
PG on trolls - sharpshoot
http://paulgraham.com/trolls.html
======
DarrenStuart
I think news.yc has a 5th troll behavior and it's down modding a comment
because they disagree with it. I have been down modded a number of times not
for saying something rude or stupid just something that others don't agree
with.

I tend to down mod rude and aggressive people on here and I also up mod people
who I think have been down modded unfairly.

I am not sure if I am alone with my way of thinking.

~~~
pg
I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously
the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable
that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.

It only becomes abuse when people resort to karma bombing: downvoting a lot of
comments by one user without reading them in order to subtract maximum karma.
Fortunately we now have several levels of software to protect against that.

~~~
mixmax
I don't entirely agree.

I have seen quite a few comments that were extremely insightful, and/or
interesting that got downmodded due to an unpopular opinion. The reason this
is unfortunate is not only that you tend to miss these (assuming that there is
a higher probability that you read or think about comments that are rated
higher, which I am surely not the only one that is guilty of) but also that it
tends to promote groupthink . This is especially important on a forum like
this where we are here to learn and share our thoughts, ideas and experiences
for a very particular niche: Starting startups.

I have noted that comments that don't promote the "build it and they will
come" view tend to be voted down. Since this site is primarily populated with
hackers this is entirely understandable - it is human nature to think that
your part of the project is the most important. But the reason we all come
here is (I presume) to learn. And the things about which we know the least are
the things where we have most to learn.

It is not only a question of abuse, but also a question of opening peoples
eyes to issues, problems and points of views that lie outside their expertise,
but which they will probably encounter in a startup. And this includes such
diverse fields as marketing, financing and sales.

I am here to learn about stuff I didn't know already, and that is often
outside my field. In return for this I will offfer my opinions in the fields
where I may have something to contribute.

At the end of the day this makes us all better entrepreneurs. Because as
anyone who has ever done a startup will tell you - you have to get everything
right. Hacking, finance, sales, PR, marketing, hiring, etc.

So I think that the up and down arrows should not express agreement, but
insightfullness or truth. Not opinion. That way I will be able to judge the
validity of a comment in a field that I do not know well by its points. And
hopefully learn something.

~~~
yters
Highly downmodded comments stand out to me almost as much as highly upmodded
comments.

~~~
pchristensen
I wish I had more votes to downmod you into prominence! J/k, I upmodded (for
agreement)

~~~
yters
Heh, it'd be funny to have the most negative karma on YC. The only reason I
care about karma is cuz I want to change my header's color. Only 15 more
points to go!

Once there, I'll stick a post on the front page and get downmodded into
oblivion.

~~~
BrandonM
Couldn't you achieve that much more easily with a Greasemonkey script?

~~~
yters
Yeah, but where's the achievement then?

------
dfranke
Like graffiti, trolling can be impressive when it's done especially well. My
favorite troll of all time is the guy from comp.compression last August:

[http://groups.google.com/group/comp.compression/browse_threa...](http://groups.google.com/group/comp.compression/browse_thread/thread/63db3f711c83d4c0/a0f09c085ce4aa7f)

followed by the famous "Is Your Son a Computer Hacker?" troll from
adequacy.org:

<http://adequacy.org/public/stories/2001.12.2.42056.2147.html>

~~~
curi
reminds me of the physicist who wrote a fake post-modernist paper and
submitted it to a journal and got it published.

~~~
simen
I'm not sure I'd regard the Sokal affair as trolling. It's hardly being an
asshole, unless you consider exposing idiots being an ass, and it's hardly
fishing for controversy, unless exposing any kind of potentially controversial
stuff is trolling (was Watergate trolling?).

~~~
bishopdante
No, watergate was not trolling, because it was not a forum game. Watergate was
a scam, it was also an accident (getting rather busted).

Trolling is a scam performed for the purposes of a humorous prank on a
discussion board.

Watergate was a scam to pervert the course of democratic government.

------
willchang
I think what PG called "incompetence" is really just rampant emotionalism.
"Incompetence" is inaccurate because it suggests that people of all levels of
experience can't happily share a forum, which I think they can. But what
happens at Reddit nowadays is that anyone who posts an inane comment with a
phrase like "why the fuck" will get lots of upvotes. (Case in point: Search
for "fuck" in the comments for the top article at Reddit, and get: "That
fucking cunt is going to get what she deserves," 15 points.)

I think in the early days of Reddit, the fact that everything including
comments could be voted on was intimidating to trolls, so they were kept at
bay. But some time later every primal scream was rewarded, and trolls started
posting in droves.

It never helped that a really low-scoring post with a high-scoring rejoinder
tended to be highly ranked. That's just begging for the sort of you-got-served
culture that excites trolls.

------
ChaitanyaSai
I wonder if trolls can be categorized automatically. Caveats and all, trolls
are characterized by their participation in negative-karma two-person
conversations and down-voting of their comments by a diverse and changing set
of users. A simple learning algorithm should zap the predictable ones. Trolls
are nourished by attention and early detection and removal should nip that
behavior in the bud.

~~~
pg
I've thought a lot about that. I wouldn't be surprised if current spam filters
would work unchanged. There are not enough trolls on News.YC to make it worth
investing time in such countermeasures, but it would be an interesting
experiment to see if you could use statistical filtering techniques to detect
trolls in some large public corpus like Digg or Reddit or Slashdot comment
threads.

