Tell HN: Can we stop commenting on troll comments?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=935790

by tptacek • 17 years ago

156 166 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

We're definitely seeing more overt troll comments lately. I'm not talking about baiting the Apple fanboys or spouting political talking points; I'm talking about comments with Slashdot "first-post" type nonsense.

That's not a big deal. The problem is, people here seem to feel compelled to point out to the troll that this is the "wrong site" to post to. They don't care. Who does care? The rest of us, who have to page through comment threads of people slapping each other on the back for telling off a troll.

We have moderation for a reason. Just let the troll comments drop to the bottom of the page. Can that be the new plan? And can we politely (and preferably out-of-band) ask people who do respond to troll comments to delete their comments to keep the threads clean?

icey2• 17 years ago

I wonder what would happen if there was an indefinite moratorium on the creation of new user accounts. I'm starting to see a lot of throwaway accounts being created solely for the purpose of trolling.

Beyond that, it seems like the overall quality of the newer users has been fairly low. I'm sure there are some exceptions, but I can't think of any that have been created in the past, say, 200 days or so.

[Edit: See tptacek and mquander's responses below to see why this is a bad idea]

japherwocky• 17 years ago

invitation based systems work too

tptacek11• 17 years ago

Absolutely not worth it. People like Joel Spolsky, DHH, or the UX guy from Zappos, can be counted on not to put effort into figuring out how to post. Cutting expert casual commenters out of HN is a huge concession to the trolls.

I'm asking for us not to freak out about them, and just let the site do its job. Don't comment. Just mod down and, as was pointed out upthread, flag. Make it not worth it for them.

chris100• 17 years ago

With all due respect, you sound very condescending. To use an analogy, think of a first generation immigrant who says that now the country is too crowded, we shouldn't let immigrants in anymore.

Why are you convinced that you are better than newer users, to the point that all new users should be forbidden? It sounds a little harsh. You could impose some new thresholds so that people's votes and comments only start mattering once they have some amount of reputation. That should help get rid of the obvious trolls.

But please, not extreme measures.

icey2• 17 years ago

I'm sure there are tons of new users who have registered recently that are great. My point is that by and large they haven't been. Closing user registration for awhile worked well for Metafilter, so I figured I'd bring it up.

tptacek made the best counter-argument for this idea; in that it would also prevent the people we want to hear from from registering; so my idea wasn't that great to begin with.

I don't know where you get the idea that I think I'm somehow better than anyone else; all I said is that the newer users haven't been of the same quality as the older users. That's just my opinion, and you're welcome to disagree with it. I've been very careful not to jump on the "this site is turning into reddit!!!1!" bandwagon, but the unfortunate truth of the matter is that the overall quality on HN has declined, and I blame the new users for that.

ionfish• 17 years ago

It's also worth noting that besides downmodding, one can flag an individual comment by going to that comment's permanent link and clicking 'flag'.

mustpax• 17 years ago

The flag button should be added to the regular thread view for comments as well. For the kind of trolling tptacek is talking about, downmodding really isn’t sufficient.

tptacek11• 17 years ago

I notice the comment flag button once every couple months, and it always surprises me, so I'm going to call it a UX failure --- even though I think the idea is to make sure comments only get flagged when someone cares a lot about the comment.

There should just be a high karma+average requirement to flag comments.

mooism2• 17 years ago

Might the flag button then get abused as much as downmodding is now?

sganesh2• 17 years ago

And the comment gets automatically deleted if it reaches a flag threshold.

nkurz2• 17 years ago

I'm mostly with you, although I think frequently the 'trolls' are just ignorant of the local customs, and will adjust their behavior if the norms are politely pointed out to them.

Perhaps it would be possible to fold (hide) the responses to negatively scored comments, so they aren't an interruption to the flow?

And is there a reason you suggest to 'just let the troll comments drop' rather than actively voting them down to the bottom of the page?

tptacek11• 17 years ago

Yes. Comments are noisy. Comments on troll posts are worthless and noisy.

Use your own best judgement. But please don't talk about adjusting the behavior of the guy who signs up as "shitcock" 15 minutes ago and channels 4chan onto the thread.

tumult2• 17 years ago

People who troll for fun don't adjust their behavior, usually. I mean, they aren't behaving that way on accident. The point of being a troll is to mess with other people. "Oh look how nice this site is, suddenly I'll stop trolling and be nice." If a site becomes prominent enough and doesn't have some kind barrier to entry, it will eventually become a plaything of trolls.

Self-moderation works to a degree, though the only sites I've ever seen maintain a high signal-to-noise ratio are those that either don't appeal to trolls (low profile sites, sites with no game/karma aspect, etc) or prevent you from just signing up for a free account and messing with people (metafilter/pay wall, moderated mailing lists, small communities that reject outsiders by default.)

A site with high-quality discussion and participants typically becomes more visible over time as it is increasingly linked to by others, raising its visibility. Instead of people being attracted to a site in order to participate in high quality discussion, now people are joining because it's visible. The signal-to-noise ratio drops, and if the site doesn't eventually implement some kind of protection, it will also be overrun by trolls/spam.

