HN Explorer

Ask HN: Please send in examples of trolls' comments

3 points by dpkendal ↗ HN
I'm experimenting with algorithmically identifying trolls and other Internet Stupid People™ and automatically filtering their comments from blog threads, etc.

I have two issues: (a) what to consider as a 'troll' vs. someone genuinely asking a simple question; and (b) getting a corpus of these comments as examples.

So I'd like to invite HNers to submit real examples of dumb/mean/bad comments. You can do it here, but I'd rather they were emailed to <badcomments@dpk.org.uk>. If you include your name, in the From header or in a signature, I'll credit you publicly when I post about my results. (Unless you ask otherwise.) (If you include the URL of your website, I'll include a link, also.)

I'm not looking for made-up examples, however representative you think they are. I don't ask for a URL to prove their authenticity, but please don't submit your own deliberately-trolling comments.

5 comments

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bhousel
Why not just crawl HN and pick out all the comments that are greyed out?
polyfractal
Very often comments will get downvoted on HN not because they are trolling, but because they are simply wrong, off-topic or not a popular point of view.
proexploit
Yeah, that's a good point. I think you might have better luck viewing any heavily down-voted comments in popular threads.
devs1010
I think HackerNews is rather light on trolling behavior, relatively speaking, a more generalized site like Reddit would probably prove a better sample-set of data for something like this.
hansy
Try visiting the tech blog site, Engadget, and reading through the comments, particularly the comments about Android and Apple devices.

The numerous flame wars and hate comments were what drove me away from the website.

(By the way I have nothing against the writers or editors creating the content for the website; they are all fine people in my opinion. My issue is with the quality control, or there lack of, of the comments moderation.)