When it comes down to it, many trolls feel the need to bash another language, OS, etc. because it's a form of self-validation: your choice says something about you. You'll see the same kind of thing with the "wars" over PC/Mac, Xbox/PS3, Emacs/vim, etc., even if the person doesn't really understand the differences: picking sides just seems to be natural.
Unfortunately, as the article says, the anonymity of the Internet allows these thoughts to rapidly bubble to the surface, where in most cases there's little repercussions for posting whatever the hell you want. I've encountered very little of this attitude when it comes to meeting people in real life. For most people, it's hard to be a dick in front of a real life person.
I would say "fortunately" rather than "unfortunately", because it is the very mechanism that allows these ideas to bubble up that also allow very good ideas to bubble up rapidly.
We don't need repercussions for posting bad content, as we will evolve powerful judgment to filter it. This is a natural market mechanism I think.
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 :)
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.
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.
The French had them long before that (in fact they had them before the automobile). But I suspect you are right: it was tax to maintain the roads that required each automobile to be numbered and registered.
I doubt it would be any different. Do you remember the license (gah, for some reason I hate spelling that word) plate of the last car that cut you off? If so, you are in the minority. Even if you knew the number, how would you correlate it with a face?
I don't think the license plate number gives much in the way of identity. In fact, it gives less identity than your average username--it is usually completely random, created with no input on the part of the driver.
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.
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.
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 posts don't mean anything. They're bits in the stream. My karma is an int on a server somewhere, incremented and decremented by the whims of my fellow users.
Trolls can help remind all of us that hey, this is all light-hearted. They say outrageous things, they stir up trouble, they cause annoyance, they sully the pristine conditions of these high-minded realms of discourse.
In short, folks, they keep us all honest. They call us on our bullshit. And when a community takes itself so seriously that it becomes a habitat for trolls, it usually is a sign that that community needs to be dispersed, cleaned, and reformed elsewhere.
HN is a pretty cool place, and I hope it lasts a long while before ossifying and becoming infested with trolls.
I'd imagine that those two are not a mutually exclusive set.
Besides, if a troll makes a reasonable point, does it matter that he was actually trolling? Truthfully it's snark that bothers me most - I can deal with someone being playful or contrary for the sake of it, but too much snark just triggers a very primal part of my brain that makes we want to start cracking skulls, and that's not very conducive to continuing the discussion.
I am presented with another person's responses to my inputs in the form of communications, and I build a model of the person. Sometimes this model is correct, sometimes this model is incorrect. I might misjudge a person who is kind to my face as being decent, when behind my back they spread rumors and gossip. Similarly, I might have a coworker who always criticizes my approaches to problems, but is the first to stick up for me in meetings.
Sometimes you judge rightly, other times wrongly, and in either event life goes on (real or virtual). This is just part of the human condition--and trolls remind us of this fact and the fact that sometimes you can't tell.
My bank account is just an int in a server somewhere, but that doesn't make it unimportant. Obviously my karma isn't important, but that's because it has little effect on my outside of HN. Being bits on a server somewhere doesn't make it unimportant.
Similarly, when someone posted a fake obit of Steve Jobs (well before he died), it caused quite an impact despite none of it mattering.
I hope your bank account isn't stored as just an int(!)
But seriously, it is a representation of something physical. Money. Money which can in turn be used for other physical things. Reputation "karma" isn't. It /is/ meaningless in this context, because you can never log into HN again and your life will go on.
I don't think the argument was "anything digital is pointless."
Only difference between money and karma is that we can't easily trade karma. Modern money is not physical, it is just a figment of our imaginations. It has only the value we collectively give it.
So, in other words, it's really important? Like, pays our bills, heats our homes, puts food on the table? If you want to apply reductionist arguments, then ancient money is just piles of metal. Not like it had any "value" beyond what they collectively gave it, either.
Do we have to revisit the barter system where value is traded for value to once again realize the reason money was invented? Fish for tools works, until you want apples.
It doesn't matter whether something "intrinsically" has value (wood as fuel, apple as food) if you can trade it for something that does. As long as that remains true, karma remains an int and bank accounts remain buying power. Fin.
Whether it puts food on the table or not doesn't matter. People spend their time here, when they could be doing other things (or earning more money to put more food on the table). Ultimately karma has a certain value to some people, whether or not it does to you. Just as I might not understand why some people will pay 10s of thousands of dollars more for a car that, ultimately, does the same thing as another car. "intangible" does not mean "valueless"
Anyway, for karma to be effective, all it has to do is have enough value to outweigh the (equally intangible) value of the satisfaction of posting something trollish.
But money is just an abstract idea that we exchange for those other physical things. It isn't really a representation of anything physical anymore.
It's not like a bank keeps a physical amount of cash equal to all account holders' deposits (if they did, they'd have nothing to lend). Instead all you do with your money is transfer it, or get paper vouchers for it in forms like checks, money orders, or federal reserve notes......
That people accept those for things that are physical doesn't change the fact that the money is in fact not a representation of anything physical.
I read the argument precisely as "anything digital is pointless"
"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 posts don't mean anything. They're bits in the stream."
I Really don't see any other way to interpret that. The "bits in the stream" are having an increasingly large amount of impact on the world outside the internet every day, and to pretend otherwise is irresponsible.
That's more accurate than you know. A down voted comment doesn't mean it's a bad comment. Simply that it doesn't adhere to what the community deems as right. This defeats the purpose of shading out the comments. Since the quality of a comment can't be determined by it's color, you have to read it yourself.
Karma has evolved to merely mean: I don't post unpopular opinions.
This is merely anecdotal, of course, and should go without saying (but needs to be said here). I see this happening with other people's comments far more often. It's a shame that while we removed karma from posts, we still display and indicator of the groupthink to the world.
In the end, a comment should either be displayed, or flagged and removed.
I think your view of trolling is colored by your participation in it.
I would like to participate in and read honest discussion. Trolls poison honest discussion. The "none of this matters" line of thought is a red-herring. Trolls get in the way of what I, personally, get out of forums.
I like honest discussion also, but also enjoy discussion that's "playful" in various ways, especially when it's on the gray-area border between serious and trollish. You can get interesting sides of people when they have something of an alibi because they aren't "really" saying something (but aren't "really" not doing so, either).
I do think it's probably better if it's in areas where there's at least tacit agreement that those are the local discussion norms, though. If you post somewhere like SomethingAwful's FYAD (though I haven't taken a look in a few years), or 4chan, you can hardly claim to be surprised or misled by the conversational norms. On HN, the local culture prefers a different style of discussion, and I like that in its own way as well. Though I also liked some subset of Slashdot trolls in their heyday, even though they weren't officially welcome at Slashdot: OGG THE CAVEMAN, the BSD Troll, and a few others were some of the more interesting posters, some mixture of net-art and actual discussion.
FYAD isn't what it used to be, but I agree that it's part of what made SA great. Not necessarily the actual content of FYAD, but the fact that it kept everyone outside of FYAD in check. The other forums did a great job of keeping the post quality high (no AOL speak, etc.), and FYAD did a great job of making sure they didn't get too full of themselves. Even if you were the most popular poster ever, there was always one forum that you would never, ever be accepted in.
I guess I just frankly disagree with that, though perhaps we have some different definition of "trolls". I haven't seen more trust (and community) in a forum than in the more playful/trollish forums I've been part of. Too much seriousness, on the other hand, I think poisons intellectual discussion.
HN is a good example, I'm not afraid to post an idea, a response, or understanding, here. I know that if I'm wrong, but I presented my thought well with reasoning, I'll receive an honest and intelligent response as to why I am wrong or why someone differs in opinion. That's trust. Trust in a community to respect each other.
