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Trolls (2008)

paulgraham.com

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Re: Trolls (2008)

#301

Post by interlagos »

scott_s wrote: post #118
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…

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.

Well here you go -- this account is now hellbanned.

Re: Trolls (2008)

#302

Post by adnam »

burgerbrain wrote: post #259
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I used to be able to "flag" posts on HN, but a few weeks ago that right appears to have been revoked.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 My ability to flag articles has since been revoked.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.

Actually, I think this is exactly what happened to me!

Re: Trolls (2008)

#303

Post by cq »

Trolls are an important part of anonymous communities. They prevent people from having their heads so far up their asses that the community becomes an echo chamber. Too much moderation will contribute to echo chambers, as well.

Re: Trolls (2008)

#304

Post by JoachimSchipper »

tshtf wrote: post #148
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 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 occasionally repost unjustly [dead] comments, e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2967831. See http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=%22[dead]%2... for more examples. This is a useful safety valve on HN's moderation, and I wish more people did it. (Of course, I only resurrect posts that clearly shouldn't have been killed.)

It's also possible to track down contact information for most HN users, either via "about" or Google. I have notified several hellbanned people who were (now) making useful contributions to HN. After all, if people have learned to behave they should be encouraged to participate. (Of course, some people are spammers or incorrigible, see e.g. "los etho s" without spaces.)

Re: Trolls (2008)

#305

Post by JoachimSchipper »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #171

One might worry this would prevent people from expressing controversial ideas, but empirically that doesn't seem to be what happens. When people say something substantial that gets modded down, they stubbornly leave it up. What people delete are wisecracks, because they have less invested in them. I am not seeing this any more on HN. This is the second time I read this essay, and my concerns are still the same: peopl…

Contrarians should probably be held to a higher standard. It is indeed hard(er) to write a comment for a somewhat hostile audience; but if you can't actually make the audience think, at least for a few seconds, does the comment really add value? In fact, a weak argument against a beloved-but-false position may make people believe more strongly - bad comments don't help your cause!

Re: Trolls (2008)

#306

Post by TeMPOraL »

robbrown451 wrote: post #110
figgles wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you can remove the human factor?

I don't know what "the human factor" is. Or maybe I should say, I don't think there is a single "human factor". Humans in a first world, upper middle class neighborhood coffeeshop behave very differently than humans in 1994 Rwanda, or the humans in the Stanford Prison Experiment. It's not that the humans themselves are different (or started out different), it's that the environment in one place encourages a different…

So, as a corollary, ideally you'd design the environment so that humans adapt to it in a particular way, thus getting rid of the 'human factor', whatever it is.

Re: Trolls (2008)

#307

Post by gtani »

pvillega wrote: post #277

Someone should send the first part to stephen colebourne, as an explanation on why spreading Scala FUD and acting like a victim will only spread hate about his behaviour. Yes, I should write this, but I'm not smart enought to stop myself to type it. After reading the definition my mind instantly draw his face...

Any PL that is widely adopted is going to have a lot of critics, including some from the angry agenda school. The compiler writers need to weight all the inputs so they know what to focus their copious spare time on.

This was entertaining:

    "He's like Goldilocks, scala's too complicated, fantom's too simple"
http://www.scala-lang.org/node/7698

Re: Trolls (2008)

#308

Post by anamax »

jbooth wrote: post #294
anamax wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 com…

The idea that Republicans are "compromising" by passing a tax cut really says it all here.

> The idea that Republicans are "compromising" by passing a tax cut really says it all here

You're not paying attention. Obama and the Dems DEMANDED a specific payroll tax cut, which the Repubs provided.

Re: Trolls (2008)

#309

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…

Which reminds me, for two of the three years when the Senate didn't pass a budget, the first two years of Obama's presidency, the House didn't pass a budge either and the Senate didn't even try a vote.

During those two years, the House was controlled by Dems and Dems had 60 votes in the Senate (until Kennedy died). How did the Repubs block things then?

Re: Trolls (2008)

#310

Post by pangrams »

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…

HN is certainly a place to market certain political ideas (e.g. Ron Paul) - if you have a different opinion on these ideas, even if it is entirely sincere and polite, you are still modded into invisibility, as if it were trolling not to wish to vote for Ron Paul.

In this respect, HN is (or has become) just like Reddit.

There is a huge editorial bias, even if it is not the perennial 'Hacker News favors YC companies in some insidious way' and even if it isn't 100% from PG himself

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