Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

PG on trolls

paulgraham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 190 posts

Re: PG on trolls

#141

Post by curi »

yters wrote: post #134
thaumaturgy wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Regarding subjectivity, if you assert morality is subjective, you don't have a leg to stand on in saying I was wrong. Well, subjectivity doesn't mean you're right in the objective sense. See, you opened your comment with a logical trick to prove the correctness of what you were about to say before you even said it, and you did so by deciding that there are intrinsically right and wrong moral decisions. I think that…

I agree with the logic trick part. To say something is undecidable is to make an objective claim. However, at the point where you want to say someone should or should not do something the subjective morality comes back to bite you (saying curi's trick was underhanded). I think this is curi's point. All you can really do with subjective morality is describe your rationale for why you do what you do, and hope the other…

Regarding contradicting goals: I think the way to tie things together is a common endpoint (the truth of the matter). If you move all your goals in that direction, it will cause them to become progressively less contradictory.

You can also remove contradictions locally if you find any. If you want, you can say that is based on the common foundation "if two ideas contradict, at least one is false". But the point is, you see a contradiction, you know at least one of the ideas is mistaken in some way, so you know there's room for improvement there, until you come up with some changes that remove the contradiction.

Re: PG on trolls

#143

Post by sspencer »

pg wrote: post #80
yters wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If chains of trust could be widely and rigorously established online, most (maybe all?) of the big problems we have today would be gone.

It would be a good thing. If anyone wants to apply to YC with that kind of idea, we'd be into it.

I actually thought long and hard the other day about how such a system might be implemented, and came up with a few interesting ideas. Perhaps this encouragement will make me apply!

EDIT: I even wrote about it a long time ago, when I still updated my blog with any semblance of regularity. Weebly seems to be down for approximately the millionth time in the last month or so, though. I'll post the article if Weebly gets righted within the edit window.

Re: PG on trolls

#144

Post by Spyckie »

pg wrote: post #36
aswanson wrote: post #19

About what size was reddit (in uniques) before it jumped the shark?

Off the top of my head, maybe 40-50,000. The fascinating thing is, all the data is still there. You can go and look at the old comments and stories and see what the site used to be like. If you could find a good proxy for stupidity, like comment length or spelling mistakes, you could graph the change as the site grew.

Is there a way to grab a reddit comment corpus (a large set of reddit's comments)? I don't browse reddit but I think it would be a fun thing to play around with.

Re: PG on trolls

#145

Post by Spyckie »

Creating more selective communities with stricter guidelines seems to be the wrong approach to dealing with trolls, especially based on the scenario pg lays out. As pg says, the larger a community grows, the easier it is for trolls to be accepted and the harder it is to mod (prune) the community. It seems that critical mass is just when the pruning community becomes smaller than the trolling community, and that by creating new communities with more stringent rules, you are just delaying the date (hopefully indefinitely) when trolls come in. I understand that the yc community is special, but even the comments here show that it won't work for much longer as the community grows beyond yc. To answer the question of "Will it scale?", I think its already a no.

If you've ever hung out with a lot of girls (from a guy's perspective), you can beging to understand the trolling community. 1 on 1 with a girl and you can get intellectual conversation, but the minute 3 or 4 girls get together, they start talking about clothes, guys, dramas, and all other stuff that just isn't interesting. I bet girls see it the same with guys too (5 guys together = WoW, DOTA, girls or crude jokes).

Solutions? Keep it small. This fails to keep in line with the existing goals of news.yc (advertising for existing startups, attracting smart people, etc). Another solution? Maybe try to preserve the small community feel as the site gets bigger. One way to do this would be to use user upvotes and downvotes as community boundaries for each user - ie: making their community presence only to those who rate them up, and to make their personal community those who they rate up. This is speculative at best, though.

Re: PG on trolls

#146

Post by sspencer »

sspencer wrote: post #143
pg wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be a good thing. If anyone wants to apply to YC with that kind of idea, we'd be into it.

I actually thought long and hard the other day about how such a system might be implemented, and came up with a few interesting ideas. Perhaps this encouragement will make me apply! EDIT: I even wrote about it a long time ago, when I still updated my blog with any semblance of regularity. Weebly seems to be down for approximately the millionth time in the last month or so, though. I'll post the article if Weebly gets…

EDIT2: Weebly finally back online: http://myothercar.weebly.com/1/post/2007/11/a-confederacy-of...

Re: PG on trolls

#147

Post by ardit33 »

iamelgringo wrote: post #115
Erikk wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

THIS IS A GREAT SITE!!!! but it's got some kind of anti-troll field protecting it. The most perfect trolling oppertunities always seem to degenerate into civilized rational discussion.

I think what Paul said about "Hacker News readers feel about trolls the way exiles from Cuba or Eastern Europe feel about dictators" is right on the money. sic semper tyrannis It's actually rather amazing that we are fairly unanimous in down-modding trollishness, without having community guidelines or a big discussion about it.

I agree and I like that line a lot. I moved to the US, from a Eastern European country, as I was fed up with the retards that had taken over my country, and ruin it down. Unfortunately, who screams the loudest, often wins.

Re: PG on trolls

#148

Post by fiaz »

foonamefoo wrote: post #137
fiaz wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also wonder how much of a contributing factor people's attempts at humor would spin the dynamics of group discussions out of control. The main reason why I went Slashdot -> Digg -> Reddit -> YCNews (and most likely YCNews -> ? within the next 18 months) was because of all the one-liners I kept reading over and over again of people attempting to be funny. My thinking is along the lines of UserXYZ posts something hum…

I think that Slashdot overall still has the highest quality comments. You just have to sort by score, and do a -2 funny modifier. The site instantly becomes much much better. Stay away from the new ajaxy score slider system.

Interesting. I wonder how Slashdot maintains a high level of commenting over time. Thanks for the tip. Perhaps I'll revisit them in 18 months...

;)

(This place is too cool at the moment!)

Re: PG on trolls

#149

Post by domnit »

Another model for keeping out trolls is Metafilter's. They require a $5 donation when an account is created, and kick out assholes. Of course, this keeps out a whole lot more than trolls. It's certainly the wrong way to do it for most sites, but it works for them, and perhaps for others.

Re: PG on trolls

#150

Post by yelsgib »

Perhaps the reason that people troll (or take part in any sort of asshole behavior, really) is that they don't have anything better to do. Hear me out.

Hacker News is a "forum" whose main purpose is getting people to talk about/think about/post links to information related to startups. It has a very explicit purpose and to this end I would not expect it to be "infested" to the extent of a lot of other forums.

For instance, would we expect to see a lot of trolls on a forum devoted to advanced topics in theoretical math? "Orbifold cohomology is so much better than Hopfschild cohomology!" No. No, we wouldn't. A serious, well-defined, topic begets serious discussion.

This is the real problem with reddit, digg, etc. - there's no clear GOAL. Like, there's no -reason- that people shouldn't be assholes. What are they getting in the way of?

It's like if you opened the doors to your house and just held a "general forum." At first, discussion would be great (it's just your friends). Later, discussion would get worse (it's your friends' friends). Eventually it would degrade into the biggest losers who have nowhere to go sitting around and making fun of all the fun they're not having out in the real world (outside the house).

I agree with pg's sentiments that the architecture/rules of hacker news make it a much more intelligent, even (gasp) friendly forum, but I also think it's the community. They keep coming back because they have active interest. They have active interest because hacker news has established as its goal the provision of things of interest.

As always, I might just be woefully naive about human nature; but things seem so simple!

Post reply on HN