If you watch the "New" section in HN right now, 4/5s of the links that roll through at some points in the day are either dupes, spam, or trolls. Auto-kill flagging helps to a degree, but I think at some point pg will need to relent and disallow new signees from submitting stories or voting.

It's not like this is a new phenomenon in internet behavior, people write about this all the time. HN is interesting because it remained pretty high quality for a while, and the "broken windows" theory seems to be true to a certain degree. But the internet isn't entirely like moving neighborhoods in real life – you can easily participate in as many sites as you want, and just as easily screw with as many as you like, provided they have little or no barrier to entry.

I think if HN was changed so that accounts can't vote at all (up OR down) or submit links until they reach a certain karma threshold from just commenting, it would go a long way in raising the quality. (The reason you take away upvoting is that the troll/spam/etc accounts will just start slinging useless votes everywhere. Comments accrue points for seemingly no reason, votes become devalued, and illegitimate accounts start gaining karma. Additionally, you need some smart 'voter-ring' detection algorithms to prevent people from making multiple accounts to vote each other up.)

I've helped run a couple of community-driven meta-moderation sites before, and watched more than my share of ones run by others become mired and sink over time. Just my two cents.

nkurz2• 17 years ago

People who troll for fun don't adjust their behavior, usually.

Good post. I agree, but the danger is confusing misguided people who want to contribute from those who are intentionally damaging the conversation. Once it can be determined that the trolling is intentional, I'm all for the heavy guns: ban the account and do what you can do to make it difficult to obtain another one.

Hexstream3• 17 years ago

Yes:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/

pg4• 17 years ago

Sadly true. HN now gets 40k uniques a day, and I am starting to worry about the character of the comments.

The biggest danger is not the obviously bad comments, though. It's the meretricious ones-- the zippy one-line putdowns and strident political statements-- because the newer users actually vote these up.

The big surprise for me is how much the mere voting power of the new users is changing the character of the site. A zippy one-liner that a year ago would have languished midway down the thread now becomes the top comment.

So while I agree with you that the right thing to do about overtly troll posts is to silently flag them, I'm still not sure what to do about the subtler and more dangerous decline I've been seeing.

I suppose I should be encouraged we made it to 40k in decent shape. Maybe I'll be able to come up with some kind of fix.

tptacek11• 17 years ago

You should do what you've been doing all along. Provide occasional reinforcement: post items urging people to look at the guidelines, urging people not to upvote naked snark, and perhaps urging them to downvote snark that seems to be catching on.

One or two comments to the effect of, "I agree with this, but the way it was phrased is toxic to the site, so I downvoted it" can't hurt either.

I don't think yours is a problem that requires a technical solution. You've already got a critical mass of people who give you extraordinary deference. Just use them to to fix it.

sganesh2• 17 years ago

Maybe the guidelines should be '0'th or the '1'st post once or twice a day.

marcusbooster2• 17 years ago

How about if a comment is losing a significant amount of points then the author is required to view a simple guidelines page on the next visit to HN and sign off on it.

heed2• 17 years ago

I spent a good amount of time lurking before signing up to get a feel for the culture. I'm actually kind of intimidated by the folks around here, and afraid I'll get torn up for saying something dumb.

With that said, I'm sure it has been mentioned before, but maybe restricting new users from commenting at all until they have held the account for a significant period of time would help.

tptacek11• 17 years ago

Thus ensuring that HN never gets a comment from Rob Pike or Daniel J. Bernstein, ever.

edw519• 17 years ago

I'm actually kind of intimidated by the folks around here

Don't be! Another way of looking at it...

Everybody is really good at some stuff and not so good at others. Use this community and its experts as your sand box for the stuff you need to work on. Better to practice here than out there.

and afraid I'll get torn up for saying something dumb.

So what? The real experts here would never "tear you up". They'd just teach. Anyone who'd tear you up probably has issues of their own. You mustn't let that bother you. And even if it did, just log off and come back fresh later. We start over every day.

Glad you stopped lurking, heed. Welcome.

kls• 17 years ago

I would not say restrict them from commenting but rather make their first fee post rather critical.

Kind of like a karma multiplier so you get an instant separation of quality and then you can look at penalizing those that take the down delta rather quickly.

Choosing to assume someone is guilty before they commit an offense would surly drive bright people away.

Anyway good comment and don't get to intimidated, many of us are just wind bags anyway, bright sure but wind bags none the less.

jacoblyles2• 17 years ago

Restrict suffrage.

edit for additional explanation: Democracy is another name for the tyranny of the mean. You can try to educate the mean all you want, but at some point it's a losing strategy due to the sheer weight of the numbers.

Further thought: stackoverflow is an example of a community that has implemented an incremental rights model successfully. Universal rights are cleaner and more elegant, but ultimately give a community over to the mean.

mquander4• 17 years ago

If we make three reasonable assumptions about HN:

- The community of readers will keep growing.

