Moderation

(h/t to Megan McArdle)

 

Writing for Wired, Clive Thompson discusses some ways that technology is being used to deal with nasty commentors.

 

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The world’s top discussion moderators have developed successful tools for keeping online miscreants from disrupting conversation. All are rooted in one psychological insight: If you simply ban trolls-kicking them off your board-you nurture their curdled sense of being an oppressed truth-speaker. Instead, the moderators rely on making the comments less prominent.

Patient Zero here is Slashdot, the tech site that pioneered one elegant way to police trolls: crowdsourcing. Slashdot has an automated system that randomly picks a handful of readers and gives them, for a day or so, the power to describe others’ comments with terms like “funny” or “off topic.” Those descriptions are translated into a score from -1 to 5. Readers can set their filters so they see only comments with high ratings-and trollery effectively vanishes. One academic study found that the majority of Slashdot readers filter out comments rated 2 or lower. Indeed, the concept of crowd-voting has worked so well that sites as high-traffic as the The New York Times now use it.

Here’s another hack: selective invisibility. It was invented by Disqus, a company whose discussion software handles the threads at 90,000 blogs worldwide (including mine). In this paradigm, if a comment gets a lot of negative ratings, it goes invisible. No one can see it-except, crucially, the person who posted it. “So the troll just thinks that everyone has learned to ignore him, and he gets discouraged and goes away,” chuckles Disqus cofounder Daniel Ha.

My personal favorite innovation is disemvoweling, a technique pioneered by Teresa Nielsen Hayden, who moderates the discussion threads at the geek-culture blog Boing Boing. Whenever Nielsen Hayden encounters a nasty post-an ad hominem attack, for example-she leaves it up but removes all the vowels: y r fckng sshl, for example. The result is incoherent enough that it’s neutered, yet coherent enough that no one can cry censorship. The comment hasn’t vanished.

Best of all, because disemvoweling is visible, it trains the community. “You’re teaching the other commenters what the lines are by showing them comments that have stepped over the line,” Nielsen Hayden says.

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I sometimes wish I was still in college because I think there are some great anthropology papers to be written about the way that people interact on the internet. I am routinely amazed at the false courage people show when safely in front of their keyboard and not debating someone in public. Statements that would get a person decked in person are common fare in many internet settings. I used to know one guy that would hurl all types of insults at people and then when someone would remark on his armchair bravery he would accuse them of threatening him.

As a veteran of the chatboards wars before my blogging days I know all too well how ugly things can get. I had been in some heated discussions and witnessed many more in the 3 years I spent on several chatboards. All boards have different rules and levels of tolerance for flaming and I found the best boards will not tolerate it.  I eventually turned to blogging because it gave me the ability to control the conversation and to not be at the mercy of a moderator when things got out-of-hand.

I’ve been lucky enough to not have problems with commentators here at The Big Stick, mostly because my traffic is pretty small and (hopefully) because I try to not write a lot of flame bait. Megan McArdle is now using comment moderation because she sees a lot of nastiness on her blog. I don’t think she encourages it though. Her problems come with popularity as the inevitable wackos find her. She shouldn’t have to deal with it.

The techniques above (I love the selective invisibility option) are hopefully going to bring some order to the more frequented comment pages of popular blogs. We need it if this medium is going to remain useful. To my readers: stay classy folks!