a mark.

scott_s8• 15 years ago

Trolls try to undermine a working system solely for their own enjoyment. That has only a superficial relationship to entrepreneurs, who try to create a new business.

r00fus2• 15 years ago

That is, until you realize that some of the biggest trolls are employed by the establishment media like John Dvorak, Rob Enderle, etc.

These folks make a good living by essentially trolling. It's a well-known media business model.

joelhaus• 15 years ago

  > Trolls try to undermine a working system solely for their own enjoyment.

This is the most concise and accurate description of a troll on this thread (so far), thank you! As you state, this can result in undermining a working system, but more specifically, this selfishness and lack of empathy inevitably leads to:

poor communication -> negative emotions -> unconstructive conflicts

Selfish enjoyment really does get at the root of a trolls motivation, otherwise, "controversial" comments supported by sound logic, factual evidence and a genuine desire to get closer to the truth actually do add to the discussion. The real problem for a moderation system is determining if the motivation of the contributor is in line with the values of the community[1].

HN's rise in popularity and decline in quality commentary demonstrates how difficult it is to maintain the values of a community in the face of fast population growth (this just began to sound a bit too similar to arguments you hear in the immigration debate). If it's important to maintain your values, then it might also be important to mandate some level of assimilation in order to acquire certain privileges. The stackexchange sites have a fairly complex system for this and I rarely see trolls there, maybe HN should implement something similar?

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, HN's Values

anonymoustrolol• 15 years ago

With the recent adoption of voting systems in forums (like this one) we are seeing troll comments often buried, and this will perhaps continue to discourage that behavior. On a bigger note, articles that draw clicks with bold conclusions or headlines (like that nerd baiting article we saw on Gizmodo) are still grabbing eyeball share and thus will continue to propagate instead of real news/information. How that fight for eyeballs is resolved is one that I don't really see a solution to yet.

hansy• 15 years ago

This is an interesting article that sort of answers a question I've had for a while: would the quality of Hacker News remain the same without the novelty of individual karma points?

PG mentions that people seeing "...their reputation in the eyes of their peers drain away..." is motivation enough to keep delivering high-quality content.

larrys• 15 years ago

'PG mentions that people seeing "...their reputation in the eyes of their peers drain away..."'

I think part of the lure of karma is simply getting affirmation that what you are saying is accepted by others.

In this case the "others" are not people you know but people you respect in many ways because of the intelligent way they write or some other power they have. Or how they appear at least to be accepted by the group.

In a sense it becomes a challenging game to write something striking a balance between sharing some knowledge or opinion and not ticking off others by going to far out of bounds with what you are saying.

"quality of Hacker News remain the same without the novelty of individual karma "

I don't think it would at this scale. On a smaller scale though it might. There is a wide range of topics and people here. On a smaller site (AVC.com comes to mind with usually 1 idea a day posted) it is a core of users and while there is karma and likes it is far less important than on HN.

robbrown4516• 15 years ago

I think the fact that you don't allow downvoting posts contributes to this. I get that you want to keep things positive. But when you don't provide an outlet for people who want to simply disagree without forcing them to come out of the woodwork and defend their position, it is inevitable that some people will come out with a lot of ugliness.

I think there are a whole lot of reasons internet forums are different than real life communication. I think there are technical solutions that can change the balance. We all know there is a big difference between, say, the comments on YouTube and the comments on Slashdot. Do you think it is all "culture"? I don't. I think it is mostly that Slashdot has technical solutions that discourage trolling (and substanceless posts, etc), while YouTube doesn't. If the culture is different, it mostly because of the karma system (or lack thereof).

scott_s8• 15 years ago

Users can downvote posts, but only users with karma above a certain threshold. No user can downvote a submission, though - you can only flag them.

robbrown4516• 15 years ago

Yeah, well probably most trolls don't ever get that karma, so they troll instead.

Also karma doesn't count for a lot here (that being one exception). Ultimately, a good karma system should simulate the what happens in the best real world environments....where there is a very complex feedback loop that reinforces the sort of behavior we want and suppresses that which we don't want. In my opinion Slashdot comes kind of close, but it has huge flaws itself.

wpeterson2• 15 years ago

Trolling is the spice or salt that keeps things interesting.

Too much can definitely turn everything brackish.

But seeing some humor/sarcasm even if it's pointed mixed in with all of the serious discourse keeps it all manageable.

Tomis• 15 years ago

You shouldn't have posted something positive about trolling. Now mind the downvotes.

This reminds me of an old phrase - "fish swimming against the current gets electrocuted".

_pius• 15 years ago

Please add (2008) to the headline.

biznickman• 15 years ago

Really only 8,000 a day? I've received 10,000 visitors from a single post on hacker news ... am I missing something? I definitely do agree however that the conversation on this site is top notch.

mattmillr• 15 years ago

The article (and that statistic) is from 2008.

Achshar• 15 years ago

It was written in 2008 :) now the latest we have is about 120k i guess.

chris_gogreen2• 15 years ago

Does PG see trolls today in the same light as he did in '98?

eric-hu• 15 years ago

Almost every day I use HN, I wonder why it hasn't implemented collapse-able comments, comment sorting by rank, and auto-collapsing comments.

I understand this could introduce agreement bias, but I feel like that's something that could be fixed by tweaking the numbers (i.e. only auto-collapse comments with -20 votes).

As it is now, it's easy to game the comments thread by piggybacking off the top comment of a post. This can be abused for trolling or just plain discussion visibility (unfairly, IMO).

rjd• 15 years ago

There is a couple more cases which add to the mix.

1) Devils advocate. People that interject with an opposing view, even one they don't believe. I often do this one myself cause another poster to go into deeper description. Often just asking for an deeper response will be ignored, but opposing a view will always bring out an argument.

2) Denial and Righteousness. Essentially nasty fan boys. People who have brought into a belief and refuse to acknowledge any second point of view at all. I had this explained at a trolling seminar at a hacking conference quite well and they picked on the audience themselves to explain how to manipulate IT people.

With most IT people they have the myers-briggs archetype finishing with --TJ. This means they are thinkers and judgmental. They will look at a problem, find the evidence, evaluate it, and make a judgmental decision on what is correct. The facts don't lie.

However the facts can be like quantum variables, you chang angles and then entire structure changes. Making judgmental calls leads to obvious one set of true factual analysis being completely wrong in another setting.

Challenging a judgmental person is challenging there core makeup. Saying they are wrong undermines there very basic personality, drawing on the opposing variable to "thinking" on the myers-briggs scale "feeling". So intelligent people do not react with intelligence first.

Instead of reacting with an "oh ok I didn't realize that was the case in your area" they respond with a protective "I don't think so Tim" and things go down hill from there, especially if the second person is also judgmental.

3) Tribalism. This is the us vs them mentality. Either you are with us or against us. A non ordained view/comment against a group of people who maybe self validating can be seen as a extremely contrasting. Becomes the group has created a false sense of security it can draw out primal responses (like feeling over thinking mentioned above) when that sense of security is threatened.

Many groups become polarising and when confronted with opposing views become more and more fundamental, close ranks. This often forms tight knit groups but also leads to a side effect of making everyone an enemy, including people with in the group who aren't are right as they should be, or people with neutral opinions.

There was an article I read a week or two go about how to talk skeptically to people. If I can find it I'll post it. It addresses how to oppose a view and avoid the bottom two responses.

3pt141592• 15 years ago

Sort of meta-related (in that I'm disagreeing with your facts, and therefore the judgement changes):

I disagree that most hackers are --TJ types. They are more likely to be -NT- with a bend towards INT-. The N is _the_ trait that tends to abstractionism, so it would make little sense for a hacker to be -S-- at all. If you look at the polls here it comes out in spades:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943722

The reason that we argue is that as Rationalists, the truth is more important than anything except for the fact that there is a truth. It is why Rationalists are likely to pick up an Aristotelian view of the word (though that might be a tautology since I think it is an axiom of that worldview).

There is a reason why people are not usually grouped in the --TJ category (the broad categories being -NT-, -NF-, -S-J, -S-P). The reason is that the most important variable, the one that correlates to income, happiness, intelligence is the second letter. It fundamentally effects how you approach the world.

jacques_chester• 15 years ago

Meyers-Briggs is not a respected test of personality in psychometrics circles; it was invented based on an amateur's reading of Jung's theories of personality.

Insofar as people say a pop personality test describes them, it's likely due to the Forer Effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forer_effect).

JoshTriplett3• 15 years ago

> 1) Devils advocate. People that interject with an opposing view, even one they don't believe. I often do this one myself cause another poster to go into deeper description. Often just asking for an deeper response will be ignored, but opposing a view will always bring out an argument.

I find this useful as a means of provoking discussion, but preferably labeled as such if you don't genuinely hold the position you advocate.

