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PG on trolls
51–60 of 190 posts
Re: PG on trolls
#52PG's essays are getting shorter. I like that -- no matter what Steve Yegge says. (http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/01/blogging-theory-201-...)
Re: PG on trolls
#53The simplest troll test. A troll (person or point of view) is incapable of introspection. This does not mean that trolls won't try to introspect, just that they cannot succeed at it. This can also be used to show why trolls have trouble with recursion and irony.
Re: PG on trolls
#54I 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…
I don't entirely agree.
I have seen quite a few comments that were extremely insightful, and/or interesting that got downmodded due to an unpopular opinion. The reason this is unfortunate is not only that you tend to miss these (assuming that there is a higher probability that you read or think about comments that are rated higher, which I am surely not the only one that is guilty of) but also that it tends to promote groupthink . This is especially important on a forum like this where we are here to learn and share our thoughts, ideas and experiences for a very particular niche: Starting startups.
I have noted that comments that don't promote the "build it and they will come" view tend to be voted down. Since this site is primarily populated with hackers this is entirely understandable - it is human nature to think that your part of the project is the most important. But the reason we all come here is (I presume) to learn. And the things about which we know the least are the things where we have most to learn.
It is not only a question of abuse, but also a question of opening peoples eyes to issues, problems and points of views that lie outside their expertise, but which they will probably encounter in a startup. And this includes such diverse fields as marketing, financing and sales.
I am here to learn about stuff I didn't know already, and that is often outside my field. In return for this I will offfer my opinions in the fields where I may have something to contribute.
At the end of the day this makes us all better entrepreneurs. Because as anyone who has ever done a startup will tell you - you have to get everything right. Hacking, finance, sales, PR, marketing, hiring, etc.
So I think that the up and down arrows should not express agreement, but insightfullness or truth. Not opinion. That way I will be able to judge the validity of a comment in a field that I do not know well by its points. And hopefully learn something.
Re: PG on trolls
#55I'm not convinced that you'll be able to deal with the Eternal September problem. It's all well and good that anti-trolling is built into the rules, but as more and more people join less and less of them will have read the rules.
Re: PG on trolls
#56It doesn't have much to do with hacker personalities. Unless you want to argue that Youtube denizens are hackers of some sort too.
Re: PG on trolls
#57I wonder if trolls can be categorized automatically. Caveats and all, trolls are characterized by their participation in negative-karma two-person conversations and down-voting of their comments by a diverse and changing set of users. A simple learning algorithm should zap the predictable ones. Trolls are nourished by attention and early detection and removal should nip that behavior in the bud.
Re: PG on trolls
#58I wonder if trolls can be categorized automatically. Caveats and all, trolls are characterized by their participation in negative-karma two-person conversations and down-voting of their comments by a diverse and changing set of users. A simple learning algorithm should zap the predictable ones. Trolls are nourished by attention and early detection and removal should nip that behavior in the bud.
I've thought a lot about that. I wouldn't be surprised if current spam filters would work unchanged. There are not enough trolls on News.YC to make it worth investing time in such countermeasures, but it would be an interesting experiment to see if you could use statistical filtering techniques to detect trolls in some large public corpus like Digg or Reddit or Slashdot comment threads.
Re: PG on trolls
#59On 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.…
News.YC users are definitely influenced by the prevailing trend, in both directions. I.e. people are more willing to vote something up as its score rises, and more prone to attack something as its score falls. It's not too bad yet here, but it got to be such a problem on Reddit that about a year ago they switched to not showing how many points a submission has till it's an hour old.
Re: PG on trolls
#60I 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 news.yc has a 5th troll behavior and it's down modding a comment because they disagree with it That's not a troll behavior ("troll" comes from the fishing term), and it's much less common here than on reddit or digg or (god help you) dailykos, where intelligent but unfashionable opinions get sunk hard. There are only a few fashionable subjects around here (the importance of lisp, for example), whereas on othe…
I'd rather a whole parliament of disagreeable colicky horseradish farmers than one unipartisan politburo.
Wow. That is the best sentence I have ever read in a comment thread.