Comment by CM30 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CM30 | Hacker News Reader

Some interesting points here:

> Though political issues in the US may appear polarizing, the politics section has one of the lowest rates of post flagging, similar to tech.

That's baffling. Though if I had to give a possible explanatation, maybe it's because people expect worse in a political debate? Maybe being a troll has become normalised in political discussions?

Hence less people would flag comments considered trolling elsewhere?

Honestly, I don't know.

> paired t-test reveals a small, but significant increase in negative behavior between 11 pm and 5 am

Presumably, people are more likely to act grouchy when tired. Might also be because of time zones though. I mean, maybe trolls like staying up to late to argue with people on the other side of the world?

For example, a European troll might like to stay up late to get into fights with American users. Or vice versa.

> Figures suggest that negative behavior can persist in and permeate a community when left unchecked

This is a fairly well known point as far as community management goes, but yeah. The more a site allows trolling (or flame wars, or spammy content, or anything else), the more it spreads on the site. This is also why webmaster forums crash and burn so quickly on a quality level. Because once one user gets away with posting meaningless fluff, you suddenly start to see more and more spammers and one line posters appearing.

Just some thoughts here.

I think tech happens to avoid trolls because trolling tech really only happens when someone who's a little clueless asks a dumb question. How many "How do I do (x)?" questions get a "rm -rf /" as the response?

Politics is probably because people take serious positions that may as well be trolling.

> Though if I had to give a possible explanatation, maybe it's because people expect worse in a political debate?

There are very few people who are interested in actually moving something in politics who read the comments. It's also a very loaded question, because any flagging in politics sections usually gets a huge crowd yelling about "censorship".

>> but significant increase in negative behavior between 11 pm and 5 am

I'm sure it's pure coincidence that this roughly coincides with the work day in Eastern Europe.

>Presumably, people are more likely to act grouchy when tired. Might also be because of time zones though. I mean, maybe trolls like staying up to late to argue with people on the other side of the world?

I think it's because people who don't have better things to do with their time tend to be up more often at those times. Conversely, people with a professional 9-5 job are less likely to troll and less likely to be up at 2am.

An overnight time corresponds fairly well to when a 9-5 working professional has retreated to bed with their spouse, yet sleep remains elusive. Finding themselves alone with their thoughts and fewer and fewer of their friends being still awake, I can see why some would turn to commenting, venting, or inciting on public forums, for malicious disruption or otherwise. I don't think the hypothesis you appear to draw follows from the facts at all.

Ah! The dead of night! When I once had my most meaningful conversations with my loved ones who, alas!, now turn to the sleep they did not before, for some reason we shall not dig into, for there lie dragons!

Politics doesn't get flagged because people on general love to fight about it. We love to humiliate, mock, gotcha, and insult the adversaries, and banning them deprives us of that pleasure.

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