PG on trolls

I think news.yc has a 5th troll behavior and it's down modding a comment because they disagree with it. I have been down modded a number of times not for saying something rude or stupid just something that others don't agree with.<p>I tend to down mod rude and aggressive people on here and I also up mod people who I think have been down modded unfairly.<p>I am not sure if I am alone with my way of thinking.

Like graffiti, trolling can be impressive when it's done especially well. My favorite troll of all time is the guy from comp.compression last August:<p><a href="http://groups.google.com/group/comp.compression/browse_thread/thread/63db3f711c83d4c0/a0f09c085ce4aa7f" rel="nofollow">http://groups.google.com/group/comp.compression/browse_threa...</a><p>followed by the famous "Is Your Son a Computer Hacker?" troll from adequacy.org:<p><a href="http://adequacy.org/public/stories/2001.12.2.42056.2147.html" rel="nofollow">http://adequacy.org/public/stories/2001.12.2.42056.2147.html</a>

I think what PG called "incompetence" is really just rampant emotionalism. "Incompetence" is inaccurate because it suggests that people of all levels of experience can't happily share a forum, which I think they can. But what happens at Reddit nowadays is that anyone who posts an inane comment with a phrase like "why the fuck" will get lots of upvotes. (Case in point: Search for "fuck" in the comments for the top article at Reddit, and get: "That fucking cunt is going to get what she deserves," 15 points.)<p>I think in the early days of Reddit, the fact that everything including comments could be voted on was intimidating to trolls, so they were kept at bay. But some time later every primal scream was rewarded, and trolls started posting in droves.<p>It never helped that a really low-scoring post with a high-scoring rejoinder tended to be highly ranked. That's just begging for the sort of you-got-served culture that excites trolls.

I wonder if trolls can be categorized automatically. Caveats and all, trolls are characterized by their participation in negative-karma two-person conversations and down-voting of their comments by a diverse and changing set of users. A simple learning algorithm should zap the predictable ones. Trolls are nourished by attention and early detection and removal should nip that behavior in the bud.

I don't think "distance" is the primary cause of asshole behavior by automobile drivers, though it does sound like a convenient first approximation.<p>If I was walking down the street with a $20,000 ming vase, and you were running around nearly hitting me, I'd probably swear at you. Likewise, if you were running around on the street wielding a sharp katana, I'd probably swear at you.<p>A car is both as expensive as a ming vase, and as deadly as a sword. The idea that a rational person would <i>not</i> get highly upset when somebody threatened both their life and the most expensive thing they own is absurd. "Distance" has little to do with it.

The Reddit thread is kind of sad.<p><a href="http://reddit.com/info/68zz4/comments/" rel="nofollow">http://reddit.com/info/68zz4/comments/</a>

Another way to keep signal to noise higher is to treat debates about languages the same as those about politics and religion. Maybe it's just best to agree to disagree.<p>I generally tend to avoid the "language war" threads for 3 reasons: 1. No one is really right or wrong. 2. Not much gets accomplished. and 3. It really doesn't make that much difference anyway.<p>Debates about favorite colors, on the other hand, should be strongly encouraged. Blue is definitely the best one.

One of the main contributing factors to the abundance of trolling on forums is indeed that text is a much less expressive medium than face-to-face communication, meaning that you very often end up trapped into voicing your opinion in a trollish manner due to just carelessly throwing your initial thoughts into the text box.<p>You can give up, though, and perpetrate the crapstorm, or you can remind yourself that being good at communicating your ideas and opinions is an important part of being a well-rounded hacker; then you can view the posting of only coherent and non-inflammatory replies on fora as practice for when you'll have to communicate about programs you are writing.

My experience on forums is that -size matters-. A pond with ten fish gets far less trollers than a pond with ten thousand.<p>As for solutions: there have to be consequences. Either losing the ability to post or losing the ability to have your posts seen. Certainly banning accounts is an option, but then you have to fight with the crapflood, if and when it comes.

On news.yc it is not so extreme, but on german tech news site heise.de, there is also a modding system. Good threads become green, bad ones red. I have often wondered if people are more likely to start flaming away in the red threads. Sort of like beating up somebody who is already down on the floor (comments on the line of "you suck"). At heise.de I often had the impression that it is the case - not so much on news.yc, but it might be interesting to look at the statistics?