- New readers will continue to find it easy to comment and participate.

- New readers will mostly enjoy and prefer the kind of content PG and many older users want to discourage (not a big reach, since there are tech-oriented sites with millions of readers and participants having pretty shallow discussions.)

Then we have a different problem; we're trying to suppress the majority of users and rule with the minority. Incremental rights with a simple "karma" model won't help us in any way I can see, because the majority will vote up people who contribute the kind of content we don't prefer, and those people will have the karma to perpetuate that content.

(As I understood, that was your original point here, but I don't see how incremental rights is a good way of tackling that issue, at least not the way SO does it.)

allenbrunson2• 17 years ago

yeah, i agree with this.

pg, you've done a hell of a job thus far. i've never seen an internet hangout get this big and this old, yet remain this polite and civil. but as external forces conspire to drag the site down toward the mean, fighting them off will require increasingly severe countermeasures.

jazzdev• 17 years ago

>The big surprise for me is how much the mere voting power of the new users is changing the character of the site.

If you don't want the character of the site to change then don't allow new users to vote. It annoyed me on StackOverflow at first, but now I see the wisdom in it.

req2• 17 years ago

You could set up a karma threshold to vote, or perhaps allot an increasing number of votes per day based on karma. It doesn't depart greatly from the present karma thresholds and would limit the drowning of commenter votes by reader votes.

m0th872• 17 years ago

In the wake of my disillusionment with the way reddit has devolved, I've been thinking about this problem for a while.

I think the best way to handle this is to apply a sort of social equivalent to the PageRank algorithm to users. Thus, when a user votes up/down an article, its points change as a function of that user's karma level. Consequently, users with greater karma have greater direct input into the community.

Eigenvalue centrality is a fascinating algorithm that provides such a use case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrality#Eigenvector_centrali...

Another benefit of such a system is you would no longer need to enforce karma thresholds for downvoting, as this sort of meritocracy arises naturally from the algorithm.

NathanKP5• 17 years ago

That makes a lot of sense to me. It ensures that the older users have more power to keep the site the way it has always been. (I really shouldn't be talking as I've not yet been a year on HN. However, I commented to ensure you that at least one newer user is not opposed to having his vote worth less than that of an older user.)

mdakin2• 17 years ago

I think using karma as a proxy for good judgement has its own inherent problems. High karma can easily be attained by karma-whoring behavior or by obsessively and excessively contributing to the site. Both of which imply poor judgement of one form or another. Not all high-karma users fall to those categories of course. I think if you combined it with an admin-controlled visible-only-to-admin override flag the high-karma filter might work.

It would be interesting too because over time as a user's karma rises or falls it would change the current score of all the articles and comments he's voted. That would be interesting for two reasons: 1. It could cause old, interesting articles to bubble back up onto the front page months or years after they were originally posted and 2. It could help alleviate people's anxiety associated with their own karma score-- it would be something that you know bounces around in an out-of-your-control manner and not something that monotonically trends upwards. The loop between user's karma, article and comment points would be closed. We could use our fancy math to analyze the stability of the system and figure out the proper controller to insert in the loop to prevent positive feedback making it all go to the rails. It could be beautiful.

thaumaturgy• 17 years ago

Systems similar to this have been proposed in the past -- probably repeatedly. For example, although you probably wouldn't want such a system to be purely karma-based, you could still implement it by selecting a handful of the users that you thought represented the kind of community you wanted.

You could establish influence as a factor of a user's "distance" from the community's founders: you'd have the founders, the founders' friends, the founders' friends' friends, and so on, each with diminishing influence in community moderation.

However, this and other suggestions are not new, and pg doesn't tend to comment on them.

So in the end it's all a waste of effort.

axod2• 17 years ago

What about a pagerank type algorithm for ranking comments that weights the votes depending on the voters own karma?

eg if a user with 1 karma upmods a comment, it adds 1 to its score, but if a user with 100 karma upmods a comment, it adds maybe 10 to its score.

Effectively tipping the balance in favor of those who have karma, and away from newbies.

(That's if we think those with lots of karma can be trusted to have a good feel for what is useful discussion and what isn't of course).

I think it might work well though - You could make a trollish comment, and a few newbies would upmod, but the big karma nicks would downmod, vastly reducing your karma, and thus the influence you have over upmodding/downmodding others comments.

Effectively your "ability to judge good comments" would then be tied to your "ability to make good comments".

Just an idea...

vaksel• 17 years ago

I don't think it'll work, I have like 19K karma, should my one opinion be worth more than 19,000 new people? Maybe if it's in tiers, 1-1000 = 1 karma point, 1000-10000 = 10 karma points, 10000+ = 20 karma points.

