

Inside the mind of the anonymous online poster - freejoe76
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/magazine/articles/2010/06/20/inside_the_mind_of_the_anonymous_online_poster/

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lotharbot
> " _The comments sections on many general-interest news sites lack both the
> carrot and the stick for encouraging responsible behavior. The carrot is the
> cohesion of a group you don’t want to disappoint, like Yoshimi25’s Front
> Burner community. The stick is the shame associated with having your real
> name publicly attached to embarrassing behavior. Without these two levers,
> the social contract breaks down._ "

They need to expand their definition to include other types of carrots and
sticks. HN has a simple but effective system of upvotes, downvotes, display by
ranking, and flagging/deleting. Other sites have similarly effective systems
of varying types. I hope eventually "Old Media" will catch on.

~~~
huhtenberg
> _HN has a simple but effective system_

You must be new here :)

HN has an obvious problem with favouritism. Posts by some users are getting
more upvotes regardless of what they post. The same goes for submissions.
Blogs not really worthy of any attention are constantly floating on the front
page simply because they are darlings of a part of the HN crowd.

Though HN manages the maintain reasonably good comment quality with few simple
measures. That's indeed an impressive achievement.

~~~
lotharbot
effective =/= perfect

> _"HN manages the maintain reasonably good comment quality with few simple
> measures."_

That's really the point -- the system works to maintain good comment quality.
Different sites will require different measures; the key is figuring out which
ones you need. The original article's comment on carrots and sticks displayed
a surprising lack of understanding of this principle; it seemed to suggest
that the lack of one particular type of carrot/stick makes creating a quality
online comment system an intractable problem.

~~~
doron
The key phrase here is "general-interest" cohesion of the group is harder to
achieve when the range of topics is very wide.

Most of the sites that maintain a good discourse revolve around specific
subjects, often to a specialized degree.

HN is a group that discusses technology and its implications, this framework
gives the group a cohesive context. The scale is different.

------
freejoe76
This part at the end -- particularly the last graf -- caught my eye: "With all
of our identifying information getting sliced, diced, and sold, by everyone
from credit card companies to Facebook, is there really such a thing as the
anonymous Web anymore? Consider this demonstration from the late ’90s by
Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor Latanya Sweeney. She
took three commonly available data points: sex (male), ZIP code (02138), and
date of birth (July 31, 1945). Those seemingly anonymous attributes could have
described lots of people, right? Actually, no. She proved they could belong to
just one person: former governor William Weld. She tells me that 87 percent of
Americans can now be identified with just these three data points."

~~~
astrange
I don't see what that has to do with an "anonymous Web" at all. Nobody on
Facebook thinks they're an anonymous forum poster, and I doubt anyone goes
around mentioning their zip code and date of birth on forums anyway. (Although
many profile pages do have city and year of birth, which might be enough…)

Besides, if it was an anonymous forum (<http://wakaba.c3.cx/shii/>), nobody
could tie your separate posts together even if you put some identifying
information in them.

On the other hand, people on Facebook are happy to put their real names on
angry political statements. So maybe this article shouldn't have bothered
confusing "anonymous" and "uses pseudonyms" to make its point.

------
Zak
I wonder how effective a text classifier could be in assisting moderators in
these situations.

I've written a rather good text classifier and I'm in search of commercially
useful non-evil applications for it. Assisted moderation for high-volume
discussions has come to mind. If anybody's interested in arranging a test of
such a system, let me know.

~~~
ronnier
Isn't that what <http://adaptivesemantics.com/> does? I remember reading about
them on HN a couple of days ago.

~~~
Zak
It looks like they are. I'm not sure if I want to compete with them, or go
after a different market. My classifier is good at author identification, and
it seems like there might be a market for catching students paying other
people to write their papers.

------
lotharbot
Single page (printer format) link:
[http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/magazine/articles/2010/06/...](http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/magazine/articles/2010/06/20/inside_the_mind_of_the_anonymous_online_poster?mode=PF)

~~~
RevRal
It appears the print page can't be linked to. I've seen this in a few other
places as well.

Link to the "single page" instead:
[http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/magazine/articles/2010/06/...](http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/magazine/articles/2010/06/20/inside_the_mind_of_the_anonymous_online_poster/?page=full)