> 2) Denial and Righteousness

Many rational people have a low tolerance for irrationality, particularly when they have to deal with it often. Particularly when participating on a technical medium or technical topic, rational people expect rationality, and sometimes react poorly when they don't get it. Rational people should not react badly to corrections supported by evidence. However, rational people react quite badly to irrational "corrections", and I can hardly blame them. Personally, I react to irrationality through detachment: if I can't correct it, I write it off and try to make it have as little impact as possible; fortunately, I rarely encounter situations where I have no choice but to deal with irrationality. However, if you don't include the second half of that (giving up when not worth it), you fall into XKCD's "wrong on the internet" problem (https://www.xkcd.com/386/), and that quickly gets out of hand.

scottmcleod• 15 years ago

Trolls can play an important role in discussion but often only when they play devils advocate. I think 75% of trolling is bruised ego's lashing out.

guscost• 15 years ago

There are few feelings on this Internet better than the one you get while "spending" points on something that needs to be said.

hooande• 15 years ago

I think the reason that troll behavior seems so much worse online is because most of us spend our time in environments where trolls are self-selected out. Assuming that most of us don't regularly deal with assholes in our work and home life, the place we're most likely to interact with them is online forums.

I'm not sure that anonymity or distance are the driving factors in online trolling. Most of the assholes I know have no problem saying mean spirited things when they're standing right next to me. I think the bigger issue is that it's easy for me to avoid those assholes in real life. In an online setting, I can't see them coming and they are Legion...for every one that we vote down, two more will rise up to take its place.

I understand Paul's frustration, but I don't know if we'll be able to find a technical solution. I think this is just one of the drawbacks (balanced by many benefits) of unfiltered communication.

troll24601• 15 years ago

I've trolled. I blame two things: frustration, and myself.

I would get frustrated that there was no reward (and often there was punishment) for correcting errors in others posts. It's incredibly rare to see a rebuttal followed by the original poster simply saying "I was wrong about that, thanks for the information." It's far more common for the OP to simply insult you, or mischaracterize your argument, or otherwise engage in nonsense as their response.

I would get frustrated that comments and posts are promoted on style, not substance.

I would get frustrated that substance was judged inaccurately; often resulting in people whose knowledge was either entirely absent, or only Google deep arguing fiercely with people who'd worked and studied the topic for years.

I would get frustrated at the general lack of respect for truth, for civility, and for each other.

I would get frustrated at pedantry.

I would get frustrated at double-standards and hypocrisy, with people posting uncited nonsense, but demanding citations from their opponents.

I would get frustrated at debate opponents who would willfully misrepresent their opponents side in the argument.

I would get frustrated that semi-plausibly-deniable passive-aggressiveness was accepted by moderators, but direct responses to that aggression were not.

I would get frustrated that sticky lies beat dry truth every time, in votes and moderation.

And once I got frustrated, I lost respect for the forums, but I didn't leave them. I liked what they could be, but not what they were.

So I trolled. I disrespected people who, I felt, were being assholes in one way or another and thus "had it coming".

This wasn't a great response, and for this I blame myself.

I should've done something more constructive with my time. The forums are going to revert to the mean with or without my help; there's no need for me to accelerate the reversion.

int3rnaut• 15 years ago

I wonder if there's an age and cultural divide when assessing trolls on the internet.

I say this in that reading the post, and then the comments from you all-- I see a bit of disparity between philosophies. I mean, for the most part I think from it's very root, trolls are trouble makers, and we can all sort of agree on that. But, there are people here who revel in that, see a symbiotic nature (good needs evil), people who think trolls are important, and that they keep things interesting--people who've even been trolls (full disclosure, when I was younger and immature I partook in such acts...nothing malicious, but acts none the less). When I read things like this I wonder where and at what time these people were introduced to the internet and forums and the like. A lot of younger people (at least the ones I know) are familiar with the trolling culture, and share many of the same previously mentioned opinions, however when I think of my Dad who was introduced to things much earlier when the internet was much more "pure", he loathes such things, "there's no place for that".

As a non-formal study, purely for my curiousity would anyone interested write down their age, the time when they were introduced (ballpark it) to the internet and forums, and their stance on trolls.

boredguy8• 15 years ago

I think one particular line got me thinking:

  Graffiti happens at the intersection of ambition and incompetence: people want 
  to make their mark on the world, but have no other way to do it than literally 
  making a mark on the world.

Paul Graham has to make a caveat because it's too easy for someone to say, "WELL, sir, you have clearly missed that some graffiti is amazing. Banksy!" But there's a very important filter that should kick in: "Can I trivially amend his point in such a way that his argument still holds?" It turns out that I can, and PG should never have need to caveat his statement.

Let me propose, for what it's worth, that a "Banksy!" reply to a statement like the one above is the sort of accidental troll that invites the slow degradation into real trolls. Whether or not Banksy is graffiti or whether or not graffiti is art: these aren't the question of the submission. This isn't to say that tangents are always bad. It's rather that these sorts of discussions quickly turn in to "what color should we paint the dog house?"* That is: lots of firmly-held beliefs with little that can dissuade someone.

So: when posting why someone is wrong, first see if there's a small or trivial way in which you can 'fix' their point. If you can, their point wasn't really broken in the first place.

*I've long been trying to find the original 'why meetings go bad when you're talking about something everyone has an opinion on', but I can't. If anyone can help me out: much appreciated.

kd5bjo• 15 years ago

http://bikeshed.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_Law_of_Trivialit...

benvanderbeek• 15 years ago

I'm truly impressed at how you stated the point about Graffiti / Banksy while simultaneously explaining why it doesn't really have any bearing on the topic at hand.

jpd• 15 years ago

I'd argue that broken analogies are worth mentioning. They do not change the caliber of the point being made by the orginal author, but it is worthwhile to bring it to their attention so that they may fix it later.

joejohnson3• 15 years ago

>> I've thought a lot over the last couple years about the problem of trolls. It's an old one, as old as forums, but we're still just learning what the causes are and how to address them.

That's crazy. We still don't know what causes Trolls?

joejohnson3• 15 years ago

Ah, never mind: this article is 3 years old.

finnw• 15 years ago

Does that make a significant difference? What have we learned about trolling in the last 3 years that we had not already learned in the previous 15 years?

cwilson• 15 years ago

I'm curious if anyone else is seeing a trend of passive aggressive, or light hearted, "trolling" on social networks with family and friends.

For example, on Facebook, a troll might play out like this:

Sarah posts "Having the worst day ever, ugh!"

David "likes" this post.

Link baiting, tagging people places they are not actually at, and other forms of this exist as well. At least in a few of my friend circles they do. In fact, at one point, one of my friends and co-founders created a Facebook group called "Operation Troll Cullen". He invited around 20 of our mutual friends, and the idea was to respond to anything I said or posted with extremely positive messages. "You're doing so great Cullen! Well done!" or "This was the MOST insightful, amazing, article I have ever read. Thank you so much for sharing Cullen, you're amazing!" would be two examples.

I of course had no idea this was going on, but suspected something was amiss. It was quite the week for me, to say the least (and I did find it quite funny, after the fact).

chris_gogreen2• 15 years ago

Sometimes the trollish comments on articles/threads/posts are more entertaining and enjoyable that the content itself.

interlagos• 15 years ago

I've been hellbanned here on HN on at least three different IP addresses and accounts...that I am aware of. Probably more.

In each case nothing I'd ever said would be considered trolling by any rational observer. Here on HN, however, as with most communities where you start to recognize the regulars (tptacek, raganwald, etc), "trolling" is redefined to simply mean "going against the grain".

There was one discussion that I participated where I predicted that Apple would see declining profit margins due to increased competition. Remarkably this completely benign, seemingly obvious observation saw me declared a troll, and shortly thereafter yet another account was hellbanned from HN (whatever the mechanism -- is this the verdict of a bored PG, or has he anointed some particularly under-employed members to apply it? -- it is horribly broken).

Troll is, more often than not, a term used to circle the wagons.

vaksel• 15 years ago

what does hellbanned look like on HN? Can't login? Can't post? Can post, but noone can see it?

tshtf4• 15 years ago

You can post, but by default no one besides you can see it. To the poster, it just appears as a normal comment. Turn on "showdead" to see posts from hellbanned users.

Cushman• 15 years ago

The last one. All of your comments are dead, but you don't know it.

If you have showdead on, sometimes you'll see perfectly reasonable comments that are inexplicably dead-- this is why.

kstenerud2• 15 years ago

Anything you post can't be seen by others unless they've turned on dead posts in their configuration, in which case anything you post has [dead] prefixed on it.

Though it happens less than in other forums, wagon circling is definitely a persistent problem on HN. I believe it's only further exacerbated by the fact that downvoted comments are displayed in a difficult to read color, meaning that downvotes can effectively censor things the majority doesn't like, regardless of the merit of the argument. It's not as bad as on Reddit, where groups of people form downvote cabals to actively censor specific users or ideas, but it's still problematic.

eldude5• 15 years ago

It doesn't look like anything to the banned individual apparently, as I just now discovered that my account was banned. Awesome.

http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3354475

scott_s8• 15 years ago

Can you point to the actual posts? Every time I've seen a hellbanned account, I have agreed with the decision.

In the interest of full disclosure, my suspicion is that the way you expressed these opinions ran counter to the kind of discussion people want to see on HN. I may be wrong, of course, which is why I'd like to see the actual posts.

zerostar072• 15 years ago

Not that I care anymore, but why was this account banned anyway: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ignifero ?

eldude5• 15 years ago

> Every time I've seen a hellbanned account, I have agreed with the decision.