Also the whole downvoting thing doesn't even work half the time. I usually see the down vote button in only like 10% of the threads, the rest I can only upvote.

wglb• 17 years ago

How about this small thing--change the wording of the button add comment to add thoughtful comment.

hxa7241• 17 years ago

Some research (probably see Cialdini) shows significantly improved compliance when a question is asked that requires confirmation from the subject. So it would better as: "Will you add a thoughtful comment?". How that can be best realised in a web context is something for further consideration . . .

kirubakaran3• 17 years ago

Yes, this simple change could really work much better than all the fancy solutions. This is a social solution to a social problem.

I would suggest one additional thing, which is a little bit more invasive. After a user submits a comment, show a confirmation question like "Are you sure you are making a positive contribution to the conversation? [Yes] [No]"

andrewljohnson3• 17 years ago

This may be a dumb idea, but how about requiring some minimum length of comment? Are there circumstances when someone legitimately should just use 8-10 words? I don't know what that minimum length would be though.

At least in this case if people want to be strident or acerbic, they have to work for it.

pg4• 17 years ago

Hmm. Could do this for new accounts at least.

blasdel2• 17 years ago

The comment fields on the MetaFilter sites have little admonishments underneath them:

http://www.metafilter.com | Note: Help maintain a healthy, respectful discussion by focusing comments on the issues, topics, and facts at hand—not at other members of the site.

http://ask.metafilter.com | Note: Ask MetaFilter is as useful as you make it. Please limit comments to answers or help in finding an answer. Wisecracks don't help people find answers. Thanks.

http://metatalk.metafilter.com | Note: Everyone needs a hug.

In the old days comments always had to be previewed in context (with a full refresh) before they could be posted. The "New Post" pages have huge search fields for dupe avoidance, dupe search on preview, stern warnings about what is allowed, and occasionally a row of siren.gif from the Drudge Report.

Diederich2• 17 years ago

After a certain threshold is met, the average quality of voting seems to be inversely proportional to the traffic on the site. This trend, with different overall parameters, appears to describe a large class of aggregation sites. I'm thinking specifically of HN, reddit and slashdot.

I think code and culture can shape this curve in useful and beneficial ways, but fundamentally, once an aggregation site gets popular, its quality declines. And the site gets popular because it has high quality.

So we are thinking about trying to shape the curve with code and culture; that's good. I bet there's a more 'meta' solution though.

I'm not really proposing this, just throwing the idea out there. For a given site, once popularity starts pushing down voting and submission quality, make a new site. Obviously something as trivial as http://news2.ycombinator.com/ won't work. I'm not sure how this could be accomplished, but it's interesting to think about.

tumult2• 17 years ago

From experience: the "News2" thing does work. The only problem is that after a few "NewsN" iterations, you come to realize that you're just basically kicking out everyone except for the same few core groups of users each time you make a new one, so you might as well just have the single site with the core users and lock it down.

imp• 17 years ago

To limit the effect of one-liners, you can try making the maximum karma a comment can have be a function of the number of words in the comment. A simple linear relationship would mean that a one-word comment ("No") could never have a karma greater than one. It may be that a more complex function would be better, but something like that may help.

Kisil• 17 years ago

I doubt the correlation between length and value is that strong. Brevity is the soul of wit; let's not penalize high information density.

alexgartrell2• 17 years ago

So the problem is that, at a certain growth point, growing the community and preserving the feel of the community become more or less mutually exclusive. New people will invariably bring their feel for things here, even if it displeases existing users.

Anything involving kharma or other metrics is also likely to fail, and will probably lead to lots of benign but likely popular posts so that people can get more "power".

Basically I think your options are to freeze the community (or make it invite only) or to be ok with the fact that trolls will start showing up and all we can do is ignore them. I don't particularly advocate either of these, but generally believe less extreme measures are superior.

There's a fine line between trolling and radical new ideas and sometimes radical new ideas are a good thing.

davi3• 17 years ago

be ok with the fact that trolls will start showing up and all we can do is ignore them

No. If signal:noise gets too low, good people will leave.

davidw3• 17 years ago

You will be very surprised to hear my suggestion: kill the off-topic articles mercilessly. No politics/economics and no fluff.

jacquesm6• 17 years ago

Right now an article about veterans is the #3 post on the homepage and has an enormous number of points.

Good luck with that.

jodrellblank5• 17 years ago

Not surprised, and agree. HN isn't covering a nice natural boundary of topics, it's trying to fit a group of people's ideas for interesting topics.

If and when it isn't doing that, said group of people should prune away the topics they don't want - otherwise it will grow into a general discussion site. Like pruning a shrub or guiding a vine. Yes, it's a bit dictatorial and a bit undemocratic, and that's fine because it's not a popularity contest trying to target the majority of people.

Often when googling for a problem and finding a result, there's a languishing forum post that goes

"problem" "irrelevant suggestion" "irrelevant suggestion" "unhelpful but well meaning comment" "me too" "answer"

and I wish someone had enough care to weed out the drivel.

jodrellblank5• 17 years ago

ooh ooh, time for me to dust off and drag out the suggestion for another set of vote buttons to separate "I agree/disagree" and "good/poor contribution"?