Even in the most openly hostile troll communities (FYAD, /b/, etc.) there is a solid "trust": you will be trolled.
This idea of trust is a very strange thing, to me. If I present an argument or point logically and it is accepted, then there is no problem. If I do so and it is rejected logically, there is no problem. If I do so and are assailed with noise and rubbish, then it is usually pretty clear that it's just garbage and to be ignored.
If I seek affirmation and reassurance from people online instead of flesh-and-blood folks I can talk to directly, I being to wonder if this is actually an okay state of affairs. If my support group could be replaced with a bunch of clever Python scripts, Markov models, and machine learning algos, I would suggest that something is deeply wrong--and that is exactly the sort of inscrutable interface forums provide.
Only when you start to "trust" the personas you encounter online and become invested in your model of them do you actually run the risk of getting hurt. Treat it like a game, learning what you can when you can and ignoring the rabble, and things go best.
The kind of trust I'm talking about is trust in honest discourse. If I don't trust that others on a forum will engage with me honestly, then I am less likely to engage with them honestly. As a consequence, the overall discussion on the forum degrades.
I don't strictly disagree, but imo you're trying to generalize a personal preference for discussion styles into general observations, by using normative and inflammatory (is "inflammatory" like "trollish"?) terms like "poison" and "degrades", as opposed to "I don't like".
But when a community has set a precedent and an expectation for trust and respectful discussion, it is poisoning and degrading that community to come in and disrupt it intentionally for your own amusement. If you dump toxic waste into a pool, you've poisoned the pool, accusing the fish of just not liking it doesn't work.
He appears to be arguing that it's bad even when the community doesn't have that precedent/expectation, though (my examples were of communities where various varieties of "trolling" are expected/normal, like SA's FYAD, and 4chan's /b/). Plus, ecosystems are complex; Slashdot's is a bit of a mix. You can't napalm the "intruders" and accuse everyone burnt by napalm of just not liking it!
Out of genuine curiosity, how would you define "honest discourse"?
Online forums are, by definition, right there on the 'net along with Google and Wikipedia and other resources, so flat-out misrepresentation of facts seems somewhat difficult. If somebody chooses to be irrational, they are readily identified as such, right? So where does honesty fit in all this?
Honest discourse is when both parties are willing to work to understand each other, and not just trying to "win." Both parties default to the most reasonable interpretation of what the other says - having all of the facts available doesn't help much if you spend most of your time clarifying what you're trying to say.
Every time I have seen (or heard in person), "I would like to participate in and read honest discussion", it has been someone who turned around and accused anyone who disagreed of "trolling" or of being "close-minded". I have found it a waste of time arguing with them, if it hadn't been the general topic of this thread, I would have just ignored the comment entirely.
Trust on the internet is dangerous. You should exercise your judgement and not let it be impaired by a perceived absence of trolls. There are trolls, flamebaiters, astroturfers, bots, vested interests, paid posters and spammers everywhere on the internet. Once upon a time, appeal to authority arguments actually influenced most of the population. Let us not go back there, it is better for us all if we don't trust everything we see and hear.
I'm a very trusting person. I don't lock my doors, for instance. But I exercise, or at least I like to think I exercise, a healthy scepticism without falling into paranoia. You can never really know or understand what everyone else's motivations and intentions are and you should remember that fact at all times.
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.
That's an interesting take, though it'd be only certain kinds of trolls imo. Some trolls inflame negative situations: the guy who shows up at comp.lang.lisp and restarts one of the many canonical flamewars is doing sort of the opposite of what a court jester is supposed to do. But I think comp.lang.lisp might actually benefit from a real court jester; there's a certain stifling, vaguely bitter seriousness that could use disruption.
Trolling also wastes valuable time from reasonable and constructive arguments. You may not value your time, but I do, greatly. If ones goal is to achieve nothing intellectually on the Internet, then trolling is fine, but if ones goal is to learn and debate, then (given, only very skilled, non-obvious) trolling is destructive.
People who bitch about trolling might as well bitch about cold weather or inconsiderate drivers. Yeah, it's not always fun, but it is just the way things are and will be. You can't remove the human factor.
That's not really true. In tight knit online communities it is very easy if not completely effortless to ban trolls. There are various ways to handle trolls and they all have value, as trolling is often purely a negative thing.
Disagree. Karma systems actually do that quite well, or at least have to potential to. Humans are like clay, and mold themselves to their environment. If you have an environment where there are no repercussions for bad behavior, you can expect such bad behavior. (read the recent NYT article on Steven Pinker, and how he was an anarchist until he saw how quickly people start looting when the police and firefighters went on strike)
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 sort of behavior than the environment in another place. (I guess you could say I tend to favor Situationism over Dispositionism)
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.
Well, getting rid of the sides of that human factor that we collectively wish to suppress. You can do it algorithmically with things like karma systems, but it's really nothing new, it's just a higher-tech way of doing what Hammurabi (and others before him) did.
> One of the best things about the 'net is that, frankly, none of this really matters.
I disagree. I think the shift from personal to electronic interaction is largely to blame for the level of shrill nastiness that pervades our present-day culture. It's okay to express yourself in ways that would have been completely socially unacceptable, or just plain embarrassing, in past times. Social norms can be stifling, and self expression is good, but it's possible to take it too far. And on the internet, it frequently is. (Although this problem predates the internet. Talk radio in the 80s and 90s comes to mind.)
Nowhere is this more evident to me than in the realm of politics, where things really do matter. The process is seemingly held hostage to whoever can scream the loudest. The result is the sort of do-nothing congressional bitchfest which is currently pleasing to a whopping 8% of Americans. I read accounts of the way things used to work (30+ years back) in Washington and am amazed--it's like studying a lost civilization.
One of my hobbies is reading a lot of history, and I don't see much support for this narrative. American politics has long been really nasty. Take a look at the 19th century presidential campaigns: there is some pretty shrill stuff in there. The 1828 election in particular was really nasty. And people regularly fought duels---actually shot each other---over politics. Political brawls were not uncommon. A Congressman beat one of his colleagues with a cane on the floor of Congress itself!
Even today, offline culture somehow seems more nasty/violent to me than online culture. It's not only in movies that people get into bar fights over stupid things. They not only yell at each other, but actually punch each other, and occasionally stab or smash bottles over each others' heads. It's a crazy world out there.
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.
I don't mean to call out the Republicans for being uniquely unpleasant in this regard -- there have been periods when the Democrats have been just as calculatingly obstructive.
> 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. The Senate refuses to even vote on it.
I wonder which party controls which branch of the legislature.
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 situation in Washington as I see it. The current Democrats in power have many flaws, but I see no reason to think their goal is to avoid action, because a lack of action would provide no benefit to them.
To argue that the House has genuinely tried to get things done during this session, I would think you would have to assent to one of the following two things:
1. Even with a divided Congress, it is not required for both parties to work together in a bipartisan spirit of compromise to pass meaningful legislation.
2. The current House of Representatives has genuinely tried to work closely together with Senate Democrats and the President in a bipartisan spirit of compromise to pass meaningful legislation.
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?
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?
I thought we were talking about 220 some-odd years of history as a constitutional republic.
Still, until Lincoln was elected and states started seceding, they did manage to pass routine funding bills. So that puts them one ahead of the current bunch of goons.
I think it is true both that politics were more substantive 30 years ago and that many 19th century presidential campaigns were incredibly nasty.
There tends to be an ebb and flow in these sorts of things. I think that there is a clear case to be made right now that the decline in common news sources among people with different political views in the last 20 years has led to nastier politics. When everyone more-or-less agreed on the facts and many of the terms of debate but disagreed on what the outcome of the debate should be, I think the form that debate took was healthier.
