Papeer logo
ExploreHubPricingPrivacy
https://web.archive.org

Scaling The K5 Community || kuro5hin.org

The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20090522061059/http://www.kuro5hin.org:80/story/2004/3/19/18454/0987

[[P]](https://web.archive.org/web/20090522061059/http://www.kuro5hin.org/print/2004/3/19/18454/0987)**[Scaling The K5 Community](https://web.archive.org/web/20090522061059/http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/3/19/18454/0987)**

By Driusan in Op-Ed

Mon Mar 22, 2004 at 12:10:01 AM EST

Tags: Kuro5hin.org ( all tags)Kuro5hin.org

Once upon a time K5 was a happy little democratic community doing happy little democratic things, run entirely by the users. Users submitted stories, users decided what stories get posted, and users rated comments and everything was just great and peachy. Then K5 grew, and K5 grew, and K5 grew, and the happy little democratic community started to break down, and rusty had to step in to fix things.

Once there was a story called Cunt in this happy little democratic community. This was before the edit queue, so as soon as it was submitted to the queue everyone was able to vote for it. It was a pretty good, well written article, so once the users starting voting for it, it became pretty obvious that it was going to make it to the front page. Rusty decided that the title was inappropriate and renamed it to "Profanity Reconsidered", which is the name that it wound up going to the front page under. Why am I telling you this? Because its the first time I can remember rusty stepping in to change the content on K5 against the rest of the community will. It caused a pretty big controversy at the time, and I bet you either weren't here or had completely forgotten about it.

More recently K5 continued to grow, and grow, and grow and then the trolls came. People complained about them and how they were ruining K5 and how the signal-to-noise ratio was hurting and how something had to be done about them and oh god won't somebody please think of the children? and life went on, and the comment rating system pretty much took care of them.

I'm not sure if at some time rusty took an active role in censoring the trolls, but recently he decided to remove the posting privileges of one, which is causing a bit of controversy in the diary section. The responses predictably fall into two categories:

  1. Censorship is evil! Rusty shouldn't be deciding who's allowed to speak.

  2. Who cares? He was a troll, he was detrimental to the site.

Even if you fall into category two, I think you'll agree that there's much more than one troll on this site and unless rusty spends the rest of his days sitting at his computer, removing posting abilities from various users the "problem" isn't going to go away.

So how do we fix the problem? Is there even a problem? Was rusty right to remove Michael Jackson's posting privileges? Obviously your answer to the second two questions will effect how you answer the first one, but I'm going to propose a few solutions to the first question in the hope that the rest of you can come up with some more, and maybe even wind up with a solution that makes everyone the least unhappy.

Solution 1: Ignore User

This is the obvious solution which most of you probably come up with. Its pretty self-explanatory: give users the ability to ignore the postings from other users that they consider trolls. In a way it's a milder version of letting rusty delete all the trolls, because it still amounts to censorship; the only difference is it's a form of censoring the information that you intake, without forcing your opinion on other people.

Personally, I think this is a horrible idea. I think we have enough bias and groupthink here as it is, and the ability to ignore users won't help that any. You have no fundamental human right to not be offended, and I don't think you should either. Your ability to ignore other users means that if you decide to ignore someone because you don't like them, the rest of the community doesn't get the benefit of seeing what happens when the two viewpoints collide. If all the socialists start ignoring all the libertarians and vice versa (for instance), this will quickly degenerate into a very boring place to have any political discussion.

It's possible (likely, even) that I'm overly cynical of peoples'   abilities to tolerate dissenting views, but what happens to the rating system already in place if the ignore user option is implemented? Let's assume that you manage to get all the trolls, crapflooders, their dupe accounts, and whatever else you don't like ignored. Now they keep posting, and there's no one left to rate them. Anonymous users come to K5, and now all the content is lost in even more noise, because all the people who would have rated the comments lowly before are now just ignoring them.

Solution 2: Form Cliques

This idea might require some modifications to Scoop, but I think it would be a pretty neat experiment to try.

The idea is based on accepting the fact that communities will never be able to scale very well, and instead trying to make the website consist of many smaller communities. In real life this already happens on an informal basis when large groups form. They pretty quickly break down into cliques, hence the name of the idea.

In the K5 version of this what would happen is the website would try and identify what posters you tend to read and converse with the most. K5 would then highlight any posts or stories made by them so that no matter how many trolls come along they'll never get lost in the noise. This could either occur on an individual basis, or it could be arranged so if someone is in your clique it would also mean that you're in their clique. In the latter case you could also belong to many different cliques, and they would each be highlighted differently. The members of your clique are likely to have similar opinions to you when it comes to ratings too, so their comment ratings would be given higher priority when the decision is made on whether to hide or show a comment. As a result of this the people you're not likely to want to see will be culled out, and the "troll problem" disappears (assuming you have your comment preferences set to hide hidden comments.)