I'd be curious to get your opinion on my (just discovered) ban: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3354475

mithaler• 15 years ago

I'm curious--can you paste the text of that comment here if you still have it? It's possible that, for example, it was your tone that got you downvoted, not your message. Or it could have been the community perceiving you to be ignoring evidence, or any number of other things. In any case, this claim here isn't sufficient for us to judge the fairness of the response.

gbog2• 15 years ago

There has been some threads where any comment that was not a praise of Steve Jobs and Apple was downvoted. Sometimes I feel fragmentation on HN, was is upvoted in a thread is downvoted in another.

teej3• 15 years ago

In the last 6 months I've been running an experiment. An experiment to make Hacker News better. Because I felt Hacker News was going to shit in several ways and I felt like I could help.

I couldn't stop naive newbies from making dumb comments, but I could stop fanboyism and groupthink.

I decided that I was going to take a different approach to commenting. In essence, I wanted to be like DHH - highly opinionated, strongly worded, and unafraid to call people out. To ensure comment integrity, I stuck only to topics in which I strongly felt I was in the right.

patio11, joshu, tptacek and pg were some of the people I spoke out against. I made the argument that those people were flat-out wrong. But not just that, I clarified -why- they were wrong in a reasoned way. And that was the key - explaining why. It turns out that people DID care about the truth. People WERE willing to hear out an alternate view and they voted with their upvotes.

I was able to move my karma from 3.5k to 5k and move my average from 7 to 14 per comment. Many of my comments took a very contrarian view to the HN status quo. Many of them were directly targeted at the "HN elite". All of them took their share of downvotes from those who thought my comments didn't add value. But in the end, they were the most successful comments I've ever made.

So don't lose hope! There is a way out of groupthink. But it takes hard work, great communication, and an academic view of persuasion. In the end, I think reasoned and rational discussion is what makes HN great, let's get back to that.

tshtf4• 15 years ago

In the last 6 months I conducted a different experiment.

I turned on "showdead" and looked through the posting history of users with dead posts. About a quarter of the time, I would have disagreed with the hellbanning.

If you're going to ban a user, you might as well be honest and tell them up front.

tokenadult2• 15 years ago

Your user name wasn't immediately familiar to me, but I see when I look back at your comments that I remember some of those very well. You have indeed posted some comments in the last few months that provide good examples of disagreeing with groupthink while referring to facts and acknowledging other points of view.

I have a different style (I think I don't ever f-bomb in online comments) but your manner of making comments is food for thought, especially on issues where what I've learned in more than five decades of life experience leads to different conclusions from the majority opinion here on HN.

nirvana2• 15 years ago

You had 3.5k karma before beginning this experiment and you're a cofounder of a YC funded company! You're already part of the "in" group.

The first comment prior to this one on your comments feed starts of with: "Your entire comment is bullshit and it pisses me off. You've never worked at Zynga, so to purport that you know exactly what it's like to work there is bullshit. Your comment reflects exactly what Silicon Valley nerds think of Zynga externally. They think that Zynga is nothing but people refining skinner boxes for people to play in. You've probably seen one or two talks of Mark Pincus talking about "doing every dirty trick in the book" or something like that. Have you ever met him? Do you even know the last time he worked directly on a game? You're allowed to have whatever opinion you like, but this opinion is bullshit. Your entire comment is ridiculously biased and unreflective of Zynga internally or externally."

This part of your response is mostly a characterization of the commentator based on your own speculation about whether he's worked at Zynga or met Mark Pincus. While strictly speaking you're only characterizing the comment, this comes off as a personal attack to me.

Meanwhile, other people have been hell banned for linking to wikipedia pages defending scientific facts, because those facts go against the dominant ideology on hacker news (or that of the people with their finger on the ban button.)

I'm tired of hearing the refrain that reason and rationality rule the day here, when it seems pretty clear to me that if you're a liberal, an apple hater, an open source advocate who opposes property rights, you get a free pass for personal insults, but if you're none of those things, no matter how reasoned or rational you are, you risk being hellbanned.

I try to restrict myself only to commenting on safe subjects for that reason. I'm actually worried that disagreeing with you will result in me getting hellbanned. That's not the kind of environment where "reasoned and rational discussion" are really going to flourish.

DiabloD34• 15 years ago

In short, you can't stop the group think.

Continuing from this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3354448

I'm not even sure if I get the point of trying either. I mean, I believe I have provided at least some value to HN, but every time I've "been unafraid to call people out", all I got was a bunch of crap for it.

Although you say we shouldn't lose hope, I think I already have. Its frustrating to have to deal with people claiming everything is the next new previous thing or the new black or the new white or the new Apple or the new Google or whatever else meme you can think of it.

I find startups intriguing, I like deeply scientific and mathematical discussions, I like hearing about stuff going on in the open source world. You'd think HN would be my thing, but there are simply elements of the HN community that rub me the wrong way and no matter how much you try to stop them, no matter how many times you down vote them, they just keep coming back stronger than before.

Honestly, there are just some people here who'd be happier over at 4chan than here, and I wish they'd just go.

BTW, I expect to get downvoted for this, and I don't care. I don't sugar coat the truth, and I'm sure as hell not going to start now.

stfu• 15 years ago

Steven Colbert might be the best example of how good trolling can lead to very enlightening statements. In an ideal case it could even bring a self-discovery in the form of a Socratian dialogue that illustrates certain "taking things too serious" positions.

Additionally I think one should draw a line between trolling and flaming. Just some "you suck" comments are not making a troll a troll.

jcampbell1• 15 years ago

The fact that you consider the observation obvious, is a sign that you were possibly trolling. You were probably being intellectually too lazy to make your point without resorting using tactics like calling your own opinions seemingly obvious.

It is not obvious that increased competition leads to declining margins. Often increased competition validates the market, and increases consumer demand far more than the effect on pricing. I have seen it in my own industry, where our sales increase when a competitor launches a big ad campaign.

dasil0032• 15 years ago

> Troll is, more often than not, a term used to circle the wagons.

I think this is true by definition, after all, if the majority are trolling then it's culturally acceptable and you have 4chan.

But I think if you are being intellectually honest you need to be open to the possibility that maybe you were acting like a dick on occasion. I've dealt with heavy duty trolling before, and it's a common refrain that the admins are "fascist" and that they are simply "censoring" unpopular opinions. All the while saying things that would get their asses kicked if said in public. For the unskilled troll their behavior is obvious, but the skilled troll can make himself indistinguishable from someone who just has a mild form of digital Aspergers. Often the only goal is to piss you off and waste your time. So in the battle against trolls, detached and ruthless action is often necessary because anything else allows them to win. If there is some collateral damage because one's opinion is just too "different", probably the best thing is to move on to a different forum, or just start a blog. Then you can post your opinions and gain even more notoriety with "the regulars" possibly defending you with the backing of their mighty reputation. Witness Ted Dziuba, that cocky prick would for sure be hellbanned if he waded into HN, but he doesn't have to because everyone reads his posts directly.

tokenadult2• 15 years ago

I'll disagree with you in part while agreeing in part. I invite onlookers to apply the rubric from pg's essay "How to Disagree"

http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html

to rate how well I do in disagreeing here.

You write, Here on HN, however, as with most communities where you start to recognize the regulars (tptacek, raganwald, etc), "trolling" is redefined to simply mean "going against the grain."

I disagree with this, because I have openly disagreed at least with tptacek, and certainly with other users who have higher karma totals than I have and have been on Hacker News longer than I have, and yet I have never been hellbanned. I have seen even more open, pointed, and frequent disagreements with some of the "regulars" here from some of the other regulars, but those accounts are still alive and well. I have used the same username here, and only this one username here, during all the 1122 days since I formed my user account. To the best of my knowledge and belief, each of my posts has been visible to users since it was posted, and the majority of my comments have stayed above 0 net karma ever since they were posted.

I agree with you that expressions of opinion that disagree with the joint opinion of the most active HN participants can result in individual net downvotes of comments. Before I got here, it was declared that the site founder is okay with participants downvoting to express disagreement with comments,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

and when I lose karma on a net basis with a particular comment, I look at how the comment was written, and think about how I could make a comment that disagrees with prevailing opinion be more persuasive the next time. (Another user who has replied to you reports experiments in doing this, and I will look at the examples found in the past comments by that user to see how it is done.) Once in a while, if an issue is important enough to me, I'll openly (and, I hope, respectfully and thoughtfully) disagree, and figure that such occasions when I burn through karma is what karma is worth accumulating for.

To sum up, I agree with the proposition that some comments here are downvoted solely to express disagreement. The art of writing comments is to figure out how to express disagreement and still appeal to disagreeing readers as a thoughtful participant in intellectual discussion. On the other hand, I don't think most users here flag comments for disagreement, but rather for blatant violation of the site guidelines. I disagree with the proposition that anyone has been hellbanned solely for posting comments that are in factual disagreement with majority opinion here. I see plenty of live accounts that manage to openly express disagreement frequently, and I possess one.

AFTER EDIT: I note, entirely with amusement, that this comment is bouncing up and down in karma score just now. Whatever, I'm just trying to point to some reasons to think about the issue differently from the opinion expressed in the parent comment. Whether you the reader agree or not is up to you.

