
Tell HN: Can we stop commenting on troll comments? - tptacek
We're definitely seeing more overt troll comments lately. I'm not talking about baiting the Apple fanboys or spouting political talking points; I'm talking about comments with Slashdot "first-post" type nonsense.<p>That's not a big deal. The problem is, people here seem to feel compelled to point out to the troll that this is the "wrong site" to post to. They don't care. Who does care? The rest of us, who have to page through comment threads of people slapping each other on the back for telling off a troll.<p>We have moderation for a reason. Just let the troll comments drop to the bottom of the page. Can that be the new plan? And can we politely (and preferably out-of-band) ask people who do respond to troll comments to delete their comments to keep the threads clean?
======
pg
Sadly true. HN now gets 40k uniques a day, and I am starting to worry about
the character of the comments.

The biggest danger is not the obviously bad comments, though. It's the
meretricious ones-- the zippy one-line putdowns and strident political
statements-- because the newer users actually vote these up.

The big surprise for me is how much the mere voting power of the new users is
changing the character of the site. A zippy one-liner that a year ago would
have languished midway down the thread now becomes the top comment.

So while I agree with you that the right thing to do about overtly troll posts
is to silently flag them, I'm still not sure what to do about the subtler and
more dangerous decline I've been seeing.

I suppose I should be encouraged we made it to 40k in decent shape. Maybe I'll
be able to come up with some kind of fix.

~~~
wglb
How about this small thing--change the wording of the button _add comment_ to
_add thoughtful comment_.

~~~
andrewljohnson
This may be a dumb idea, but how about requiring some minimum length of
comment? Are there circumstances when someone legitimately should just use
8-10 words? I don't know what that minimum length would be though.

At least in this case if people want to be strident or acerbic, they have to
work for it.

~~~
pg
I've thought of considering comment length in the sorting algorithm. There's
definitely a correlation between length and quality.

Another possibility would be to look at the words people used. I'm pretty sure
you could train a spam filter to recognize lame comments.

~~~
Freebytes
Another possibility would be to implement a waiting period before people have
the opportunity to vote. This may help with the issue of newer members
upvoting the one line witty comments. However, I am not sure if the short
comments are necessarily negative. Should users be required to contribute
exceptionally long and verbose posts without the benefit of shorter posts in
between? From my own perspective, I tend to only skim over 'wall of text'
comments if they do not engage my interests from the beginning so the
intermingling of short comments with longer comments to me is not a bad thing.
The voting up or down of comments from those that may be deemed inadequate to
accurately judge the quality of the post (new members) seems to be more of an
issue. These new users may vote based on their opinions (as I mentioned in
another post) rather than on the quality of the arguments or information
presented so a probation period may be the solution.

------
yason
A site like HN is basically a group of insiders, namely folks who have decided
what is smart and what is not. So the system ought to favor insiderism and
reject power from newcomers.

So, why let newer users vote at all? They can't downvote either, so there
ought to be a karma threshold for voting as well, too. Then you would have to
own some credibility (=karma) before you can begin to affect the site's
future.

You get karma by posting good links and writing good comments. Who decides
what's "good"? Those who have karma, of course! Back to the circle of
insiders! So, you ought to gain karma normally if a high-karma user votes up
your submission or comment. If lots of low-karma users do that you might get a
tiny bit of karma but no more. If only few low-karma users do that you get
nothing.

That should at least give most of the control to users with high karma. Note:
I'm not entirely sure how HN works for beginners these days, so some of the
above might already be in effect.

~~~
tomjen2
That might work, but why give them the ability to post stories initially? That
way, to get karma they would have to be able to impress the insiders with what
they have to bring to the table personally and can't just find some good stuff
made by others.

You could even combine them, so that the threshold is different - you can post
stories with karma of, say, 30 but you can't vote before you have hit a karma
of 500.

I have lived in my country all my life, but I was 18 before they let me vote.

~~~
shaddi
I think story submission is a really important way to add to the HN community.
New users who can contribute what the community thinks are interesting
articles are valuable users. Plus, if new users cannot vote until receiving a
certain karma threshold, stories would only be upvoted by users with some
familiarity with HN culture.

------
ionfish
It's also worth noting that besides downmodding, one can flag an individual
comment by going to that comment's permanent link and clicking 'flag'.

~~~
mustpax
The flag button should be added to the regular thread view for comments as
well. For the kind of trolling tptacek is talking about, downmodding really
isn’t sufficient.

~~~
tptacek
I notice the comment flag button once every couple months, and it always
surprises me, so I'm going to call it a UX failure --- even though I think the
idea is to make sure comments only get flagged when someone cares a lot about
the comment.

There should just be a high karma+average requirement to flag comments.

