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.
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.
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.
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.
Building a community makes sense when the community is the primary focus on the website. But when your primary focus is something else - such as sharing letters from interesting people in history - it's just not worth the effort. I think Shaun made the right choice, and I think it applies to most websites.
It's a shame because a site about sharing letters from interesting people in history will attract experts, and they will have fascinating things to say. Yet they are not heard because of all the flamebaiting and trollfeeding.
To push the metaphor a bit too far, I think it's more about people realizing they just don't want cake that much.
As you say, it's perfectly possible to build a good community if you're willing to put some work into it. People who run community-oriented sites mostly know this by now.
But a lot of sites pick up communities accidentally. Blogs tend to have comments enabled by default. Adding a forum to a site sometimes seems like a simple idea that will make users happy. Social networking features seem like a must have for some kinds of web apps, even if they aren't the main focus. And of course, these accidental communities inevitably decay until the reek of them spreads through the whole site.
I think a lot of people are remembering that they didn't actually want to run communities in the first place. They added community features because it was the path of least resistance, and now that they've seen where it leads, they're turning them off rather than sinking a lot of effort into making them work.
I'm pretty happy with the development, personally. The communities I like are going to stick around, and as for the others, well, there are more than enough places to have flamewars already.
(Disclaimer: I turned off comments on my own blog a couple of months ago. It's made me a happier person, but I may be projecting just a bit.)
Not everything needs to have a 'community'. A depressing majority of the web using public are idiots and having a no-consequence comment area just encourages them to leave their garbage for you to clean up.
All these people here making earnest suggestions about building comunities - you really should think about what went on here. Communities occur when people have something in common they care about, I doubt historic letters was ever going to be one of those. A community of people who collect historic letters? Perhaps. A community of people who just read them from time to time? Don't be so stupid.
Actually, I feel his pain. I'm sick of all the things the parent LoN post talks about, sometimes enough to want to switch off commenting on everything. Most of us have more useful things to do even if we understand that building community takes work. One trip over to a comment thread on a typical YouTube video is enough to make sensitive people lose their faith in humanity a little.
This is an incredibly insightful comment. There is simply no way to avoid the hard work of curating the community. That is the way for many valuable things, which is why they are valuable.
That said, there is a way to motivate speakers to speak well, substantially, and with respect: convince them that there's something in it for them if they do. "Reputation points" are only loosely coupled to the real prize here at HN: civil discussion between bona fide hackers about the topics we are interested in. This is very hard to find, and extremely valuable.
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.
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.
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.
I think you mean we soon found ourselves overwhelmed. He still takes discussion from people over email, twitter and facebook linked directly on the site.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A problem is that reputation-based sites require accounts, which discourages insightful blog commenting by those not ready to commit to another log-in. Bayesian algorithms can defeat most spam while still allowing you to have an account-not-required comment system, but it does nothing to stop trolls.
Although maybe you could train algorithms to detect derogatory nouns and adjectives. And you could still allow reps on individual comments and hide low comments by default, which effectively crowdsources the troll moderation. I believe I've seen sites using Disqus in a way close to this.
I'm curious what the overlap is between people willing/able to write insightful blog comments and those not willing to create a login. I would expect it to be very small.
The time it takes to create a login is trivial compared to that necessary for a decently detailed comment.
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.
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.
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.
Another problem is that gaming the system is often a faster route to a reputation than making meaningful comments.
So someone making an honest attempt to discuss unpopular opinions gets shut out but someone making relatively meaningless platitudes to the group gets cheered on.
For a small group that isn't interested in those opinions anyway it wouldn't matter, but it limits the usefulness of that reputation elsewhere.
>So someone making an honest attempt to discuss unpopular opinions gets shut out but someone making relatively meaningless platitudes to the group gets cheered on.
That's the Achilles heel of reputation moderating systems. You don't have to be insightful; you just have to play to the crowd.
I read it as he meant a pre-packed "reputation system" for forum/comment software, not necessarily that there'd be a shared reputation value for all forums.
"absolutely no bearing"? I totally disagree. A good reputation system should reward things like diplomacy, ability to form coherent posts, maturity, ability to size up a community and act appropriately, etc. All of these things should transfer, at least to some degree.
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.
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.
"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."
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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?
Uhm, the site isn't officially done yet, and I have no relation to the actual developer of it. I just follow the developer's rss feed (tynan.com) and noticed him mention that he plans to release it in the coming months.
I could point to other startups my friends are working on and they currently look horrible, but they're intended just for a few friends right now and they're thankful nobody's done a "show HN" for them yet.
Sorry if this came off as a troll, just saw someone vent about a problem that other folks seem to be attempting to be working on. I have no idea whether sett is going to actually solve the problem or not.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
If it works well for them that's awesome, but that signup stinks of elitism for me. "You can't do some simple calculus? You must have nothing to add to the discussion."
To be fair, if you can't do calculus you have no business consuming bandwidth of their quantum random bit generator. It is a limited resource (they have a fixed bandwidth at which the random data is produced), so it makes sense to limit the availability.
And if you get a problem that is too hard you can refresh a few times until you get an easy one.
I just read a story yesterday about a pilot who chopped his head off trying to hand-prop his plane. There were many terrible comments, one from a man laughing at his predicament and nominating the pilot for the Darwin Award and such, and mocking family and friends who were commenting to pay their respects.
The commenter's first, middle, and last name appeared right next to a picture of himself with his kids.
Google announced recently that it didn't. They thought it would, but it turns out that people are perfectly happy to behave awfully under their real name (or, in some cases, throwaway accounts).
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?
Look at sensationalist TV (eg, Jerry Springer or Jeremy Kyle or similar) to see people who are more than happy to have their real world identity tied to extremes of behaviour.
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
What people want:
What you have to do: 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.