That way you can acknowledge the wit in zingy one liners and agree with political and ideological statements while still shoving them down to the bottom as being poor contributions. You still get the feeling of being able to chime in while not facing the "I agree so I don't want to downvote" dilemma.

lhorie• 17 years ago

>> The biggest danger is not the obviously bad comments, though. It's the meretricious ones-- the zippy one-line putdowns and strident political statements-- because the newer users actually vote these up.

How about using your ideas from your antispam series* to limit maximum karma points awarded to a comment? Would it trigger too many false positives/negatives?

I remember someone applying a learning network or something like that to filter HN articles a while back and it didn't turn out that bad.

*http://www.paulgraham.com/antispam.html

davi3• 17 years ago

I suppose I should be encouraged we made it to 40k in decent shape. Maybe I'll be able to come up with some kind of fix.

Please keep us updated as to your thinking & actions. It has been consistently interesting to watch you manage HN's evolution and growth.

riffer2• 17 years ago

Since it sounds like the problem is comments rather than posts, and posts are commonly flagged and killed, why not encourage users to flag comments that are inconsistent with the character of the site?

I only realized a couple of days ago that one can flag comments by following the comment's permalink -- why not make this more obvious and promote its wider use as an experiment?

zaidf• 17 years ago

As a new user, you should not be able to vote until you've read x number of posts or spent x number of days on the site to understand the culture.

This is not the same as just not counting the votes. Point here is by preventing voting you're explicitly communicating your expectations to the new user.

fhub• 17 years ago

Expanding on the idea of the 'classic' link, you could add a user selectable/configurable threshold for who's votes count based on age of registration. Newer users up voting meretricious comments would not impact those with a high set threshold.

pasbesoin• 17 years ago

How about making upvoting power (e.g. votes per day (or hour, or whatever) accrue with tenure and/or karma? New users start with a low number of upvotes per period. At the start of each period, their count is reset to this maximum. (Unused votes do not roll over.)

The user's upvote count scales up per some formula, and beyond a certain point, it becomes uncapped.

I wouldn't grandfather anyone, either. KISS, and so that it also addresses the problem with the current population.

Potentional problems with this:

+ In line with the general policy of transparency that is practiced here, you may want to show users how many upvotes they have. But you may not want the load of additional profile page hits that might occur as people check their counts. Perhaps it would be a lower load to show that count in a fashion similar to how karma is shown in the banner next to the user name. However, I don't have a suggestion for a design that wouldn't make the banner look too busy.

+ A scarcity of upvotes might promote more low-value commenting. Perhaps a user's minimum time between comments needs to be defined and similarly throttled. (Simply cutting off comments when the count hits zero will merely result in people turning to comments before their count hits zero.

To take the glass half full view, perhaps such throttling would not eliminate participation, but would help people observe and become accustomed to the community's values before handing them the keys to the kingdom. And if they don't respect those values, it's going to hinder them from progressing to greater influence.

Including karma in the formula allows for high value contributors to progress more quickly. Tenure keeps a one hit wonder or clique of friends from gaining undue influence.

Erf• 17 years ago

Similar: Perhaps make downvoting power -- as opposed to upvoting power -- proportional to age/karma? That would empower experienced (indoctrinated?) members to discourage the undesired content, without too heavily influencing the discussion.

DanielBMarkham• 17 years ago

Most important part of this article: pg is now talking about how the site has quality problems.

(For the noobs, I don't think this has happened before)

mlLK• 17 years ago

How hard would it be to implement a 'classic' or 'noobs' controller (filter) for handling how different items are viewed? Easiest hack (from someone ignorant in arc) could be as simple as adding an optional view variable after each id.

Would it be difficult to integrate comment filtering for /classic and /noobs while they act as somewhat of a controller and items behave like views?

sown• 17 years ago

You could try and make membership a bit harder to achieve, similar to how demonoid will open and close memberships occasionally and have allowed them to maintain their unique culture (to say nothing of torrents).

endtime2• 17 years ago

How about not letting accounts newer than, say, six months vote on comments? Perhaps you could also do something to ensure that those accounts are active (e.g. they click on links from time to time). It's a lot less sexy than eigenvector centrality, but I think it would have the intended effect. Most trolls don't have the patience to wait that long.

noodle2• 17 years ago

doesn't this submission seem to violate the principles that its suggesting? or is it just me?

sp332• 17 years ago

It's just you. Trolls abuse attention, which is why you should ignore them. People who feed trolls are just misguided, it's OK to talk to them.

noodle2• 17 years ago

fair enough, but would that also mean that its ok to reply to people who reply to trolls in the threads?

astine• 17 years ago

Tptacek seems to be worried more about drawing attention to particular trolls than to trolling in general. If you comment on a troll comment, you draw attention to it and lift it up the page giving it more visibility at the expense of more useful posts. In contrast, this thread/submission doesn't give any more visibility to any particular troll, but does provide a place for meta-discussion on dealing with them.

xtho• 17 years ago

I don't see this a problem because most only few posts on the front page have that many comments. I find troll comments mostly in the discussion thread of posts with 100+ comments, which are rather rare. What I find more annoying are low quality blog posts that are actually spam in disguise.