Solution 3: More Democracy

If you think that rusty is right to remove the comment abilities of trolls but will never be able to keep up, then this solution is for you. The idea is that we, as a community, get to vote on what permissions other users have. If you decide that Michael Jackson or Hide The Hamster is a nuisance to the community, then you simply vote for them to not be able to post anything. If you think that drduck is abusing his rating privileges, then you vote for him to not have them. If enough of the users of the website decide that a user is abusing his privileges, then they lose them. It has the same effect as rusty going and doing it (i.e. we still have censorship), but at the very least it only occurs if the entire community decides that someone is a problem, not at one arbitrary person's discretion.

The direct democracy approach does, of course, have its drawbacks. What happens when people start making multiple accounts and then vote away your ability to vote? Well then there's not much you can do within the democratic system. In theory dupe accounts will be spotted and lose their privileges, but in practice who knows how it would work?

GET A F*CKING LIFE, FAGG*T.

GO WORRY ABOUT THINGS THAT MATTER, LIKE THE FACT THAT YOU'RE PROBABLY A HUGE LOSER.

THE WEAK AMONG US CLAMOR ABOUT ETHICS BECAUSE IT'S THE ONLY CHAIN THEY HAVE LEFT TO SHACKLE THE STRONG.

is too lazy to lift a finger to do anything around here. Lucky for him he happens to know other people who unlike him don't have a severe allergy to work.

Recently, it is believed that rusty asked hulver to step in and save K5, even though hulver is probably rusty's most outspoken critic. From what I understand hulver refused the offer since he doesn't want to suit up in the 11th hour to try to save this fiasco of a website.

I myself have been a strong rusty supporter up until now, but enough is enough. I think we need radical changes around here, and start getting rid of the old guard and yes-men that have made this once-proud website into the single biggest joke on the entire internet.

I wonder what goes on in Rusty's mind ( 2.55 / 9) ( #6)

by JChen on Fri Mar 19, 2004 at 06:53:24 PM EST

each time he opens and scans the latest bill from the K5 ISP?

Let us do as we say.

Metafilter is about the best web link site. There is not much trolling there. And the way they've done it appears to be to not let new people in. It's a bit harsh, but it's worked.

Why not try something like that here? Why not make it so that you can't get an account for a week. Change the system so that you have to post x times or post x number of diaries before you can get post an article.

The other problem with K5 is that it takes time and effort to write something decent. How many of you have written an article that isn't MLP? I tried once, and the article was slammed in the edit queue, which was legitimate. But, what it comes down to is writing even a decent MLP requires effort, and there has to be some reward. If the site runs well, and even now, the reward is good responses and knowing that you've written something that gets a lot of responses. As the site is now, clearly people have left and gone to Husi, Orkut or where ever.

In other words, why not have a hierarchy? If you look at some open source projects this is exactly what happens. Linus has people who check submissions for him, and it goes gradually up. K5 does not seem to do this, perhaps I'm wrong. It seems that is rusty and one or two other admins, and then the rest of us, but perhaps that needs to change.

Some of the trolls would hopefully stay, Tex, James Joyce and a few others are actually funny. But if they went overboard they'd get kicked off and have to wait a while before coming back. The only problem with this is that it would require people to watch the place. Would enough people volunteer? It would also require changes to scoop. Again, would there be enough volunteers?

its a website run by one guy, and he decides when/if  things change around here.....

I've been around long enough to know that many many many great ideas have been passed around and nothing was ever done, much less discussed by the admins...

its futile, trust me,.....

  • Query by aphrael, 03/19/2004 08:15:02 PM EST ( none / 3)

    • self-negating query by Wah, 03/22/2004 01:08:43 PM EST ( none / 0)

      • Yes by aphrael, 03/24/2004 01:48:33 PM EST ( none / 0)

        • oy vey by Wah, 03/25/2004 09:32:31 AM EST ( none / 0)

          • Nah. by aphrael, 03/25/2004 12:23:08 PM EST ( none / 0)

  • I just like ranting by Phil San, 03/23/2004 07:12:55 PM EST ( none / 0)

You have no fundamental human right to not be offended, and I don't think you should either.

On the other hand, what we have instead is a situation in which actions are divorced from consequences. The normal "consequence" aspect of any other social interaction, whatever that consequence may be, tends to keep obnoxious or detrimental behavior in check.

