

Kottke: Does the broken windows theory hold online? - hernan7
http://www.kottke.org/08/12/does-the-broken-windows-theory-hold-online

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jerf
This is why I'll actually complain about off-topic postings and such, despite
the utterly inevitable complaints about the complaint. (At least nobody's
babbled about how it's their free-speech right to post whatever crud they want
to a social site in a while, and you just have to suck it up...) Community
standards don't maintain themselves.

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tvchurch
Case in point: Hacker News comments vs. Reddit comments vs. Digg comments.

Sure, there's a population bias. But Reddit used to have mostly intelligent
comments. Not anymore.

~~~
atlbeer
4chan

~~~
unalone
4chan is brighter than it lets on. But recently it's become a parody of
itself. What once began hilarious and meme-laden has become a bunch of people
repeating memes, which aren't funny unless they're clever.

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ig1
One way you could test this is to datamine Google's or Microsoft's usenet
archive. You could track if users behaved in less social ways in more troll-
tolerant newsgroup (i.e. track say a million users and compare their behaviour
across different newsgroups). It could also be done across time for individual
newsgroups to remove any bias inherent in the topic of the group.

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iigs
This problem is framed in a way that is subtly different from another way of
looking at it that may offer different solutions.

Looking at a given comment as a "broken window" would seem to me to lend
itself to specific treatments (i.e. a "flag" or "report" option), but you
could also look at each comment as a contribution to the community that should
be considered as a whole.

I think if you treat every comment (exclusing illegal content or obvious
spam/vandalism) as though it has value, even if that value is negative, it
might lead to tools that highlight comments, demonstrating that they're
unacceptable. HN (and now Engadget?) have shaded negative comments that are
along the lines of what I'm thinking of.

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foulmouthboy
What's interesting about online comments is that the comments themselves
become a part of the "landscape" of a site. So a site could be aesthetically
pleasing and designed well (i.e. no apparent "broken windows" as Kottke would
define them), but if the comments are full of expletives and "roflmao" type
messages, then they effectively become the broken windows.

If I were to apply the broken windows theory online, I'd consider "bad"
comments as graffiti and "good" comments as public art. The broken windows
would be more an analogy of a community misusing what's been made available to
them as opposed to a designer purposely or accidentally creating something
ugly.

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hs
slightly off topic but still on broken windows theory

do you normally clean up your code 'aesthetic' ?

like the commented:

old code (to make it unactive) -> ;(define bla)

return value -> ;returns '(1 2 3)

debugging print statements -> ;(print bla)

hacks -> ;quick hack for x, buggy but good enough for now

what's the better practices? thx