------
blhack
A few days ago, somebody had a made some silly comment like this:

"OMG She is t3h winrar of t3h intarnets!". Their point was that somebody had
done something very noteworthy. It added nothing to the conversation and was
exactly the type of thing I think we're talking about here.

I did what I think this thread is asking me not to and responded with
something like this:

"Just so you know, you're being downmodded for using the word 'internets',
people around here don't like that" (or something to that effect).

My question is if this was the "wrong" thing to do? I was wrong, and the user
I was responding to had been here for a long time, but I felt like it might
have been helpful to inform new people that the sorts of things that are
welcomed and encouraged on reddit, are not here.

Is this thread encouraging us NOT to do stuff like that?

~~~
tptacek
Yes. That's what this thread is encouraging you not to do.

That goes _triple_ for comments in the middle of bona fide comment threads,
because the [troll, rebuke] comment pair is going to be stuck right in the
middle of the comments page, not at the bottom.

~~~
mbreese
Would it be helpful then to have a special type of comment that can't be voted
up (zero points always)? So, for the troll rebuke, have the rebuke marked so
that people couldn't vote it up.

This way it would appear in the users's comment's page, but would be down-
modded to the bottom of the page, with the trollish comment?

Maybe just include a "no points" button or checkbox on the comment edit
screen?

------
dschobel
To represent a contrary viewpoint: I haven't seen more than a handful of the
patently useless accounts whereas I've noticed more and more "big names"
showing up on HN.

Just the other day in the Python language moratorium story I was asking about
a particular PEP making the cut-off and the author of the PEP responded. I was
blown-away.

The HN experience balance is still massively in favor of those latter moments
rather than the former.

The level of the technical discourse is still higher than any other general
technology site, even if there are a few ankle-biters around now.

------
DenisM
Don't know if you realize this, but regular snark in your comments reinforces
bad behavior from newcomers. There is no gray area here: either we tolerate
snark & sarcasm and slide into a pit of goo, or we don't tolerate it and keep
this place civilized. Every single post counts.

~~~
cd34
I believed that until a post about a hamster in a tutu falling in the LHC
outranked a post on an async i/o python engine.

This is just slashdot with a different frontend/theme and less sci-fi.

~~~
DenisM
I don't think we should give up, at the very least because there is nowhere
else to go. That, plus YC has monetary resources they use to bring quality
traffic here - all the YC members and applicants are by definition people who
are at lest trying to build something, .i.e. being constructive.

------
icey
I wonder what would happen if there was an indefinite moratorium on the
creation of new user accounts. I'm starting to see a lot of throwaway accounts
being created solely for the purpose of trolling.

Beyond that, it seems like the overall quality of the newer users has been
fairly low. I'm sure there are some exceptions, but I can't think of any that
have been created in the past, say, 200 days or so.

[Edit: See tptacek and mquander's responses below to see why this is a bad
idea]

~~~
chris100
With all due respect, you sound very condescending. To use an analogy, think
of a first generation immigrant who says that now the country is too crowded,
we shouldn't let immigrants in anymore.

Why are you convinced that you are better than newer users, to the point that
all new users should be forbidden? It sounds a little harsh. You could impose
some new thresholds so that people's votes and comments only start mattering
once they have some amount of reputation. That should help get rid of the
obvious trolls.

But please, not extreme measures.

~~~
icey
I'm sure there are tons of new users who have registered recently that are
great. My point is that by and large they haven't been. Closing user
registration for awhile worked well for Metafilter, so I figured I'd bring it
up.

tptacek made the best counter-argument for this idea; in that it would also
prevent the people we want to hear from from registering; so my idea wasn't
that great to begin with.

I don't know where you get the idea that I think I'm somehow better than
anyone else; all I said is that the newer users haven't been of the same
quality as the older users. That's just my opinion, and you're welcome to
disagree with it. I've been very careful not to jump on the "this site is
turning into reddit!!!1!" bandwagon, but the unfortunate truth of the matter
is that the overall quality on HN has declined, and I blame the new users for
that.

~~~
mquander
I suspect that what really worked for Metafilter was maintaining full-time
moderators who eliminate bad posts and talk one-on-one with users who are not
contributing well. I think the barriers to registration just prevented the
community from growing faster than the moderator team.

------
nkurz
I'm mostly with you, although I think frequently the 'trolls' are just
ignorant of the local customs, and will adjust their behavior if the norms are
politely pointed out to them.

Perhaps it would be possible to fold (hide) the responses to negatively scored
comments, so they aren't an interruption to the flow?

And is there a reason you suggest to 'just let the troll comments drop' rather
than actively voting them down to the bottom of the page?

~~~
tumult
People who troll for fun don't adjust their behavior, usually. I mean, they
aren't behaving that way on accident. The point of being a troll is to mess
with other people. "Oh look how nice this site is, suddenly I'll stop trolling
and be nice." If a site becomes prominent enough and doesn't have some kind
barrier to entry, it will eventually become a plaything of trolls.

