Trolls (2008) • Hacker News Board

Re: Trolls (2008)

#11

Post by bennyfreshness » Wed, Dec 14, 2011, 9:32 PM UTC

oscilloscope wrote: post #5

That's 8,000 unique visitors per day? Didn't realize HN readership was so small. I catch people in San Francisco scanning new articles, but it must be location bias. http://www.google.com/trends?q=hacker+news%2C+reddit Edit: That number was from 2008

That number is from 2008, when PG wrote the post. Today I bet its much higher, although still far below reddit. But like PG said, much better quality.

Re: Trolls (2008)

#12

Post by Abundnce10 » Wed, Dec 14, 2011, 9:32 PM UTC

oscilloscope wrote: post #5

That's 8,000 unique visitors per day? Didn't realize HN readership was so small. I catch people in San Francisco scanning new articles, but it must be location bias. http://www.google.com/trends?q=hacker+news%2C+reddit Edit: That number was from 2008

I wonder how many unique visitors per day HN is getting now. Is there any place I can find this info?

Re: Trolls (2008)

#13

Post by imgabe » Wed, Dec 14, 2011, 9:33 PM UTC

sambeau wrote: post #4

I wonder how much worse road etiquette would be if we had no license plates? I suspect there is a reasonable argument against net anonymity hidden in the history of the motor car. Does anyone know what the tipping point for license plates was?

I think license plates are roughly equivalent to an IP address. It gives you no incentive to be polite, but authorities can use it to track you down if you break the law.

Re: Trolls (2008)

#14

Post by memset » Wed, Dec 14, 2011, 9:33 PM UTC

oscilloscope wrote: post #5

That's 8,000 unique visitors per day? Didn't realize HN readership was so small. I catch people in San Francisco scanning new articles, but it must be location bias. http://www.google.com/trends?q=hacker+news%2C+reddit Edit: That number was from 2008

This essay was written 3 years ago; readership has soared tremendously since then, to the point that sometimes PG's innocuous comments on the site are spun into Techcrunch headlines.

Re: Trolls (2008)

#15

Post by peter_l_downs » Wed, Dec 14, 2011, 9:33 PM UTC

Top sentence according to bookshrink [1]:

> There's a sort of Gresham's Law of trolls: trolls are willing to use a forum with a lot of thoughtful people in it, but thoughtful people aren't willing to use a forum with a lot of trolls in it.

I think that pretty much sums it up. Trolls are attracted to the forums with the most interesting/intelligent users (the "best" forums). I think that news.yc has been very successful in terms of the amount of trolling that takes place, especially since:

> The core users of News.YC are mostly refugees from other sites that were overrun by trolls.

[1] http://bookshrink.com

Re: Trolls (2008)

#16

Post by cobrausn » Wed, Dec 14, 2011, 9:34 PM UTC

sambeau wrote: post #4

I wonder how much worse road etiquette would be if we had no license plates? I suspect there is a reasonable argument against net anonymity hidden in the history of the motor car. Does anyone know what the tipping point for license plates was?

License plates came into existence in the early 1900s in Massachusetts when they needed a way to tax people to repair and maintain their roadways, and vehicle registration was the way they decided to accomplish it. It was also proposed as a way of linking drivers with actions, as there was a rapid increase in the number of roadway accidents about that time.

http://www.mass.gov/rmv/history/

Re: Trolls (2008)

#17

Post by karlzt » Wed, Dec 14, 2011, 9:35 PM UTC

mindstab wrote: post #3

Do we have any more recent stats about the viewership of HN now for 2011? How big is it, and more subjectively, how do people feel we are doing with trolls? I for one think on the whole conversation is still good and worthwhile checking out :)

http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html#5oct2011

"Also, a traffic update: HN now gets over 120k unique ips on a weekday, and serves over 1.3 million page views."

Re: Trolls (2008)

#18

Post by chrishenn » Wed, Dec 14, 2011, 9:35 PM UTC

I hope that trolling can be kept out of HN by the simple goodwill of the people using the site. I can't think of many forum systems that can effectively remove the incentive to troll.

I put up a forum online for people in my journalism class. They're nice people, but something about the fact that the conversation was online turned the discussion into something pretty dumb.

My hope is that people who grow up with the internet their whole lives will realize that you still have to be civil online. It's no different than real life, yet no one is teaching you manners online.

Re: Trolls (2008)

#19

Post by kghose » Wed, Dec 14, 2011, 9:37 PM UTC

angersock wrote: post #6

Good post, but as someone who dabbles in trolling as a hobby, I'd like to suggest the following: Trolls are important. Trolling, especially as seen on places like slashdot/4chan/somethingawful/etc., can oftentimes be a mechanism of critique for ideas and rhetorical styles. One of the best things about the 'net is that, frankly, none of this really matters. None of it. It's a big joke. My twitters and my wikis and my…

But how do we know the real trolls from the assholes? Emoticons help, but we can't see their FACE, so it's hard to tell.

Re: Trolls (2008)

#20

Post by rafedb » Wed, Dec 14, 2011, 9:38 PM UTC

Honestly the hn community has degenerated into nothing more than a bunch of snobbish behavior that up/downvote things needlessly based upon that person's likes or dislikes, rather than on the validity of the content. Don't get me wrong, every site similar to this with voting eventually gets there, but lately it has started getting worse and worse. Which is why I am posting with this account because I am sure this comment will get plenty more downvotes! lol

As I saw in another comment here I agree that trolls usually help make a community better. The voting system being used on comments rather than just the initial post to rank listing is much more of a hindrance to a community than trolls imo.