AFTER FURTHER EDIT, RELATING TO COMMENT REPLYING TO THIS COMMENT: Thank you for your reply. I agree that it is logically correct to say that pointing to accounts that survive despite disagreement is not an airtight proof that no accounts have been hellbanned for disagreement. On the other hand, my general point is that I don't see any affirmative evidence for the extraordinary claim that this site is moderated with swift and frequent hellbanning for disagreement as a routine part of the moderation policy. I join the other users who have already said, "link, please?" to follow up statements of the nature of "In each case nothing I'd ever said would be considered trolling by any rational observer," so that we can all see just what the problem was. I had showdead on for most of 2010 and 2011, and I never felt, as I read dead posts, that users who don't see dead posts are missing much from the thousands of posts here on Hacker News. The way to get a reality check on this statement, of course, is to turn on showdead and see what dead posts look like day after day after day on a variety of subjects in a variety of threads.

tshtf4• 15 years ago

I disagree with the proposition that anyone has been hellbanned solely for posting comments that are in factual disagreement with majority opinion here. I see plenty of live accounts that manage to openly express disagreement frequently, and I possess one.

This is a logical fallacy. Simply because there exist an account that hasn't been hellbanned because they express disagreement doesn't mean that other accounts aren't hellbanned for expressing disagreement.

tptacek• 15 years ago

There is zero chance yelling at or about me on HN is going to get you hellbanned. There's a bigger chance I'll get hellbanned.

This is one of the dumber meta-threads HN has had. Not so much your comment in particular as the whole thing.

eldude5• 15 years ago

I'm absolutely shocked and disgusted to be be reading this discussion regarding being "hellbanned" only to discover that my account in fact has been hellbanned for the past 1.5 yrs without even knowing it!

http://news.ycombinator.org/threads?id=CrabDude * enable showdead in your profile to read my comments

As you can see from my comments and contributions, most are extremely well reasoned and often entirely unique and invaluable contributions to a given conversation that to my frustration were inexplicably never upvoted or commented on, without any real insight as to why. I honestly am in shock and beyond frustrated that so much of my efforts and attempts to edify and contribute have been undermined by something that is explicitly allowed in comment guidelines. [1]

Specifically, the comment that is apparently responsible for my hellban, was on a post that linked to MY NodeKnockout entry which both won the competition category and received over 60 votes to end up on the front page:

  HEY ALL! REMEMBER TO VOTE FOR US! WE'RE TRYING TO WIN THE INNOVATION CATEGORY!
  http://nodeknockout.com/teams/starcraft-2-destroyed-my-marri...
  AND RETWEET THIS WITH #nodeko! =)

Worse, this manner of comment is explicitly mentioned as okay in the guidelines. [1]

  Empty comments can be ok if they're positive. There's nothing wrong with submitting a comment saying just "Thanks."

And to any who would comment that my use of all caps elicited my ban, I'd respond by pointing out the use of capitalization is used "for emphasis," [2] in this case, specifically, enthusiasm -- unfortunately making the resulting ban all the more disgusting and frustrating.

To any in YC who have control over such things, please unban my account. I would greatly prefer to use it and retain all my contributions than be forced to play wack-a-mole in response to inaccurate rule enforcement.

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_caps

ericd• 15 years ago

That comment looks a LOT like spam. Hellbanning is necessary, because if a spammer realizes they've been banned overtly, they'll just create a new account and keep on spamming. You do have a lot of legitimately good comments in that list, though.

burgerbrain4• 15 years ago

"With the advent of the internet, all caps in messages became closely identified with "shouting" or attention-seeking behaviour and is considered very rude."

philwelch• 15 years ago

It would be helpful if you provided links to your previous accounts, so we could see for ourselves.

anigbrowl2• 15 years ago

I find that kind of hard to believe. I don't hack or even work in the computer industry any more, have got into arguments with almost every long-term member at some point or other, and hold distinctly minority positions on a variety of topics (most often about governance). And heaven knows that I can be as snarky or pompous as anyone else when I've had a bad day. Maybe I'm just lucky, but the admins seem pretty hands off to me.

jcr3• 15 years ago

anigbrowl, I enjoy your comments, both on your good days and your bad days. On rare occasions it seems like you may have misread something since your reply comes from a surprising angle, but English is not the first language of everyone, and everyone misreads things on occasion. The good news is when I see something surprising as if things were misread, it means I should reread them to make sure that I didn't misread them.

shiven• 15 years ago

The hellbanning is what turned me off commenting and sharing my opinions on HN. With the passage of time, what was once a forum to discuss (and openly dissent) ideas feels like an old boys club ... with a few anointed head goons to keep the order (and teach newcomers a lesson with zealous downvoting and hellbanning), a few ol timers who still act decently in hopes that HN may yet regain its spirit (as they remember it) and the rest of the crowd filled with the usual riff-raff on any web forum who have no idea what HN started off as and will probably never care. PG, HN was (is?) a great idea and a great place and well worth the while. Burned two handles over the years, getting the hang of it, but by then it was no longer the place I liked.

I'll keep lurking, at least for now.

Good luck.

tripzilch2• 15 years ago

I agree that hellbanning on HN is completely out of control.

I've seen people (that otherwise posted useful contributions, before and after) hellbanned for making a rather tasteless joke. The joke was sufficiently tasteless that I can totally see a moderator suspending or even banning that user. But not hellbanning. Not that it's strictly worse or anything, it's just so utterly useless and childish.

This user had no idea that anything had happened, and he just kept posting for weeks. All that wasted time! And I'm fairly sure that if a moderator would have just told him "hey we'd rather not have people make jokes about dead children here" the guy would have replied "right, my bad that was out of line, won't happen again" cause the rest of his comments didn't seem very inflammatory or anything.

Instead the guy gets no message at all and keeps on posting invisibly. A regular ban would have at least sent some message.

... and then there's these things I've heard about people getting temporary hellbans? So people can come back all butthurt after realizing they've been tricked into invisibly wasting their time? That's the dumbest kind of moderation I've ever heard about, really. A hellban should be forever, or not at all. There is no such thing as a "hell suspension".

Sukotto• 15 years ago

My go-to commentary on this general topic is the classic penny-arcade comic "John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory"

(Normal Person) + (Anonymity) + (Audience) = (Total Fuckwad)

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/3/19/

psn• 15 years ago

I hate this cartoon. it leads real name requirements on sites, in the hope of removing anonymity. This hurts all sorts of groups (see the google+ real names saga for a long list) but doesn't really slow down trolling. You can and do see people making racist / sexist / whatever comments with their real name. Possibly the trolls know that there are many John Smiths in the world. Its a "theory" thats been disproven by this point.

billswift3• 15 years ago

More generally: (Normal Person) + (Wrong Situation) = (Oops)

See: Banality of Evil http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banality_of_evil

and, http://www.radioopensource.org/hannah-arendt-and-the-banalit...

billpatrianakos7• 15 years ago

I like the measures HN has in place to combat trolling. Karma, up/down votes, the downvote threshold, dead links, etc. are all really good and seem to work. The biggest thing though is just making sure everyone understands the kind of unspoken spirit of the site. I'd also argue that we want to keep this place kind of hushed as not to attract too broad of an audience.

What I don't like that I have seen a lot of, is what I like to call "karma police". People who abuse the downvote button to silence perfectly valid comments that they just happen to disagree with. That's a problem. I think we need to be more judicious about the up and down votes. It's easy to just up vote something with a title we agree with but does it really call for it? I liken it to how easy it is to press the Facebook like button everywhere. As for downvotes, that button should be reserved for off-topic, vulgar, or otherwise obvious trolling cases and not just because "I didn't like what he said, he's stupid, or whatever".

JoshTriplett3• 15 years ago

The downvote button means, literally, "this comment should appear less prominently, and its author should get a very small penalty for having written it". Similarly, upvote means, literally, "this comment should appear more prominently, and its author should get a very small reward for having written it".

With that in mind, "perfectly valid" takes on a different light. While sometimes downvoting does get used to reinforce groupthink, sometimes it just thwacks a comment with incorrect but authoritative-sounding information, or an off-topic comment, or a rehash of an well-known unresolvable debate (valid or otherwise), or in general a comment which will produce more heat than light.

In this case, I disagree with your comment, but I've upvoted it because I think it deserves more prominence and more discussion.

Can you give an example of the kind of comment which you think received unwarranted downvotes?

billpatrianakos7• 15 years ago

Sure, the examples I remember usually come up whenever there's a discussion over copyright and piracy. What I'll see is a discussion about whether piracy really hurts anyone with people arguing that it's free marketing and people who pirate wouldn't buy anyway. Then someone comes along and the subject moves on to open source vs free software. Someone says piracy is good because all software should be free. Then a bunch of people pile on and agree. Then one guy comes along saying that software companies aren't evil and developers should be able to charge for their work and piracy is bad. He is then downvoted to hell not because he said something off topic but because he held an unpopular opinion.

I actually totally agree with you and the other responder to my comment. Now that you guys have said something I feel like I should rhrase and simply say that sometimes I feel like the up and down vote buttons are sometimes abused. I hate to see group think win the day. I really think the downvote button is a great way to show people that what they're saying isn't okay around here. Downvoted comments get frayed out and are almost unreadable. That's a signal that the comment isn't worth reading at all more so than "it deserves less prominence". So instead if we just up vote the good stuff, ignore mediocre stuff, and downvote bad stuff, then I think we'd be helping to show participants what kind of community this is in a better way. The real trolls get punished. The guys who are boring won't be offended and will be more apt to contribute better stuff next time if you just give them no points at all.

mquander• 15 years ago

As for downvotes, that button should be reserved for off-topic, vulgar, or otherwise obvious trolling cases and not just because "I didn't like what he said, he's stupid, or whatever."

