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Trolls (2008)

paulgraham.com

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Re: Trolls (2008)

#261

Post by burgerbrain »

eldude wrote: post #200
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…

I'm absolutely shocked and disgusted to be be reading this discussion regarding being "hellbanned" only to discover that my account in fact has been hellbanned for the past 1.5 yrs without even knowing it! http://news.ycombinator.org/threads?id=CrabDude * enable showdead in your profile to read my comments As you can see from my comments and contributions, most are extremely well reasoned and often entirely unique an…

"With the advent of the internet, all caps in messages became closely identified with "shouting" or attention-seeking behaviour and is considered very rude."

Re: Trolls (2008)

#262

Post by anamax »

wanorris wrote: post #210
anamax wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The current Congress can't get anything done because one of the political parties has decided that it isn't in their interest to get anything done, to keep the other party from getting credit for it. Hmm. The House passed a budget this year. The Senate hasn't for almost three years. The House passed an extension to govt financing/ operations. The Senate hasn't. The House passed an extension to the payroll tax cut.…

Absent a 60-member supermajority, passing a bill in the Senate requires both parties to at least agree to let it come to a vote. Passing a bill in the House does not require it to be palatable to the other party, the Senate, or the President, nor is it required for it to have any realistic hope of ever becoming law. I didn't really mean for this to be an unpleasantly partisan post, just a statement of facts about the…

The Dems didn't even bring any of those things up for a vote (even on cloture), so how did the Repubs keep them from passing? (Actually, there were two Senate votes on budget proposals. One was an Obama proposal and it went down something like 97-0. The other was what passed the house, and it went down 47-53. Yup, the Senate Dems haven't voted yes on a budget proposal for three years....)

> a bipartisan spirit of compromise

I see that the repubs have given the dems some things that the dems want and the dems have refused "the deal" because they didn't everything that they wanted. How does that translate to "the repubs won't compromise"?

For example, the Dems claim to want an extension of the payroll tax reduction. The Repubs gave it to them. Is it unreasonable for the Repubs to get something as well?

I'm not saying that the Repubs are blameless, but it's absurd to claim that they're the only ones to blame.

You disagree, so please define this "bipartisan compromise" that the Dems are (at least somewhat) willing to do and that the Repubs are unwilling to do. Do you agree that this definition should be somewhat symmetric?

Note that the payroll tax extension package that passed the House did get some Dem votes. Do you interpret that as "some Dems were willing to compromise" or "Repubs offered a package that was acceptable to some Dems"? How, exactly, did you come to your conclusion?

Re: Trolls (2008)

#263

Post by billpatrianakos »

nirvana wrote: post #163
tshtf wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have showdead turned on as well. It breaks my heart to see these comments from people who are trying to contribute. I don't go look up all their past history, but I'd say %75 of the comments are attempts to contribute to the conversation (even if they aren't great attempts or original) and about %25 are just comments that don't really add anything, but aren't really offensive or spammy or inappropriate.

I have gone through the history of a few people like the ones you mention and I have to say that I didn't really see anything worthy of banning. In every case I looked at (around 10 or 15 I think) I saw comments that were either sincere but not adding too much value (mediocre, let's say) or sometimes just not in agreement with popular opinion.

The really screwed up thing is that I've looked through the comment and submission histories of obvious spammers and I saw a guy with about 132 spam submissions with an account about as old as mine (almost 200 days) and his account wasn't banned. It seems that you can disagree around here but only to a point.

I get that maybe some are afraid of diluting the community but by being so overly sensitive you can really be doing everyone a disservice. Lately I feel like I have to watch out for the karma police. The guys who downvote anything that disagrees too much even if it's totally rational and put in as nice of terms as possible. And despite protests from the "in" crowd it really does seem like what they say gets auto-up voted. Experiments be damned, that reputation and age of any one profile really can make or break you.

Here's an experiment I'd like to see:

Pg, patio11, edw, reagawald, and the others all make new profiles and about commenting as always while not letting slip who they really are. Then let's see if their karma and average end up climbing at their usual rate.

Re: Trolls (2008)

#264

Post by billpatrianakos »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #204
teej wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 short, you can't stop the group think. Continuing from this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3354448 I'm not even sure if I get the point of trying either. I mean, I believe I have provided at least some value to HN, but every time I've "been unafraid to call people out", all I got was a bunch of crap for it. Although you say we shouldn't lose hope, I think I already have. Its frustrating to have to deal with…

Can you be more explicit about who or what type of people those are that'd be more at home on 4chan? I'm just curious. I often times feel like maybe I shouldn't be here either. It took me a while before I quit being a lurker and sometimes I wonder "am I HN material or do I belong with the rest of the riff raff?"