But here, the crapflooders and tossers are able to run amok with zero consequences whatsoever, and the more legitimate users suffer for it in the form of increased signal-to-noise and general annoyance.

What we have is totally artificial - a more "natural" alternative would be to allow users to impose some kind of actual consequences upon offenders, and if that consequence is "People aren't even going to see what you write," then so be it.

Most people around here are not so blithe that they would ignore any passing user who happens to have an opposing view. The problem with your argument is that the people this would largely affect aren't espousing opinions at all - so it's not as though we're censoring opinions to suit our personal fancy. It's like someone vaulting onto the stage at some sort of recital or reading, screaming incoherently at the top of their lungs, and the audience being told that they are not allowed to kick this clown off the stage and make room for the real performers, or indeed to even cover their ears to block out the babbling.

The idea is that we, as a community, get to vote on what permissions other users have. If you decide that Michael Jackson or Hide The Hampster is a nuisance to the community, then you simply vote for them to not be able to post anything.

Solutions simliar to this have been offered before. The vote threshold would have to have a fairly high limit, and each vote would have to have an expiration date, to allow for inevitable abuse of the system, but I think that properly implemented, such a voting system could go a long way to helping the situation. "Legitimate" users come here to discuss current events, technology, and other interesting aspects of society and the world, and that's primarily what the site was made for. There's no reason we should all have to put up with a small but extremely vocal group of asshats hell-bent on spewing their brainvomit all over the place just to make noise.

mirrorshades radio - synthpop, darkwave , futurepop, ebm .

I prefer trial by jury for trolls. ( 2.73 / 15) ( #33)

by waxmop on Fri Mar 19, 2004 at 09:02:45 PM EST

They can be accused, then tried by a jury, then banned. It could be fun!

I'd also like to see a 24 hour waiting period after opening an account before posting permission is turned on. It would slow down people from using the queue as a place to dump press releases.

--

Long-term consequences of Bush deficits

Solution 1: Ignore User ( 2.20 / 5) ( #51)

by glor on Fri Mar 19, 2004 at 10:30:56 PM EST

The whole thing is ridiculous to me. ( 2.58 / 12) ( #59)

by Kasreyn on Sat Mar 20, 2004 at 12:11:28 AM EST

Rusty, if trolls outnumber "legitimate" users, then doesn't that mean that trolling is the new DEFINITION of "legitimate"?

I find Michael Jackson's trolls amusing as hell, most of the time at any rate. Often the same for NIWS. Meta-humor, basically. I still don't see where you get off banning or "anonymizing" (anyone care to tell me what the heck that is?) someone's account.

-Kasreyn

"Extenuating circumstance to be mentioned on Judgement Day:

We never asked to be born in the first place."

R.I.P. Kurt. You will be missed.

Some thoughts of mine ( 2.83 / 6) ( #62)

by melia on Sat Mar 20, 2004 at 03:37:43 AM EST

Personally, I think this is a horrible idea. I think we have enough bias and groupthink here as it is

The impression I get is that this is part of K5's goal - to try and be a site without cliques and groupthink. If so, then it must be understood that this whole site is an experiment, designed to consider whether that goal scales. Besides, since the membership of the group has an effect on new entrance, K5 itself is a clique. So what's the point?

Perhaps the fundamental (and given the nature of the internet, difficult to solve) problem is one of verifying identity, or rather, preventing users from having multiple identities. Otherwise, how is it possible to have democracy?

If K5 was a democracy, what makes you think you'd like it? Maybe the opinion of the masses is diametrically opposed to yours.

Surely, as soon as we give people the ability to ignore other users, this place basically just duplicates usenet.

I think that fundamentally, the idea of "rated comments" is a good one, yet I rarely rate. Perhaps a better interface? I also think that maybe "trusted users" should never have been done away with.

I think the administrators have something of a PR problem - the impression given (whether true or not I don't know) is that nothing about K5 has changed for a long time. I'm sure just the faintest hint of activity would give the place a new lease of life. While the content is still enough to bring me back this place is really feeling a little stale. I can't pinpoint exactly why, but there's an air of neglect surrounding it. I think it's a mistake to think that putting a database behind a site means it'll run itself.

Finally, I really don't think that K5 is as bad as people make out. I suspect the quality of the stories is slightly lower than when I arrived, but how much I can't judge.

Disclaimer: All of the above is probably wrong

  • detecting dups by speek, 03/22/2004 07:44:32 AM EST ( none / 1)

    • Because by rusty, 03/22/2004 08:11:55 AM EST ( 3.00 / 5)

Saw "community" and "democratic" then went weeep-beeooooohh -1, Dump It!

Free spirits are a liability.

August 8, 2004: "it certainly is" and I had engaged in a homosexual tryst.