I disagree. Why do you think that? I think that "I didn't like what he said, he's stupid, or whatever" (e.g. I think this comment is foolish, I think this comment is unreasonably rude, I think this comment is uninteresting) is a very good reason to downvote. The purpose of the up- and down-voting is to allow readers to decide which comments are good and which are not very good. Why would you accept that readers have the power to move up comments that they like, but not to move down the ones that they don't like?

billpatrianakos7• 15 years ago

I don't think I was very clear. My main concern is that people will move something down because they disagree. There can be a comment I disagree with very much but if it's well reasoned and on topic I can't really punish the author only on the basis of me not sharing the same opinion. And that's what I feel is happening quite often.

It's okay in the cases of foolish and unreasonably rude comments, there's no question about it. But in cases where you simply disagree its uncalled for. In the case of uninteresting comments that don't qualify as rude or foolish I don't think there's a reason to downvote. Instead you up vote the good ones around it and let it just stagnate.

Downvoting is a way you can kind of give others hints of the kind of things that are expected around here. If you downvote on the basis of it not being interesting the person may come to believe they've said something offensive or foolish when really it was just boring. If they see they're getting no up votes then they can kind of tell that what they said was boring without giving them the wrong impression. People who get severely downvoted definitely get the hint if they're being off topic or foolish but when they're downvoted for being boring I don't think they get it and may think something else is up.

metachris• 15 years ago

Which means that once trolling takes hold, it tends to become the dominant culture. That had already happened to Slashdot and Digg by the time I paid attention to comment threads there, but I watched it happen to Reddit.

Reddit actually has a fascinating, rich culture. Trolling is just a part of it, but the community seems to be managing.

iambvk• 15 years ago

Yes, I think reddit is not as bad as many think. Given the huge size of reddit community, I guess, reddit has managed to retain a high quality humor and knowledge (eg: r/askscience). Their fu is one of the best source of innovative comics I ever found.

daenz• 15 years ago

The fact that official moderators (read: people with super-user powers) are needed on a forum indicates that the regulating powers are broken by design.

Back in late 2009 I built a forum that allowed every user to temporarily ban any other user. There were restrictions... bans lengths were temporary (and voted on democratically), expiring after the voted time limit, you could only ban a person you replied to, and everyone would be able to see that you were the person who banned the parent post. Other than that, the forum was completely anonymous, and it was able to regulate large numbers of trolls (mostly from 4chan). They seemed to appreciate the equality and the natural regulation.

firefoxman1• 15 years ago

I was thinking along the same lines yesterday about why there are so many negative comments online and not offline. I think one of the main reasons (that PG didn't cover) is that in the real world, people associate together in groups.

Nobody wants to be around a negative person, so not only does the negative person have a minimal negative impact on the people around him (since no one will listen), but the main problem arises when he gets online. Not only is this troll frustrated that no real people will listen to his negativity, but when he jumps online he's equal to everyone else. There are no groups. Nobody looks at his username like they would his face in the real-world and says "oh he's an ass, don't listen to him." I think it's partially because faces are easier to remember than usernames, and partially because we associate a whole personality with a face so we can avoid this person next time.

When everyone's equal they each have the same impact. This would be a beautiful system if there was 0 negativity online because the new guy with great ideas would be heard just as well as a 10-year online veteran. But in the online social world its strength seems to be its weakness. How am I supposed to know if the person commenting is a really cynical person or a constructive criticism-type person until I've fully read his comment, and by then he's already made his impact on me.

I don't think modern social networks have this problem as much though. I only socialize with my real friends on FB, Twitter, and G+.

phzbOx• 15 years ago

There is a difference between trolling, making a funny statement and saying a contrived opinion. On HN, all of these get down-voted equally.

Often time, I find something funny, say it as a comment, and get down-voted. It's not a stupid joke or something inappropriate, just a comment that'd make the reader smile. And I know it's hard to judge because I keep saying the score of these comments oscillating (I.e. people upvote it because it's funny, and people downvote it because it's funny (or they don't find it funny.))

About contrived opinion, that one is sad. There's a difference between something wrong and saying your opinion. For instance, someone saying "I don't like Backbone.js because x, y, z" will get on average a really small or negative score. Why? People who agree with this statement in small minority +x, people who disagree with this statement but agree that it was some good arguments and points: +y, majority of people who disagree with the statement -z. It just so happen that z>(x+y) with controversial statements.

Lastly, trolling is more about searching for trouble or pissing of people. For instance, they'll say "Wtf, stop wasting your time with perl. It's a DEAD LANGUAGE, WAKE UP". This kind of posts should just get deleted and the user warned and then banned from HN imo. Note that there're a couple of wrong things with this statement. First, it's extremely aggressive and provocative. Personally, I hate this but some well known people act like that and are really appreciated so I won't judge. Secondly, there's no argument or fact.. it's just trash talking without ground to base yourself on. Lastly, there's usually lots of words in caps and 'wtf' 'lol' 'trololol' which make it look unprofessional for readers of HN used to read well written text. (Ironically, I know this current text isn't well written but it's because english is not my main language, not because I'm trying to skip words or be unprofessional).

Anyway, what I'd suggest is to have a way to differentiate between theses. 1- A 'flag as spam/troll/non-respectful'. 2- A +1 (like what we have) to say this is an interesting post/comment. 3- A Agree/Disagree button to express your opinion.

So basically, someone saying "You guys are fucking stupid; 1+1=2" would be flagged as unrespectful but could still be valid and agreed by the majority.

But in the end, is it worth it? As they say in engineering, it it works, don't fix it. HN is not perfect, but I still enjoy reading the comments and I learn quite a lot.. is it worth trying to fix it for a minority of trolls or disrespectful people?

skybrian• 15 years ago

Even if they're funny, posts that consist only of a joke generally aren't allowed. They'd be more appropriate for Reddit. Hacker News posts are supposed to have some substance to them.

(You're seeing fluctuations because not everyone knows this.)

dasil0032• 15 years ago

I'd amend that to say you have to say something really fucking hilarious and you'll do okay. And that's fine, we just can't allow average jokes because otherwise you end up with reedit where a 30-level deep joke thread is at the top of every single post.

draegtun• 15 years ago

> they'll say "Wtf, stop wasting your time with perl. It's a DEAD LANGUAGE, WAKE UP". This kind of posts should just get deleted and the user warned and then banned from HN imo.

It would be good if something could be done. Nearly every Perl post here that gets some traction will often have this problem [1]. And sadly in most cases this engulfs the topic being posted :(

[1] And often its the same few people causing the problem.

alexcharlie• 15 years ago

Facebook has an interesting solution to the content quality problem, and trolling is a very specific type of content quality problem. Positively reinforce good content and HIDE everything else. The "Like" button accomplishes this well.

If you've used facebook for a few years, you might remember the introduction of the "Like" button. Facebook before the "Like" button was very different from a UGC perspective. People did a lot more bitching and moaning. People posted much more inane ramblings about what they ate for lunch lunch or random happenings in their day. The "Like" button created a positive reinforcement loop and consciously or not people started to try to post content that would get more likes. Someone being emo about their shitty boyfriend or girlfriend is probably not going to get likes, probably wont get surfaced in the news feed and will never be heard. Eventually when people stop seeing those posts they are less compelled to post those things themselves. Facebook describes this as the virtuous cycle of sharing. Someone posts something, they get patted on the back. YOU see their post and their pats on the back and you tend to want to do the same thing. If you have friends on twitter and friends on facebook, just put the two feeds up next to eachother. You'll see a HUGE difference in the types of updates that people post.

zerostar072• 15 years ago

Downvoting is a sort of trolling too. People don't like unconventional opinions here. Say something bad about the late S. Jobs and you re certain to be buried. Even scientifically proven facts get buried sometimes. The problem is not solved. Let's try something radical, like, ban all adjectives.

efsavage• 15 years ago

"The conversations on Reddit were good when it was that small."

When reddit was small, it was full of, and dominated by, crackpots. It was barely even at the level of being entertaining, and I'd hesitate to call it a community at all. Intentional trolls generally don't mess with crackpots, for some reason. I don't know if it's because it's too easy or unsatisfying, but the trolls usually come with mainstreaming.

(There are still lots of crackpots there, but it's gelled to a far more coherent community that is much more fun to incite).

jvandenbroeck• 15 years ago

Well because down voting influences karma I'm probably posting 70% less than I would. I see HN more like a news site in which I sometimes share my view on something but not to comment or to discuss something (sadly).

First I saw HN as something to have an intelligent discussion, but after a few "controversial" posts, and having negative karma, I don't bother. I only post something when I think it's "safe" to post, or when I have time to write a detailed essay.

I think some people can have an intelligent discussion on HN, not for me, maybe because of my dyslexia I'm bad with words. But then again, maybe that's the price to pay to keep the trolls away.

nickik2• 15 years ago

Well I think on a blog post with the title 'php suckx!' there want be an intelligent discussion but when there is something about a cool project you sometimes get good discussions. For example the resent post about the Facebook Jit: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3348853

edw5192• 15 years ago

Discussions like this remind me of my favorite scene from "Roadhouse", the best bad movie ever. Discussion forums are kinda like bars and hackers are kinda like coolers...