But that period was the byproduct of a limited number of TV news programs all of which adopted a sort of consensus mainstream agenda, combined with a newspaper system with one or two papers per town that tended to do the same. This was a specific period, not an all-purpose "in the old days" thing.
In some earlier eras, it was common for there to be a number of different newspapers in a city, each of which had quite a different agenda -- as still survives in the UK, for example.
> The process is seemingly held hostage to whoever can scream the loudest.
Some might say that the kabuki theater of American politics is now exposed for the facade that it is given how corrupt and captured our system really is... in fact, the corporatist coup happened a long time ago, and only with the Internet (ie, electronic interaction) is this layer peeled back and exposed.
I don't think the racist and similar ones are the worst. Usually people will just ignore them and they'll get downvoted to hell anyway. Example from Slashdot: "You forgot to mention that you're still gay."
I read it and forget it. It doesn't mean anything.
The worst are the flamebaters. Another example from Slashdot (context is Firefox compilation hitting memory limits):
A- My resource usage rarely goes about 1 GB with multiple applications open.
B- If your usage rarely goes above 1GB then you're not a user of Firefox
The problem with this is that it's poised to incite a discussion between the people who feel strongly about the issue without adding anything new or useful.
"None of it really matters." That's your opinion. For some people finding a place, a community, with people disciplined enough to keep conversation interesting, to call people on BS without using troll tactics, that annoy and disparage, matters very much.
PG in his article, 3 years ago, describes the second kind of troll in more broad terms and notes, "Now when people talk about trolls they usually mean this broader sense of the word." 3 years ago. The first definition of troll is, in my opinion, near dead. The broad, asshole, troll reigns. They don't just 'sully the pristine conditions of these high-minded realms of discourse,' they break it down, and erode it.
A troll might think everything is a big joke, but many people deal with problems communicating in person: they don't have groups interested in the things they are near them, they have social and personality issues, they feel passionately about their views and enjoy expressing them but don't feel confident face to face or in a room of people. Connecting and communicating can happen legitimately on the internet, to say it's all a joke devalues that connection and that communication, which is how trolls hurt communities and people.
> "None of it really matters." That's your opinion.
Actually, it's more of a deliberate choice than an opinion, and I think it's clearly the correct choice based on the nature of anonymous online communities. Other people can choose to take anonymous trolling seriously, as if it were a person insulting them or being inappropriate face-to-face. But to do so is to misunderstand the idea of anonymity and online communities. I would argue that anonymous online communities really don't matter, in the sense that it's foolish to even be invested enough to be offended by insults or inappropriate behavior. I think people who choose to invest themselves personally in an anonymous online community are failing to understand the nature of the community, analogous to someone who misinterprets a work of parody or farce as sincere and is thus offended.
Obviously, there are exceptions, namely when people aren't acting anonymously online. No one is suggesting for example that an entrepreneur or a VC shouldn't be held accountable for things they post on twitter or their blog. When you're not anonymous, then online communication is essentially equivalent to face-to-face communication, with full liability.
Also, I'm not necessarily arguing against moderation in online communities. It's fine for admins to be restrictive in who they allow in a community, or to remove "troll posts." I'm just arguing that to invest yourself personally or emotionally in an anonymous online community is to misunderstand the nature of such communities, and is objectively unwise.
Anonymity shouldn't be an excuse for mean or inflammatory behavior, and it shouldn't be a reason to accept that behavior. And, I can speak from personal experience in dealing with people that have emotional issues that it isn't always a choice to take such things seriously. It wears on them.
I don't think it's in 'the nature' of online anonymous communities to be cruel, flippant, and intentionally inflammatory. Anonymity is not in place to devalue the communication, or the community. the asshole problem is a negative side effect.
I would argue that some people, just as in face-to-face problems, have issues disconnected themselves from online abuse or trolling.
This goes beyond emotional issues, though. It matters to me that Hackers News (or a handful of other sites I spend time on) is a place where you and I can have this discussion in this way. When I'm done writing this there will not be 5 replies of "fag" to my or your post, because we are all invested in keeping this community respectable. We're invested in well thought out discourse, and we take the rules seriously. There's a trust that ripples throughout this online anonymous community that the users need to conduct themselves respectfully. It matters to me, and while I'm not invested to the point of letting it hurt me if someone were to troll me, I'm invested enough that I treat people and their words with respect because I expect the same. Good, healthy, strong online communities are of great value to me, they matter.
I never once justified the act of being cruel. I am only saying that it is foolish to invest oneself into an anonymous online community because to do so is to nearly guarantee that you'll be hurt. Perhaps some people do have emotional issues, or even just naivete about the Internet, that cause them to unknowingly become invested in online communities as if they are real face-to-face communities. I think learning the nature of anonymous online communities isn't "automatic," so I shouldn't have sounded so harsh toward people who are ignorant or who may have real emotional issues.
I should add that the biggest problem isn't necessarily with insulting users. Something I see a lot these days, especially on reddit, is people clearly looking for real human connections through the communities, only to get burned. I think there have been several times where someone makes a highly emotionally-charged claim (they have cancer and need emotional/financial support, they caught someone abusing a child or animal and want justice, etc.) that the community rallies around, only to find out that the post was complete bogus. I don't condone the people creating the hoaxes, but I'm more concerned with the widespread tendency, even active desire, to invest emotionally in an anonymous post with absolutely no proof provided. Call me cynical, but I'm content to only emotionally invest myself with my real life friends and family.
I'm sorry I implied that you justified cruelty, that wasn't part of your point. And, I'm actually only deeply emotionally invested in friends and family, too. I might have gone overboard on the emotional, bleeding into the cyberbully arena.
My primary issue is the, "it doesn't matter," as a correct choice. It might be the correct choice that it doesn't matter if someone calls you a fag on the internet, you should shrug it off and carry on, or ignore it altogether. I read angersocks answer as basically saying it's OK to go into online communities and disrupt them because they don't matter, but they do. People wouldn't take time to type all this stuff out, to talk to each other, to engage, if it never mattered.
A community works to create an atmosphere and an environment, if it didn't matter they wouldn't try to maintain it. I do believe that the communities we create online matter and its a wonderful thing when a community can maintain itself respectfully. I guess I just feel that discussion and exchanging ideas is important face-to-face or online, and we should invest enough to show respect.
The one big thing from Slashdot that I miss the most on HN are the "funny" comments. I know it's hard to separate the funny from the malicious sometimes, but there were/are some GOOOOD, and often creative, senses of humor over there. This seems to be largely suppressed here in HN, for better or worse...
In some ways I do too, having been an early /. user.
However, I think HN supports truly funny comments, but they have to be original, creative, and slightly non-obvious. I've made a few valueless pithy comments that got a decent amount of up-votes, and I've seen others do the same thing.
But, repeated and reused jokes aren't met with much enthusiasm here, so you don't get the same memes developing like you did on /. There is practically no spin on "a beowulf cluster of these" (or similar) that would ever fly here.
Overall, I'm pleased with HN's handling of humor-based comments.
There are plenty of places where it does matter, very much. e.g. support groups for abuse survivors, terminal disease patients, etc.
And even when it does not matter very much, trolls deny others the right to be serious, derail discussions, and spew bullshit. By insisting on turning everything into a joke, trolls are selfish.
They're bits in the stream. My karma is an int on a server somewhere
Like your bank account is just a database entry somewhere, like a dollar bill is just a paper, like all of your life's memories are just some information stored in your brain -- again just a few cells. In the end, everything is just some atoms anyway, right?
There are obviously people who don't add any value and instigate vitriol that should be banned.
