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PG on trolls

paulgraham.com

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Re: PG on trolls

#41

Post by rms »

boredguy8 wrote: post #13

My experience on forums is that -size matters-. A pond with ten fish gets far less trollers than a pond with ten thousand. As for solutions: there have to be consequences. Either losing the ability to post or losing the ability to have your posts seen. Certainly banning accounts is an option, but then you have to fight with the crapflood, if and when it comes.

>losing the ability to have your posts seen.

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

Re: PG on trolls

#42

Post by curi »

dfranke wrote: post #37
curi wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's only a truth to the matter if you can get people to agree on a premise. Two libertarians who adopt the same premises can have a meaningful debate This is the myth of the framework. See Popper's book by that name: http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Framework-Defence-Science-Rationa... Besides the issue of whether productive debate is possible across frameworks, there is also your (possibly accidental) assertion that w…

your (possibly accidental) assertion that what premises people believe affects what statements about reality are true None of the statements in question have to do with reality, only with abstract ideas. Libertarians believe that property ownership is a right; communists believe that it is an offense. Neither of these assertions is empirically testable. If the debate is about what policies will make us wealthier rath…

You give a good example: which policies towards the market create more wealth (on average, various things being equal) is a matter of fact. But I think this sort of non-arbitrary approach to thinking has much wider applicability, and indeed that all interesting subjects can be approached in a careful, meaningful way not based on personal taste.

Which policies are ethical, with "ethics" rightly construed, is also a matter of fact. Morality is about how to live, and it's not a religious concept. The notion that morality is (and must be) religious is unfortunately a bad, religious idea, that (oddly) most atheists still believe.

Just to get started, we can consider which lifestyles do and do not accomplish their own internal goals. Lifestyles that do not are bad ways to live -- they are "immoral". We don't have to use moral terminology; that isn't important. But whatever you call it, there are objective facts about how we should or shouldn't live.

And there's better than that. You can take a very wide variety of goals, and examine how to achieve them. And you can find common points -- certain ways of life are good for achieving many goals, while others are not. These common points, which make people powerful and able to accomplish things in general, are an important, useful, and objective find the field of morality.

Re: PG on trolls

#43

Post by DarrenStuart »

pg wrote: post #27
DarrenStuart wrote: post #11

I think news.yc has a 5th troll behavior and it's down modding a comment because they disagree with it. I have been down modded a number of times not for saying something rude or stupid just something that others don't agree with. I tend to down mod rude and aggressive people on here and I also up mod people who I think have been down modded unfairly. I am not sure if I am alone with my way of thinking.

I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness. It only becomes abuse when people resort to karma bombing: downvoting a lot of comments by one user without reading them in order to subtract maximum karma. Fortunately we now have several levels of software to pro…

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

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

Re: PG on trolls

#44

Post by gojomo »

pg wrote: post #27
DarrenStuart wrote: post #11

I think news.yc has a 5th troll behavior and it's down modding a comment because they disagree with it. I have been down modded a number of times not for saying something rude or stupid just something that others don't agree with. I tend to down mod rude and aggressive people on here and I also up mod people who I think have been down modded unfairly. I am not sure if I am alone with my way of thinking.

I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness. It only becomes abuse when people resort to karma bombing: downvoting a lot of comments by one user without reading them in order to subtract maximum karma. Fortunately we now have several levels of software to pro…

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

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

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

Re: PG on trolls

#45

Post by simen »

curi wrote: post #6
dfranke wrote: post #3

Like graffiti, trolling can be impressive when it's done especially well. My favorite troll of all time is the guy from comp.compression last August: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.compression/browse_threa... followed by the famous "Is Your Son a Computer Hacker?" troll from adequacy.org: http://adequacy.org/public/stories/2001.12.2.42056.2147.html

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

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

Re: PG on trolls

#46

Post by curi »

simen wrote: post #45
curi wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

yeah i know. what pg said as well. still reminded me.

Re: PG on trolls

#47

Post by DarrenStuart »

DarrenStuart wrote: post #43
pg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness. It only becomes abuse when people resort to karma bombing: downvoting a lot of comments by one user without reading them in order to subtract maximum karma. Fortunately we now have several levels of software to pro…

very true but I have seen valid responses down modded because of fanboyism and blindness to other views. I guess we don't always behave in a grown up way online. I am as guilty of that as the next guy.

lol the irony of being down modded for my last comment :p

Re: PG on trolls

#48

Post by willchang »

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

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

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

Re: PG on trolls

#49

Post by Tichy »

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

Re: PG on trolls

#50

Post by Darmani »

gojomo wrote: post #44
pg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness. It only becomes abuse when people resort to karma bombing: downvoting a lot of comments by one user without reading them in order to subtract maximum karma. Fortunately we now have several levels of software to pro…

It might be interesting to experiment with two axes of rating: one signifying agreement/disagreement, the other quality/abuse. Whether it's worth the added complexity, I'm not sure, but it would resolve an ambiguity in the signals sent to commenters. (To squeeze into the existing UI and mental model of this sort of site, I might make the current up/down mean quality -- should more people see this or should it recede…

The problem is that the two axes may get confused in one's head. If I disagree with something (especially ideologies), it's often enough because I feel the opposing viewpoints are not thought out, and the post may set off the same internal growling as rudeness. Someone on your side may seem like a virtuous knight as you watch them engage the opposition in debate; the other side may view them as an harsh aggressor.
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