  All you have to do is follow three simple rules.
  One: never underestimate your opponent.
  Expect the unexpected.
  Two: take it outside.
  Never start anything inside the bar unless it's absolutely necessary.
  And three: be nice.
  Come on.
  If somebody gets in your face and calls you a cocksucker, I want you to be nice.
  OK.
  Ask him to walk, be nice.
  If he won't walk, walk him. But be nice.
  If you can't walk him, one of the others will help you.
  And you'll both be nice.
  I want you to remember that it's a job.
  - It's nothing personal. - Uh-huh.
  Being called a cocksucker isn't personal?
  No. It's two nouns combined to elicit a prescribed response.
  What if somebody calls my mama a whore?
  Is she?
  (laughter)
  I want you to be nice...
  ..until it's time to not be nice.
  Well, how're we supposed to know when that is?
  You won't. I'll let you know.

Sometimes we hackers work too hard to make things more complicated than they need to be.

Be nice.

(Oh, and by the way, I'm letting you know now when it's time to not be nice here: never.)

jshen2• 15 years ago

"Sometimes we hackers work too hard to make things more complicated than they need to be."

tl;dr: maintaining an online community is anything but simple.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean. One possibility is that you're referring to the hackers that build communities online who try to establish some sort of guidelines for behavior.

If this is what you meant then I think I disagree. I've tried a very similar experiment to pg's with HN. I run a small community site http://yakkstr.com and most of the users came from an older site called soulcast. soulcast had no rules and it degenerated exactly as expected and was full of trolls in no time. My entire goal was to recreate that site minus the trolls, and I ruthlessly enforced one simple rule. Do not directly insult other users of the site. (actually two rules: no porn, illegal stuff, or spam)

Simple right? Not really. I loved pg's child metaphor, and just like a child the trolls from the old site, who are smarter than actual children, do everything they can to find the limits to what is allowed, and they hover right around that line. As soon as they think you're going easy they push it farther.

One example, people like to argue about politics on yakkstr and one of the trolls uses a pattern of associating a label like "liberal" to someone then they insult the label. Moronic ideas for liberals, liberals are morons, etc, etc. Technically he's not violating my rule, but it's very hard to define an explicit rule to deal with such instances because you want to allow people to sometimes say controversial things about generic groups.

The problem arises when someone gets offended and reacts by directly insulting the savy troll. How do you deal with it? Not so easy. And occasionally a good user gets made at something and calls someone a moron. It leaves a bad taste in their mouth if you come down with an iron fist on them.

I don't have good answers to these problems, but I think the hard work is working out pretty well for my little community. But it is complicated and requires constant vigilance.

edw5192• 15 years ago

Sometimes we hackers work too hard to make things more complicated than they need to be.

I was referring to the hackers who use the forum, not the ones who run it. Sorry for the confusion.

It really is much easier and more beneficial for everyone to just be nice. Why work harder to achieve less?

A few strategies that have made it easier for me to "be nice":

1. Avoid long back and forth threads. Say what you have to say and get back to work.

2. Try to plan your comment to not be misinterpreted. This avoids much unnecessary pain. It's also difficult.

3. If someone responds negatively to you, wait and let others respond on your behalf. It's amazing how much better this feels.

4. Imagine that the other person has 42 legitimate reasons for not being nice. Let 'em slide.

5. Imagine that the other person may someday be your ideal co-founder, mentor, collaborator, customer, or angel. (Or more likely, your ideal co-founder, mentor, collaborator, customer, or angel is witnessing this exchange.) Don't say anything to scare them away.

6. Most of all: It doesn't matter! This is all optional. We were all busy working before Hacker News and will be busy working after Hacker News is gone (perish the thought). Lighten up.

ggchappell• 15 years ago

> My entire goal was to recreate that site minus the trolls, and I ruthlessly enforced one simple rule. Do not directly insult other users of the site.

I've pondered this issue a lot, and I've also noticed that, as you indicated, lots of troll messages would be acceptable under your rule, but many responses to those messages would not be.

My favorite example comes from a discussion group about hamsters as pets. Someone -- clearly a troll -- posts a recipe for barbecued hamster. 100 people respond something like, "You're sick!"

In that case, it seemed to me that it was not the trolling that wrecked the discussion, but the response to it. And of course the troll is not violating your rule, but those who replied to him are. So I like your rule.

> And occasionally a good user gets made at something and calls someone a moron. It leaves a bad taste in their mouth if you come down with an iron fist on them.

Hmmm ... but directly asking them not to do it again would probably work well. If they can't even handle that, then you probably don't want them anyway. (And really, is the iron-fist policy so bad? So someone gets a bad taste in their mouth. That someone was wrecking your community.)

Jugglernaut• 15 years ago

Ban the line pushers or at least probate them for a fortnight. There is no reason to allow someone to take up your time by making you wonder if you should ban or not ban.

yvdriess• 15 years ago

You might be interested in this presentation on running an internet community: http://vimeo.com/5623703

emmelaich2• 15 years ago

Here's a real life example of a bouncer being nice and firm. Like the top rated comment says, it's as if he is a doctor in psychology.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWfetF1jCO4

emmelaich2• 15 years ago

And here's a similar event related in the hacker/online context.

http://pugs.blogs.com/audrey/2009/08/my-hobby-troll-hugging....

Discussed here on hackernews: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=786874

d0mine• 15 years ago

The monolog from "Roadhouse" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojPVOhHhwnk#t=2m

sytelus• 15 years ago

Currency in the economy of trolls is attention. When forums are small, trolling is much less rewarding and vice versa. Troll economy also feeds on to itself and upvoting/downvoting/karma mechanisms would be less and less effective as forum membership grows. To boost the attention economy, trolls would resort to upvote each other more frequently eventually outweighing votes of others.

From theoretical perspective this is very similar problem to links and webpages. A troll is equivalent to a spammy web page. Upvotes/downvotes are equivalent to traffic you get on your web page. When UserA upvotes UserB, a link is created between two. The goal of a troll is to get as much traffic as possible. They are incentivised to give each other upvotes in the hope of return favor, or in other words, create as many links to each other as possible. It would be mistake to think that few "good guys" can be used as gate keeper to protect the system against these trolls. In nutshell that is the hope and approach many early search engines had and they failed as the size grew out of their hands. The solution has to be technical and automated. Algorithms like PageRank or machine learning models is highly applicable to trolling issue. For instance, the real value of karma should not be a naïve count of upvotes (in the same way that real important of the page is not how many other pages points to it) but rather who has upvoted it. I think algorithms like PageRank can be easily applied to calculate the value of karma. If trolls upvotes each other 1000 times, their net karma would be much less than 1000 de- incentivising them for putting in the efforts for upvoting. Of course, there are many ways to fool PageRank and but I think algos like this should be sufficient for forums were you don't have to deal with more sophisticated folks like search marketers.

adnam2• 15 years ago

I used to be able to "flag" posts on HN, but a few weeks ago that right appears to have been revoked. No idea what I may have done wrong; perhaps I'm a "troll" and I don't know it?

seiji• 15 years ago

Same thing happened to my account a few months ago. I recall having a few bad days where I was, perhaps, overzealous in flagging what I considered inane or wrong or groupthink or low quality self-promotional drivel.

Having your features pared down is a fine line between "we're doing this for your own good to save you from yourself" and "we think your input is less valuable than everybody else here."

burgerbrain4• 15 years ago

I flagged every single steve jobs article the day after his death... which happened to be every article.... My ability to flag articles has since been revoked.

To be honest, it felt good. Made me feel like I had been heard. Shot down, sure, but still heard.

adnam2• 15 years ago

Actually, I think this is exactly what happened to me!

TomGullen• 15 years ago

I'm quite a big fan of a well placed witty troll. It's one of the most delicate, subtle and hilarious forms of humour. That's when it's done well however, not all trolls are like that.

Some of the heartiest laughs I've ever had are sourced from trolls.

My troll spotting ability is falling at the wayside though. I used to be really good at spotting trolls, nowadays I come across something every now and think, "Is he trolling?". And that's the beauty of the best trolls, they border on insanity but keep it just within the realms of believability.

switz• 15 years ago

HN is great because you can say controversial things and still get voted up. Most comment voting systems are often: agree (vote up) or disagree (vote down). HN seems to be more along the lines of: Does this comment make empirical sense or is this person talking out of their ass.

zhazam• 15 years ago

What about HN voting specifically prevents the first case (agree/disagree) from happening?

DanielBMarkham• 15 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.

I am not seeing this any more on HN.

This is the second time I read this essay, and my concerns are still the same: people who have minority opinions might not be able to express them in such a polite way as to be considered "thoughtful" by the majority.

I'm a bit of a contrarian commenter. That's because forums such as this one naturally gravitate to extremes. The programmer who lost his dog, and suddenly everybody is looking for him. The news story that causes us to be concerned about an intrusive government, and suddenly everybody sees Nazis everywhere.

People in groups naturally gravitate towards extremes. Whether they are right or wrong, other people may choose to try to persuade them of their error (and most times, the crowd is wrong because it takes things too far). In a highly-emotional discussion, it is almost impossible to convince the crowd that they might be wrong, no matter how you phrase it. People who try this are called trolls by the definition I see here, and they don't belong in the same category as folks who aren't part of the group but drop in to throw rhetorical hand-grenades at the rest of us. Quick test: if there were topic on HN titled "Final proof that the Earth is Still Flat" that linked to a reputable source and all the commenters were in agreement (stretch your imagination a bit) could you comment in such a fashion to show thoughtful consideration of the majority's opinion yet ask for people to really think this over? If you can follow along in my thought experiment, you'll find this is not a very easy thing to do at all. Most folks would just throw out a snarky rejoinder.