On the other hand, you have people like Ted Dziuba who often provoke controversy and critique popular ideas/products. I find those critiques both entertaining and legitimate in their content.
I worry you lose a lot in a community when you rule out both types of Trolling.
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.
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.
One thing I have seen a lot of people do when teaching is to troll. You come up with a crazy hypothetical that is obviously wrong but hard to show why, assert it, and watch your students try hard to prove you wrong. Things like:
"There is no consistent legal principle that prevents an attempted murder charge from being prosecuted against someone for the use of voodoo dolls."
or
"I think it's perfectly Constitutional to require that parents, if necessary, donate kidneys to their children."
Both are classic trolls. However, they are fun, and they are hard to grapple with.
Personally, I "troll" in real life. It's usually among friends and just taunting them, lying to them, etc, for the purpose of teasing them. They're trolls too, and it's a bit of a game between us.
Really, in communities I frequent, there are so many trolls, we troll them back. Perhaps we're using the term differently from how pg is?
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.
> 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.
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.
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 them later on.
As parents, we should be looking out for our kids, both in real life, and online.
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."
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.
hey go fuck yourself pg. trolls will infest this site just as they will infest all sites. also, you are worthless. in 25 years after your death, almost nobody will remember you, or care if someone who does brings it to their attention, and in 50 absolutely no one will. you'll be remembered the same as the founder of ibm is today, which is, you won't be.
I find unsubstantial / uninteresting / obvious / superfluous comments (like "I love it!" <send>) worse than very controversial or insulting comments. As long as the general information in the forum stay interesting and enjoyable.
Also isn't the "naughtiness" (some pg essay used that word I think) part of what some of the best contributors here have in common? And aren't entrepreneurs trolls, too, according to the OP's definition?
They disagree with something, they choose a path that is more fun than an ordinary life, they want to leave a mark.
Trolls try to undermine a working system solely for their own enjoyment. That has only a superficial relationship to entrepreneurs, who try to create a new business.
> Trolls try to undermine a working system solely for their own enjoyment.
This is the most concise and accurate description of a troll on this thread (so far), thank you! As you state, this can result in undermining a working system, but more specifically, this selfishness and lack of empathy inevitably leads to:
poor communication -> negative emotions -> unconstructive conflicts
Selfish enjoyment really does get at the root of a trolls motivation, otherwise, "controversial" comments supported by sound logic, factual evidence and a genuine desire to get closer to the truth actually do add to the discussion. The real problem for a moderation system is determining if the motivation of the contributor is in line with the values of the community[1].
HN's rise in popularity and decline in quality commentary demonstrates how difficult it is to maintain the values of a community in the face of fast population growth (this just began to sound a bit too similar to arguments you hear in the immigration debate). If it's important to maintain your values, then it might also be important to mandate some level of assimilation in order to acquire certain privileges. The stackexchange sites have a fairly complex system for this and I rarely see trolls there, maybe HN should implement something similar?
With the recent adoption of voting systems in forums (like this one) we are seeing troll comments often buried, and this will perhaps continue to discourage that behavior. On a bigger note, articles that draw clicks with bold conclusions or headlines (like that nerd baiting article we saw on Gizmodo) are still grabbing eyeball share and thus will continue to propagate instead of real news/information. How that fight for eyeballs is resolved is one that I don't really see a solution to yet.
This is an interesting article that sort of answers a question I've had for a while: would the quality of Hacker News remain the same without the novelty of individual karma points?
PG mentions that people seeing "...their reputation in the eyes of their peers drain away..." is motivation enough to keep delivering high-quality content.
'PG mentions that people seeing "...their reputation in the eyes of their peers drain away..."'
I think part of the lure of karma is simply getting affirmation that what you are saying is accepted by others.
In this case the "others" are not people you know but people you respect in many ways because of the intelligent way they write or some other power they have. Or how they appear at least to be accepted by the group.
In a sense it becomes a challenging game to write something striking a balance between sharing some knowledge or opinion and not ticking off others by going to far out of bounds with what you are saying.
"quality of Hacker News remain the same without the novelty of individual karma "
I don't think it would at this scale. On a smaller scale though it might. There is a wide range of topics and people here. On a smaller site (AVC.com comes to mind with usually 1 idea a day posted) it is a core of users and while there is karma and likes it is far less important than on HN.
I think the fact that you don't allow downvoting posts contributes to this. I get that you want to keep things positive. But when you don't provide an outlet for people who want to simply disagree without forcing them to come out of the woodwork and defend their position, it is inevitable that some people will come out with a lot of ugliness.
I think there are a whole lot of reasons internet forums are different than real life communication. I think there are technical solutions that can change the balance. We all know there is a big difference between, say, the comments on YouTube and the comments on Slashdot. Do you think it is all "culture"? I don't. I think it is mostly that Slashdot has technical solutions that discourage trolling (and substanceless posts, etc), while YouTube doesn't. If the culture is different, it mostly because of the karma system (or lack thereof).
Yeah, well probably most trolls don't ever get that karma, so they troll instead.
Also karma doesn't count for a lot here (that being one exception). Ultimately, a good karma system should simulate the what happens in the best real world environments....where there is a very complex feedback loop that reinforces the sort of behavior we want and suppresses that which we don't want. In my opinion Slashdot comes kind of close, but it has huge flaws itself.
Really only 8,000 a day? I've received 10,000 visitors from a single post on hacker news ... am I missing something? I definitely do agree however that the conversation on this site is top notch.
Almost every day I use HN, I wonder why it hasn't implemented collapse-able comments, comment sorting by rank, and auto-collapsing comments.
I understand this could introduce agreement bias, but I feel like that's something that could be fixed by tweaking the numbers (i.e. only auto-collapse comments with -20 votes).
As it is now, it's easy to game the comments thread by piggybacking off the top comment of a post. This can be abused for trolling or just plain discussion visibility (unfairly, IMO).
There is a couple more cases which add to the mix.
1) Devils advocate. People that interject with an opposing view, even one they don't believe. I often do this one myself cause another poster to go into deeper description. Often just asking for an deeper response will be ignored, but opposing a view will always bring out an argument.
2) Denial and Righteousness. Essentially nasty fan boys. People who have brought into a belief and refuse to acknowledge any second point of view at all. I had this explained at a trolling seminar at a hacking conference quite well and they picked on the audience themselves to explain how to manipulate IT people.
With most IT people they have the myers-briggs archetype finishing with --TJ. This means they are thinkers and judgmental. They will look at a problem, find the evidence, evaluate it, and make a judgmental decision on what is correct. The facts don't lie.
However the facts can be like quantum variables, you chang angles and then entire structure changes. Making judgmental calls leads to obvious one set of true factual analysis being completely wrong in another setting.
Challenging a judgmental person is challenging there core makeup. Saying they are wrong undermines there very basic personality, drawing on the opposing variable to "thinking" on the myers-briggs scale "feeling". So intelligent people do not react with intelligence first.
Instead of reacting with an "oh ok I didn't realize that was the case in your area" they respond with a protective "I don't think so Tim" and things go down hill from there, especially if the second person is also judgmental.
3) Tribalism. This is the us vs them mentality. Either you are with us or against us. A non ordained view/comment against a group of people who maybe self validating can be seen as a extremely contrasting. Becomes the group has created a false sense of security it can draw out primal responses (like feeling over thinking mentioned above) when that sense of security is threatened.
Many groups become polarising and when confronted with opposing views become more and more fundamental, close ranks. This often forms tight knit groups but also leads to a side effect of making everyone an enemy, including people with in the group who aren't are right as they should be, or people with neutral opinions.
There was an article I read a week or two go about how to talk skeptically to people. If I can find it I'll post it. It addresses how to oppose a view and avoid the bottom two responses.