~~~
thaumaturgy
I don't think that would work; you would essentially require a filter that
could actually understand the subject matter, in order to determine whether
the purpose of the stated opinion was to bait people's responses. For example:

"I've thought a lot about that. I would be surprised if current spam filters
could work unchanged. There are not enough trolls on News.YC to make it worth
investing time in trying to write it in Lisp, but it would be an interesting
experiment to see if you could use C++ programming techniques to detect trolls
in some large public corpus like Digg or Reddit or Slashdot's comment
threads."

~~~
iamelgringo
Not necessarily.

Spam filters routinely filter out emails based on a common set of words that
are used without understanding the subject matter. For example, if an email
contains the words viagara and store, the probability of that email being spam
go up tremendously. Paul's "A plan for Spam" essay explains a lot more. And,
from what I understand, Bayesian filtering is at the root of most spam
blockers out there.

I'd be willing to wager that Bayesian filtering would be pretty powerful in
filtering out trolls on social sites, as well. For example, if a post contains
the words "asshole" and "fucktard" the probability of that post coming from a
troll goes up exponentially.

If you trained a Bayesian filter, or spam algorithm well enough, it should be
able to flag trollish posts fairly easily.

------
ken
I don't think "distance" is the primary cause of asshole behavior by
automobile drivers, though it does sound like a convenient first
approximation.

If I was walking down the street with a $20,000 ming vase, and you were
running around nearly hitting me, I'd probably swear at you. Likewise, if you
were running around on the street wielding a sharp katana, I'd probably swear
at you.

A car is both as expensive as a ming vase, and as deadly as a sword. The idea
that a rational person would _not_ get highly upset when somebody threatened
both their life and the most expensive thing they own is absurd. "Distance"
has little to do with it.

~~~
sarosh
Aside: The elegant symmetry with which this metaphor crosses three cultures is
absurd, baffling, and truly humbling. What lead you to conjure that up? What
is it that you are reading?

~~~
ken
Hagakure.

------
rms
The Reddit thread is kind of sad.

<http://reddit.com/info/68zz4/comments/>

~~~
initself
It's more than kind of sad, it's pathetic.

~~~
dcurtis
My favorite (upmodded 26 points as of 9pst):

Regarding News.YC: "Your ancient ritual has summoned me to News.YC so those
tight-assed holier-than-thou fucktards can be shown the error of their ways.
Maybe the reason there aren't trolls is because NOBODY FUCKING VISITS THEIR
SHITTY SITE."-- terwin, Reddit

~~~
Erikk
THIS IS A GREAT SITE!!!! but it's got some kind of anti-troll field protecting
it. The most perfect trolling oppertunities always seem to degenerate into
civilized rational discussion.

~~~
iamelgringo
I think what Paul said about "Hacker News readers feel about trolls the way
exiles from Cuba or Eastern Europe feel about dictators" is right on the
money. _sic semper tyrannis_

It's actually rather amazing that we are fairly unanimous in down-modding
trollishness, without having community guidelines or a big discussion about
it.

~~~
ardit33
I agree and I like that line a lot. I moved to the US, from a Eastern European
country, as I was fed up with the retards that had taken over my country, and
ruin it down. Unfortunately, who screams the loudest, often wins.

------
edw519
Another way to keep signal to noise higher is to treat debates about languages
the same as those about politics and religion. Maybe it's just best to agree
to disagree.

I generally tend to avoid the "language war" threads for 3 reasons: 1. No one
is really right or wrong. 2. Not much gets accomplished. and 3. It really
doesn't make that much difference anyway.

Debates about favorite colors, on the other hand, should be strongly
encouraged. Blue is definitely the best one.

~~~
curi
While I agree with you that avoiding those discussions is a reasonable general
policy, it's not the case that "no one is really right or wrong" in debates
about computer languages, politics, or religion. There is a truth of the
matter.

Your point that not much is accomplished by such discussions is definitely
what usually happens. But it isn't what _must_ happen. There are rational ways
of discussing these subjects which can lead to knowledge creation and
agreement.

The reason I'm posting is basically that I think people are a little too quick
to give up, and if they tried to discuss seriously a bit more, they might find
it sometimes works. Especially if they are careful to ignore the bad replies
they get and only reply to the other people who are also taking the discussion
seriously.

~~~
dfranke
_it's not the case that "no one is really right or wrong" in debates about
computer languages, politics, or religion. There is a truth of the matter._

Well, yes and no. There's only a truth to the matter if you can get people to
agree on a premise. Two libertarians who adopt the same premises can have a
meaningful debate with each other. They'll agree that there can only be one
consistent position -- so if they disagree on what it is then one of them must
be mistaken -- and set about trying to figure out which of them holds the
fallacy. But if you pit a libertarian with the premise of self-ownership
against a communist with the premise of "property is theft", nobody is going
to accomplish anything because neither will view the other's argument as
relevant.

~~~
curi
_There's only a truth to the matter if you can get people to agree on a
premise. Two libertarians who adopt the same premises can have a meaningful
debate_

This is the myth of the framework. See Popper's book by that name:

[http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Framework-Defence-Science-
Rationa...](http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Framework-Defence-Science-
Rationality/dp/0415135559/)

Besides the issue of whether productive debate is possible across frameworks,
there is also your (possibly accidental) assertion that what premises people
believe affects what statements about reality are true (beyond statements
about who believes what). That's solipsism.

~~~
dfranke
_your (possibly accidental) assertion that what premises people believe
affects what statements about reality are true_

None of the statements in question have to do with reality, only with abstract
ideas. Libertarians believe that property ownership is a right; communists
believe that it is an offense. Neither of these assertions is empirically
testable.

If the debate is about what policies will make us wealthier rather than what
policies are ethical, then that's a different matter. But in that case, both
sides are sharing the common framework of utilitarianism.

~~~
curi
You give a good example: which policies towards the market create more wealth
(on average, various things being equal) is a matter of fact. But I think this
sort of non-arbitrary approach to thinking has much wider applicability, and
indeed that all interesting subjects can be approached in a careful,
meaningful way not based on personal taste.

Which policies are ethical, with "ethics" rightly construed, is also a matter
of fact. Morality is about how to live, and it's not a religious concept. The
notion that morality is (and must be) religious is unfortunately a bad,
_religious_ idea, that (oddly) most atheists still believe.

Just to get started, we can consider which lifestyles do and do not accomplish
their own internal goals. Lifestyles that do not are bad ways to live -- they
are "immoral". We don't have to use moral terminology; that isn't important.
But whatever you call it, there are objective facts about how we should or
shouldn't live.

And there's better than that. You can take a very wide variety of goals, and
examine how to achieve them. And you can find common points -- certain ways of
life are good for achieving many goals, while others are not. These common
points, which make people powerful and able to accomplish things in general,
are an important, useful, and objective find the field of morality.