Creating more selective communities with stricter guidelines seems to be the wrong approach to dealing with trolls, especially based on the scenario pg lays out. As pg says, the larger a community grows, the easier it is for trolls to be accepted and the harder it is to mod (prune) the community. It seems that critical mass is just when the pruning community becomes smaller than the trolling community, and that by creating new communities with more stringent rules, you are just delaying the date (hopefully indefinitely) when trolls come in. I understand that the yc community is special, but even the comments here show that it won't work for much longer as the community grows beyond yc. To answer the question of "Will it scale?", I think its already a no.<p>If you've ever hung out with a lot of girls (from a guy's perspective), you can beging to understand the trolling community. 1 on 1 with a girl and you can get intellectual conversation, but the minute 3 or 4 girls get together, they start talking about clothes, guys, dramas, and all other stuff that just isn't interesting. I bet girls see it the same with guys too (5 guys together = WoW, DOTA, girls or crude jokes).<p>Solutions? Keep it small. This fails to keep in line with the existing goals of news.yc (advertising for existing startups, attracting smart people, etc). Another solution? Maybe try to preserve the small community feel as the site gets bigger. One way to do this would be to use user upvotes and downvotes as community boundaries for each user - ie: making their community presence only to those who rate them up, and to make their personal community those who they rate up. This is speculative at best, though.

"Often users have second thoughts and delete such comments."<p>@PG, I've always wondered, are you able to see all the comments that I've posted and then deleted two minutes later? And if so, is this an acceptable way to send you semi-private messages?

It doesn't have much to do with hacker personalities. Unless you want to argue that Youtube denizens are hackers of some sort too.

"Hackers can be abrupt even in person. Put them on an anonymous forum, and the problem gets worse."<p>I am sure everyone on this forum is on some kind of social network. If we can get every user's handle to link to their flavor-du-jour social network's public profile, verify via email -- that should at least cut down on some of the noise.<p>PG: What do you think?

I wish comments remained deletable longer. My last comment is 3 hr old (and has no replies) and it has already become undeletable whereas when I made an insensitive comment, it continued to be downmodded for about 24 hr.<p>By "become undeletable", I mean there is no "edit" or "delete" link on the comment.

I just want to point out an issue with a small point Paul brings up, and that issue is how Karma works on YC versus Reddit.<p>I'm not saying one is better than the other, but there <i>is</i> a tradeoff. On Reddit, you can be rude, and people can downmod you, and it doesn't matter once the post sinks. Here, if you act like an asshole, you get downmodded, and your karma suffers. But even if you make a well reasoned, but controversial comment, you often do still get downmodded because of your unpopular views.<p>Not that I comment here often, but I'm at four down from seven at one point, and it's really the logical consequence of such a system. It seems to work here, but I do wonder, as Paul expresses near the end of his article here, does this technique scale?

PG's essays are getting shorter. I like that -- no matter what Steve Yegge says. (<a href="http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/01/blogging-theory-201-size-does-matter.html" rel="nofollow">http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/01/blogging-theory-201-...</a>)

I'm not convinced that you'll be able to deal with the Eternal September problem. It's all well and good that anti-trolling is built into the rules, but as more and more people join less and less of them will have read the rules.

I saw this on Metafilter. I am not a member but I enjoy almost daily reading on the site. I would offer than you have an unaddressed aspect in regard to those than are called trolls. Specifically Forum members who try to end a debate by labeling someone a troll. I am a member of Syracuse.com and DailyKos. I started posting maybe 7 years ago on Syracuse,com after RWers brought God to the defense an UNJUST war. I am a Catholic who marched against the Vietnam War and for black rights and anti-poverty programs. Since I started posting I have tried to distinguish between what Jesus would support in the positions of the Republicans and the Democrats. To the Right Wingers on Syracuse.com I am a troll because I call them to account concerning unjust wars, the death penalty and their continuing efforts to strangle social programs in a bathtub. On Daily Kos I am called a troll for not supporting "gay rights" or abortion. My views are consistent with my religion. Moreover when I was younger I developed a great appreciation for the Amish and Mennonites who view things in a similar manner but maybe to a greater extent and with greater consistency than the Catholics, I am civil and stay well within the site posting rules. I have had my posts and user name constantly deleted on Syracuse.com and that is fairly easily done there by any poster hitting the "Inappropriate Post" button. The modest size gay friendly community within DailyKos are very hostile to any posts that are in opposition to their goals.

I LOVE how the first response is a Troll comment! My only thought to add is an interaction I had recently with a programmer/hacker/entrepreneur who had made a macro program to automate mining in Eve Online. The program is explicitly contrary to the EULA and so constitutes a hack. The programmer/owner had an elaborate feedback password system, so I had to IM him directly to activate my copy of the program once I paid my fee. He was wildly rude--just throwing off flippant and rude remarks like a vagrant dog throws fleas. After the third or fourth example I started to call him on it--to his, and my great frustration. He did not like being called on his nasty tone at all and denied having one at all. I got so heated that I almost ditched the whole project, but finally calmed down enough to get the transaction done. Later I spoke to a friend in-game who had an identical experience. My point is that this article on how hackers and some programmers tend towards this behavior as a culture explains a lot. My programmer provocateur thought his nastiness was somehow normal, acceptable, and utterly justifiable on the basis of some sense of his own personal superiority. I suppose this is what happens when people take their coding/hacking acumen as a license for megalomania and a total disregard of social graces.<p>Great essay.

