Antisocial Behavior in Online Discussion Communities [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Antisocial Behavior in Online Discussion Communities [pdf]

arxiv.org

49 pointsjermaink25 comments

You will not be able to efficiently automate finding trolls with an algorithm. You may accidentally catch some trolls with it, but this is not really the same as the algorithm working - with a large enough userbase you could randomly ban accounts and probably catch a few trolls as well, given a flexible enough definition of "troll."

What you will accomplish with an automated filter is a way for trolls to game the system (that is what actual trolls do), and an excuse for human mods, if you have them, not to care (or worse, to game it themselves in order to censor legitimate posters.) "Future banned user?" How wonderfully fascistic. If you can read that term and feel it's a good way to describe new users to your whatever community, do everyone else a favor and, please, give someone else the banhammer.

Du Plessis said, give me 5 sentences written by the most honest of men and I will find something in them to hang him.

The more things change, the more they stay the same...

Better known as Cardinal Richelieu:

    Armand Jean du Plessis,
    Cardinal-Duc de Richelieu et de Fronsac

The quotation is also disputed:

    Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites
    de la main du plus honnête homme,
    j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.

        If you give me six lines written
        by the hand of the most honest of men,
        I will find something in them which
        will hang him.

Édouard Fournier, in L'Espirit dans l'Historie (1867), 3rd edition, Ch. 51, p. 260, disputes the traditional attribution, and suggests various agents of Richelieu might have been the actual author.

Source: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Cardinal_Richelieu

This is astonishingly stupid. It's also time to retire the word "troll", it has become so bastardized that its use shouldn't be taken at all seriously anymore.

Care to explain why? Right now you're just making an unbased statement. Please clarify!

It is a poorly understood term people use to shoot down unpopular opinion. This is so common. Here is one from last day where a user is accused of being a troll for criticizing the new StarWars trailer.

http://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/32yudu/furious_7_cro...

Another example is my experience from /r/php. If you go there and criticize the language, you will be called a troll and will be eventually labeled as such. People are emotional, and they will use terms like this when their beliefs are threatened. It is an easy response. In a while, everything you say will be, by default, down voted and even lead to a ban solely out of this impression.

It's not just "trolling". the text describes it as antisocial behaviour (defined as "undesired behavior, which includes trolling, flaming, bullying, and harassment").

To me it seems like detecting "trolling" could be as difficult as detecting sarcasm. It requires information about the context and complicated logic. "flaming", "bullying" and "harassment" usually follow much simpler patterns (language, targeting specific users).

Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9398399

It's not getting much love from the HN community, and has tripped the "flame war" detector - only 26 points, but 40 comments. Much back and forth, much heat, not much light.

Although, reading that thread, I don't see an actual flame war anywhere....

In a company situation you also experience trolls and you can't get rid of them, at all. To my personal surprise I find that they, between periods of stress, also contribute to the company. You just need to get around their trolling and they can be a productive part of the community.

Maybe instead of detecting them faster we should learn how to integrate them better. If they troll more when resisted (as suggested in the article) then maybe they troll less when supported? They are humans, and as humans they desire to belong, just as we do, right?

He who controls the topic filters...controls the universe!

Given the stated accuracy and such a low base rate it looks like it would yield ten times more false positives than true positives. To eliminate some of the trolls you effectively eliminate anyone outside the consensus trance. You might as well use astrology.

But very interesting to see the actual CNN, ING and Breitbart numbers.

How come so many places don't use a combination of account age and reputation to score and sort posts?

For example why hasn't Google tried this with YouTube comments?

So how long before it flags the whole of humanity as trolls, and go for the Skynet option?

The concentration of inside-the-box thinking and bullshit science in this is unbearable, I think it gave me cancer.

So was this actually written for April Fools' Day?

arXiv:1504.00680v1 [cs.SI] 2 Apr 2015

While I agree with your comment. I don't feel like this is the proper way of saying it.

Be careful, they might flag you as a troll ;)

the parent commenter isn't always constructive (I glanced through their posting history to see if the comment was just obvious satire, different from their normal style) but I still think the comment is more of a joke :)

In practice, for active human posters, as account age goes to infinity, the probability of being banned approaches one.

I look forward to an age when all comment posting and all moderation is performed by competing AIs.

> In practice, for active human posters, as account age goes to infinity, the probability of being banned approaches one.

Not necessarily?

Every man carves in history an everlasting description of who he is

Every man carves in history an everlasting description of what he has carved in history

This must imply that every poster will, sooner or later, utter much stupidity or any moderation system is deeply flawed?

In the valley of vanity, viciousness, Full schedules and empty containers. We’re kissing the coshes that cripple us. Enjoying the Beigeness.

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