~~~
lg
It's funny that you think a lifestyle is immoral if it doesn't accomplish its
own "internal goals." I think that's wrong, and not just in pathological
cases. I might be an ultracompetitive misanthrope who lives to be on top
(gordon-gecko-ish capitalist). But the way I get there (startup? investing?)
might end up helping lots of people; maybe helping them surpass me. Was I
immoral, because I didn't accomplish my goal to be number one? I'd rather have
more of those people than more couch potatoes complaining about the immorality
of powerful people.

~~~
curi
That was a brief summary and one can say it more carefully. Most importantly,
immorality is not a boolean thing. If you aren't accomplishing a goal, it'd be
an improvement (more moral, a better way of life) to either change your
approach, or change your goal. It is less moral (a worse way of life, immoral)
to continue with a lifestyle that is failing by its own criteria of success
and failure.

That needs the caveat that we only mean goals you actually intend to
accomplish. We don't mean vague goals, and we definitely don't mean the sort
of goal you would be happy to partially achieve -- in that case, the real goal
is just making progress towards ... your "goal". (It's the same word, but it's
a different concept than the one I mean).

Back to your points, you say that even if you fail by your own standards, you
might help others, and the net effect of your life may be positive. That's
absolutely true. However, it'd be even better (more moral) if you did the same
actions, but had wiser goals, which those actions were achieving. Then you'd
help others, but also consider your own life successful.

~~~
yters
Mustn't goals themselves be good or bad, regardless of whether they're
achievable? Or would you say that goals, such as Hitler's, were bad only b/c
eugenics ultimately would be bad from an evolutionary point of view?

Then, there is a the problem of heroism, which is defined by a person's
courage to pursue a noble goal even if its achievement is very unlikely.

Finally, by your definition, I could be one of the most moral people by making
my goal "do whatever I want." Everyone is always doing whatever they want, at
least at some level. This would pretty much render all talk of morality
pointless. But, I suppose I'm being too literal with your definition.

~~~
curi
These are just starting points. I do think goals are themselves good or bad,
but it's much harder to explain how you can _objectively_ make assertions like
that, so I wanted to make the lesser claim, for now: there are ways to explore
morality objectively.

I'm definitely not claiming consistency of this sort is the only criterion of
morality. Only that it's an important and objective one.

I don't mean to be a tease, but if I say too many things at once, I won't be
understood as well. On the other hand, threads here go stale fast (usually in
under a day), so I'm not sure how to ever get very far in explaining, here. By
contrast, on another forum, I am in a thread that has been going for 4 years.
And it's only 180 comments long -- so around 1 comment per 8 days.

I'll keep posting here if anyone replies. Or contact me, curi42 on AIM or
curi@curi.us

So for depth, my best idea so far is to link longer, external writing. Here
are two things I wrote about morality which explain my views a bit more:

Essay: <http://www.curi.us/blog/post/1252-xii>

Dialog: <http://www.curi.us/blog/post/1169-morality>

~~~
yters
Ah, good. I figured I wasn't getting the whole picture. Something similar to
objectivism makes sense to me. I think there is such a thing as human nature,
so everyone is ultimately made happy by the same things, at a certain
granularity. Morality's objectively good goal, in your framework, is to
maximize happiness.

However, at this point I have to veer into territory considered "religious,"
because such a claim requires at least an element of non-materialism to make
sense of our moral intuitions.

At any rate, my views are not rigorously defined enough, and I'd benefit from
critical, constructive discussion. I'll check out your links and see if I can
participate.

~~~
curi
If it's any help:

I don't think there is any such thing as 'human nature', though I do think
there is a lot of complex knowledge in cultures that achieves some of the same
practical results.

I don't think the purpose of morality, or life, is to maximize happiness. I
suspect maximizing happiness is consistent with the right way of life, if you
understand enough, but I don't think it's the best way to look at things, and
I think it makes it harder to see the answers.

In general, ideas don't need foundations. "You can't justify that," is not a
valid criticism. This includes moral ideas. So if you have a "moral
intuition", or think a common sense notion of morality makes sense, but can't
justify it perfectly, I don't think that's a problem. It may be a sign of
religion, but not a bad one.

The correct way to look at ideas is not to seek justification, but instead to
compare them to rival theories. In other words, ask, "Got a better idea?" If
there is no rival theory, then criticism is sort of useless. It can help us
notice we'd like a better theory and find places to look for new ideas. But
without a rival theory to compare with, we can't see which theory seems truer,
or which stands up to criticism better, and can't abandon the current theory.

The ideas about foundations and justifications here were best explained in
published work by Karl Popper, and also somewhat by David Deutsch (but more to
come, he should have a new book out within 2 years). They are not especially
popular, but in my judgment they actually make sense, unlike all the rival
philosophies.

If you read Popper, be aware that he never wrote much applying his ideas to
morality or education. He wrote a lot about science, and about communism and
historicism, and also about certain (bad) schools of philosophy, but also
explained epistemology in abstract.

Guess that's long enough for now. For what it's worth, I like fielding (non-
hostile) questions in these areas.

~~~
yters
I guess I should rephrase it as morality's goal maximises happiness.

What would you propose as an objective moral goal?

Do you recommend anything by Popper or Deutsch specifically?

~~~
curi
Deutsch only has one book out, which is very good. My only warning is that
half of it is sort of off topic (physics, virtual reality, computation, time
travel). But that's ok, because of the density of ideas fit into each chapter.

[http://www.amazon.com/Fabric-Reality-Parallel-Universes-
Impl...](http://www.amazon.com/Fabric-Reality-Parallel-Universes-
Implications/dp/014027541X/)

Popper has lots of books. Maybe The Myth of the Framework is a good choice. As
I recall, it has content from lectures he gave to people not already familiar
with his philosophy, so those parts are especially clear and accessible.

Proposing an actual moral goal is tricky, because we have to be careful to
keep separate the issues of whether there are true moral ideas, and whether my
particular idea is true. And very strictly, my idea will _not_ be true. It
will have truth to it, but not be perfect. Which may be a confusing concept,
because the prevailing epistemology says that knowledge is "justified, true
belief" by which it means 100% absolutely, perfectly true. That perspective
discounts any possibility of "partial truths" as knowledge. Further, it
encourages people to believe they possess (final, certain) truths. But I don't
claim to have any of those, nor do I think one can have those.

If you're OK with all that, I can tell you some _tentative guesses_ at moral
truths.