I want my ostrakion! ( 2.00 / 4) ( #68)

by craigd on Sat Mar 20, 2004 at 11:05:30 AM EST

Give us the ability to vote to ban other users. If most people want someone banned, away they go, just like ancient Greek ostracism.

A man who says little is a man who speaks two syllables.

I suppose we could turn kuro5hin.org into Avogato.

People who bitch about Rusty forget about Paul Dunne, though most the current readership doesn't know that Paul Dunne ever posted here. Not surprising; Paul's been gone for, what, over three years now? Christ, I feel positively ancient. His last comment was on February 1, 2001.

He deleted an obvious troll. Didn't just discourage posting it, or using heavy-handed influence to get the story voted down quick; he deleted it.

It wasn't even that bad of a troll. Some might have even called it thought-provoking, though I wouldn't. I don't even remember whose story he deleted, or what it was about, but I seem to remember thinking that it wasn't all that bad, just, well, trollish.

I've only seen Rusty delete crap, and his current band of admin-types seem to follow his lead. There's a lot of garbage on kuro5hin, and the thing to bear in mind is that Rusty (bless his heart) puts up with it, though Lord knows why.

[ random rambling | kuro5hin diary ]

Some level of super-editorship is always required ( 2.83 / 6) ( #101)

by FishBait on Sat Mar 20, 2004 at 02:59:09 PM EST

There will always be a need for one person (or a small group) to have the final say on what gets deleted. As others have pointed out, any fully automatic system will be abused.

Personally, I think that having users mark posts as "troll" is a bad idea. It doesn't work well on slashdot, many posts are marked as troll which don't deserve it. Branding certain users as trolls is also a bad idea, just downvote their comments if you think they are detrimental to the site.

Remember, there is a fine line between making a point sarcastically and trolling. Troll's can stimulate discussion as well as destroy it. Of course, really offensive stories and posts (abusive, racist, etc) should be deleted by the editors. Everything else should just be downvoted as it is now.

No. (reposted so it's topical, not editorial..bah) ( 3.00 / 9) ( #110)

by coryking on Sat Mar 20, 2004 at 05:10:51 PM EST

You are limiting your options

4.  Have a board of editors who maintain a section.

5.  Fork the site into smaller subsites, each with their own editor/moderators.

Your crys of cencorship are unfounded and inmature.  They are unfounded that most editorial control is far from cencorship, it's merely weeding out the crap.  You honstly belive that a community can scale with no editorial oversight?  Point me to a single discussion site with no editorial control that doesn't have pure crap for comments.  Here are some examples  of sites with no mechanisms for weeding crap.  I assure you that most comments to those websites are purely inflamitory crap.  You are inmature for thinking that a discussion board should be like some university debate hall where every discusses stuff in some coridal manner.  It ain't like that kid - this is the internet and any asshole can and does overrun a forum with no strong administration.

Community moderation, aka rating are a dysmal failure.  Every site that uses them attracts nothing but "geeks", cause geeks are about the only people who can figure out how to use them and have a thick enough internet skin to tollerate low ratings.  Everybody else gets pissed off that some rightous nerd moderated their braindump a "one" or "troll" cause they mis-used "its" or didn't post a page of references and leaves.  That or nobody knows anything about moderation yet the controls exist, but nobody uses them (my best example is on the largest scoop site out there - http://www.dailykos.com - the rating controls are there, but there is nary a single comment rating on anything save one or two hard-core scoop users).

I'm sorry, but community moderation and more democracy is not the answer.  Incorporating user feedback is essential, but it will not build a solid community.  You must have an editor, or a team of editors that keep a website on focus by cleaning out the crap.  To ignore this fact is to ignore the heaps of ghost-town websites ran people thought otherwise.

I'm all for Ignore User (option 1) ( 2.95 / 23) ( #117)

by Kasreyn on Sat Mar 20, 2004 at 06:54:31 PM EST

Here's why.

Responsible users who came here for discussion and not just for ME-TOO'ing will only use it to ignore egregious crapflooders and truly content-free posters. This will reduce the constantly flow of valuable contributors abandoning the site for alternatives like HuSi because of the dropping signal to noise ratio. Individuals would be able to filter out the worst of the noise, like Worker Bee's recent "what I had to eat" diary crapflood. There's no debate there, only discouragement.

Irresponsible or intellectually cowardly users will use it to block any opposing viewpoint, and will thus rapidly edit themselves out of the discussion. They'll fall silent because, as far as their eye can see, there is no discussion occurring. After blinding themselves to the site's vitality, k5 will be about as exciting to them as watching linoleum peel. They'll get bored and eventually (hopefully) leave, leaving only adult-minded debate participants.

