
And then...silence - wallflower
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2011/06/and-thensilence.html
======
gerggerg
I think a lot of the sentiment here comes from people wanting to have their
cake and eat it too.

What people want:

    
    
        Everyone 'good' for the discussion.
        No one 'bad' for the discussion.
        No manual labor.
        Unlimited growth while maintaining a perfect community.
    

What you have to do:

    
    
        Grow slowly
        Restrict Signups
        Moderate
    
    

The internet is clearly still an incredible communication platform, but it is
by no means a human utopia, or even an opportunity for one. If you want to
build a good community, you have to do just that. _Build_ it. The internet is
rarely going to just give it too you. And your community will without a doubt
rot as time goes on if you don't pay attention.

~~~
joebadmo
Yes, what I find most interesting about listening to the Stack Exchange
podcast is how much attention and conscious effort they put into constructing
the community, and in a continuous fashion (i.e. it's never finished).

That said, it seems to me that we haven't reached the limits of the machine
part of the human-machine moderation team. Voting up and down (here on HN, on
Stack Exchange, Slashdot, etc.) is fine, but pretty rudimentary, for example.
I'm wondering if there are any others experimenting with more heavily
algorithmic moderation.

~~~
DanBC
I love the attitude of "meta == death" that stack exchange has. They have just
enough meta to get the job done. The absence of social networking stuff is
pleasing too. Compared to, for example, Wikipedia which has gigabytes of
useless meta trollery and weird social norms.

~~~
squeed
I agree. I've lurked on StackOverflow for a long time now, and I watched the
rise of 'meta' style questions as they polluted the question space. This lead
to the establishment of the Meta-StackExchange site, which was not an obvious
choice at the time. I love how the product they've created provides a very
strict structure within which a community can take place.

I wonder what approach, if any, Quora will take to the potential of meta-
pollution.

------
dredmorbius
This, and the empirical experiences of many, many, many other online forums
dating to Usenet days, are a direct refutation of Metcalfe's law: the value of
a network does _not_ scale with the number of nodes, all nodes do _not_
contribute equally to the value of a network, and many nodes are in fact a net
negative in terms of contribution to the network. Interactions between
negative nodes can further degrade network value (e.g.: flamewars, retaliatory
attacks, etc.).

There's a modification to Metcalfe's law which suggests that the value of
additional nodes degrades with time (Odlyzko &Tilly, "A Refutation of
Metcalfe's Law" <http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.ps>)

I'd argue that Odlyzko and Tilly are optimists.

And that any comments architecture which relies on Metcalfe's Law is
fundamentally flawed.

You can either arbitrarily restrict who has access to your network (Usenet and
ARPANET worked well when they were limited to defense, edu, and a handful of
tech companies), or find a scalable and subversion-resistant moderation system
which leverages your community to enact filtering. Scaling slowly means you've
got a better chance of maintaining community cohesion ("September effect" &
"Eternal September").

And remember Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap.

(Sturgeon was also an optimist).

------
bittermang
We marveled with wonder at the free and open channel of communication that was
the Internet. What unparalleled discussion it would bring. The truly free
exchange of ideas, thoughts, and opinion.

Soon some of us soon found that we didn't actually want to hear any of it.

~~~
jgrahamc
You clearly weren't on Usenet in the late 1980s.

~~~
bittermang
I was, but I was also just around 12 years old. Admittedly one of the
aforementioned persons who were a "waste of flesh, bone, and dangerously
limited brain function" starting flame wars about trivial topics because I had
a long distance phone connection I wasn't paying for and a keyboard in front
of me.

Though some might say that the more things change... but I digress.

------
kmfrk
You can't manage comments in a site that doesn't have a sense of community.
Letters of Note's blog post usually get traffic from random links and e-mails
by other people - just look at the recent letter from a former American slave
- which just brings together all these random people.

For a site with as much traffic as LoN, it would take hiring someone to
moderate all the comments to reach a decent level of discussion.

------
tnicola
One of the people I admire as a mentor of my avocation (writing) has the
following rule on her blog:

>>My website and my weblog are an extension of my living room. You are an
invited guest. Have a seat, settle in, and enjoy talking to the amazing group
of guests who are already here.

>>If you cease to act like an invited guest, which I define as someone who is
here to enjoy the give and take of intelligent conversation, I’ll mark your
post as spam, delete it, and block you from posting again. I am under no
obligation to leave garbage on my site. The First Amendment mandate for
Freedom of Speech protects your right to say what you want without government
intervention. Private speech, which is what you have here, is not a right, but
a privilege, and you earn it with every coherent, intelligent, reasoned post
you write.

For the full list of her rules, here is the link <http://hollylisle.com/blog-
rules/>

I think that analogy of your blog to your living room is powerful. It creates
a powerful visual. Not many people (even if they do so on the internet) would
walk into someone's living room and say what they have no quams of leaving in
comments sections of people's blogs.

------
SMrF
I think sites like hacker news and slashdot have a pretty good handle on this
problem but only in their own communities. A good start to a more generalized
solution would be to make these currently siloed reputation systems portable.