~~~
yters
Yeah go ahead.

~~~
curi
To any disagreeable people reading this: please bear in mind that if you say
the following ideas are incorrect, and that therefore I am incorrect to say
morality can be approached objectively ... you will be contradicting yourself,
because you will have made an assertion about the objective truth of the
matter (that I am, in fact, mistaken).

So some good goals, in my opinion:

Long term: open-ended knowledge creation

Medium term: cure aging, invent self-replicating nanobots, win war on terror,
write important book, invent AI

Short term: make a sandwich, be kind to one's children, quit smoking, make a
useful product, solve a problem you were having, learn how to play Mario
Galaxy well

None of these are (I imagine) especially odd. That is because we have to start
where we are. We already have goals. Most of them are good goals to pursue,
for now. In the event we decide we want something better, or see a problem
with them, we should seek to make (gradual) improvements. So, nothing
revolutionary here. In fact, while I think most people are mistaken about
moral philosophy, I don't have a problem with most of their actual ideas about
how to live day to day. We have the most peaceful, cooperative, and effective
civilization ever to exist; or, in other words, we have the most knowledge of
morality that has ever existed. Average people have this, and use it in their
routine lives.

Can we do even better? Of course. But most of my suggestions are not about
changing one's goals, but instead about changing how one tries to accomplish
them. So, for example, it is very important to enjoy criticism. This is common
knowledge, but people still have trouble with it, and often don't fully
understand the reasons it's important. To sketch out my answer, criticism
stabilizes true ideas (because they withstand it better than their rivals),
while an environment without criticism does not differentiate truth and
falsity. And criticism is a means of error correction. Error correction is the
only way to reliably achieve any goal. There is no way to reliably come up
with the right approach, initially, so anyone who wants to consistently
succeed has to be able to find and correct errors.

Why do people dislike criticism, anyway? They take it personally. They hear
that they are mistaken, or bad, but they want to be right. That is an
irrational and ineffective attitude towards life. If you want to be right, the
only path forward is to be willing to change what you are, until you are
what's right. And whether you are criticized or not does not change whether
you are mistaken. It only changes whether you find out about it. That is a
gift. Instead of being mistaken and ignorant, you have a change to change your
mind.

So to tie this back to what I was saying earlier, one of the common points for
the best way to accomplish many different goals, is to enjoy criticism.
Alternative approaches such as disliking and avoiding (some) criticism are
immoral, because they sabotage achieving one's goals. The more distasteful you
find criticism, the less reliably you can accomplish what you want to.

To add to this, we could go through all the different attitudes which are
important to learning and problem solving in general, and list them as
important pieces of morality. They are all fundamental to how we should live.

~~~
thaumaturgy
> you will be contradicting yourself, because you will have made an assertion
> about the objective truth of the matter

...unless I assert that morality is subjective. :-)

As for the rest of it ... well, I do disagree. I think Guy Kawasaki outlined
it best in his book, "Rules for Revolutionaries". It has a section titled, if
I remember correctly, "Don't let bozosity get you down".

A certain amount of criticism that a person will encounter will be, well,
wrong. It can even be wrong when it's coming from an expert. You see this all
the time in the business world. I can't tell here if you're suggesting that a
person take all criticism to heart -- I think so, because of the way you talk
about changing to adapt to criticism -- but, if you are, then you're
suggesting that a person allow themselves to be buffeted by the winds of the
popular and the trendy.

There's no way to always to always be correct, to always do the right thing.
You might listen to a bunch of criticism, and a bunch of suggestions, and
still make the wrong decision for all the right reasons. Listening to more
criticism, and allowing that criticism to further change your habits, doesn't
necessarily ameliorate that.

I counter that it's important to know when to accept criticism, and when to
ignore it and forge ahead. I also posit that it's impossible to know that, so
you just have to make your best guess.

~~~
curi
Regarding subjectivity, if you assert morality is subjective, you don't have a
leg to stand on in saying I was wrong. What would that even mean? I was right,
for me, or whatever.

Regarding "forging ahead": Scheduling criticism is a different issue, and one
well known to writers: if you keep editing the first chapter, you'll never
finish. There certainly is a place for that kind of thing. It is really a
separate (and large) issue.

\-----

Of course you have to use your judgment about which criticism you think is
correct. The point is not to dislike criticism generally, or to ignore it.
Doing those things makes it harder to find and use good criticism.

To use a YC example, some people have posted here asking for comments and
criticism for their fledgling startup. And people have blogged about how this
criticism was harsh and hard to take, but made their startup better, so they
encourage others to ask for comments/criticism as well.

This illustrates a few different attitudes. There are some people who are too
scared of criticism to ask for any. Their startups won't get the improvement
that some more bold or open minded people have gotten.

And then of the people who did ask for criticism, many still partially dislike
it, which makes it harder to fairly evaluate the criticism (finding it
somewhat painful is distracting!), and their distaste makes them overlook some
other, more subtle opportunities to get more criticism, that a person who
loves criticism would have found.

So this is an important and relevant issue even at an exceptionally
enlightened place. There is no magic formula to always make correct decisions,
but there are ways of life which are more effective and reliable.

~~~
thaumaturgy
> Regarding subjectivity, if you assert morality is subjective, you don't have
> a leg to stand on in saying I was wrong.

Well, subjectivity doesn't mean you're right in the objective sense. See, you
opened your comment with a logical trick to prove the correctness of what you
were about to say before you even said it, and you did so by deciding that
there are intrinsically right and wrong moral decisions. I think that
morality, specifically, happens to be an extremely subjective thing, first of
all. It varies dramatically from culture to culture, society to society, era
to era. Secondly, I think that was kind of an underhanded thing to do, and a
friendly jest was my way of calling you on it. If I were to pull an equally
underhanded trick, I might say that my reply is in fact a criticism of your
thinking, and, according to your own principles, you must take it under
consideration and use it to change the way you act.

> The point is not to dislike criticism generally, or to ignore it.