In my opinion a bit of nuance is required in this essay which is not present. EDIT: J.S. Mill, is on the money here: "...He argued that even if an opinion is false, the truth can be better understood by refuting the error..." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill#Views_on_freed... Note the conflict between how the real world has to act, and how the online community is desired to act by the site owner (and the majority opinion) The short-term interest of the site, perhaps "a happy majority pushing forward to a new understanding in a specific field of study" and the strategic interest of a well-functioning society are very much in conflict here. This is a hugely important point, and in my opinion PG does not recognize this except in passing.

sneak• 15 years ago

I am proud of the fact that most of my comments are clustered around -4 and +4.

JoachimSchipper2• 15 years ago

Contrarians should probably be held to a higher standard. It is indeed hard(er) to write a comment for a somewhat hostile audience; but if you can't actually make the audience think, at least for a few seconds, does the comment really add value? In fact, a weak argument against a beloved-but-false position may make people believe more strongly - bad comments don't help your cause!

pg6• 15 years ago

"But we still only have about 8,000 uniques a day."

Wow, now it's more like 120,000. If I was already worried about the problem then (which I must have been if I took the time to write about it), I'm surprised the site is even usable now.

pgsucks3• 15 years ago

interesting...

TechboyUK• 15 years ago

This reminds me of the Gardening Trolls of Pennadomo, Italy

http://blog.techboy.co.uk/the-gardening-trolls-of-pennadomo-...

angus77• 15 years ago

I hate it when I don't know why I'm being downvoted---did I make some kind of error? did I word things wrong? or do people just disagree with me?

What if there were a separate "flag" that people could click for trolls and spam, but when you downvoted someone, you were forced to post a reply explaining why?

zedshaw2• 15 years ago

I normally find that, unless an essay is about mathematics, if it is based on a binary argument then it's just false because it's too simplistic to be based in reality. In this case saying there's only "trolls" and "super awesome people!" is childish. There's a much more interesting spectrum of human behavior online that doesn't fit into these convenient categories. To then say there's only two types of "trolls" is again to reduce the argument to just two boolean options.

For example: I know for a fact that the various people who run HN use it to selectively market what they want, but maintain that it is some trust worthy news source for hackers. Since there's no way to distinguish between the astroturfed "top stories" advertising for YC companies and a real news story the entire forum becomes suspect. I consider this just as bad as trolling, except the leadership does it so people don't comment on it.

I've also seen huge double standards on here, again because people in charge can do whatever they want. They'll yell about ad hominem attacks and then do them two comments down. They'll post one-liner attack comments and call that "enlightened discourse", then call someone else's similar comment a "troll". Shit, people on here have outright called me a cocksucker and posted whole presentations vilifying me personally and nobody bats a wee little eyelash at it.

All of you are heavily manipulated on this forum and yet, here you are complaining about trolls? At least trolls can't hellban you to defend their little astroturf empire.

lmbe• 15 years ago

So Hackernews is the new slash-dot yawn. I'm all about lamernews. You can't change a community you can only leave it.

DiabloD34• 15 years ago

Although I'm pretty sure you made this comment to be troll bait, I'm upvoting it.

>You can't change a community you can only leave it.

This is very very true. I've quit many communities because they devolved into noise and spam. I've publicly said that I came to HN merely because I wanted a good list of links worth reading, and somehow I ended up with an account and almost 1000 karma.

I suspect in the next 2-3 years I'll leave HN because it really will have jumped the shark by then. Although, I think the discussion of the slashdotification of HN is off-topic according to the rules.

LearnYouALisp2• 15 years ago

Lamer-news! Now that would be a funny website.

m0th873• 15 years ago

Are you suggesting HN's ranking algorithm biases toward YC-related content? Because that is a serious accusation.

I realize YC job posts can disable comments, and there is a separate tab for open jobs. That's no big deal because the behavior is externally visible and obvious.

If HN actually re-ranks articles to support YC content though, that is a big deal. And it's scary how that might subtly affect the Valley, given how large and influential HN is now.

to3m• 15 years ago

Interesting viewpoint. I'd always assumed that YC-specific "stuff" would get automatic preference, or would at least be marginally sticky. Is that not the case?

While this site does permit random people to submit random links, and then allow more random people to comment on the articles, I'd just assumed it was fundamentally a source of marketing for Mr Graham and his activities. After all, it IS part of ycombinator.com...

zedshaw2• 15 years ago

Never said ranking algorithm. I said, there's a bunch of links (like job postings and YC company PR posts) that get privileged front page status with their own decay algorithms, yet they aren't flagged as "promoted". They're just mixed in as if it's actually relevant news a bunch of people upvoted to the front page. Or how about all that crap that was on scribd back when nobody knew what scribd was? If you think this isn't a manipulated news source then you're high on a metric ton of horseshit.

jamesaguilar• 15 years ago

It's easier to talk about modes than distributions. The way I read it, that's what PG is doing here.

pg6• 15 years ago

For example: I know for a fact that the various people who run HN use it to selectively market what they want

While you are vague here about what you mean by this, you are more precise later in this thread,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3354698

and what you say there is false. Stories about YC companies don't get any extra points or have a different ranking algorithm. They are also treated the same by anti-abuse code, like the voting ring detector.

If you'd thought more about it, you'd have realized things couldn't be otherwise. I know people will ask me whether there is any sort of bias in the frontpage rankings in favor of stories about YC cos, and I have to be able to say truthfully that there isn't.

jcr3• 15 years ago

Paul, please don't get me wrong, but I would like to politely point out the exception; job posts from YC companies do get preferential treatment in rankings on the front page. It's a known fact, and since absolutely everything here is paid for by you and/or YC, no one has any right or room to complain about YC funded companies getting some additional exposure on their jobs posting. It's fair to consider the YC company job postings as a small advertisement supporting the site.

Considering the crap that Patrick (patio11) and Google received about mixing advertisements with results in (intentionaly?) confusing ways, it might be better to put the YC company job ads in a different location (top of the page, un-numbered and time limited to 24 hours or so) just to make the intent and separation more clear. --It's just a thought.

Your handling of the AirBnB fiasco was stellar. You let the negative story posts stay on the HN, and you allowed them to be up-voted to infinity and beyond. The thing most people don't realize is "Why the stories eventually started to decline in rankings, and why they declined so quickly?" --The reason is people like me; those who got tired of seeing the font page loaded with derogatory speculation and opinion about AirBnB, and decided to 'flag' all of the submissions. Though I have no proof, I'm certain I'm not the only one to be annoyed to the point of flagging all the nonsense.

The most recent HN Troll happened this morning, namely the HTTP LoLCats crap. It made it to the #2 spot on the front page (possibly #1 for a short period). I was impressed that in the 17 comments, there were no "This doesn't belong on HN" posts, so a lot of people were smart enough to just silently hit the 'flag' link. I just finished checking, and the HTTP LoLCats submission was nowhere to be seen in the first 360 results. Had the HTTP LolCats submission still been on the front page after I got a few hours of sleep, I may have logged out of HN and never returned.

It's fantastic to know you have voting-ring detection functioning to some degree. It's a great way to prevent spam in all of it's various forms. Without knowing the code you're really running (secret sauce and all that), I can see one potential problem; Since the HN moderators are from the ranks of the YC funded company founders, their participation on HN is most likely weighted differently. In other words, the friends amongst the YC founders not only constitute a voting-ring of sorts, but their actions/votes on HN may have more weight. With human beings wanting their friends to succeed, there is really no way around this issue, technical or otherwise.

Though I have no special weight or privileges here on HN, I openly admit to voting up and rooting for some of the YC funded companies that are doing great things. A more direct way to say it is, I'm also part of the "problem" of YC funded companies getting preferential treatment. Maybe I'm a terrible person for wanting them to succeed, but then again, maybe I'm only human, like rooting for good people doing great things, and maybe there are plenty of other normal humans like me around here.

A lot of people, including Zed, only notice the very real inconsistencies, but they don't understand the fundamental and technical causes of the inconsistencies. You did address Zed's point, but you are essentially defending a non-issue.

EDIT: Seeing this post get down-voted is disheartening. It tells me that there is something definitely wrong, and the cause could be me, or HN, or both, but I don't know for certain.

pangrams• 15 years ago

HN is certainly a place to market certain political ideas (e.g. Ron Paul) - if you have a different opinion on these ideas, even if it is entirely sincere and polite, you are still modded into invisibility, as if it were trolling not to wish to vote for Ron Paul.

In this respect, HN is (or has become) just like Reddit.

There is a huge editorial bias, even if it is not the perennial 'Hacker News favors YC companies in some insidious way' and even if it isn't 100% from PG himself

vault_• 15 years ago

This comment is a fantastic example of what is probably the most insidious form of trolling.

m_for_monkey• 15 years ago

In fact, that comment highlights a point missing from pg's essay - that a forum can easily become too closed, and if someone is on an even slightly different opinion than the residents then he is called a troll immediately. Just try to say that "Lisp is not perfect" on this forum! :)

Confusion• 15 years ago

  They'll yell about ad hominem attacks and then do them two 
  comments down.

