Trolls (2008) • Hacker News Board

Re: Trolls (2008)

#251

Post by shiven » Thu, Dec 15, 2011, 4:45 AM UTC

interlagos wrote: post #91

I've been hellbanned here on HN on at least three different IP addresses and accounts...that I am aware of. Probably more. In each case nothing I'd ever said would be considered trolling by any rational observer. Here on HN, however, as with most communities where you start to recognize the regulars (tptacek, raganwald, etc), "trolling" is redefined to simply mean "going against the grain". There was one discussion t…

The hellbanning is what turned me off commenting and sharing my opinions on HN. With the passage of time, what was once a forum to discuss (and openly dissent) ideas feels like an old boys club ... with a few anointed head goons to keep the order (and teach newcomers a lesson with zealous downvoting and hellbanning), a few ol timers who still act decently in hopes that HN may yet regain its spirit (as they remember it) and the rest of the crowd filled with the usual riff-raff on any web forum who have no idea what HN started off as and will probably never care. PG, HN was (is?) a great idea and a great place and well worth the while. Burned two handles over the years, getting the hang of it, but by then it was no longer the place I liked.

I'll keep lurking, at least for now.

Good luck.

Re: Trolls (2008)

#252

Post by joejohnson » Thu, Dec 15, 2011, 4:47 AM UTC

finnw wrote: post #139

joejohnson wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, never mind: this article is 3 years old.

Does that make a significant difference? What have we learned about trolling in the last 3 years that we had not already learned in the previous 15 years?

I don't know. I'm not sure if there have been any break throughs recently determining where the trolls came from.

Re: Trolls (2008)

#253

Post by KeithMajhor » Thu, Dec 15, 2011, 4:48 AM UTC

InclinedPlane wrote: post #244

KeithMajhor wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"1. Avoid long back and forth threads. Say what you have to say and get back to work." If everyone followed all those rules I think this one would be detrimental. Seeing you smarter-than-me people go back and forth about stuff I'm right on the verge of understanding is pretty cool.

It depends on the reason for the back and forth. Is it to exchange new information and deepen the conversation or is it to retread the same ground and try to defend a point? When it's the latter it's rarely productive. If you were unclear the first time and someone misinterpreted you then perhaps take the time to make sure to be clearer in restating what you meant, but try not to go beyond that.

I remember going back and forth with you about that escher illusion a guy built in his garage. Just an example of what I'm talking about and why I think it's cool. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2233584

Re: Trolls (2008)

#254

Post by jshen » Thu, Dec 15, 2011, 4:55 AM UTC

ggchappell wrote: post #236

jshen wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Sometimes we hackers work too hard to make things more complicated than they need to be." tl;dr: maintaining an online community is anything but simple. I'm not sure exactly what you mean. One possibility is that you're referring to the hackers that build communities online who try to establish some sort of guidelines for behavior. If this is what you meant then I think I disagree. I've tried a very similar experime…

> My entire goal was to recreate that site minus the trolls, and I ruthlessly enforced one simple rule. Do not directly insult other users of the site. I've pondered this issue a lot, and I've also noticed that, as you indicated, lots of troll messages would be acceptable under your rule, but many responses to those messages would not be. My favorite example comes from a discussion group about hamsters as pets. Someo…

"And really, is the iron-fist policy so bad? So someone gets a bad taste in their mouth. That someone was wrecking your community."

The person I'm talking about was/is a good member of the community, but they got mad 1 out of 200 of their threads. I don't want them to leave.

Re: Trolls (2008)

#255

Post by baby » Thu, Dec 15, 2011, 5:02 AM UTC

I feel like some people here are going to say that it went downhills. I personally find HN to be the one of the most civilized and the most interesting (in terms of discussions generated) place I visit.

Re: Trolls (2008)

#256

Post by burgerbrain » Thu, Dec 15, 2011, 5:03 AM UTC

eldude wrote: post #221

scott_s wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you point to the actual posts? Every time I've seen a hellbanned account, I have agreed with the decision. In the interest of full disclosure, my suspicion is that the way you expressed these opinions ran counter to the kind of discussion people want to see on HN. I may be wrong, of course, which is why I'd like to see the actual posts.

> Every time I've seen a hellbanned account, I have agreed with the decision. I'd be curious to get your opinion on my (just discovered) ban: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3354475

ALL CAPS alls warrants a ban.

That said, hellbans are fucking despicable. They might be the proper way to deal with spambots, but for contributing members they are as far as I am concerned incredibly unethical.

Re: Trolls (2008)

#257

Post by burgerbrain » Thu, Dec 15, 2011, 5:31 AM UTC

DiabloD3 wrote: post #193

Being a recent "victim"[1] of trolling here on HN, I understand pg's sentiment. However, the question is, has HN (since 2008, anyways) fallen into the pit with the trolls? For example, recently there was the thing with Rob Malda's resume. The entire thread on that was rather derailed into either sucking up to Rob, or saying Slashdot is full of trolls. Or rather, it had a rather unfavorable signal to noise ratio. I tr…

In that discussion they were not trolling you, at least not intentionally. Instead you were seeing what happens when you combine a strong dose of cognitive dissonance with the ability to downvote.

This is a common effect in HN and other so called "enlightened" communities because they do have higher concentrations of honestly intelligent people, people particularly susceptible to cognitive dissonance.

When you say something truthful that a "normal" person thinks is wrong, 9 times out of 10 they will ignore you, because they "know" you are wrong. Not so with intelligent populations.