This part I like. It makes me really want to agree with what you're trying to
say. But, then you go from that, to things like, "...more subtle opportunities
to get more criticism, that a person who loves criticism would have found." I
have a problem with that, because I think of criticism as a distraction that
is sometimes an opportunity. To really love criticism is to dwell on what will
ultimately be a distraction.

I really wish I could find my copy of Rules for Revolutionaries. (I really dig
that book, and it was signed! Sometimes I loan it out ... rats.) It cited some
specific examples of this, sometimes where businesses had too closely followed
criticism and been hurt by that, and others where they hadn't followed it, and
benefited from that.

So, it's not just scheduling criticism. In the book writing example, sometimes
you have to know when to ignore your editor altogether.

~~~
yters
I agree with the logic trick part. To say something is undecidable is to make
an objective claim.

However, at the point where you want to say someone should or should not do
something the subjective morality comes back to bite you (saying curi's trick
was underhanded). I think this is curi's point.

All you can really do with subjective morality is describe your rationale for
why you do what you do, and hope the other person buys it. Even that is
inconsistent because you are motivated by the thought that the other person
should do something.

Curi, while it is true we start from first impressions, either our goals have
to be mutually independent, or they must have a common foundation. Otherwise
they end up contradicting each other. That's the point of moral philosophy,
and what I meant by justifying moral intuition.

~~~
curi
Regarding contradicting goals: I think the way to tie things together is a
common _endpoint_ (the truth of the matter). If you move all your goals in
that direction, it will cause them to become progressively less contradictory.

You can also remove contradictions locally if you find any. If you want, you
can say that is based on the common foundation "if two ideas contradict, at
least one is false". But the point is, you see a contradiction, you know at
least one of the ideas is mistaken in some way, so you know there's room for
improvement there, until you come up with some changes that remove the
contradiction.

~~~
yters
Yes, I agree with the end point. I think morals are properly posed in
teleological terms. So, moral philosophy has to do with determining the end.
What are our goals aiming at?

~~~
curi
What we should aim for, in the long term, is a tough question. But fortunately
we don't need to know that, now. What's much easier is determining some good
short term goals, and then after completing them, determining the next set of
short term goals. In that way, we can make progress indefinitely, without ever
seeing especially far ahead.

But certainly seeing as much of an "ultimate purpose" to aim for, as we can,
is helpful. We have ideas of parts of it. Creating knowledge is good, and
destroying it is bad. Freedom is good, and controlling other people is at best
a temporary stopgap measure, not an ideal. Cooperation or indifferent
tolerance is good, and violent conflict is bad, both because it's destructive,
and because it's not a truth seeking process. Settling for less is not ideal,
and anything that puts pressure on people, or creates incentives, to not
strive for all we can, is bad.

Some of these assertions have directly applicability today. For example, the
common perception that striving for more is "hard" (unpleasant) indicates
something or other is going wrong. Or there's the idea that life is about
compromise, which is essentially settling for less. People don't just fail to
find a with to proceed with no downsides, but often people don't even try, and
assume such things do not exist. The ideas in our culture which cause these
attitudes clearly have room for improvement.

 _"moral philosophy has to do with determining the end"_

Yes, but that's not all. How to approach goals, how to solve problems and
correct errors, what sorts of policies for how to live your life are
effective, are also very important topics (and perhaps more accessible and
directly useful). One of the critical ideas here, I think, is that all these
things depend on _knowledge_. How do you approach a goal? In general, you need
to create knowledge about the goal and how best to approach it (and also
whether it's worth accomplishing, in case it was mistaken). To solve a
problem, you have to figure out how to solve it. (And if implementing the
solution is hard or unpleasant in any way, that could be avoided with still
more knowledge of how to solve the problem in an easier way.) To correct
errors, you have to create knowledge of what ideas are in error, and what
would be better ideas. And so on. And therefore, anyone who is seriously
interested in morality ought to study epistemology.

~~~
RobKohr
ahhhhh.... I have been squished against the wall!

~~~
curi
lol yeah the UI doesn't work so well with heavy nesting

------
serhei
One of the main contributing factors to the abundance of trolling on forums is
indeed that text is a much less expressive medium than face-to-face
communication, meaning that you very often end up trapped into voicing your
opinion in a trollish manner due to just carelessly throwing your initial
thoughts into the text box.

You can give up, though, and perpetrate the crapstorm, or you can remind
yourself that being good at communicating your ideas and opinions is an
important part of being a well-rounded hacker; then you can view the posting
of only coherent and non-inflammatory replies on fora as practice for when
you'll have to communicate about programs you are writing.

------
boredguy8
My experience on forums is that -size matters-. A pond with ten fish gets far
less trollers than a pond with ten thousand.

As for solutions: there have to be consequences. Either losing the ability to
post or losing the ability to have your posts seen. Certainly banning accounts
is an option, but then you have to fight with the crapflood, if and when it
comes.

~~~
davidw
I think the community size bit is important (see 'monkey number'). I also
wonder if that means that sites should somehow attempt to break people into
smaller groups in some way in order to maintain that 'small town feel'.

------
Tichy
On news.yc it is not so extreme, but on german tech news site heise.de, there
is also a modding system. Good threads become green, bad ones red. I have
often wondered if people are more likely to start flaming away in the red
threads. Sort of like beating up somebody who is already down on the floor
(comments on the line of "you suck"). At heise.de I often had the impression
that it is the case - not so much on news.yc, but it might be interesting to
look at the statistics?