If that's an example of 'doing whatever they want', then we can all do whatever we want. Nobody gets punished for the behavior you describe here, except by downvotes on the second comment. It's not about a double standard: it's a lack of judgement that many people suffer from. Being able to tell ad hominems in comments by others does not imply being able to tell ad hominems in your own comments.

  and nobody bats a wee little eyelash at it.

You're kindly forgetting the many people that disagree with such namecalling and vilification and are calling others out for that. You can't find a thread where there weren't also people that agreed with you.

DiabloD34• 15 years ago

Being a recent "victim"[1] of trolling here on HN, I understand pg's sentiment. However, the question is, has HN (since 2008, anyways) fallen into the pit with the trolls?

For example, recently there was the thing with Rob Malda's resume. The entire thread on that was rather derailed into either sucking up to Rob, or saying Slashdot is full of trolls.

Or rather, it had a rather unfavorable signal to noise ratio. I tried to vote comments accordingly, but it didn't really seem to help.

[1] Tried to stick up for FOSS and expose Microsoft/Mono for what it really is, got downvoted for doing the right thing. Oh well, the trolls got me, not really a big deal.

burgerbrain4• 15 years ago

In that discussion they were not trolling you, at least not intentionally. Instead you were seeing what happens when you combine a strong dose of cognitive dissonance with the ability to downvote.

This is a common effect in HN and other so called "enlightened" communities because they do have higher concentrations of honestly intelligent people, people particularly susceptible to cognitive dissonance.

When you say something truthful that a "normal" person thinks is wrong, 9 times out of 10 they will ignore you, because they "know" you are wrong. Not so with intelligent populations.

eropple• 15 years ago

Alternatively, he was saying things that were out-and-out factually untrue.

Which, you know. He was. HN voters have this tendency to downvote posts that sound like crazy-person conspiracy theorizing, for some strange reason. (I downvoted him because he was maliciously inaccurate--mistakes happen, but that wasn't a mistake. That was fabrication.)

nodesocket• 15 years ago

Love what Ryan Dahl has to say about being humble. http://youtu.be/SAc0vQCC6UQ?t=55m58s Honestly, happens almost daily, especially in SF. We meet awesome developers, but they are frankly arrogant assholes. This sort of entitlement results in those people trolling and flaming. Be humble, there are many smart people in the world; you're not that awesome.

mixmax• 15 years ago

Technical tweaks may also help. On Reddit, votes on your comments don't affect your karma score, but they do on News.YC. And it does seem to influence people when they can see their reputation in the eyes of their peers drain away after making an asshole remark.

After points stopped being shown on comments this point seems ironically moot.

Any chance of getting them back? Personally I think it's the worst decision in the history of HN.

kin• 15 years ago

I definitely feel like the term isn't used correctly in the context of the article but in any case there is definitely a certain attitude of nastiness on HN that I experience all the time. I always find myself carefully choosing words and being incredibly specific because any amount of vagueness can lead to flags on my comment. Sometimes I just delete everything and say "I agree" or "Congrats!" or "Good work" and I get a few points. Toss in a "but..." and I get flagged. How about reply to my comment and ask my why I said what I said? And actually most of the time I say something I say why I say it and I still get a backlash.

Anyway, it doesn't happen all the time but it's definitely out there.

zobzu• 15 years ago

The issue with votes is that they don't fix all that much. People often downvote other people they simply disagree with. In fact, most often do that.

So it does not just shut off the "trolls" as in the "assholes". It also shuts off any unpopular opinion.

That is sad, because unpopular opinions are generally interesting by nature, and sometimes insightful. That is because popular ones are well-known, thus cannot be "interesting".

For example, if you bash a popular company by saying what they do is wrong (whichever it is, Google, Apple, you name it), you will get down voted a lot. No matter how insightful and righteous you were.

billpatrianakos7• 15 years ago

I was trying to say the same thing in my previous comment above. Thank you for being able to put it this way. I think the downvote button should be reserved for off topic/trolling posts. If you downvote out of disagreement or boredom you risk actually turning that person into a troll later on. The newbie who writes a sincere but boring comment and gets downvoted doesn't learn how to better contribute. He just gets alienated. On the other hand, the newbie who writes a few boring comments, gets no up votes and then finally gets an up vote or two for a good contribution learns more about how to be a better contributor than if he had just gotten downvoted for what may seem to him or her, no reason at all.

einhverfr6• 15 years ago

I agree with you. It's far better to upvote than downvote. I dunno about others but I am willing to upvote people I disagree with. those who just repeat stock they have been told by others I don't downvote. It's only those who entirely detract from conversation....

I find the downvoting due to disagreement to be amusing here. Sometimes I read downvoted comments just to get a different viewpoint.

What I do find disturbing in this discussion are people with substantially high karma who have been hellbanned. That strikes me as dangerous. I have seen at least 4 hellbanned people on this forum and I would have disagreed with the banning of two of them (the other two were clearly trolls by any definition).

rjurney• 15 years ago

Hacker News lacks a feature that would 'close entire thread,' and so the top troll comment is disproportionately rewarded with attention.

You could fix this with a simple feature.

VonGuard• 15 years ago

I dunno guys, there seems to be a big worry here about HN degrading, or trolling being more prevalent and mods banning non-troll entities...

If you've been to Reddit recently and tried to engage that community, you might not be so worried about things here at HN. It's like hot and cold running compassion/rape over there. They either flood you with love, or ransack your house and ruin your life. Dangerous stuff, that Reddit Hive Mind.

It's just something that happens on the Internet: more people = more trolls and perceived-but-not-really tolls. I wonder if someone could do a paper on the average parts per million for trolls in any mass of words on the Internet.

baby• 15 years ago

I feel like some people here are going to say that it went downhills. I personally find HN to be the one of the most civilized and the most interesting (in terms of discussions generated) place I visit.

theviciousfish• 15 years ago

examples of trolls in teh wild: http://animalsbeingdicks.com/post/12195340657/troll-cat

pvillega• 15 years ago

Someone should send the first part to stephen colebourne, as an explanation on why spreading Scala FUD and acting like a victim will only spread hate about his behaviour.

Yes, I should write this, but I'm not smart enought to stop myself to type it. After reading the definition my mind instantly draw his face...

gtani• 15 years ago

Any PL that is widely adopted is going to have a lot of critics, including some from the angry agenda school. The compiler writers need to weight all the inputs so they know what to focus their copious spare time on.

This was entertaining:

    "He's like Goldilocks, scala's too complicated, fantom's too simple"

http://www.scala-lang.org/node/7698

tle9• 15 years ago

I love reading Graham's essays. Wealth and Why to not not start a start up

antirez• 15 years ago

There are much better trolls than the one described here, that are guys using trolling to show a point about a controversial subject. For instance the flying spaghetti monster thing is a form of trolling, and it is a good one.

I think that in programming forums the biggest source of trolling is due to clueless people that still want to say something... in the real world they would be put at the door, but you can't do this in a forum, and even after a ban it is too simple to re-enter.

The simplest form of protection about this is to associate a cost to username creation in a forum. Even 5$ is enough. This time the ban is a real cost for the troller that will likely stop after the first 5$ rounds.

Another widely used form of "cost" is badges, that is, you start with an account that can do very little and it takes time (and a good comportment) to grow in features. However there is the risk of trolls opening N accounts in parallel just to have reserves of usernames, so it is also very important to penalize non used accounts.

realschool• 15 years ago

There is something about the hacker news community, people here are a little less 'cordial' sometimes. It probably has something to do with the way people who are technological have to deal with regular people (when it comes to technology) and then how they feel they can deal with people who are peers.

This is good when it allows honest feedback about an idea and products, but can also come across as coarse sometimes.

tripzilch2• 15 years ago

This article sounds like someone that doesn't understand trolls, trolling, or how to deal with them. Which is strange because he does mention the origins of trolling on Usenet in his footnote.

Anyway, he's wrong on several accounts:

> Trolling tends to be particularly bad in forums related to computers

This really makes me wonder what other forums that aren't related to computers PG frequented, probably not very many. Let's see, there's forums related to wicca, libertarians (the nutty kind), religion/spirituality, failed startups, "magick", seduction, conspiracy freaks ... all those topics attract significantly more trolls than computer related forums. Both of the "broader" definition ("assholes") and the sports trolling type.

> There's a sort of Gresham's Law of trolls: trolls are willing to use a forum with a lot of thoughtful people in it, but thoughtful people aren't willing to use a forum with a lot of trolls in it.

This is just false. Of all the forums I've seen, the two most thoughtful and intelligent communities just happened to be largely made up of trolls and people very familiar with trolling. It's because they won't stand bullshit and call people on it. Regular forums or forums that can't really deal with trolls always tend to plateau on a certain level of intelligence and thoughtfulness, which can be high, but limited. This is not at all a rule btw, most trolls anyone is going to find will be forums filled with screaming kids, obscenities and bug porn.

I just mean to say this "Gresham's Law" thing is false, sometimes the trolls are the thoughtful people and the ones that get driven away are good riddance.

cq• 15 years ago

Trolls are an important part of anonymous communities. They prevent people from having their heads so far up their asses that the community becomes an echo chamber. Too much moderation will contribute to echo chambers, as well.

Trolls (2008)

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