SlyShy2• 17 years ago

I find the "go back to reddit" or "go back to digg" posts particularly ironic. If you are going to criticize those sites, then perhaps you shouldn't contribute to the degradation of this site in the same post.

That said, I was recently guilty of the commenting on a troll comment But I think it was justified in that instance, because the original poster was being attacked in a particularly vicious way, and I didn't want him to feel nobody was backing him up.

tptacek11• 17 years ago

You commented a troll comment from a user literally named 'shitcock' (that actually happened!). Please don't do that. The most likely outcome from that response is that the troll has yet another hook to comment on.

SlyShy2• 17 years ago

Well, I certainly won't be doing it in the future. ;)

tokenadult2• 17 years ago

An alternative is to post an approving reply to the user you agree with, rather than a disagreeing reply to the user you disagree with. In some threads where I see a lot of trolling, I just liberally use the downvote button and don't comment at all. I try to post most of my comments in threads where a lot of participants are acting thoughtfully, unless I can get in VERY EARLY with some substantial information that is unfamiliar to most other participants on a perennially controversial issue.

makecheck• 17 years ago

This is a lot like graffiti in a city, and should probably be dealt with in the same way. Cities have been known to paint murals, react quickly to cover up graffiti, and patrol so that they can catch offenders in the act.

The HN equivalent of a mural is to submit something really interesting, that will be voted to the top quickly.

The HN equivalent of covering up graffiti is to flag a post or a comment, or to post better stories and comments that push the garbage out. Though a way to mark duplicates would be nice.

What we really lack is a way to catch offenders. I have seen several "karma: 1, created 15 minutes ago" accounts, that are always attached to useless contributions. Sure, I can flag a comment, but it's very obvious that the entire account should just be banned (and perhaps the IP it came from), and there's no flag that applies to an entire user. Perhaps there should be, at least for accounts that have only existed for a short time.

butterfi• 17 years ago

You're alluding to the broken windows theory

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

blhack2• 17 years ago

A few days ago, somebody had a made some silly comment like this:

"OMG She is t3h winrar of t3h intarnets!". Their point was that somebody had done something very noteworthy. It added nothing to the conversation and was exactly the type of thing I think we're talking about here.

I did what I think this thread is asking me not to and responded with something like this:

"Just so you know, you're being downmodded for using the word 'internets', people around here don't like that" (or something to that effect).

My question is if this was the "wrong" thing to do? I was wrong, and the user I was responding to had been here for a long time, but I felt like it might have been helpful to inform new people that the sorts of things that are welcomed and encouraged on reddit, are not here.

Is this thread encouraging us NOT to do stuff like that?

tptacek11• 17 years ago

Yes. That's what this thread is encouraging you not to do.

That goes triple for comments in the middle of bona fide comment threads, because the [troll, rebuke] comment pair is going to be stuck right in the middle of the comments page, not at the bottom.

blhack2• 17 years ago

Okay, thank you.

mbreese• 17 years ago

Would it be helpful then to have a special type of comment that can't be voted up (zero points always)? So, for the troll rebuke, have the rebuke marked so that people couldn't vote it up.

This way it would appear in the users's comment's page, but would be down-modded to the bottom of the page, with the trollish comment?

Maybe just include a "no points" button or checkbox on the comment edit screen?

josefresco• 17 years ago

I replied to your reply clarifying why the one-liner comment was downmodded. In further hopes that my comment would dissuade others considering a one-liner. Does that make my action 2x worse? confused

mquander4• 17 years ago

I think the philosophy is that a comment such as the above is (or should be) sufficiently inappropriate that anyone posting it here is either consciously trolling or oblivious to his environment. If he needs to be explicitly instructed not to post that, he will also be inclined to post a thousand other crappy comments, each of which are, as Tolstoy might or might not have said, crappy in their own way.

The best clarification possible is to create a sea of high-quality comments around his, so that he can contrast them with his, and learn.

gouki• 17 years ago

I'm a new user to this website, but I've notice the level of integrity and consistency on the comments. It's actually the reason that made me select this "community" and not others like Digg/Slashdot/whatever.

The users are the strong point of HN, and losing that would not be good at all.

I say +1 for invitation based system. Also, users could have a more active role on moderation. Just not sure how, exactly.

prawn• 17 years ago

On invitations, who would have invited me to read and participate? I live and work overseas and don't know anyone else that uses HN. I would feel too intimidated, and as though I were begging, to approach an existing user to ask for some sort of endorsement or invitation.

How might it work?