Sort of meta-related (in that I'm disagreeing with your facts, and therefore the judgement changes):
I disagree that most hackers are --TJ types. They are more likely to be -NT- with a bend towards INT-. The N is _the_ trait that tends to abstractionism, so it would make little sense for a hacker to be -S-- at all. If you look at the polls here it comes out in spades:
The reason that we argue is that as Rationalists, the truth is more important than anything except for the fact that there is a truth. It is why Rationalists are likely to pick up an Aristotelian view of the word (though that might be a tautology since I think it is an axiom of that worldview).
There is a reason why people are not usually grouped in the --TJ category (the broad categories being -NT-, -NF-, -S-J, -S-P). The reason is that the most important variable, the one that correlates to income, happiness, intelligence is the second letter. It fundamentally effects how you approach the world.
Meyers-Briggs is not a respected test of personality in psychometrics circles; it was invented based on an amateur's reading of Jung's theories of personality.
I've heard this plenty of times, and I know this anecdotal, but it does predict things. Every developer at FreshBooks when I was there was the same type. Every one of my girlfriends (that I got to take the test long after we broke up) is the same type.
There are correlations with IQ, with employment, with other accepted tests. The primary weakness of MB is that results are normally distributed across each letter, so a majority of the population is not strongly correlated with each letter. Just look at the hacker news response. I know it is self reported, but I don't buy that the two of the least populous types self reported themselves by a factor of 1000.
> 1) Devils advocate. People that interject with an opposing view, even one they don't believe. I often do this one myself cause another poster to go into deeper description. Often just asking for an deeper response will be ignored, but opposing a view will always bring out an argument.
I find this useful as a means of provoking discussion, but preferably labeled as such if you don't genuinely hold the position you advocate.
> 2) Denial and Righteousness
Many rational people have a low tolerance for irrationality, particularly when they have to deal with it often. Particularly when participating on a technical medium or technical topic, rational people expect rationality, and sometimes react poorly when they don't get it. Rational people should not react badly to corrections supported by evidence. However, rational people react quite badly to irrational "corrections", and I can hardly blame them. Personally, I react to irrationality through detachment: if I can't correct it, I write it off and try to make it have as little impact as possible; fortunately, I rarely encounter situations where I have no choice but to deal with irrationality. However, if you don't include the second half of that (giving up when not worth it), you fall into XKCD's "wrong on the internet" problem (https://www.xkcd.com/386/), and that quickly gets out of hand.
I think the reason that troll behavior seems so much worse online is because most of us spend our time in environments where trolls are self-selected out. Assuming that most of us don't regularly deal with assholes in our work and home life, the place we're most likely to interact with them is online forums.
I'm not sure that anonymity or distance are the driving factors in online trolling. Most of the assholes I know have no problem saying mean spirited things when they're standing right next to me. I think the bigger issue is that it's easy for me to avoid those assholes in real life. In an online setting, I can't see them coming and they are Legion...for every one that we vote down, two more will rise up to take its place.
I understand Paul's frustration, but I don't know if we'll be able to find a technical solution. I think this is just one of the drawbacks (balanced by many benefits) of unfiltered communication.
I've trolled. I blame two things: frustration, and myself.
I would get frustrated that there was no reward (and often there was punishment) for correcting errors in others posts. It's incredibly rare to see a rebuttal followed by the original poster simply saying "I was wrong about that, thanks for the information." It's far more common for the OP to simply insult you, or mischaracterize your argument, or otherwise engage in nonsense as their response.
I would get frustrated that comments and posts are promoted on style, not substance.
I would get frustrated that substance was judged inaccurately; often resulting in people whose knowledge was either entirely absent, or only Google deep arguing fiercely with people who'd worked and studied the topic for years.
I would get frustrated at the general lack of respect for truth, for civility, and for each other.
I would get frustrated at pedantry.
I would get frustrated at double-standards and hypocrisy, with people posting uncited nonsense, but demanding citations from their opponents.
I would get frustrated at debate opponents who would willfully misrepresent their opponents side in the argument.
I would get frustrated that semi-plausibly-deniable passive-aggressiveness was accepted by moderators, but direct responses to that aggression were not.
I would get frustrated that sticky lies beat dry truth every time, in votes and moderation.
And once I got frustrated, I lost respect for the forums, but I didn't leave them. I liked what they could be, but not what they were.
So I trolled. I disrespected people who, I felt, were being assholes in one way or another and thus "had it coming".
This wasn't a great response, and for this I blame myself.
I should've done something more constructive with my time. The forums are going to revert to the mean with or without my help; there's no need for me to accelerate the reversion.
I wonder if there's an age and cultural divide when assessing trolls on the internet.
I say this in that reading the post, and then the comments from you all-- I see a bit of disparity between philosophies. I mean, for the most part I think from it's very root, trolls are trouble makers, and we can all sort of agree on that. But, there are people here who revel in that, see a symbiotic nature (good needs evil), people who think trolls are important, and that they keep things interesting--people who've even been trolls (full disclosure, when I was younger and immature I partook in such acts...nothing malicious, but acts none the less). When I read things like this I wonder where and at what time these people were introduced to the internet and forums and the like. A lot of younger people (at least the ones I know) are familiar with the trolling culture, and share many of the same previously mentioned opinions, however when I think of my Dad who was introduced to things much earlier when the internet was much more "pure", he loathes such things, "there's no place for that".
As a non-formal study, purely for my curiousity would anyone interested write down their age, the time when they were introduced (ballpark it) to the internet and forums, and their stance on trolls.
320 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 274 ms ] threadUnfortunately, as the article says, the anonymity of the Internet allows these thoughts to rapidly bubble to the surface, where in most cases there's little repercussions for posting whatever the hell you want. I've encountered very little of this attitude when it comes to meeting people in real life. For most people, it's hard to be a dick in front of a real life person.
We don't need repercussions for posting bad content, as we will evolve powerful judgment to filter it. This is a natural market mechanism I think.
I for one think on the whole conversation is still good and worthwhile checking out :)
"Also, a traffic update: HN now gets over 120k unique ips on a weekday, and serves over 1.3 million page views."
Does anyone know what the tipping point for license plates was?
http://www.mass.gov/rmv/history/
I don't think the license plate number gives much in the way of identity. In fact, it gives less identity than your average username--it is usually completely random, created with no input on the part of the driver.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=hacker+news%2C+reddit
Edit: That number was from 2008
http://trends.google.com/websites?q=reddit.com%2C+news.ycomb...
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 posts don't mean anything. They're bits in the stream. My karma is an int on a server somewhere, incremented and decremented by the whims of my fellow users.
Trolls can help remind all of us that hey, this is all light-hearted. They say outrageous things, they stir up trouble, they cause annoyance, they sully the pristine conditions of these high-minded realms of discourse.
In short, folks, they keep us all honest. They call us on our bullshit. And when a community takes itself so seriously that it becomes a habitat for trolls, it usually is a sign that that community needs to be dispersed, cleaned, and reformed elsewhere.
HN is a pretty cool place, and I hope it lasts a long while before ossifying and becoming infested with trolls.
Besides, if a troll makes a reasonable point, does it matter that he was actually trolling? Truthfully it's snark that bothers me most - I can deal with someone being playful or contrary for the sake of it, but too much snark just triggers a very primal part of my brain that makes we want to start cracking skulls, and that's not very conducive to continuing the discussion.
I am presented with another person's responses to my inputs in the form of communications, and I build a model of the person. Sometimes this model is correct, sometimes this model is incorrect. I might misjudge a person who is kind to my face as being decent, when behind my back they spread rumors and gossip. Similarly, I might have a coworker who always criticizes my approaches to problems, but is the first to stick up for me in meetings.