Re: Trolls (2008)

#258

Post by billpatrianakos » Thu, Dec 15, 2011, 5:32 AM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #243

billpatrianakos wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, the examples I remember usually come up whenever there's a discussion over copyright and piracy. What I'll see is a discussion about whether piracy really hurts anyone with people arguing that it's free marketing and people who pirate wouldn't buy anyway. Then someone comes along and the subject moves on to open source vs free software. Someone says piracy is good because all software should be free. Then a bun…

Your example, to me, falls more in the category of "downvoted for retreading an old and tired discussion" than "downvoted for going against groupthink". Or, quite frequently, "downvoted for using HN as a soapbox rather than trying to contribute to the discussion". I find that the best comments in a discussion typically have at least some connection to the posted article, beyond simply discussing the same topic. The o…

Fair enough. I'm not exactly an old hat myself. My account's less than a year old so maybe I'm totally off on this and it's me who should keep my mouth shut and learn a bit more. That said, I still think there's enough people who are karma police in that they hoard points and use the up/down vote system in not-so-honorable ways to merit some discussion about that. I also think there's enough group-think going on to merit mentioning too. I'll admit my example wasn't really solid but, hey, now that I said it maybe you'll be able to spot it next time and be able to come back and say I was right. Or wrong. But I'm decently confident it's prevalent enough to spot easily and quickly.

Re: Trolls (2008)

#259

Post by burgerbrain » Thu, Dec 15, 2011, 5:33 AM UTC

adnam wrote: post #154

I used to be able to "flag" posts on HN, but a few weeks ago that right appears to have been revoked. No idea what I may have done wrong; perhaps I'm a "troll" and I don't know it?

I flagged every single steve jobs article the day after his death... which happened to be every article.... My ability to flag articles has since been revoked.

To be honest, it felt good. Made me feel like I had been heard. Shot down, sure, but still heard.

Re: Trolls (2008)

#260

Post by jcr » Thu, Dec 15, 2011, 5:41 AM UTC

pg wrote: post #246

zedshaw wrote: post #179

I normally find that, unless an essay is about mathematics, if it is based on a binary argument then it's just false because it's too simplistic to be based in reality. In this case saying there's only "trolls" and "super awesome people!" is childish. There's a much more interesting spectrum of human behavior online that doesn't fit into these convenient categories. To then say there's only two types of "trolls" is a…

For example: I know for a fact that the various people who run HN use it to selectively market what they want While you are vague here about what you mean by this, you are more precise later in this thread, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3354698 and what you say there is false. Stories about YC companies don't get any extra points or have a different ranking algorithm. They are also treated the same by anti-abus…

Paul, please don't get me wrong, but I would like to politely point out the exception; job posts from YC companies do get preferential treatment in rankings on the front page. It's a known fact, and since absolutely everything here is paid for by you and/or YC, no one has any right or room to complain about YC funded companies getting some additional exposure on their jobs posting. It's fair to consider the YC company job postings as a small advertisement supporting the site.

Considering the crap that Patrick (patio11) and Google received about mixing advertisements with results in (intentionaly?) confusing ways, it might be better to put the YC company job ads in a different location (top of the page, un-numbered and time limited to 24 hours or so) just to make the intent and separation more clear. --It's just a thought.

Your handling of the AirBnB fiasco was stellar. You let the negative story posts stay on the HN, and you allowed them to be up-voted to infinity and beyond. The thing most people don't realize is "Why the stories eventually started to decline in rankings, and why they declined so quickly?" --The reason is people like me; those who got tired of seeing the font page loaded with derogatory speculation and opinion about AirBnB, and decided to 'flag' all of the submissions. Though I have no proof, I'm certain I'm not the only one to be annoyed to the point of flagging all the nonsense.

The most recent HN Troll happened this morning, namely the HTTP LoLCats crap. It made it to the #2 spot on the front page (possibly #1 for a short period). I was impressed that in the 17 comments, there were no "This doesn't belong on HN" posts, so a lot of people were smart enough to just silently hit the 'flag' link. I just finished checking, and the HTTP LoLCats submission was nowhere to be seen in the first 360 results. Had the HTTP LolCats submission still been on the front page after I got a few hours of sleep, I may have logged out of HN and never returned.

It's fantastic to know you have voting-ring detection functioning to some degree. It's a great way to prevent spam in all of it's various forms. Without knowing the code you're really running (secret sauce and all that), I can see one potential problem; Since the HN moderators are from the ranks of the YC funded company founders, their participation on HN is most likely weighted differently. In other words, the friends amongst the YC founders not only constitute a voting-ring of sorts, but their actions/votes on HN may have more weight. With human beings wanting their friends to succeed, there is really no way around this issue, technical or otherwise.

Though I have no special weight or privileges here on HN, I openly admit to voting up and rooting for some of the YC funded companies that are doing great things. A more direct way to say it is, I'm also part of the "problem" of YC funded companies getting preferential treatment. Maybe I'm a terrible person for wanting them to succeed, but then again, maybe I'm only human, like rooting for good people doing great things, and maybe there are plenty of other normal humans like me around here.

A lot of people, including Zed, only notice the very real inconsistencies, but they don't understand the fundamental and technical causes of the inconsistencies. You did address Zed's point, but you are essentially defending a non-issue.

EDIT: Seeing this post get down-voted is disheartening. It tells me that there is something definitely wrong, and the cause could be me, or HN, or both, but I don't know for certain.