Self-moderation works to a degree, though the only sites I've ever seen
maintain a high signal-to-noise ratio are those that either don't appeal to
trolls (low profile sites, sites with no game/karma aspect, etc) or prevent
you from just signing up for a free account and messing with people
(metafilter/pay wall, moderated mailing lists, small communities that reject
outsiders by default.)

A site with high-quality discussion and participants typically becomes more
visible over time as it is increasingly linked to by others, raising its
visibility. Instead of people being attracted to a site in order to
participate in high quality discussion, now people are joining because it's
visible. The signal-to-noise ratio drops, and if the site doesn't eventually
implement some kind of protection, it will also be overrun by trolls/spam.

If you watch the "New" section in HN right now, 4/5s of the links that roll
through at some points in the day are either dupes, spam, or trolls. Auto-kill
flagging helps to a degree, but I think at some point pg will need to relent
and disallow new signees from submitting stories or voting.

It's not like this is a new phenomenon in internet behavior, people write
about this all the time. HN is interesting because it remained pretty high
quality for a while, and the "broken windows" theory seems to be true to a
certain degree. But the internet isn't entirely like moving neighborhoods in
real life – you can easily participate in as many sites as you want, and just
as easily screw with as many as you like, provided they have little or no
barrier to entry.

I think if HN was changed so that accounts can't vote at all (up OR down) or
submit links until they reach a certain karma threshold from just commenting,
it would go a long way in raising the quality. (The reason you take away
upvoting is that the troll/spam/etc accounts will just start slinging useless
votes everywhere. Comments accrue points for seemingly no reason, votes become
devalued, and illegitimate accounts start gaining karma. Additionally, you
need some smart 'voter-ring' detection algorithms to prevent people from
making multiple accounts to vote each other up.)

I've helped run a couple of community-driven meta-moderation sites before, and
watched more than my share of ones run by others become mired and sink over
time. Just my two cents.

~~~
nkurz
_People who troll for fun don't adjust their behavior, usually._

Good post. I agree, but the danger is confusing misguided people who want to
contribute from those who are intentionally damaging the conversation. Once it
can be determined that the trolling is intentional, I'm all for the heavy
guns: ban the account and do what you can do to make it difficult to obtain
another one.

------
SlyShy
I find the "go back to reddit" or "go back to digg" posts particularly ironic.
If you are going to criticize those sites, then perhaps you shouldn't
contribute to the degradation of this site in the same post.

That said, I was recently guilty of the commenting on a troll comment But I
think it was justified in that instance, because the original poster was being
attacked in a particularly vicious way, and I didn't want him to feel nobody
was backing him up.

~~~
tptacek
You commented a troll comment from a user _literally named_ 'shitcock' (that
actually happened!). Please don't do that. The most likely outcome from that
response is that the troll has yet another hook to comment on.

~~~
SlyShy
Well, I certainly won't be doing it in the future. ;)

------
nzmsv
Erecting walls is never the answer. Any community, from a website to an entire
country, suffers if it decides to close itself off from the world. There are
too many examples to list.

So, making registration hard or invite-only, or making new users feel inferior
is not the answer. I like the fact that I can vote on articles right after
joining. Having to "earn my privileges" by having my opinions validated by
someone first would have likely made me leave. And though I'm a newbie, I
solemnly promise I won't be posting any lolcats :)

This doesn't mean a lack of policing, but with this many users it has to be
improved. One problem that pops out right away is: there is no feedback
associated with votes.

Are private messages a possibility? Or even a limited implementation, just for
votes? A downvote would require a reason (to be sent to the poster by PM).
This way the user can learn to write better comments. The downvote should be
anonymous for the receiving user, so the discussion doesn't devolve into
vengeful bickering. Upvotes could also have a reason (perhaps optional). I
think this would balance out the impression of being shot down all the time.

~~~
michaelkeenan
_Erecting walls is never the answer. Any community, from a website to an
entire country, suffers if it decides to close itself off from the world.
There are too many examples to list._

Though you are correct that many communities suffer when they restrict
membership, that isn't an infallible rule.

Communities that have benefited from restricting membership include the
Freemasons, Mensa, and the online community TheRoot42. Those are just a few we
know about! Many closed communities are also at least somewhat secret.
Barriers to community entry are sometimes beneficial (not that I'm advocating
it for HN).

Entry difficulty is a significant contributor to group cohesiveness
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_cohesiveness>).

------
makecheck
This is a lot like graffiti in a city, and should probably be dealt with in
the same way. Cities have been known to paint murals, react quickly to cover
up graffiti, and patrol so that they can catch offenders in the act.

The HN equivalent of a mural is to submit something really interesting, that
will be voted to the top quickly.

