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Trolls (2008)

paulgraham.com

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Re: Trolls (2008)

#141

Post by Karunamon »

jtreminio wrote: post #33
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…

I haven't visited the SA forums in over 6 years, but last I remember, trolling in non-troll forums (FYAD) was usually met with a ban, resulting in a loss of your :10bux:. This was loosened a bit with the introduction of the... what's it called? Prison? Time out? that prevents a user from posting for X number of hours.

Probation, with the time choosable via mod.

Re: Trolls (2008)

#142

Post by seles »

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…

I think PG only aims to keep the "asshole" kind of trolls out not the ones that say controversial things, as he gave examples of how people tend to be stubborn and not delete their own comments that are being downvoted for controversy, but do delete their asshole comments.

Re: Trolls (2008)

#143

Post by jpk »

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…

I would argue that all of positives you cite can be accomplished without trolling. What distinguishes a thoughtful but contrary comment from a trolling comment is that the troll wants to force other users into negative behavior. Trolls win when somebody blows up, or somebody's self-image is toppled, or whatever. That attitude adds zero value to a conversation.

Whether any of this matters or not is immaterial. If someone thinks it matters and you want to convince them otherwise, pushing them to drop the banhammer in anger isn't the way to do it.

Re: Trolls (2008)

#144

Post by mquander »

billpatrianakos wrote: post #95

I like the measures HN has in place to combat trolling. Karma, up/down votes, the downvote threshold, dead links, etc. are all really good and seem to work. The biggest thing though is just making sure everyone understands the kind of unspoken spirit of the site. I'd also argue that we want to keep this place kind of hushed as not to attract too broad of an audience. What I don't like that I have seen a lot of, is wh…

As for downvotes, that button should be reserved for off-topic, vulgar, or otherwise obvious trolling cases and not just because "I didn't like what he said, he's stupid, or whatever."

I disagree. Why do you think that? I think that "I didn't like what he said, he's stupid, or whatever" (e.g. I think this comment is foolish, I think this comment is unreasonably rude, I think this comment is uninteresting) is a very good reason to downvote. The purpose of the up- and down-voting is to allow readers to decide which comments are good and which are not very good. Why would you accept that readers have the power to move up comments that they like, but not to move down the ones that they don't like?

Re: Trolls (2008)

#145

Post by shasta »

ericingram wrote: post #32
re_todd wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went camping with a group of lawyers once, and they were a lot like this too. They wanted to constantly argue and debate. They would even assert things that I knew they personally disagreed with, just to start an argument. If nobody was arguing, they'd get kind of tense and nervous as if some calamity was about to happen, and then starting a debate seemed to relieve everyone's tension. Seemed strange to me.

That sounds like fun, I love debating

I bet you're a master.

Re: Trolls (2008)

#146

Post by jvandenbroeck »

Well because down voting influences karma I'm probably posting 70% less than I would. I see HN more like a news site in which I sometimes share my view on something but not to comment or to discuss something (sadly).

First I saw HN as something to have an intelligent discussion, but after a few "controversial" posts, and having negative karma, I don't bother. I only post something when I think it's "safe" to post, or when I have time to write a detailed essay.

I think some people can have an intelligent discussion on HN, not for me, maybe because of my dyslexia I'm bad with words. But then again, maybe that's the price to pay to keep the trolls away.

Re: Trolls (2008)

#147

Post by edw519 »

Discussions like this remind me of my favorite scene from "Roadhouse", the best bad movie ever. Discussion forums are kinda like bars and hackers are kinda like coolers...

  All you have to do is follow three simple rules.
  One: never underestimate your opponent.
  Expect the unexpected.
  Two: take it outside.
  Never start anything inside the bar unless it's absolutely necessary.
  And three: be nice.
  Come on.
  If somebody gets in your face and calls you a cocksucker, I want you to be nice.
  OK.
  Ask him to walk, be nice.
  If he won't walk, walk him. But be nice.
  If you can't walk him, one of the others will help you.
  And you'll both be nice.
  I want you to remember that it's a job.
  - It's nothing personal. - Uh-huh.
  Being called a cocksucker isn't personal?
  No. It's two nouns combined to elicit a prescribed response.
  What if somebody calls my mama a whore?
  Is she?
  (laughter)
  I want you to be nice...
  ..until it's time to not be nice.
  Well, how're we supposed to know when that is?
  You won't. I'll let you know.
Sometimes we hackers work too hard to make things more complicated than they need to be.

Be nice.

(Oh, and by the way, I'm letting you know now when it's time to not be nice here: never.)

Re: Trolls (2008)

#148

Post by tshtf »

teej wrote: post #137
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…

In the last 6 months I've been running an experiment. An experiment to make Hacker News better. Because I felt Hacker News was going to shit in several ways and I felt like I could help. I couldn't stop naive newbies from making dumb comments, but I could stop fanboyism and groupthink. I decided that I was going to take a different approach to commenting. In essence, I wanted to be like DHH - highly opinionated, stro…

In the last 6 months I conducted a different experiment.

I turned on "showdead" and looked through the posting history of users with dead posts. About a quarter of the time, I would have disagreed with the hellbanning.

If you're going to ban a user, you might as well be honest and tell them up front.

Re: Trolls (2008)

#149

Post by jcampbell1 »

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 fact that you consider the observation obvious, is a sign that you were possibly trolling. You were probably being intellectually too lazy to make your point without resorting using tactics like calling your own opinions seemingly obvious.

It is not obvious that increased competition leads to declining margins. Often increased competition validates the market, and increases consumer demand far more than the effect on pricing. I have seen it in my own industry, where our sales increase when a competitor launches a big ad campaign.

Re: Trolls (2008)

#150

Post by sytelus »

Currency in the economy of trolls is attention. When forums are small, trolling is much less rewarding and vice versa. Troll economy also feeds on to itself and upvoting/downvoting/karma mechanisms would be less and less effective as forum membership grows. To boost the attention economy, trolls would resort to upvote each other more frequently eventually outweighing votes of others.

From theoretical perspective this is very similar problem to links and webpages. A troll is equivalent to a spammy web page. Upvotes/downvotes are equivalent to traffic you get on your web page. When UserA upvotes UserB, a link is created between two. The goal of a troll is to get as much traffic as possible. They are incentivised to give each other upvotes in the hope of return favor, or in other words, create as many links to each other as possible. It would be mistake to think that few "good guys" can be used as gate keeper to protect the system against these trolls. In nutshell that is the hope and approach many early search engines had and they failed as the size grew out of their hands. The solution has to be technical and automated. Algorithms like PageRank or machine learning models is highly applicable to trolling issue. For instance, the real value of karma should not be a naïve count of upvotes (in the same way that real important of the page is not how many other pages points to it) but rather who has upvoted it. I think algorithms like PageRank can be easily applied to calculate the value of karma. If trolls upvotes each other 1000 times, their net karma would be much less than 1000 de- incentivising them for putting in the efforts for upvoting. Of course, there are many ways to fool PageRank and but I think algos like this should be sufficient for forums were you don't have to deal with more sophisticated folks like search marketers.

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