|  
  
February 2008  
  
A user on Hacker News recently posted a comment that 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 of trolls.
It's an old one, as old as forums, but we're still just learning what the
causes are and how to address them.  
  
There are two senses of the word "troll." In the original sense it meant
someone, usually an outsider, who deliberately stirred up fights in a forum by
saying controversial things.  For example, someone who didn't use a certain
programming language might go to a forum for users of that language and make
disparaging remarks about it, then sit back and watch as people rose to the
bait. This sort of trolling was in the nature of a practical joke, like
letting a bat loose in a room full of people.  
  
The definition then spread to people who behaved like assholes in forums,
whether intentionally or not. Now when people talk about trolls they usually
mean this broader sense of the word. Though in a sense this is historically
inaccurate, it is in other ways more accurate, because when someone is being
an asshole it's usually uncertain 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 most important is
distance. People will say things in anonymous forums that they'd never dare
say to someone's face, just as they'll do things in cars that they'd never do
as pedestrians  like tailgate people, 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. Most of them (myself
included) are more comfortable dealing with abstract ideas than with people.
Hackers can be abrupt even in person. Put them on an anonymous forum, and the
problem gets worse.  
  
The third cause of trolling is incompetence. If you disagree with something,
it's easier to say "you suck" than to figure out and explain exactly what you
disagree with. You're also safe that way from 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 way to do it than literally making a mark on the world.   
  
The final contributing factor is the culture of the forum. Trolls are like
children (many _are_ children) in that they're capable of a wide range of
behavior depending on what they think will be tolerated. In a place where
rudeness isn't tolerated, most can be polite. But vice versa as well.  
  
There's a sort of Gresham's Law of trolls: trolls are willing to use a forum
with a lot of thoughtful people in it, but thoughtful people 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 the dominant culture. That had already happened to
Slashdot and Digg by the time I paid attention to comment threads there, but I
watched it happen to Reddit.  
  
News.YC is, among other things, an experiment to see if this fate can be
avoided. The sites's guidelines explicitly ask people not to say things they
wouldn't say face to face. If someone starts being rude, other users will step
in and tell 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 comments don't affect
your karma score, but they do on News.YC. And it does seem to influence people
when they can see their reputation in the eyes 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 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.  
  
So far the experiment seems to be working. The level of conversation on
News.YC is as high as on any forum I've seen. But we still only have about
8,000 uniques a day. The conversations on Reddit were good when it was that
small. The challenge is whether we can keep things this way.  
  
I'm optimistic we will. We're not depending just on technical tricks. The core
users of News.YC are mostly refugees from other sites that were overrun by
trolls. They feel about trolls roughly the way refugees from Cuba or Eastern
Europe feel about dictatorships. So there are a lot of people working to keep
this from happening again.  
  
  
  
  
  
**