The HN equivalent of covering up graffiti is to flag a post or a comment, or
to post better stories and comments that push the garbage out. Though a way to
mark duplicates would be nice.

What we really lack is a way to catch offenders. I have seen several "karma:
1, created 15 minutes ago" accounts, that are _always_ attached to useless
contributions. Sure, I can flag a comment, but it's very obvious that the
entire account should just be banned (and perhaps the IP it came from), and
there's no flag that applies to an entire user. Perhaps there should be, at
least for accounts that have only existed for a short time.

~~~
butterfi
You're alluding to the broken windows theory

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixing_Broken_Windows>

------
Mz
"The big surprise for me is how much the mere voting power of the new users is
changing the character of the site. A zippy one-liner that a year ago would
have languished midway down the thread now becomes the top comment.

So while I agree with you that the right thing to do about overtly troll posts
is to silently flag them, I'm still not sure what to do about the subtler and
more dangerous decline I've been seeing."

Perhaps a lot of the new users are relatively unsavvy about some things and
some instruction is in order. This might be done in the form of a "best
practices" listing. I have found when dealing with Internet Newbies, it helps
to list out a few things like "Don't say anything online that you wouldn't
want on the front page of your local newspaper." A lot of times, inexperienced
people just don't realize the potential consequences of doing certain things
online. It may seem "obvious" to most people here what the best thing to do
is, but perhaps the newer users just have no idea. If that is the case, some
of them might be very cooperative in going along with some "best practices"
posted somewhere.

This may be especially true if you are finally attracting more women. I'm
female and I've spent a lot of time in online communities where the majority
of members are female. The culture is very different from male dominated
online cultures. It's been a bit disorienting for me to try to figure out how
to effectively participate here. I consider it a growth experience and I
expected to have to adapt. But not everyone will show up with that
expectation.

------
xtho
I don't see this a problem because most only few posts on the front page have
that many comments. I find troll comments mostly in the discussion thread of
posts with 100+ comments, which are rather rare. What I find more annoying are
low quality blog posts that are actually spam in disguise.

------
nailer
HackerNews succumbed to mob rule some time ago.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=935085> \- a response consisting of 'I
disagree' with no additional content - is currently sitting at 6.

------
rms
I disagree with the premise of this post. A lot of people making stupid
comments do care and just don't understand the nature of this site.

The comments can still be killed, but it's a mistake to not give people a
chance to change their behavior.

------
gouki
I'm a new user to this website, but I've notice the level of integrity and
consistency on the comments. It's actually the reason that made me select this
"community" and not others like Digg/Slashdot/whatever.

The users are the strong point of HN, and losing that would not be good at
all.

I say +1 for invitation based system. Also, users could have a more active
role on moderation. Just not sure how, exactly.

~~~
prawn
On invitations, who would have invited me to read and participate? I live and
work overseas and don't know anyone else that uses HN. I would feel too
intimidated, and as though I were begging, to approach an existing user to ask
for some sort of endorsement or invitation.

How might it work?

I think HN could do worse than add an intro guide for newcomers that carefully
explains the difference between this and other sites the newcomer may have
experienced before. e.g., a big difference IMO is the lack of playing for +1
Funny as is done on Slashdot. "Like Slashdot, but with just Insightful and
Interesting." ;)

------
dan_the_welder
You have to teach the culture you want to see.

My pet peeve is repeat submissions. I'd like to see a primary source
focus.With news that's difficult as many outlets break the same story more or
less simultaneously.

I get annoyed when I see something for the second or third time from different
source, sometimes weeks later after it's made the rounds of the blog-o-sphere.

------
chasingsparks
I've actually stopped casually referencing or recommending HN in a silly
attempt to guard it. (Note, I don't mean this in the "this band was great
until they sold out and got popular" way.) I'd actually be happier if the
number of users regressed.

------
ErrantX
I have to confess I haven't noticed a huge increase in replies to trolls and
so called back slapping

Not that there aren't problems; I just haven't seen this specific one as being
the biggest myself

------
lleger
Agreed. I've always been a fan of the intellectual and enlightening
conversations here. It's really the main reason I keep coming back.

------
polynomial
Couldn't help but notice this is by far the most commented post on the front
page, and by an order/magnitude more than most others.

------
noodle
doesn't this submission seem to violate the principles that its suggesting? or
is it just me?

~~~
sp332
It's just you. Trolls abuse attention, which is why you should ignore them.
People who feed trolls are just misguided, it's OK to talk to them.

~~~
noodle
fair enough, but would that also mean that its ok to reply to people who reply
to trolls in the threads?

~~~
tptacek
Please don't; it compounds the problem. If you do, can I suggest that you say,
"I'm going to delete my comment in a little while. Can you delete yours?"

------
iterationx
I'd like to see people stop commenting with "I upmodded your post because"