~~~
chimeracoder
The problem is that reputation is relative. You may have high reputation on
HackerNews, which could be linked to high reputation on ServerFault, but has
absolutely no bearing your reputation on a board for writers and essayists.

To borrow a concept, it's a bit like Whuffie in Doctrow's _Down and Out in the
Magic Kingdom_.

~~~
SMrF
High karma on hacker news may not translate to a high reputation on a writer's
blog, but it would pretty much guarantee a civil, thoughtful comment. In this
way karma is pretty portable, you just have to give everyone karma somehow.
Maybe start off by trusting friends of people with high karma.

~~~
chimeracoder
That may be what you look for on HN, but that's not true of all forums (I
trust that you can think of one obvious counterexample).

Even look at Reddit - trolls are usually downvoted, sure, but a lot of people
with high reputation are really just novelty accounts. That's not bad for
Reddit, but that's not what I would associate with high reputation on HN.

And finally, look at one of the comments below about gaming the system -
that's the problem with having a (displayed) numeric value associated with
one's reputation.

------
dpcan
All I could think the whole time I read this was:

What a MIRACLE it would be if I woke up one morning, opened my Android
Developer Console and saw an option to disable comments on my apps.
Permanently.

~~~
megamark16
Interesting idea, that. I might be less likely to download an app from the app
store if the author had disabled comments/ratings, but that seems like the
kind of call that the app author should be allowed to make. I recall reading
about someone who uploaded a test hello world app to the Android Market and
started getting lots of reviews and ratings (both good and bad) from trolls
and idiots.

------
clebio
In related news, this just now: <http://www.bgr.com/2012/02/01/commenting-on-
bgr/>

"I’m disabling comments for a bit, though. I’m tired of reading nonsense and
of interacting with people that solely troll this site just to get a rise out
of other commenters and start a holy war in the comments section. I’m tired of
having to delete crap and I’m tired of people complaining that a few thousand
people ruin it for millions."

[edit: adding quote from the article]

------
nym
BoingBoing went through the same thing... they closed down comments
completely, and then some time later brought them back with a community
moderator, who ironically privately censored posts by "disemvoweling", as well
as completely censoring posts related to Violet Blue (or anyone referencing
that fiasco).

[http://sfist.com/2008/07/01/boing_boing_responds_to_violet_b...](http://sfist.com/2008/07/01/boing_boing_responds_to_violet_blue.php)

~~~
jgarmon
We had a more subtle approach at a forum for IT pros I used to moderate. We
called it the Crazy Cafe. Known trolls wouldn't be banned -- they'd just
create a new login and start trolling again, leading to a metagame amongst our
community of guessing which of the old trolls the new troll really was.
Instead, we'd simply flag the troll as a member of the Crazy Cafe, and their
posts would be invisible except to other members of the Crazy Cafe (and to
mods, if we so chose). The trolls didn't know they'd been made invisible; all
they saw was that no one (save other trolls) responded to their flame bait,
and thus they lost interest. It worked shockingly well.

~~~
scott_s
The same thing is done here, and it's called a "hellban." The difference being
that anyone can see hellbanned posts if they turn "showdead" to on - which
implies that most of the time, other hellbanned people won't see each other.

------
philwelch
Unless you're willing to carefully curate a healthy community, allowing and
reading comments from any idiot with a web browser is a losing proposition.
The comments section on your local newspaper or TV station's website, or on
YouTube, or on any site with high readership and low moderation is just a
waste of time that does little than fuel one's misanthrophy.

Does this mean there's no such thing as open discourse on the web? Nonsense.
But if you're not willing to set up an account or set up your own blog to back
up your discourse with some sort of identity, your discourse is worthless.

------
djtriptych
The current state of forums and comments is pathetic on the internet. Most
group attempting to engage in open discussion are defenseless against the
combination of spam, Eternal September, flame wars, etc. There ARE technical
solutions to this problem - I don't buy that people just don't want to hear
open discourse.

~~~
jlarocco
I somewhat agree, but I don't think it's as dire as your comment makes it
sound.

Going by sheer numbers, there are probably a million crappy, spammy forums for
every good one.

 _But_ , I've found that most topics have at least one or two really good,
(mostly) spam free forums where real discussions take place and the signal to
noise ratio is really good.

Comments for articles and blog posts do seem to be more hit or miss, though.

~~~
djtriptych
yeah it's frustrating to me because discussion forums really are the best
place on the web for detailed thoughtful conversation. avsforums is an
unbelievable repository of information, for instance.

However, actually extracting that information from a 3,000 page avsforum post
is nearly impossible - that's the problem with most good forums.

That and the moderation efforts are extraordinarily high even in very good
forums where people generally agree on what they want to read.

I suppose I'm just saying that we nerds need to provide better tools to
automate some of the moderation cost.

------
pvarangot
I wonder how this would affect traffic on a heavily trolled site, since
usually trolls remain anxiously refreshing the page to engage in further
discussion. I was under the assumption most newspapers kept their flaming
comment sections open because they know they engage banner-viewing ad-clicking
eyeballs.

------
seltzered_
Just a thought, you may want to look at Tynan's sett comment system coming
soon, it seems to be introducing some type of comment moderation system
<http://sett.com/>

~~~
ChrisNorstrom
Well, that is the worst designed page I have ever seen.