I think HN could do worse than add an intro guide for newcomers that carefully explains the difference between this and other sites the newcomer may have experienced before. e.g., a big difference IMO is the lack of playing for +1 Funny as is done on Slashdot. "Like Slashdot, but with just Insightful and Interesting." ;)

jacquesm6• 17 years ago

hey there T., good seeing you here :)

An invitation based system could work, but there would have to be some kind of 'fast track', some people are only here because their stuff was once discussed on HN and then signed up to be able to provide a different point of view.

If they would have to wait for an invite that would take some really good stuff out of the mix.

NathanKP5• 17 years ago

You aren't kidding about new user, only ten days old. I guess now that you are on board you don't care if we switched to an invitation based system, but what about all the others out there who might, like you, crave the "integrity and consistency" of HN?

yason• 17 years ago

A site like HN is basically a group of insiders, namely folks who have decided what is smart and what is not. So the system ought to favor insiderism and reject power from newcomers.

So, why let newer users vote at all? They can't downvote either, so there ought to be a karma threshold for voting as well, too. Then you would have to own some credibility (=karma) before you can begin to affect the site's future.

You get karma by posting good links and writing good comments. Who decides what's "good"? Those who have karma, of course! Back to the circle of insiders! So, you ought to gain karma normally if a high-karma user votes up your submission or comment. If lots of low-karma users do that you might get a tiny bit of karma but no more. If only few low-karma users do that you get nothing.

That should at least give most of the control to users with high karma. Note: I'm not entirely sure how HN works for beginners these days, so some of the above might already be in effect.

conflux0• 17 years ago

I honestly think this is the best way to do it. I've been a lurker on hacker news for a while now for the occasional article that doesn't involve business tips (most of them are bogus). In addition to what you said I think that maybe that users could be sorted into groups by upvote/downvote correlation, and that users with a higher correlation to you would have a greater weight on the tiering of your articles.

joshfinnie• 17 years ago

I think this is by far the best idea that I have heard on this thread. We know that the ability to remove features based on karma is there (due to the inability for new people to downvote or most people to start polls), so why not remove the ability to upvote for people under a certain threshold of karma.

I think this would also alleviate the issue of having people upvote stores on the front page as a sort of bookmarking feature. I have strong opinions that many of the upvotes on the front page come from new people who are using it as a bookmarking feature and not a bestowment of karma to a good post.

tomjen24• 17 years ago

That might work, but why give them the ability to post stories initially? That way, to get karma they would have to be able to impress the insiders with what they have to bring to the table personally and can't just find some good stuff made by others.

You could even combine them, so that the threshold is different - you can post stories with karma of, say, 30 but you can't vote before you have hit a karma of 500.

I have lived in my country all my life, but I was 18 before they let me vote.

shaddi2• 17 years ago

I think story submission is a really important way to add to the HN community. New users who can contribute what the community thinks are interesting articles are valuable users. Plus, if new users cannot vote until receiving a certain karma threshold, stories would only be upvoted by users with some familiarity with HN culture.

shaddi2• 17 years ago

I really like this idea. However, I'm not sure if it is solving the trolling problem. Most troll comments I've seen come from "throwaway" accounts -- one post, and then not used again. These trolls presumably don't care about being able to vote or not.

I like what Twitter is doing for their (IMO, similar) spam account problem. Users flag for review and block updates from suspected spammer. We already have flagging, but we don't have blocking. It would be nice to be able to selectively hide specific comments or users (perhaps behind a "[blocked]" tag, like deleted comments are done now), so existing users at least could more easily ignore these trolls.

Account banning could be done by voting. Once an account is flagged, it gets added to a list of suspect accounts. Users (potentially above a karma threshold) can vote on these accounts based on their usage history; if enough people flag and confirm these accounts as spam they will be deleted, with their posted comments masked under a "[spam]" tag.

gord• 17 years ago

second that - current members have moral right to preserve the intent of the site.

Id make upvote power logarithmic in Karma, vis -

    upvote = K log( karma )
    dnvote = K/4 log( karma )

which would imply a certain Karma before you could upvote at all, and a larger karma before you could downvote at all.

Not sure how to solve karma hunting, but that's orthogonal, and a smaller issue.

Id weaken downvote power because it is more damaging when used, and also because it seems to act in a way to reduce freedom of speech : people may be scared to speak the truth due to fear of losing karma, which devalues the site. Id almost prefer not to have downvotes, but there are comments I might want downvoted [racism, personal abuse, religious bigotry etc]

DenisM2• 17 years ago

Don't know if you realize this, but regular snark in your comments reinforces bad behavior from newcomers. There is no gray area here: either we tolerate snark & sarcasm and slide into a pit of goo, or we don't tolerate it and keep this place civilized. Every single post counts.

tptacek11• 17 years ago

I wasn't looking for a whole "soul of Hacker News" thread here. I'd just like people to stop cluttering the comment threads with things that reinforce the behaviors of the "shitcocks" of the site.

The rest of my response I'll take offline to you directly. Why clutter the thread further?

cd34• 17 years ago

I believed that until a post about a hamster in a tutu falling in the LHC outranked a post on an async i/o python engine.