Sometimes you judge rightly, other times wrongly, and in either event life goes on (real or virtual). This is just part of the human condition--and trolls remind us of this fact and the fact that sometimes you can't tell.
Similarly, when someone posted a fake obit of Steve Jobs (well before he died), it caused quite an impact despite none of it mattering.
But seriously, it is a representation of something physical. Money. Money which can in turn be used for other physical things. Reputation "karma" isn't. It /is/ meaningless in this context, because you can never log into HN again and your life will go on.
I don't think the argument was "anything digital is pointless."
Do we have to revisit the barter system where value is traded for value to once again realize the reason money was invented? Fish for tools works, until you want apples.
It doesn't matter whether something "intrinsically" has value (wood as fuel, apple as food) if you can trade it for something that does. As long as that remains true, karma remains an int and bank accounts remain buying power. Fin.
Anyway, for karma to be effective, all it has to do is have enough value to outweigh the (equally intangible) value of the satisfaction of posting something trollish.
It's not like a bank keeps a physical amount of cash equal to all account holders' deposits (if they did, they'd have nothing to lend). Instead all you do with your money is transfer it, or get paper vouchers for it in forms like checks, money orders, or federal reserve notes......
That people accept those for things that are physical doesn't change the fact that the money is in fact not a representation of anything physical.
"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 posts don't mean anything. They're bits in the stream."
I Really don't see any other way to interpret that. The "bits in the stream" are having an increasingly large amount of impact on the world outside the internet every day, and to pretend otherwise is irresponsible.
Karma has evolved to merely mean: I don't post unpopular opinions.
This is merely anecdotal, of course, and should go without saying (but needs to be said here). I see this happening with other people's comments far more often. It's a shame that while we removed karma from posts, we still display and indicator of the groupthink to the world.
In the end, a comment should either be displayed, or flagged and removed.
I would like to participate in and read honest discussion. Trolls poison honest discussion. The "none of this matters" line of thought is a red-herring. Trolls get in the way of what I, personally, get out of forums.
I do think it's probably better if it's in areas where there's at least tacit agreement that those are the local discussion norms, though. If you post somewhere like SomethingAwful's FYAD (though I haven't taken a look in a few years), or 4chan, you can hardly claim to be surprised or misled by the conversational norms. On HN, the local culture prefers a different style of discussion, and I like that in its own way as well. Though I also liked some subset of Slashdot trolls in their heyday, even though they weren't officially welcome at Slashdot: OGG THE CAVEMAN, the BSD Troll, and a few others were some of the more interesting posters, some mixture of net-art and actual discussion.
This idea of trust is a very strange thing, to me. If I present an argument or point logically and it is accepted, then there is no problem. If I do so and it is rejected logically, there is no problem. If I do so and are assailed with noise and rubbish, then it is usually pretty clear that it's just garbage and to be ignored.
If I seek affirmation and reassurance from people online instead of flesh-and-blood folks I can talk to directly, I being to wonder if this is actually an okay state of affairs. If my support group could be replaced with a bunch of clever Python scripts, Markov models, and machine learning algos, I would suggest that something is deeply wrong--and that is exactly the sort of inscrutable interface forums provide.
Only when you start to "trust" the personas you encounter online and become invested in your model of them do you actually run the risk of getting hurt. Treat it like a game, learning what you can when you can and ignoring the rabble, and things go best.
:)
Online forums are, by definition, right there on the 'net along with Google and Wikipedia and other resources, so flat-out misrepresentation of facts seems somewhat difficult. If somebody chooses to be irrational, they are readily identified as such, right? So where does honesty fit in all this?
I'm a very trusting person. I don't lock my doors, for instance. But I exercise, or at least I like to think I exercise, a healthy scepticism without falling into paranoia. You can never really know or understand what everyone else's motivations and intentions are and you should remember that fact at all times.
I disagree. I think the shift from personal to electronic interaction is largely to blame for the level of shrill nastiness that pervades our present-day culture. It's okay to express yourself in ways that would have been completely socially unacceptable, or just plain embarrassing, in past times. Social norms can be stifling, and self expression is good, but it's possible to take it too far. And on the internet, it frequently is. (Although this problem predates the internet. Talk radio in the 80s and 90s comes to mind.)
Nowhere is this more evident to me than in the realm of politics, where things really do matter. The process is seemingly held hostage to whoever can scream the loudest. The result is the sort of do-nothing congressional bitchfest which is currently pleasing to a whopping 8% of Americans. I read accounts of the way things used to work (30+ years back) in Washington and am amazed--it's like studying a lost civilization.
Even today, offline culture somehow seems more nasty/violent to me than online culture. It's not only in movies that people get into bar fights over stupid things. They not only yell at each other, but actually punch each other, and occasionally stab or smash bottles over each others' heads. It's a crazy world out there.
I don't mean to call out the Republicans for being uniquely unpleasant in this regard -- there have been periods when the Democrats have been just as calculatingly obstructive.
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. The Senate refuses to even vote on it.
I wonder which party controls which branch of the legislature.
I didn't really mean for this to be an unpleasantly partisan post, just a statement of facts about the situation in Washington as I see it. The current Democrats in power have many flaws, but I see no reason to think their goal is to avoid action, because a lack of action would provide no benefit to them.
To argue that the House has genuinely tried to get things done during this session, I would think you would have to assent to one of the following two things:
1. Even with a divided Congress, it is not required for both parties to work together in a bipartisan spirit of compromise to pass meaningful legislation.
2. The current House of Representatives has genuinely tried to work closely together with Senate Democrats and the President in a bipartisan spirit of compromise to pass meaningful legislation.
Do you believe one of these things?
> 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?
You're not paying attention. Obama and the Dems DEMANDED a specific payroll tax cut, which the Repubs provided.
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?
Still, until Lincoln was elected and states started seceding, they did manage to pass routine funding bills. So that puts them one ahead of the current bunch of goons.
I remember reading about it in one of my american history class.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preston_Brooks
I'd watch CSPAN more if they had officiated brawls :)
There tends to be an ebb and flow in these sorts of things. I think that there is a clear case to be made right now that the decline in common news sources among people with different political views in the last 20 years has led to nastier politics. When everyone more-or-less agreed on the facts and many of the terms of debate but disagreed on what the outcome of the debate should be, I think the form that debate took was healthier.
But that period was the byproduct of a limited number of TV news programs all of which adopted a sort of consensus mainstream agenda, combined with a newspaper system with one or two papers per town that tended to do the same. This was a specific period, not an all-purpose "in the old days" thing.
In some earlier eras, it was common for there to be a number of different newspapers in a city, each of which had quite a different agenda -- as still survives in the UK, for example.
Some might say that the kabuki theater of American politics is now exposed for the facade that it is given how corrupt and captured our system really is... in fact, the corporatist coup happened a long time ago, and only with the Internet (ie, electronic interaction) is this layer peeled back and exposed.
First there are the discourse enhancing trolls, those who provide value to a discussion by suggesting alternative, usually taboo points of view.
Then there's the troll trolls. You know the type. The ones who spew racist or derogatory comments just for the hell of it.
Many people commonly mix the two into a single bucket, which I think is wrong to do, since one is a ++ for a forum, the other a -------.
Anyway, that's my take on the situation as someone who has ran 3 mid size forums in the past.