Color and layout wise it's beautiful. Content wise, where on earth is the
"contact us" link? "About" link? copyright info? Sign up for beta? Etc... The
logo is huge, but I don't care about the logo, I care about the product. And
all the screenshots of the product are TINY. And I can't click on them. And
why are they checker boarded all over the place, just have images on the left,
text on the right. Checker boarding images is terrible practice.

It looks like such a good product and I want to know more but they're hiding
everything from me. And that just stresses me out to the point where I hope
their product fails. Call me a dick but I never would have guessed visiting a
web page would piss me off so much. Why? Because I feel like they're teasing
me, showing me something good and keeping me from getting to it. The
equivalent of waving food in front of my face when I'm hungry but never giving
it to me.

Design like that is just beyond unforgivable. That's the perfect example of
what not to do when launching a web app. What am I suppose to do, dig around
in the who-is info for their contact info?

~~~
ryanwaggoner
You're definitely the right amount of upset about this.

Maybe, just _maybe_ , the lack of all the things you mentioned is an
indication that this is not intended for you at this point?

Are you trying to do an ironic troll thing on a thread about trolling? If so,
you got me :)

~~~
libraryatnight
I felt the same way about the site actually. It may be it's not intended for
us at this point, but the person posted that site as if it would offer some
clarification. He's not trolling -- at least, I don't think he is -- it's just
not a helpful website. I realize the initial comment said 'coming soon,' but
linking it seemed to imply that there would be something, some shred, of
useful information that would make the site relevant to the discussion.

~~~
seltzered_
I feel somewhat bad now about linking to it. The developer's blog (tynan.com)
hasn't even linked to it yet, just mentioned the name of the site coming soon.
I was bored one day and typed the supposed url in, and oh look a beta
placeholder page.

------
ahi
My favorite approach is the approach taken by exiledonline.com. Trolls and Ron
Paul fanatics get their comments "improved", often with sarcasm highlighting
the stupidity of the underlying comment and poster. Guts that particular troll
so other posters aren't tempted to reply and serves as a disincentive for
future trolling. Even subpar comments are discouraged since the consequences
of not meeting standards are a little bit greater than if they were simply not
approved.

------
Qiasfah
I would guess that the need to "root out" the people who do not have
constructive things to say will ultimately hurt the site more than it helps
it. The editor shouldn't feel any need to moderate the posts through deletion
but rather should focus on using comments to build the community. Stressing on
the negative misses the points to the positive.

------
Argorak
Interesting. The internet finally held its promise of effortless, direct
communication. And suddenly, some people realize thats not what they want. And
yet, when it comes to person-to-person-communication, putting some effort into
it (by writing an email and waiting for a reply, etc.) seems to improve
affairs for some people...

Well, just a train of thought.

------
Supermighty
Derek Powazek said it best in _Design for Community_ , create barriers to
entry. The harder it is to leave a comment the better the comments will be.
Shutting off comments is a knee-jerk reaction.

------
draggnar
I understand that every site is not necessarily a forum. What will be lost
from having to have the conversation on the site you got the link from?

------
nickolai
I think we need some sort of captcha system that keeps not only spammers, but
also the kind of people he refers to out.

The one Quantum Random Bit Generator had set up comes to mind[1].

[1] <http://random.irb.hr/signup.php> . seems to be down atm, see
[http://web.archive.org/web/20110304151851/http://random.irb....](http://web.archive.org/web/20110304151851/http://random.irb.hr/signup.php)

~~~
SoftwareMaven
The sets of people who can do calculus and people who are trolls are far from
disjoint. Until there is strong AI, I don't think that a "content value"
filtering mechanism is really possible. Even people have a hard time
differentiating irony from stupidity in comments.

~~~
icebraining
_people who can do calculus_

Or who can plug some characters in Wolfram|Alpha and get the result.

------
doorty
Use Facebook-authenticated comments. Requiring people to use their real names
usually alleviates this kind of problem.

~~~
simonsarris
This stopped 90% of the insane comments on my local newspaper (they moved from
disqus to facebook).

It also cut the average comments for an article in half or more.

~~~
finnw
Interesting - are Facebook users really better-behaved than average blog
commenters? Or was it just that the lazier trolls gave up when their old
cookies stopped working?

------
ck2
This is what moderators are for.

------
kenrik
Welcome to the internet!

I love this quote From "How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale
Carnegie"

<quote> "I will speak ill of no man," he said, "...and speak all the good I
know of everybody." ~ (Benjamin Franklin) Any fool can criticize, condemn and
complain - and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be
understanding and forgiving. </quote>

I say do you part, and ignore everyone else and your world will be a better
place. You can't hope to control other people, however you can control how you
react to them. ~Kenrik