~~~
pg
News.YC users are definitely influenced by the prevailing trend, in both
directions. I.e. people are more willing to vote something up as its score
rises, and more prone to attack something as its score falls. It's not too bad
yet here, but it got to be such a problem on Reddit that about a year ago they
switched to not showing how many points a submission has till it's an hour
old.

~~~
ced
Ever thought about doing a controlled experiment about it? I.e.: showing high
points for a post to half the users, and low points to the other half.

------
Spyckie
Creating more selective communities with stricter guidelines seems to be the
wrong approach to dealing with trolls, especially based on the scenario pg
lays out. As pg says, the larger a community grows, the easier it is for
trolls to be accepted and the harder it is to mod (prune) the community. It
seems that critical mass is just when the pruning community becomes smaller
than the trolling community, and that by creating new communities with more
stringent rules, you are just delaying the date (hopefully indefinitely) when
trolls come in. I understand that the yc community is special, but even the
comments here show that it won't work for much longer as the community grows
beyond yc. To answer the question of "Will it scale?", I think its already a
no.

If you've ever hung out with a lot of girls (from a guy's perspective), you
can beging to understand the trolling community. 1 on 1 with a girl and you
can get intellectual conversation, but the minute 3 or 4 girls get together,
they start talking about clothes, guys, dramas, and all other stuff that just
isn't interesting. I bet girls see it the same with guys too (5 guys together
= WoW, DOTA, girls or crude jokes).

Solutions? Keep it small. This fails to keep in line with the existing goals
of news.yc (advertising for existing startups, attracting smart people, etc).
Another solution? Maybe try to preserve the small community feel as the site
gets bigger. One way to do this would be to use user upvotes and downvotes as
community boundaries for each user - ie: making their community presence only
to those who rate them up, and to make their personal community those who they
rate up. This is speculative at best, though.

------
Alex3917
"Often users have second thoughts and delete such comments."

@PG, I've always wondered, are you able to see all the comments that I've
posted and then deleted two minutes later? And if so, is this an acceptable
way to send you semi-private messages?

~~~
davidw
"Paul Graham sees all the comments anyone has posted anywhere. What's more, he
knows all the comments they will post in the future, too."

~~~
tyler
"...and has already categorized them using Bayesian filtering."

------
ChaitanyaSai
It doesn't have much to do with hacker personalities. Unless you want to argue
that Youtube denizens are hackers of some sort too.

~~~
bishopdante
Forums used to be the province of the technorati. Not no more they ain't.

------
prakash
"Hackers can be abrupt even in person. Put them on an anonymous forum, and the
problem gets worse."

I am sure everyone on this forum is on some kind of social network. If we can
get every user's handle to link to their flavor-du-jour social network's
public profile, verify via email -- that should at least cut down on some of
the noise.

PG: What do you think?

~~~
yters
If chains of trust could be widely and rigorously established online, most
(maybe all?) of the big problems we have today would be gone.

~~~
pg
It would be a good thing. If anyone wants to apply to YC with that kind of
idea, we'd be into it.

~~~
sspencer
I actually thought long and hard the other day about how such a system might
be implemented, and came up with a few interesting ideas. Perhaps this
encouragement will make me apply!

EDIT: I even wrote about it a long time ago, when I still updated my blog with
any semblance of regularity. Weebly seems to be down for approximately the
millionth time in the last month or so, though. I'll post the article if
Weebly gets righted within the edit window.

~~~
sspencer
EDIT2: Weebly finally back online:
[http://myothercar.weebly.com/1/post/2007/11/a-confederacy-
of...](http://myothercar.weebly.com/1/post/2007/11/a-confederacy-of-
dunces.html)

------
hollerith
I wish comments remained deletable longer. My last comment is 3 hr old (and
has no replies) and it has already become undeletable whereas when I made an
insensitive comment, it continued to be downmodded for about 24 hr.

By "become undeletable", I mean there is no "edit" or "delete" link on the
comment.

------
tac-tics
I just want to point out an issue with a small point Paul brings up, and that
issue is how Karma works on YC versus Reddit.

I'm not saying one is better than the other, but there _is_ a tradeoff. On
Reddit, you can be rude, and people can downmod you, and it doesn't matter
once the post sinks. Here, if you act like an asshole, you get downmodded, and
your karma suffers. But even if you make a well reasoned, but controversial
comment, you often do still get downmodded because of your unpopular views.

Not that I comment here often, but I'm at four down from seven at one point,
and it's really the logical consequence of such a system. It seems to work
here, but I do wonder, as Paul expresses near the end of his article here,
does this technique scale?

------
akkartik
PG's essays are getting shorter. I like that -- no matter what Steve Yegge
says. ([http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/01/blogging-
theory-201-...](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/01/blogging-
theory-201-size-does-matter.html))

------
DTanner
I'm not convinced that you'll be able to deal with the Eternal September
problem. It's all well and good that anti-trolling is built into the rules,
but as more and more people join less and less of them will have read the
rules.

------
jondo
I saw this on Metafilter. I am not a member but I enjoy almost daily reading
on the site. I would offer than you have an unaddressed aspect in regard to
those than are called trolls. Specifically Forum members who try to end a
debate by labeling someone a troll. I am a member of Syracuse.com and
DailyKos. I started posting maybe 7 years ago on Syracuse,com after RWers
brought God to the defense an UNJUST war. I am a Catholic who marched against
the Vietnam War and for black rights and anti-poverty programs. Since I
started posting I have tried to distinguish between what Jesus would support
in the positions of the Republicans and the Democrats. To the Right Wingers on
Syracuse.com I am a troll because I call them to account concerning unjust
wars, the death penalty and their continuing efforts to strangle social
programs in a bathtub. On Daily Kos I am called a troll for not supporting
"gay rights" or abortion. My views are consistent with my religion. Moreover
when I was younger I developed a great appreciation for the Amish and
Mennonites who view things in a similar manner but maybe to a greater extent
and with greater consistency than the Catholics, I am civil and stay well
within the site posting rules. I have had my posts and user name constantly
deleted on Syracuse.com and that is fairly easily done there by any poster
hitting the "Inappropriate Post" button. The modest size gay friendly
community within DailyKos are very hostile to any posts that are in opposition
to their goals.

------
afreshvegetable
I LOVE how the first response is a Troll comment! My only thought to add is an
interaction I had recently with a programmer/hacker/entrepreneur who had made
a macro program to automate mining in Eve Online. The program is explicitly
contrary to the EULA and so constitutes a hack. The programmer/owner had an
elaborate feedback password system, so I had to IM him directly to activate my
copy of the program once I paid my fee. He was wildly rude--just throwing off
flippant and rude remarks like a vagrant dog throws fleas. After the third or
fourth example I started to call him on it--to his, and my great frustration.
He did not like being called on his nasty tone at all and denied having one at
all. I got so heated that I almost ditched the whole project, but finally
calmed down enough to get the transaction done. Later I spoke to a friend in-
game who had an identical experience. My point is that this article on how
hackers and some programmers tend towards this behavior as a culture explains
a lot. My programmer provocateur thought his nastiness was somehow normal,
acceptable, and utterly justifiable on the basis of some sense of his own
personal superiority. I suppose this is what happens when people take their
coding/hacking acumen as a license for megalomania and a total disregard of
social graces.