The worst are the flamebaters. Another example from Slashdot (context is Firefox compilation hitting memory limits):
The problem with this is that it's poised to incite a discussion between the people who feel strongly about the issue without adding anything new or useful.PG in his article, 3 years ago, describes the second kind of troll in more broad terms and notes, "Now when people talk about trolls they usually mean this broader sense of the word." 3 years ago. The first definition of troll is, in my opinion, near dead. The broad, asshole, troll reigns. They don't just 'sully the pristine conditions of these high-minded realms of discourse,' they break it down, and erode it.
A troll might think everything is a big joke, but many people deal with problems communicating in person: they don't have groups interested in the things they are near them, they have social and personality issues, they feel passionately about their views and enjoy expressing them but don't feel confident face to face or in a room of people. Connecting and communicating can happen legitimately on the internet, to say it's all a joke devalues that connection and that communication, which is how trolls hurt communities and people.
Actually, it's more of a deliberate choice than an opinion, and I think it's clearly the correct choice based on the nature of anonymous online communities. Other people can choose to take anonymous trolling seriously, as if it were a person insulting them or being inappropriate face-to-face. But to do so is to misunderstand the idea of anonymity and online communities. I would argue that anonymous online communities really don't matter, in the sense that it's foolish to even be invested enough to be offended by insults or inappropriate behavior. I think people who choose to invest themselves personally in an anonymous online community are failing to understand the nature of the community, analogous to someone who misinterprets a work of parody or farce as sincere and is thus offended.
Obviously, there are exceptions, namely when people aren't acting anonymously online. No one is suggesting for example that an entrepreneur or a VC shouldn't be held accountable for things they post on twitter or their blog. When you're not anonymous, then online communication is essentially equivalent to face-to-face communication, with full liability.
Also, I'm not necessarily arguing against moderation in online communities. It's fine for admins to be restrictive in who they allow in a community, or to remove "troll posts." I'm just arguing that to invest yourself personally or emotionally in an anonymous online community is to misunderstand the nature of such communities, and is objectively unwise.
I don't think it's in 'the nature' of online anonymous communities to be cruel, flippant, and intentionally inflammatory. Anonymity is not in place to devalue the communication, or the community. the asshole problem is a negative side effect.
I would argue that some people, just as in face-to-face problems, have issues disconnected themselves from online abuse or trolling.
This goes beyond emotional issues, though. It matters to me that Hackers News (or a handful of other sites I spend time on) is a place where you and I can have this discussion in this way. When I'm done writing this there will not be 5 replies of "fag" to my or your post, because we are all invested in keeping this community respectable. We're invested in well thought out discourse, and we take the rules seriously. There's a trust that ripples throughout this online anonymous community that the users need to conduct themselves respectfully. It matters to me, and while I'm not invested to the point of letting it hurt me if someone were to troll me, I'm invested enough that I treat people and their words with respect because I expect the same. Good, healthy, strong online communities are of great value to me, they matter.
I should add that the biggest problem isn't necessarily with insulting users. Something I see a lot these days, especially on reddit, is people clearly looking for real human connections through the communities, only to get burned. I think there have been several times where someone makes a highly emotionally-charged claim (they have cancer and need emotional/financial support, they caught someone abusing a child or animal and want justice, etc.) that the community rallies around, only to find out that the post was complete bogus. I don't condone the people creating the hoaxes, but I'm more concerned with the widespread tendency, even active desire, to invest emotionally in an anonymous post with absolutely no proof provided. Call me cynical, but I'm content to only emotionally invest myself with my real life friends and family.
My primary issue is the, "it doesn't matter," as a correct choice. It might be the correct choice that it doesn't matter if someone calls you a fag on the internet, you should shrug it off and carry on, or ignore it altogether. I read angersocks answer as basically saying it's OK to go into online communities and disrupt them because they don't matter, but they do. People wouldn't take time to type all this stuff out, to talk to each other, to engage, if it never mattered.
A community works to create an atmosphere and an environment, if it didn't matter they wouldn't try to maintain it. I do believe that the communities we create online matter and its a wonderful thing when a community can maintain itself respectfully. I guess I just feel that discussion and exchanging ideas is important face-to-face or online, and we should invest enough to show respect.
However, I think HN supports truly funny comments, but they have to be original, creative, and slightly non-obvious. I've made a few valueless pithy comments that got a decent amount of up-votes, and I've seen others do the same thing.
But, repeated and reused jokes aren't met with much enthusiasm here, so you don't get the same memes developing like you did on /. There is practically no spin on "a beowulf cluster of these" (or similar) that would ever fly here.
Overall, I'm pleased with HN's handling of humor-based comments.
And even when it does not matter very much, trolls deny others the right to be serious, derail discussions, and spew bullshit. By insisting on turning everything into a joke, trolls are selfish.
Like your bank account is just a database entry somewhere, like a dollar bill is just a paper, like all of your life's memories are just some information stored in your brain -- again just a few cells. In the end, everything is just some atoms anyway, right?
as someone who dabbles in trolling as a hobby
Oh wait, I fell for it! :)
I wondered on that myself ;)
It's recursive, then.
On the other hand, you have people like Ted Dziuba who often provoke controversy and critique popular ideas/products. I find those critiques both entertaining and legitimate in their content.
I worry you lose a lot in a community when you rule out both types of Trolling.
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.
"There is no consistent legal principle that prevents an attempted murder charge from being prosecuted against someone for the use of voodoo dolls."
or
"I think it's perfectly Constitutional to require that parents, if necessary, donate kidneys to their children."
Both are classic trolls. However, they are fun, and they are hard to grapple with.
Really, in communities I frequent, there are so many trolls, we troll them back. Perhaps we're using the term differently from how pg is?
> 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
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.
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 them later on.
As parents, we should be looking out for our kids, both in real life, and online.
It'd be nice if it taught stuff like "how not to be an idiot on the internet."
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.
I find unsubstantial / uninteresting / obvious / superfluous comments (like "I love it!" <send>) worse than very controversial or insulting comments. As long as the general information in the forum stay interesting and enjoyable.
Also isn't the "naughtiness" (some pg essay used that word I think) part of what some of the best contributors here have in common? And aren't entrepreneurs trolls, too, according to the OP's definition?
They disagree with something, they choose a path that is more fun than an ordinary life, they want to leave a mark.
These folks make a good living by essentially trolling. It's a well-known media business model.
poor communication -> negative emotions -> unconstructive conflicts
Selfish enjoyment really does get at the root of a trolls motivation, otherwise, "controversial" comments supported by sound logic, factual evidence and a genuine desire to get closer to the truth actually do add to the discussion. The real problem for a moderation system is determining if the motivation of the contributor is in line with the values of the community[1].
HN's rise in popularity and decline in quality commentary demonstrates how difficult it is to maintain the values of a community in the face of fast population growth (this just began to sound a bit too similar to arguments you hear in the immigration debate). If it's important to maintain your values, then it might also be important to mandate some level of assimilation in order to acquire certain privileges. The stackexchange sites have a fairly complex system for this and I rarely see trolls there, maybe HN should implement something similar?
[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, HN's Values
PG mentions that people seeing "...their reputation in the eyes of their peers drain away..." is motivation enough to keep delivering high-quality content.
I think part of the lure of karma is simply getting affirmation that what you are saying is accepted by others.
In this case the "others" are not people you know but people you respect in many ways because of the intelligent way they write or some other power they have. Or how they appear at least to be accepted by the group.
In a sense it becomes a challenging game to write something striking a balance between sharing some knowledge or opinion and not ticking off others by going to far out of bounds with what you are saying.
"quality of Hacker News remain the same without the novelty of individual karma "
I don't think it would at this scale. On a smaller scale though it might. There is a wide range of topics and people here. On a smaller site (AVC.com comes to mind with usually 1 idea a day posted) it is a core of users and while there is karma and likes it is far less important than on HN.