&#62;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.<p>How would you know? How would you know it does not stiffle unpopular opinions?<p>I think that I would personally practice self-censoring if I would lose karma by expressing unpopular opinions that are likely to be down-voted. I know that I already do on reddit, and there the down-votes are at least only temporary.<p>Not wanting to lose karma may seem a foolish reason for not expressing your opinions, and at first I din't mind. I kept writing my unpopular opinions on reddit, the down-votes made me put even more effort into them so that they would be above approach. But they' still only get a handful of points whereas one-liners expressing the popular opinion would get much more. So eventually I gave up.<p>Now I mostly just read a couple of stories a day, and occassionally write the one-liner comment.<p>As a final comment, I've always been disgusting by the way that people on reddit would constantly compare themselves, always favorable, to their bigger, would-be rival: Digg. Now you do the same thing towards reddit, and I can only shake my head in disgust. Learn to value your site in itself, not as the compare to other sites. It does not need to be a competition.

About what size was reddit (in uniques) before it jumped the shark?

PG misses an important perspective, cyberbullies!<p>People who bully other people because they have better computer knowledge, mainly the two areas of administration and programming<p>The thing is learning, working ... are both hard, and many ppl got screwed or unlucky over their lives, they either learned useless crap at school or university, or work at non interesting jobs with bad bosses or collegues<p>And sometimes, we are humans, we are attracked to certain aspects of what we try to learn to escape, or trying to improve upon our bad lack<p>And sometimes the cyberbullies call us trolls. It's okay, thought, better be a troll than a bully, the thing is, in time we will learn, and on that road we will have fun, and, the road will not end, and it will meet plenty of bullies, and overtime we will learn to be quiet, for the next person we talk to, and dare to show to them that we don't know, might just be, the next bully ... who will accuse me of being troll ... or that other word incompetent.<p>But the bully don't see, just like the one in the school yard, its just a school yard, don't take yourself too seriously, its just a forum or irc!<p>I am reading chatting and enjoying my time, until you came and changed the game, ... thou shall not speak! and now the book seller might have won, for you know, thought can't do teach! And most of the blogs I read were just trolls!

Perhaps the reason that people troll (or take part in any sort of asshole behavior, really) is that they don't have anything better to do. Hear me out.<p>Hacker News is a "forum" whose main purpose is getting people to talk about/think about/post links to information related to startups. It has a very explicit purpose and to this end I would not expect it to be "infested" to the extent of a lot of other forums.<p>For instance, would we expect to see a lot of trolls on a forum devoted to advanced topics in theoretical math? "Orbifold cohomology is so much better than Hopfschild cohomology!" No. No, we wouldn't. A serious, well-defined, topic begets serious discussion.<p>This is the real problem with reddit, digg, etc. - there's no clear GOAL. Like, there's no -reason- that people shouldn't be assholes. What are they getting in the way of?<p>It's like if you opened the doors to your house and just held a "general forum." At first, discussion would be great (it's just your friends). Later, discussion would get worse (it's your friends' friends). Eventually it would degrade into the biggest losers who have nowhere to go sitting around and making fun of all the fun they're not having out in the real world (outside the house).<p>I agree with pg's sentiments that the architecture/rules of hacker news make it a much more intelligent, even (gasp) friendly forum, but I also think it's the community. They keep coming back because they have active interest. They have active interest because hacker news has established as its goal the provision of things of interest.<p>As always, I might just be woefully naive about human nature; but things seem so simple!

Regarding the future of communities while they grow and "technical tweaks", eBay recently adjusted its policies to improve its community quality, restricting sellers from leaving negative feedback to buyers: <a href="http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2008/02/crowd_control.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2008/02/crowd_control.php</a>

Very small nitpick, but I think "It an old one, as old as forums" should be "It _is_ an old one, as old as forums".<p>Update: this has been corrected.

"The sites's guidelines explicitly ask people not to say things they wouldn't say face to face."<p>Interesting, I know quite a few people that would in fact all but troll in person, to your face.<p>Although in their case, its more to do with them having no outbound tact filter: <a href="http://www.mit.edu/~jcb/tact.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.mit.edu/~jcb/tact.html</a>

Regarding News.YC, I fear that it may eventually suffer the same fate as Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, etc. Trolling is a minor problem compared to self-promoting. The challenge is that there's no scarcity on the internet, so you have to create artificial scarcity. It may be that the best way to fix the problem (i.e. to create scarcity) is through fees. For example, a $1.00 (rising with demand) fee per submission would keep a lot of junk out of any discussion site. And any serious content producer or blogger wouldn't blink at the notion of a small fee. The assumption that everything should be free is what kills many of these sites.

