

Shared awareness: a better way to manage comment trolls - RyanMcGreal
http://quandyfactory.com/blog/54/shared_awareness_a_better_way_to_manage_comment_trolls

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anigbrowl
Regrettably, it doesn't scale well in my experience. I take part in one large
political internet forum (for reasons that are increasingly unclear to me...)
where this kind of up/down system was tried, albeit with uncapped totals.

Prior to that users could only recommend posts, and the mechanism was
transparent enough that members of a faction would cross-promote each others'
posts and employ many other 'turf war'-like tactics to maintain mindshare.
After up/down voting was introduced about a year ago, a majority of members
prefer it while 25% or so complained bitterly about censorship and all the
usual cliches. Flamebait or outright stupidity is now downvoted fairly
quickly, but turf wars persist and a negative response to a new thread is
frequently seized on as an excuse to start a mini-thread about 'downvoting
trolls' and use said 'discussion' to keep the thread alive despite its poor
reception by a majority.

Anecdotal to be sure, but with about 2m monthlies and a year's worth of
observation (plus umpteen meta-polls, since every community enjoys gazing at
its own navel) the trend is pretty obvious. By comparison, HN is populated by
wise and kindly Vulcans.

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techiferous
Wonderful post. I'm looking forward to an enlightening discussion about this.

I was disappointed by the end, however, because it suggested that downvoting
was a way of managing trolls. I think downvoting means different things to
different people: some downvote to merely show disagreement, for example. So a
downvoted comment on Hacker News does not necessarily mean that it is likely a
troll comment. Therefore, downvotes can't achieve the necessary shared
awareness.

(I will disagree with myself and note that comments that have been voted all
the way down to -4 tend to be trollish, so maybe it works to an extent.)

~~~
RyanMcGreal
You raise an important point. About a year ago, on a community website I run
[1], I implemented a group moderation system like the one I described in this
essay and it worked pretty much as described.

However, there are certainly some cases of people voting against comments on
the basis of disagreement rather than comment quality - which goes against the
comment voting guidelines [2].

This issue does occasionally come up among regular commenters. Interestingly,
simply pointing out that someone was downvoted for expressing an opinion that
was unpopular rather than illegitimate seems at least partially to reverse the
effect (unlike HN, users can change their vote after making it).

Again, this seems to suggest that as community moderation becomes internalized
as an important value, it becomes more effective at preserving quality
discussion.

[1] <http://raisethehammer.org/>

[2] <http://raisethehammer.org/article/874/>

~~~
epochwolf
Is it really possible to have people vote on quality?

I've noticed most people don't understand how to be objective. Worse still is
unless you are familiar with excellence you will be very poor at judging it.
Perhaps this is because of differing measures of excellence people use or the
result of ignorance.

I think a system that accepts fuzziness in measurement would be better than
one that tries to be exact.

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shalmanese
This site is useful, if only for the bowdlerized version of John Gabriel's
greater internet fuckwad theory: <http://www.penny-
arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/>

There has been, at minimum, at least 3 different presentations in which I've
had to joke "I'm pretty sure this is the first time the word shitcock has
appeared on a slide at X"

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aneth
The Chinese have a way of handling uncomfortable posts. They make them visible
to the poster, but invisible to everyone else. That way, the poster thinks no
one is interested, and hopefully goes away. Since most people won't even know
that's possible, they won't check with another login.

No reason to piss a troll off by deleting his post. Just hide it from everyone
else.

~~~
lamby
This is called "sending them to Coventry" in the UK.

