The 'broken windows' theory of crime is tested and seems correct

http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12630201&CFID=31056247&CFTOKEN=41038121

by robg • 18 years ago

108 35 18 years ago

I read something else into that. You can't be half-hearted, only perfection will do. It isn't enough to repaint the wall, a handful of candy wrappers will undo all your good work.

Corollary: litter-precursors (the things that most often get dropped, like cans and cigarette filters) might need to be banned or somehow forced into low-litter forms, their cumulative downside looks like it might be harsh enough to outweigh the property-rights case.

palish3• 18 years ago

"... litter-precursors (the things that most often get dropped, like cans and cigarette filters) might need to be banned or somehow forced into low-litter forms ..."

It seems more beneficial to keep arbitrary restrictions to a minimum. It's more efficient in the long run to achieve that goal by changing culture, not by introducing legislation.

JulianMorrison2• 18 years ago

The trouble here is that there seems to be feedback - anti-civilized behavior promotes itself. While they haven't looked at cultural side effects, I would expect a behavior's prevalence to influence its acceptability.

Where can the loop be interrupted? Probably easiest at the point where no minds are involved, it's merely physical mess. So, aggressive cleaning. But for that to be realistic, the spigot has to be closed a little. Hence, bans on litter precursors.

quantumhobbit2• 18 years ago

It is far easier to put garbage cans on streetcorners than change how people behave or ban common packaging.

strlen2• 18 years ago

I wonder how that translates into online communities - both in terms of wrongful behaviour (spiteful and illiterate comments, trolling) and in terms of user experience impacting quality of user generated content (wow lot of user- related buzzwords in the last sentence).

An interesting experiment would be a video/music/file sharing site which specifically prohibits (and removes) copyrighted content and one that doesn't -- and how that affects other interactions (e.g. comments, forums).

robg2• 18 years ago

I really think there's something to that - broken "windows" in online communities. A wakeup for me was how trolls are dealt with here and comments on other sites. Different communities appear to take on the conditions of their founding and then that DNA spreads as it replicates. However, any mutations along the way left unchecked become cancerous.

iigs• 18 years ago

Strong agree. Case in point: the politics and automaker bailout stuff that has had more of a pass since the election. Even in the weeks leading up to the election the articles were policed more heavily than now.

Not sure it doesn't beat another half dozen articles on BS ruby infighting, though.

pg3• 18 years ago

I'm a big believer in the broken windows theory. I was living in NYC when Giuliani took over. I was also a Reddit user when it was overrun by trolls. It was clear there was a correlation between trolling and other types of badness. That's why News.YC not only bans trolls, but also does things that seem unrelated, like fixing spelling mistakes and typographical abuses in story titles.

Alex3917• 18 years ago

The tipping point seems to be when low-value comments get more attention than thoughtful posts, because that's when the valuable contributors leave. At least on K5 that's what happened, all the smart contributors left because every time they'd submit an article the response would always be "-1, faggery" or whatever. So I guess my theory is that trolls are toxic not (only) because they pollute the signal to noise ratio, but because they cause thoughtful contributors to feel less valued.

tdavis• 18 years ago

I saw the translation first-hand over a number of years. There used to be a forum community I was a part of (it was regarded by some as a spin-off of the Something Awful forums, but that's another story). Many moons ago (roughly 4-5 years or so) it was a great community full of intelligent, witty, fun people. There was almost never a thread that wasn't worth reading in any number of forums there and the moderators took their jobs quite seriously. Basically, good people and good content were everywhere.

Then, as time went on, things started going down hill. It's impossible to attribute this to a single event, but a series of circumstances changed that caused the site to lose its quality, both in members and content. There was some serious alienation of Moderators caused by the site owner, the board started becoming more popular via Google and drew many, for lack of a better term, "Publics," etc. Due to these and other events, the best moderators jumped ship or just stopped caring (likely influenced by the owner's lack of involvement, too). The members who contributed the most worthwhile content started leaving as they noticed the boards being overrun with worthless posts.

And so it went, until a few months ago when the original owner sold off the site to somebody new who promptly shut the whole place down (after saying he had no plans to change things, or so I heard). It started as a place to make friends, share ideas, create witty banter, etc. Hell, it even lead to a few in-person meet-ups (if you've never attended a party held in another state by some random person you've never met in real life, I highly recommend it). It eventually degraded into "just another forum community" where the few people who still worked to make it a place worth coming to were drowned out by the masses of peasants clamoring "LOL!"

There's a 5-year experiment for you ;)

strlen2• 18 years ago

> if you've never attended a party held in another state by some random person you've never met in real life, I highly recommend it

This somewhat off-topic, but I'd highly recommend this as well. In general, I've been a member of a few Internet (IRC, forums, mailing lists) communities that would organize real-life events and made good friends and formed important associations through this.

I've also seen several degrade into "just another $medium community". In many cases they would be forked many times into smaller/more selective communities that'd would maintain the feel of the older days (you could say reddit this with news.y.c and programming.reddit).

lionhearted• 18 years ago

Downright scary to me:

13% to 27% of people were willing to steal €5 from a mailbox. In a first world, affluent country.

dejb• 18 years ago

Better to take it than allow it to fall into the hands of some hoodlum/criminal. Seriously I think that would be some people's mindset/excuse. Especially in the 'Broken Window' case.

Tichy• 18 years ago

If that was the rationale, it would be better to just push it into the mail box completely.

jbert• 18 years ago

Does a similar effect apply to code?

Perhaps technical debt comes with punitive interest rates, making maintainers add more cruft than they otherwise would.

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

haasted• 18 years ago

It does indeed.

Things like amount of unit tests and comments are influenced heavily by this effect.

It's elaborated further in The Pragmatic Programmer (http://pragprog.com/titles/tpp/the-pragmatic-programmer), which actually introduced me to the concept some time back.

xiaoma• 18 years ago

I've often wondered about this issue in regards to tax code. Does a massive, labyrinthine system encourage legislators to add still more layers of complexity?

alecco2• 18 years ago

Disgusting.

  * The Economist (more often than not missing the point and failing on preditions.)
  * No link to original research.
  * Lack of signs of peer-reviewed research
  * Missing analysis of opposing view.

This isn't science or unbiased journalism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixing_Broken_Windows#Critics_o...

ig1• 18 years ago

The article was about the research Dr Keizer has just published in Science. How is that research not original or peer reviewed ?

alecco2• 18 years ago

Somehow I missed that paragraph, sorry. My bad.

Still... The Economist.. Against graffiti... I don't know.

ChaitanyaSai• 18 years ago

Reminds of the Just-noticeable-difference concept (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_noticeable_difference) from psychophysics. If disorder is evaluated as a general aggregate of cleanliness, crime etc. An increased baseline of disorder will mean that any personal transgressions that were perceived as "wrong" before would now be perceived as lesser wrongs in comparison.

They probably accounted for this, but is it possible that graffiti is resulting in bikers park elsewhere, implying that it isn't individual behavior that is being modified, but group make-up.

swapspace• 18 years ago

Apart from HN, another community which has handled trolls quite well is MetaFilter.

An interesting paper on MeFi: http://www.noor.bz/pdf/ali-hasan_metafilter.pdf [pdf] I wonder how much the $5 joining fee is responsible for that.

snewe• 18 years ago

Not to be confused with the Broken Window Fallacy:

http://freedomkeys.com/window.htm

The 'broken windows' theory of crime is tested and seems correct

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