I totally agree. Seeing that most forums are started with something stupid like 'Everyone who uses this forum are woodheads', it sets a series of replies such as 'i am NOT a woodhead!' or "I agree, you are a woodhead or you wouldn't be here'. Especially when I don't know all those shortcuts that eliminate these posts, I find it terribly disturbing to have to read through all those 'comments'. And I hope this isn't spam, please tell me if it is. I am only 11 years old.

Paul, have you considered personalising as a method of minimising trolling?<p>As you pointed out, people do things on forums that they wouldn't do in person. IMO, this is partly because they're hiding behind a handle and partly because their target is.<p>I'm not sure how you'd go about making accounts have more personality and identity, but IMO that would be considerably more effective than just instructing people to behave like they're face-to-face. They know they're not.

Give George Carlin The Asshole Theory(~):<p>"The amount of an asshole a person is is directly proportional to the distance they are away from you at the time you discover this fault. Someone on TV is REALLY AN ASSHOLE! Someone in the car next to you is Pretty Much of an Asshole. A guy standing next to you on line: &#60;whispers&#62; 'this guy's a real asshole here'"

It's simple, trolls prey on people's inner asshole. It's like a form of bullying, if you rise to the bait, then you're done. There's no technical fix, there's a mentality fix. The act is as old as the hills, and they provide balance to the debate. Trolls are a form of court jester.<p>I am therefore pro-troll and anti troll-victim.

Another model for keeping out trolls is Metafilter's. They require a $5 donation when an account is created, and kick out assholes. Of course, this keeps out a whole lot more than trolls. It's certainly the wrong way to do it for most sites, but it works for them, and perhaps for others.

The simplest troll test. A troll (person or point of view) is incapable of introspection. This does not mean that trolls won't try to introspect, just that they cannot succeed at it. This can also be used to show why trolls have trouble with recursion and irony.

I think this might be the exact kind of situation that an advanced <a href="http://phoenomi.com/2008/02/13/the-rise-of-social-governance/" rel="nofollow">http://phoenomi.com/2008/02/13/the-rise-of-social-governance...</a> system could solve.

I actually like trolls of the 1st kind. You know, the practical jokers, the original trolls, the ones that have no real bad intentions but just like to be silly once in a while. The second kind, well, I just call them "people"

Some people troll because they know better but they are tired of explaining it. They say the truth(tm) when the crowd does not want to here it. I like them.

Observing just the length of this thread, my initial thought is that pg has executed quite an exceptional troll himself...

This is a fantastic post on a topic that's been a problem with the web since day one.<p>Very insightful. The Four Reasons feel very accurate.<p>Thanks, Paul!

Maybe this is interesting idea: <a href="http://lemurcatta.org/" rel="nofollow">http://lemurcatta.org/</a>

Is there any fundamental difference in how karma is awarded in News.YC compared with Slashdot?

Who is this guy and what authority does he have to write about these topics? I haven't read the essay, but there's no way anything so short and written in such an informal style could have anything useful to say about such and such topic, when people with degrees in the subject have already written many thick books about it.

i feel like fox news has moved trolling to television. its a good thing i stopped watching tv years ago

... and with this post i register.

it's not clear to me that nastiness is more common at hacker forums. a <i>certain kind</i> is. but i've seen much nastier stuff on parenting forums (which i've been to a lot).<p>on parenting forums, you don't find so many jerks. when people are mean, they tend to be a bit more subtle (or passive aggressive) about it. but they make it emotional and personal, and i think that does a more effective job of actually hurting anyone.

I suspect that this article is a direct consequence of Arc's sceptical reception on Slashdot, Digg, and Reddit.

Pretty typical paul graham post. He doesn't provide any evidence and he shows very little understanding of the problem. He doesn't even understand he is being trolled because he is wrong. No one cares about 4000 lines of macros for PLT Scheme. All of his arc hype led to some dumb macros. We listened to years of essays about how to program and what makes productive programmers only to find he takes R5RS and adds some macros. Wow. Amazing LISP revolution.<p>Paul you are being "trolled" because people disagree with you. You haven't seen real trolls.

pfft, you're just bitter about the way arc was recieved

This is bad. Anyone should be able to say anything. That way everyone can see what is being said - good, bad, sad, left, right, or wrong. Remember, a democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding whats for dinner. Fuck lamb for dinner!