I think there are a whole lot of reasons internet forums are different than real life communication. I think there are technical solutions that can change the balance. We all know there is a big difference between, say, the comments on YouTube and the comments on Slashdot. Do you think it is all "culture"? I don't. I think it is mostly that Slashdot has technical solutions that discourage trolling (and substanceless posts, etc), while YouTube doesn't. If the culture is different, it mostly because of the karma system (or lack thereof).
Also karma doesn't count for a lot here (that being one exception). Ultimately, a good karma system should simulate the what happens in the best real world environments....where there is a very complex feedback loop that reinforces the sort of behavior we want and suppresses that which we don't want. In my opinion Slashdot comes kind of close, but it has huge flaws itself.
Too much can definitely turn everything brackish.
But seeing some humor/sarcasm even if it's pointed mixed in with all of the serious discourse keeps it all manageable.
This reminds me of an old phrase - "fish swimming against the current gets electrocuted".
I understand this could introduce agreement bias, but I feel like that's something that could be fixed by tweaking the numbers (i.e. only auto-collapse comments with -20 votes).
As it is now, it's easy to game the comments thread by piggybacking off the top comment of a post. This can be abused for trolling or just plain discussion visibility (unfairly, IMO).
1) Devils advocate. People that interject with an opposing view, even one they don't believe. I often do this one myself cause another poster to go into deeper description. Often just asking for an deeper response will be ignored, but opposing a view will always bring out an argument.
2) Denial and Righteousness. Essentially nasty fan boys. People who have brought into a belief and refuse to acknowledge any second point of view at all. I had this explained at a trolling seminar at a hacking conference quite well and they picked on the audience themselves to explain how to manipulate IT people.
With most IT people they have the myers-briggs archetype finishing with --TJ. This means they are thinkers and judgmental. They will look at a problem, find the evidence, evaluate it, and make a judgmental decision on what is correct. The facts don't lie.
However the facts can be like quantum variables, you chang angles and then entire structure changes. Making judgmental calls leads to obvious one set of true factual analysis being completely wrong in another setting.
Challenging a judgmental person is challenging there core makeup. Saying they are wrong undermines there very basic personality, drawing on the opposing variable to "thinking" on the myers-briggs scale "feeling". So intelligent people do not react with intelligence first.
Instead of reacting with an "oh ok I didn't realize that was the case in your area" they respond with a protective "I don't think so Tim" and things go down hill from there, especially if the second person is also judgmental.
3) Tribalism. This is the us vs them mentality. Either you are with us or against us. A non ordained view/comment against a group of people who maybe self validating can be seen as a extremely contrasting. Becomes the group has created a false sense of security it can draw out primal responses (like feeling over thinking mentioned above) when that sense of security is threatened.
Many groups become polarising and when confronted with opposing views become more and more fundamental, close ranks. This often forms tight knit groups but also leads to a side effect of making everyone an enemy, including people with in the group who aren't are right as they should be, or people with neutral opinions.
There was an article I read a week or two go about how to talk skeptically to people. If I can find it I'll post it. It addresses how to oppose a view and avoid the bottom two responses.
I disagree that most hackers are --TJ types. They are more likely to be -NT- with a bend towards INT-. The N is _the_ trait that tends to abstractionism, so it would make little sense for a hacker to be -S-- at all. If you look at the polls here it comes out in spades:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943722
The reason that we argue is that as Rationalists, the truth is more important than anything except for the fact that there is a truth. It is why Rationalists are likely to pick up an Aristotelian view of the word (though that might be a tautology since I think it is an axiom of that worldview).
There is a reason why people are not usually grouped in the --TJ category (the broad categories being -NT-, -NF-, -S-J, -S-P). The reason is that the most important variable, the one that correlates to income, happiness, intelligence is the second letter. It fundamentally effects how you approach the world.
Insofar as people say a pop personality test describes them, it's likely due to the Forer Effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forer_effect).
There are correlations with IQ, with employment, with other accepted tests. The primary weakness of MB is that results are normally distributed across each letter, so a majority of the population is not strongly correlated with each letter. Just look at the hacker news response. I know it is self reported, but I don't buy that the two of the least populous types self reported themselves by a factor of 1000.
I find this useful as a means of provoking discussion, but preferably labeled as such if you don't genuinely hold the position you advocate.
> 2) Denial and Righteousness
Many rational people have a low tolerance for irrationality, particularly when they have to deal with it often. Particularly when participating on a technical medium or technical topic, rational people expect rationality, and sometimes react poorly when they don't get it. Rational people should not react badly to corrections supported by evidence. However, rational people react quite badly to irrational "corrections", and I can hardly blame them. Personally, I react to irrationality through detachment: if I can't correct it, I write it off and try to make it have as little impact as possible; fortunately, I rarely encounter situations where I have no choice but to deal with irrationality. However, if you don't include the second half of that (giving up when not worth it), you fall into XKCD's "wrong on the internet" problem (https://www.xkcd.com/386/), and that quickly gets out of hand.
I'm not sure that anonymity or distance are the driving factors in online trolling. Most of the assholes I know have no problem saying mean spirited things when they're standing right next to me. I think the bigger issue is that it's easy for me to avoid those assholes in real life. In an online setting, I can't see them coming and they are Legion...for every one that we vote down, two more will rise up to take its place.
I understand Paul's frustration, but I don't know if we'll be able to find a technical solution. I think this is just one of the drawbacks (balanced by many benefits) of unfiltered communication.
I would get frustrated that there was no reward (and often there was punishment) for correcting errors in others posts. It's incredibly rare to see a rebuttal followed by the original poster simply saying "I was wrong about that, thanks for the information." It's far more common for the OP to simply insult you, or mischaracterize your argument, or otherwise engage in nonsense as their response.
I would get frustrated that comments and posts are promoted on style, not substance.
I would get frustrated that substance was judged inaccurately; often resulting in people whose knowledge was either entirely absent, or only Google deep arguing fiercely with people who'd worked and studied the topic for years.
I would get frustrated at the general lack of respect for truth, for civility, and for each other.
I would get frustrated at pedantry.
I would get frustrated at double-standards and hypocrisy, with people posting uncited nonsense, but demanding citations from their opponents.
I would get frustrated at debate opponents who would willfully misrepresent their opponents side in the argument.
I would get frustrated that semi-plausibly-deniable passive-aggressiveness was accepted by moderators, but direct responses to that aggression were not.
I would get frustrated that sticky lies beat dry truth every time, in votes and moderation.
And once I got frustrated, I lost respect for the forums, but I didn't leave them. I liked what they could be, but not what they were.
So I trolled. I disrespected people who, I felt, were being assholes in one way or another and thus "had it coming".
This wasn't a great response, and for this I blame myself.
I should've done something more constructive with my time. The forums are going to revert to the mean with or without my help; there's no need for me to accelerate the reversion.
I say this in that reading the post, and then the comments from you all-- I see a bit of disparity between philosophies. I mean, for the most part I think from it's very root, trolls are trouble makers, and we can all sort of agree on that. But, there are people here who revel in that, see a symbiotic nature (good needs evil), people who think trolls are important, and that they keep things interesting--people who've even been trolls (full disclosure, when I was younger and immature I partook in such acts...nothing malicious, but acts none the less). When I read things like this I wonder where and at what time these people were introduced to the internet and forums and the like. A lot of younger people (at least the ones I know) are familiar with the trolling culture, and share many of the same previously mentioned opinions, however when I think of my Dad who was introduced to things much earlier when the internet was much more "pure", he loathes such things, "there's no place for that".
As a non-formal study, purely for my curiousity would anyone interested write down their age, the time when they were introduced (ballpark it) to the internet and forums, and their stance on trolls.