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If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault (2011)

anildash.com

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Re: If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault (2011)

#41

Post by barbecue_sauce »

goldcd wrote: post #25

I think it depends on the website you're wanting to run.. I was part of a now-dead "threaded message board", which had a somewhat cliquey view of what should/shouldn't be posted. In the evening when the moderators were away, the discussion became more interesting as it strayed off-topic. Eventually the community wanted 'to fork' so I decided to build something myself. I'm not IT trained, so first version was PL/SQL o…

You're not IT trained but you knew Oracle PL/SQL?

Edit: I know it's gauche to complain about downvotes, so I'll explain my question further. I find his situation extremely interesting as I associate Oracle with the "IT-iest" of "IT" things.

Re: If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault (2011)

#42

Post by braythwayt »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #40
braythwayt wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a fairly classic ad hominem comment. What difference does it make who makes this argument, if the argument itself is sound? On the other hand, if the man is 50% saint, 50% angel, and 50% genius, what difference would that make, if the argument itself was terrible? Comments suggesting that he shouldn't make this argument do not actually address the argument itself. In the best case, they are a distraction from…

It does make a difference when you believe that the reason Dash is making this kind of argument is because of his life experiences (or lack thereof). The general point Dash is trying to make about moderating communities is fine. But it's easy to preach about not allowing assholes when you don't consider yourself to be one. The day the zeitgeist shifts considerably in the favor of assessing him as an asshole, I suspec…

The comment said he shouldn't make the argument. That's one kind of ad hominem, a tu quoque

You're (possibly unwittingly) making another, an ad hominem circumstantial, by questioning his motives.

It's always best to just debate the argument itself and leave the author's character and motives and misconceptions out of it.

Otherwise we end up spending a lot of time discussing Mr. Dash, instead of discussing moderation of online communities,.

Re: If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault (2011)

#43

Post by RugnirViking »

goldcd wrote: post #25

I think it depends on the website you're wanting to run.. I was part of a now-dead "threaded message board", which had a somewhat cliquey view of what should/shouldn't be posted. In the evening when the moderators were away, the discussion became more interesting as it strayed off-topic. Eventually the community wanted 'to fork' so I decided to build something myself. I'm not IT trained, so first version was PL/SQL o…

I love these kinds of sites, and they always leave an impression on me, even when I only spend a day or two lurking the recent posts. Especially ones designed for niche interests such as old and long-dead games.

I genuinely think you should feel proud for making the world just a little bit better and more like it's ideal self

Re: If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault (2011)

#45

Post by mayneack »

ve55 wrote: post #10

This post is more reasonable for smaller curated communities, but as we can see from, well, every large social website that exists currently, it can be difficult to scale. I'm curious what the other thinks the solution would be to an obvious example like Twitter. When a website consists of so many groups of users that everyone's definition of 'assholes' contradicts the others, you find that banning them gets to be pr…

This argument doesn't exclude "too big to moderate" sites. Huge social networks chose to scale at the cost of making it impossible to control the assholes. It seems that's a good financial decision to running a profitable company, but it doesn't make it not their fault.

Re: If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault (2011)

#46

Post by malvosenior »

braythwayt wrote: post #42
kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does make a difference when you believe that the reason Dash is making this kind of argument is because of his life experiences (or lack thereof). The general point Dash is trying to make about moderating communities is fine. But it's easy to preach about not allowing assholes when you don't consider yourself to be one. The day the zeitgeist shifts considerably in the favor of assessing him as an asshole, I suspec…

The comment said he shouldn't make the argument. That's one kind of ad hominem, a tu quoque You're (possibly unwittingly) making another, an ad hominem circumstantial, by questioning his motives. It's always best to just debate the argument itself and leave the author's character and motives and misconceptions out of it. Otherwise we end up spending a lot of time discussing Mr. Dash, instead of discussing moderation…

It really is as simple as Dash’s online behavior being “assholish”. It’s on the topic of the post, he’s just an extreme example of the behavior he’s lambasting.

Re: If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault (2011)

#47

Post by doc_gunthrop »

The first site to come to mind is voat.co. I explored it out of curiosity a while after the "purging of intolerable subreddits" a couple years back. The impression I got was that of a seedy underbelly of aggregate news sites like reddit, populated by a mass of displaced misanthropes. It didn't take long to nope out of there.

Re: If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault (2011)

#48

Post by codinghorror »

smacktoward wrote: post #27
ve55 wrote: post #10

This post is more reasonable for smaller curated communities, but as we can see from, well, every large social website that exists currently, it can be difficult to scale. I'm curious what the other thinks the solution would be to an obvious example like Twitter. When a website consists of so many groups of users that everyone's definition of 'assholes' contradicts the others, you find that banning them gets to be pr…

> This post is more reasonable for smaller curated communities, but as we can see from, well, every large social website that exists currently, it can be difficult to scale. I'm curious what the other thinks the solution would be to an obvious example like Twitter. One solution would be to not jam the entire world's conversations into a couple of gigantic, one-size-fits-all platforms. You ask what solution would work…

Ironically Facebook’s original design around “only a list of approved friends see any of your content” may have been more correct in the long term. Randos do not scale, particularly when like Twitter you are not particularly competent at evolving your product.

Re: If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault (2011)

#49

Post by x0x0 »

wpietri wrote: post #17
jcroll wrote: post #2

What's an example of a major site with a good community?

Depends on what you mean by "major", but Metafilter is one example that comes to mind. Honestly, though, I think "major site" and "good community" are in conflict. Facebook's revenue is something like $0.12 per user-day. Twitter's is circa $0.07. It is at best extremely difficult to do effective policing of users with that kind of money to spend. You can use ML, etc, to do the first cut. But real anti-abuse work basi…

You seem to have thought about this, and you're generally insightful, but I have to disagree. The problem with twitter and fb isn't the low revenues per user-day. The problem is the behavior they've cultivated and incentivized from the beginning.

For example, had twitter not created a culture of basically brigading, they would be in a different place. But they at minimum allowed and probably incentivized that to become part of the twitter experience, and I don't think it can be recovered from.

As for facebook, if it took you until 2019 to say Alex Jones can't build his business on your platform, you haven't even started to think in any serious way about what behavior you want on fb. Well actually they have: mark wants dollars and doesn't give a shit about anything else.

You may find this interview with former Reddit pm Dan McComas fascinating: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/04/dan-mccomas-reddit-pr...

Re: If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault (2011)

#50

Post by dahart »

zzo38computer wrote: post #24
dahart wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the time. I see dang smoothing things out like almost daily. You can also turn on “showdead” in your profile options, and maybe you’ll become more aware of it.

I do keep it on, because I want to see all messages even if most people hate it. Fortunately, they do not delete the messages permanently in such case, unlike some others do. (I also use custom CSS so that no messages are grey; all of them are black. If I can, I would also want to change the sort order of messages so that it is based on time (perhaps, of the most recent nested reply) rather than karma (if that is wha…

Comments and articles both definitely have a time component in the sort. For comments, time might mostly be a tie-breaker, because up-votes do have a greater weight. Articles always drop over time, upvotes only keep them around for slightly longer. I don’t know what the precise sort is, but FWIW I think Paul Graham published what it used to be, once upon a time... you can probably find the old code. I’d guess it hasn’t changed all that much except maybe for how it handles gaming / voting rings.
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