Great essay.

------
Kolibri
>One might worry this would prevent people from expressing controversial
ideas, but empirically that doesn't seem to be what happens. When people say
something substantial that gets modded down, they stubbornly leave it up. What
people delete are wisecracks, because they have less invested in them.

How would you know? How would you know it does not stiffle unpopular opinions?

I think that I would personally practice self-censoring if I would lose karma
by expressing unpopular opinions that are likely to be down-voted. I know that
I already do on reddit, and there the down-votes are at least only temporary.

Not wanting to lose karma may seem a foolish reason for not expressing your
opinions, and at first I din't mind. I kept writing my unpopular opinions on
reddit, the down-votes made me put even more effort into them so that they
would be above approach. But they' still only get a handful of points whereas
one-liners expressing the popular opinion would get much more. So eventually I
gave up.

Now I mostly just read a couple of stories a day, and occassionally write the
one-liner comment.

As a final comment, I've always been disgusting by the way that people on
reddit would constantly compare themselves, always favorable, to their bigger,
would-be rival: Digg. Now you do the same thing towards reddit, and I can only
shake my head in disgust. Learn to value your site in itself, not as the
compare to other sites. It does not need to be a competition.

~~~
aston
On your final comment, it's a pretty universal truth that every community will
eventually find a common enemy. It's part of feeling like you're part of
something.

------
aswanson
About what size was reddit (in uniques) before it jumped the shark?

~~~
pg
Off the top of my head, maybe 40-50,000.

The fascinating thing is, all the data is still there. You can go and look at
the old comments and stories and see what the site used to be like. If you
could find a good proxy for stupidity, like comment length or spelling
mistakes, you could graph the change as the site grew.

~~~
Spyckie
Is there a way to grab a reddit comment corpus (a large set of reddit's
comments)? I don't browse reddit but I think it would be a fun thing to play
around with.

~~~
Tichy
wget perhaps?

------
systems
PG misses an important perspective, cyberbullies!

People who bully other people because they have better computer knowledge,
mainly the two areas of administration and programming

The thing is learning, working ... are both hard, and many ppl got screwed or
unlucky over their lives, they either learned useless crap at school or
university, or work at non interesting jobs with bad bosses or collegues

And sometimes, we are humans, we are attracked to certain aspects of what we
try to learn to escape, or trying to improve upon our bad lack

And sometimes the cyberbullies call us trolls. It's okay, thought, better be a
troll than a bully, the thing is, in time we will learn, and on that road we
will have fun, and, the road will not end, and it will meet plenty of bullies,
and overtime we will learn to be quiet, for the next person we talk to, and
dare to show to them that we don't know, might just be, the next bully ... who
will accuse me of being troll ... or that other word incompetent.

But the bully don't see, just like the one in the school yard, its just a
school yard, don't take yourself too seriously, its just a forum or irc!

I am reading chatting and enjoying my time, until you came and changed the
game, ... thou shall not speak! and now the book seller might have won, for
you know, thought can't do teach! And most of the blogs I read were just
trolls!

------
yelsgib
Perhaps the reason that people troll (or take part in any sort of asshole
behavior, really) is that they don't have anything better to do. Hear me out.

Hacker News is a "forum" whose main purpose is getting people to talk
about/think about/post links to information related to startups. It has a very
explicit purpose and to this end I would not expect it to be "infested" to the
extent of a lot of other forums.

For instance, would we expect to see a lot of trolls on a forum devoted to
advanced topics in theoretical math? "Orbifold cohomology is so much better
than Hopfschild cohomology!" No. No, we wouldn't. A serious, well-defined,
topic begets serious discussion.

This is the real problem with reddit, digg, etc. - there's no clear GOAL.
Like, there's no -reason- that people shouldn't be assholes. What are they
getting in the way of?

It's like if you opened the doors to your house and just held a "general
forum." At first, discussion would be great (it's just your friends). Later,
discussion would get worse (it's your friends' friends). Eventually it would
degrade into the biggest losers who have nowhere to go sitting around and
making fun of all the fun they're not having out in the real world (outside
the house).

I agree with pg's sentiments that the architecture/rules of hacker news make
it a much more intelligent, even (gasp) friendly forum, but I also think it's
the community. They keep coming back because they have active interest. They
have active interest because hacker news has established as its goal the
provision of things of interest.

As always, I might just be woefully naive about human nature; but things seem
so simple!

------
cawel
Regarding the future of communities while they grow and "technical tweaks",
eBay recently adjusted its policies to improve its community quality,
restricting sellers from leaving negative feedback to buyers:
<http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2008/02/crowd_control.php>

------
bhb
Very small nitpick, but I think "It an old one, as old as forums" should be
"It _is_ an old one, as old as forums".