Re: Trolls (2008)

#265

Post by eldude »

burgerbrain wrote: post #261
eldude wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm absolutely shocked and disgusted to be be reading this discussion regarding being "hellbanned" only to discover that my account in fact has been hellbanned for the past 1.5 yrs without even knowing it! http://news.ycombinator.org/threads?id=CrabDude * enable showdead in your profile to read my comments As you can see from my comments and contributions, most are extremely well reasoned and often entirely unique an…

"With the advent of the internet, all caps in messages became closely identified with "shouting" or attention-seeking behaviour and is considered very rude."

Or in this case it was simply a matter of drawing attention for any who appreciated our entry to show appreciation by helping us win. Considering this was my project, I felt obliged to bring attention to something I felt warranted it. I was neither being rude, nor would it be rude in person (as is often emphasized in the guidelines) to speak loudly in a crowded noisy room filled with people gathering to appreciate what you've built. I often host developer events, and as a host this type of behavior is not only not rude, but often necessary and appreciated. The notion that all caps are "very rude" is at best contextual. In this case, it would seem to be ignorance on the part of the admins to recognize such a purpose and intention.

However, it would appear I stand corrected as I missed the following:

"Please don't use uppercase for emphasis." [1]

However, I stand by the ridiculousness of banning a sincere contributer that's bringing traffic to the site solely due to (positive constructive) ignorance of the rules.

Would you kick a guest out from your home without warning for temporarily speaking loudly in good intention, and exclude them from all future discussions? It would seem in this case HN violates their own rule regarding civility treating people online as you would in a face to face conversation, and please don't give me the excuse of this being necessary in order to deal with spambots. Such an argument defends rudeness and laziness as a better algorithm could easily be written.

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Trolls (2008)

#266

Post by chrishenn »

watmough wrote: post #105
chrishenn wrote: post #18

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…

I've seen some relatives' kids accounts on Facebook. I'm not sure I can be as optimistic as your last paragraph. If anything, I'm pessimistic that many kids are writing utter utter trollish garbage online that may never ever go away. Of course, there will be kids that are smart and don't do this, but kids that want to 'fit in' or 'be popular' may well end up rolling with the crowd and posting things that will hurt th…

This may fit into the same category of way too optimistic, but I think it should be something that's in school, from an early age. My high school has a mandatory computer literacy test, but it only tests a few skills like MS Office or "What is an ethernet port?"

It'd be nice if it taught stuff like "how not to be an idiot on the internet."

Re: Trolls (2008)

#267

Post by pg »

lukeholder wrote: post #250
pg wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said, there's a bunch of links (like job postings and YC company PR posts) that get privileged front page status with their own decay algorithms You are mistaken. Only job postings have their own decay algorithm, and those are visually distinguished from stories by e.g. not having points or comments. All stories have the same decay rate.

Sometime I see articles very high up with no comments which made me think some non-job post were self promoted. but maybe thats a cache lag and the votes refresh quicker than comments?

It's not due to caching. Some stories just get a lot more votes than comments. E.g. this currently has 87 points and 1 comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3353065

Re: Trolls (2008)

#268

Post by vault_ »

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…

This comment is a fantastic example of what is probably the most insidious form of trolling.

Re: Trolls (2008)

#269

Post by jcr »

anigbrowl wrote: post #249
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…

I find that kind of hard to believe. I don't hack or even work in the computer industry any more, have got into arguments with almost every long-term member at some point or other, and hold distinctly minority positions on a variety of topics (most often about governance). And heaven knows that I can be as snarky or pompous as anyone else when I've had a bad day. Maybe I'm just lucky, but the admins seem pretty hands…

anigbrowl, I enjoy your comments, both on your good days and your bad days. On rare occasions it seems like you may have misread something since your reply comes from a surprising angle, but English is not the first language of everyone, and everyone misreads things on occasion. The good news is when I see something surprising as if things were misread, it means I should reread them to make sure that I didn't misread them.

Re: Trolls (2008)

#270

Post by goodweeds »

zedshaw wrote: post #233
m0th87 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting HN's ranking algorithm biases toward YC-related content? Because that is a serious accusation. I realize YC job posts can disable comments, and there is a separate tab for open jobs. That's no big deal because the behavior is externally visible and obvious. If HN actually re-ranks articles to support YC content though, that is a big deal. And it's scary how that might subtly affect the Valley, give…

Never said ranking algorithm. I said, there's a bunch of links (like job postings and YC company PR posts) that get privileged front page status with their own decay algorithms, yet they aren't flagged as "promoted". They're just mixed in as if it's actually relevant news a bunch of people upvoted to the front page. Or how about all that crap that was on scribd back when nobody knew what scribd was? If you think this…

I think HN is manipulated but in a way you're not quite insinuating. There are a few hundred YC start-ups now, and they're like a gang. They've got each other's back. When somebody wants something linked to they can count on the private YC mailing lists, requests to personal contacts, and followers' reciprocity with twitter,linkedin, and facebook. I've seen exactly this happen at a couple of YC companies when trying to get their postings about their job postings voted to the top. I've participated in it.
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