This is just slashdot with a different frontend/theme and less sci-fi.

DenisM2• 17 years ago

I don't think we should give up, at the very least because there is nowhere else to go. That, plus YC has monetary resources they use to bring quality traffic here - all the YC members and applicants are by definition people who are at lest trying to build something, .i.e. being constructive.

chasingsparks2• 17 years ago

I've actually stopped casually referencing or recommending HN in a silly attempt to guard it. (Note, I don't mean this in the "this band was great until they sold out and got popular" way.) I'd actually be happier if the number of users regressed.

dschobel• 17 years ago

To represent a contrary viewpoint: I haven't seen more than a handful of the patently useless accounts whereas I've noticed more and more "big names" showing up on HN.

Just the other day in the Python language moratorium story I was asking about a particular PEP making the cut-off and the author of the PEP responded. I was blown-away.

The HN experience balance is still massively in favor of those latter moments rather than the former.

The level of the technical discourse is still higher than any other general technology site, even if there are a few ankle-biters around now.

lleger• 17 years ago

Agreed. I've always been a fan of the intellectual and enlightening conversations here. It's really the main reason I keep coming back.

nzmsv• 17 years ago

Erecting walls is never the answer. Any community, from a website to an entire country, suffers if it decides to close itself off from the world. There are too many examples to list.

So, making registration hard or invite-only, or making new users feel inferior is not the answer. I like the fact that I can vote on articles right after joining. Having to "earn my privileges" by having my opinions validated by someone first would have likely made me leave. And though I'm a newbie, I solemnly promise I won't be posting any lolcats :)

This doesn't mean a lack of policing, but with this many users it has to be improved. One problem that pops out right away is: there is no feedback associated with votes.

Are private messages a possibility? Or even a limited implementation, just for votes? A downvote would require a reason (to be sent to the poster by PM). This way the user can learn to write better comments. The downvote should be anonymous for the receiving user, so the discussion doesn't devolve into vengeful bickering. Upvotes could also have a reason (perhaps optional). I think this would balance out the impression of being shot down all the time.

michaelkeenan• 17 years ago

Erecting walls is never the answer. Any community, from a website to an entire country, suffers if it decides to close itself off from the world. There are too many examples to list.

Though you are correct that many communities suffer when they restrict membership, that isn't an infallible rule.

Communities that have benefited from restricting membership include the Freemasons, Mensa, and the online community TheRoot42. Those are just a few we know about! Many closed communities are also at least somewhat secret. Barriers to community entry are sometimes beneficial (not that I'm advocating it for HN).

Entry difficulty is a significant contributor to group cohesiveness (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_cohesiveness).

ErrantX• 17 years ago

I have to confess I haven't noticed a huge increase in replies to trolls and so called back slapping

Not that there aren't problems; I just haven't seen this specific one as being the biggest myself

polynomial• 17 years ago

Couldn't help but notice this is by far the most commented post on the front page, and by an order/magnitude more than most others.

rms• 17 years ago

I disagree with the premise of this post. A lot of people making stupid comments do care and just don't understand the nature of this site.

The comments can still be killed, but it's a mistake to not give people a chance to change their behavior.

nailer• 17 years ago

HackerNews succumbed to mob rule some time ago.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=935085 - a response consisting of 'I disagree' with no additional content - is currently sitting at 6.

Mz• 17 years ago

"The big surprise for me is how much the mere voting power of the new users is changing the character of the site. A zippy one-liner that a year ago would have languished midway down the thread now becomes the top comment.

So while I agree with you that the right thing to do about overtly troll posts is to silently flag them, I'm still not sure what to do about the subtler and more dangerous decline I've been seeing."

Perhaps a lot of the new users are relatively unsavvy about some things and some instruction is in order. This might be done in the form of a "best practices" listing. I have found when dealing with Internet Newbies, it helps to list out a few things like "Don't say anything online that you wouldn't want on the front page of your local newspaper." A lot of times, inexperienced people just don't realize the potential consequences of doing certain things online. It may seem "obvious" to most people here what the best thing to do is, but perhaps the newer users just have no idea. If that is the case, some of them might be very cooperative in going along with some "best practices" posted somewhere.

This may be especially true if you are finally attracting more women. I'm female and I've spent a lot of time in online communities where the majority of members are female. The culture is very different from male dominated online cultures. It's been a bit disorienting for me to try to figure out how to effectively participate here. I consider it a growth experience and I expected to have to adapt. But not everyone will show up with that expectation.

iterationx• 17 years ago

I'd like to see people stop commenting with "I upmodded your post because"

dan_the_welder• 17 years ago

You have to teach the culture you want to see.

My pet peeve is repeat submissions. I'd like to see a primary source focus.With news that's difficult as many outlets break the same story more or less simultaneously.

I get annoyed when I see something for the second or third time from different source, sometimes weeks later after it's made the rounds of the blog-o-sphere.

Tell HN: Can we stop commenting on troll comments?

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