Update: this has been corrected.

~~~
pg
Thanks, fixed.

------
michaelneale
"The sites's guidelines explicitly ask people not to say things they wouldn't
say face to face."

Interesting, I know quite a few people that would in fact all but troll in
person, to your face.

Although in their case, its more to do with them having no outbound tact
filter: <http://www.mit.edu/~jcb/tact.html>

------
jdueck
Regarding News.YC, I fear that it may eventually suffer the same fate as
Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, etc. Trolling is a minor problem compared to self-
promoting. The challenge is that there's no scarcity on the internet, so you
have to create artificial scarcity. It may be that the best way to fix the
problem (i.e. to create scarcity) is through fees. For example, a $1.00
(rising with demand) fee per submission would keep a lot of junk out of any
discussion site. And any serious content producer or blogger wouldn't blink at
the notion of a small fee. The assumption that everything should be free is
what kills many of these sites.

------
kitty_pineapple
I totally agree. Seeing that most forums are started with something stupid
like 'Everyone who uses this forum are woodheads', it sets a series of replies
such as 'i am NOT a woodhead!' or "I agree, you are a woodhead or you wouldn't
be here'. Especially when I don't know all those shortcuts that eliminate
these posts, I find it terribly disturbing to have to read through all those
'comments'. And I hope this isn't spam, please tell me if it is. I am only 11
years old.

------
irrevenant
Paul, have you considered personalising as a method of minimising trolling?

As you pointed out, people do things on forums that they wouldn't do in
person. IMO, this is partly because they're hiding behind a handle and partly
because their target is.

I'm not sure how you'd go about making accounts have more personality and
identity, but IMO that would be considerably more effective than just
instructing people to behave like they're face-to-face. They know they're not.

------
researchdcs
Give George Carlin The Asshole Theory(~):

"The amount of an asshole a person is is directly proportional to the distance
they are away from you at the time you discover this fault. Someone on TV is
REALLY AN ASSHOLE! Someone in the car next to you is Pretty Much of an
Asshole. A guy standing next to you on line: <whispers> 'this guy's a real
asshole here'"

------
bishopdante
It's simple, trolls prey on people's inner asshole. It's like a form of
bullying, if you rise to the bait, then you're done. There's no technical fix,
there's a mentality fix. The act is as old as the hills, and they provide
balance to the debate. Trolls are a form of court jester.

I am therefore pro-troll and anti troll-victim.

------
domnit
Another model for keeping out trolls is Metafilter's. They require a $5
donation when an account is created, and kick out assholes. Of course, this
keeps out a whole lot more than trolls. It's certainly the wrong way to do it
for most sites, but it works for them, and perhaps for others.

------
smithfield
The simplest troll test. A troll (person or point of view) is incapable of
introspection. This does not mean that trolls won't try to introspect, just
that they cannot succeed at it. This can also be used to show why trolls have
trouble with recursion and irony.

------
jonthewayne
I think this might be the exact kind of situation that an advanced
[http://phoenomi.com/2008/02/13/the-rise-of-social-
governance...](http://phoenomi.com/2008/02/13/the-rise-of-social-governance/)
system could solve.

------
cnf
I actually like trolls of the 1st kind. You know, the practical jokers, the
original trolls, the ones that have no real bad intentions but just like to be
silly once in a while. The second kind, well, I just call them "people"

------
gopher
Some people troll because they know better but they are tired of explaining
it. They say the truth(tm) when the crowd does not want to here it. I like
them.

~~~
parsifal
I'm of the opinion that if you can't explain something without being
exasperated, then why are you bothering to explain it? Go do something else.

------
sammyo
Observing just the length of this thread, my initial thought is that pg has
executed quite an exceptional troll himself...

------
parsifal
This is a fantastic post on a topic that's been a problem with the web since
day one.

Very insightful. The Four Reasons feel very accurate.

Thanks, Paul!

------
valda
Maybe this is interesting idea: <http://lemurcatta.org/>

------
hillbilly1
Is there any fundamental difference in how karma is awarded in News.YC
compared with Slashdot?

~~~
Tichy
It's been a while since I've been on slashdot, but back then their system was
quite sophisticated. You could not always vote on stories, only when temporary
moderator status was assigned to you by a random process. Additionally,
sometimes you would be assigned meta-moderator status and get to vote on the
quality of moderators ratings. Those meta-moderations would in turn influence
the likelihood of the rated moderators to become moderators again in the
future. Also, they have categories for the votes ("funny", "insightful",
"troll", ...).

------
anewaccountname
Who is this guy and what authority does he have to write about these topics? I
haven't read the essay, but there's no way anything so short and written in
such an informal style could have anything useful to say about such and such
topic, when people with degrees in the subject have already written many thick
books about it.

~~~
dfranke
Where can I get a degree in trolling?

~~~
jcwentz
I'd try Hampshire College, UC Santa Cruz, or the New School.

~~~
johnnowak
As a New School student, I can only say... well... okay yes, you're probably
right. It's great fun though. I can't imagine hating school anywhere else.

------
achoi02
i feel like fox news has moved trolling to television. its a good thing i
stopped watching tv years ago

------
dysmas
... and with this post i register.

------
curi
it's not clear to me that nastiness is more common at hacker forums. a
_certain kind_ is. but i've seen much nastier stuff on parenting forums (which
i've been to a lot).

on parenting forums, you don't find so many jerks. when people are mean, they
tend to be a bit more subtle (or passive aggressive) about it. but they make
it emotional and personal, and i think that does a more effective job of
actually hurting anyone.

------
jazj
I suspect that this article is a direct consequence of Arc's sceptical
reception on Slashdot, Digg, and Reddit.

------
typicalpg
Pretty typical paul graham post. He doesn't provide any evidence and he shows
very little understanding of the problem. He doesn't even understand he is
being trolled because he is wrong. No one cares about 4000 lines of macros for
PLT Scheme. All of his arc hype led to some dumb macros. We listened to years
of essays about how to program and what makes productive programmers only to
find he takes R5RS and adds some macros. Wow. Amazing LISP revolution.

Paul you are being "trolled" because people disagree with you. You haven't
seen real trolls.

------
wololoooo
pfft, you're just bitter about the way arc was recieved

------
Trollbert
This is bad. Anyone should be able to say anything. That way everyone can see
what is being said - good, bad, sad, left, right, or wrong. Remember, a
democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding whats for dinner. Fuck lamb for
dinner!

~~~
FatBastard
For those who aren't gun nuts, the parable goes: Democracy is two wolves and a
lamb voting on what's for dinner. Liberty is a well-armed lamb prepared to
contest the vote. Here is a good example of a reasonable point poorly made.
Seems off topic because not all the premises are stated, but in his meatspace,
everybody can fill in the blanks with common knowledge. Also, in his world,
everybody uses small, old, anglo-saxon words to add poetry to their speech, he
may not realize (or care) that it offends some delicate sensibilities. This is
the graffitti of which PG spoke. And surprisingly, it is art. Not art in the
beautiful sense, but art in the message sense. Imagine yourself in China and
you wrote on the wall "Fuck Tiananmen". This is not pretty, but it is not
spam.

