February 2008A user on Hacker News recently posted acommentthat set me thinking: Something about hacker culture that never really set well with me was this — the nastiness. ... I just don't understand why people troll like they do.I've thought a lot over the last couple years about the problem oftrolls. It's an old one, as old as forums, butwe're still just learning what the causes are and how to addressthem.There are two senses of the word "troll." In the original senseit meant someone, usually an outsider, who deliberately stirred upfights in a forum by saying controversial things.[1]For example,someone who didn't use a certain programming language might go toa forum for users of that language and make disparaging remarksabout it, then sit back and watch as people rose to the bait. Thissort of trolling was in the nature of a practical joke, like lettinga bat loose in a room full of people.The definition then spread to people who behaved like assholes inforums, whether intentionally or not. Now when people talk abouttrolls they usually mean this broader sense of the word. Thoughin a sense this is historically inaccurate, it is in other waysmore accurate, because when someone is being an asshole it's usuallyuncertain even in their own mind how much is deliberate.That is arguably one of the defining qualities of an asshole.I think trolling in the broader sense has four causes. The mostimportant is distance. People will say things in anonymous forumsthat they'd never dare say to someone's face, just as they'll dothings in cars that they'd never do as pedestrians — like tailgatepeople, or honk at them, or cut them off.Trolling tends to be particularly bad in forums related to computers,and I think that's due to the kind of people you find there. Mostof them (myself included) are more comfortable dealing with abstractideas than with people. Hackers can be abrupt even in person. Putthem on an anonymous forum, and the problem gets worse.The third cause of trolling is incompetence. If you disagree withsomething, it's easier to say "you suck" than to figure out andexplain exactly what you disagree with. You're also safe that wayfrom refutation. In this respect trolling is a lot like graffiti.Graffiti happens at the intersection of ambition and incompetence:people want to make their mark on the world, but have no other wayto do it than literally making a mark on the world.[2]The final contributing factor is the culture of the forum. Trollsare like children (many are children) in that they're capable ofa wide range of behavior depending on what they think will betolerated. In a place where rudeness isn't tolerated, most can bepolite. But vice versa as well.There's a sort of Gresham's Law of trolls: trolls are willing touse a forum with a lot of thoughtful people in it, but thoughtfulpeople aren't willing to use a forum with a lot of trolls in it.Which means that once trolling takes hold, it tends to become thedominant culture. That had already happened to Slashdot and Digg bythe time I paid attention to comment threads there, but I watchedit happen to Reddit.News.YC is, among other things, an experiment to see if this fatecan be avoided. The sites's guidelinesexplicitly ask people not to say things they wouldn't say face toface. If someone starts being rude, other users will step in andtell them to stop. And when people seem to be deliberately trolling,we ban them ruthlessly.Technical tweaks may also help. On Reddit, votes on your commentsdon't affect your karma score, but they do on News.YC. And it doesseem to influence people when they can see their reputation in theeyes of their peers drain away after making an asshole remark.Often users have second thoughts and delete such comments.One might worry this would prevent people from expressing controversialideas, but empirically that doesn't seem to be what happens. Whenpeople say something substantial that gets modded down, theystubbornly leave it up. What people delete are wisecracks, becausethey have less invested in them.So far the experiment seems to be working. The level of conversationon News.YC is as high as on any forum I've seen. But we still onlyhave about 8,000 uniques a day. The conversations on Reddit weregood when it was that small. The challenge is whether we can keepthings this way.I'm optimistic we will. We're not depending just on technicaltricks. The core users of News.YC are mostly refugees from othersites that were overrun by trolls. They feel about trolls roughlythe way refugees from Cuba or Eastern Europe feel about dictatorships.So there are a lot of people working to keep this from happeningagain.Notes[1]I mean forum in the general sense of a place to exchange views.The original Internet forums were not web sites but Usenet newsgroups.[2]I'm talking here about everyday tagging. Some graffiti isquite impressive (anything becomes art if you do it well enough)but the median tag is just visual spam.
