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PG on trolls

paulgraham.com

151–160 of 190 posts

Re: PG on trolls

#152
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

wget perhaps?

Re: PG on trolls

#153

Is there any fundamental difference in how karma is awarded in News.YC compared with Slashdot?

It's been a while since I've been on slashdot, but back then their system was quite sophisticated. You could not always vote on stories, only when temporary moderator status was assigned to you by a random process. Additionally, sometimes you would be assigned meta-moderator status and get to vote on the quality of moderators ratings. Those meta-moderations would in turn influence the likelihood of the rated moderators to become moderators again in the future. Also, they have categories for the votes ("funny", "insightful", "troll", ...).

Re: PG on trolls

#156
post #141
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, y…

Yes, I agree with the end point. I think morals are properly posed in teleological terms. So, moral philosophy has to do with determining the end. What are our goals aiming at?

Re: PG on trolls

#157
post #22
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where can I get a degree in trolling?

I'd try Hampshire College, UC Santa Cruz, or the New School.

As a New School student, I can only say... well... okay yes, you're probably right. It's great fun though. I can't imagine hating school anywhere else.

Re: PG on trolls

#158
Observing just the length of this thread, my initial thought is that pg has executed quite an exceptional troll himself...

Re: PG on trolls

#159
Regarding News.YC, I fear that it may eventually suffer the same fate as Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, etc. Trolling is a minor problem compared to self-promoting. The challenge is that there's no scarcity on the internet, so you have to create artificial scarcity. It may be that the best way to fix the problem (i.e. to create scarcity) is through fees. For example, a $1.00 (rising with demand) fee per submission would keep a lot of junk out of any discussion site. And any serious content producer or blogger wouldn't blink at the notion of a small fee. The assumption that everything should be free is what kills many of these sites.

Re: PG on trolls

#160
post #85
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite (upmodded 26 points as of 9pst): Regarding News.YC: "Your ancient ritual has summoned me to News.YC so those tight-assed holier-than-thou fucktards can be shown the error of their ways. Maybe the reason there aren't trolls is because NOBODY FUCKING VISITS THEIR SHITTY SITE."-- terwin, Reddit

It surprises me that people can indict others with the adjective "holier-than-thou" and not feel ashamed of themselves. The word screams, "I'm going to bring you down to my level!"

Self-righteousness is often misplaced and is very unbecoming.
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