This will naturally thin the k5 ranks substantially, but I have no problem with that. A lot of our problems are being caused by site overpopulation anyway. V will back me up on that.

-Kasreyn

"Extenuating circumstance to be mentioned on Judgement Day:

We never asked to be born in the first place."

R.I.P. Kurt. You will be missed.

Note: I didn't read much of your article, only the headings and a few excerpts. I really don't think anything you produce will be worth my time. However,

Solution 1 - What you don't realize is that they are, in fact, generally ignored now. Take a peek into any of their diaries and the only people you'll see responding is the other crapflooders. Even if a non-crapflooder responds, it is not in a sense that would make any pundit say, "wow, that guy was trolled." What they've done is mutate (in their own heads, i suppose) the very definition of being trolled. Generally, *any* response at all is considered a "bite". Even a post which solely contains "you're a witless crapflooder" would fall under their criteria of a "bite".

What I think would be nice is if the crapflooders would ignore the regular users and trolls. They essentially only interact with each other nowadays, so I just wish they would finally realize that their common bond of crapflooding is a misrepresentation to their common bond of sophomoric antics. However, for some odd reason they feel they need an audience to "troll", even though the audience never gives them any attention. Even more odd is that some crapflooders (NIWS) have even stated that they wish to destroy the audience, which is even more of a paradox (in the "why are retards so happy" kind of way).

Anyway, i think the goal should be to convince the crapflooders they really don't need others to watch them play grabass. Once they realize this, they'll be able to start their own site and post ascii art and trollaxor pieces until the cows come home.

Solution 2 - no.

Solution 3 - no. as you said, there will always be the idiots who create dupe accounts. unless rusty implements some type of measure which prevents them from registering or possibly being functional (the former being near impossible), then you'll see dupe accounts fucking everything up. to give you an idea of one crapflooders obsession, i must remind you that suicidal ideation once tried create ~95 dupe accounts to vote up some crapflood of his in the queue. I think he was caught halfway.

Remember that the crapflooders around here (Jackson, Hampster, M Moore, gangsta, etc.) hang around here all hours of the day and night, so don't think that they don't have the time or the inclination to do something massively [stupid].

I remember the "Cunt" story.

No, he shouldn't have changed the name of it, but at the time he wanted K5 to be something he could no doubt put on a resume, and with stuff like that, it wouldn't be great. Now there are other "scoop success stories" so he doesn't have to just point to the bastard child.

If you really think the troll situation is under control, you're living in a fantasy world.

There's fucking faeries (for lack of a better term) running around calling other people trolls just for shits and giggles. That's what lets you know how people truly see the site. They see it as an infestation of trolls, and thus, a "mob rule" would be deterimental.

Which is why I agree with this idea. I would like to see even more of a mob rule, with people stripping posting rights of other users for posting crap like, "-1, another god damn Bush-hating article".

Cause then it won't be intelligent discussion on here, it'll be the liberals vs. "liberals as conservative trolls". Which IMHO, is what K5 has pretty much already turned out to be.

I guess thurler is still here, but my old account, Sheepdot, is long, long, gone. And it'll probably only be a matter of time before I quit posting under this account too.

I'll keep my diaries though, those are always fun.

  • Actually by rusty, 03/22/2004 08:15:52 AM EST ( 3.00 / 6)

    • yeah by Armada, 04/01/2004 11:59:30 PM EST ( none / 0)

  • What? by LilDebbie, 03/24/2004 10:26:04 AM EST ( none / 0)

  • Scott Lockwood? by JayGarner, 03/22/2004 09:40:11 PM EST ( none / 1)

K5 recently posted a crapflooder manifesto by the GNA, and I objected to using K5 as a forum for people who want to sabotage MovableType blogs, and for hosting links to tools to DDoS those blogs. Of course I got shouted down as a censorious bastard.

So excuse me if I laugh my ass off, now that K5 is struggling with crapflooders. Serves you right.

The answer is always cool experimental technology ( 3.00 / 6) ( #133)

by digitaleus on Mon Mar 22, 2004 at 07:05:21 AM EST

This is just the outline of an idea, that will probably be full of holes. But, i still think that in principle it could work.

Essentially, rather than say "what's a good post" and "what's a bad post", say "what posts do i want to read?". and for anonymous visitors, they can read what rusty likes.

Each post has a rating, say 1-3, 2 being the default. so far so ordinary.

Then, via some computationally expensive (but not too expensive) trickery, you make a set of tuples: user-id-1, user-id-2, similarity quotient.

  • It would need to ensure fuzzy transitivity (if jim is mostly like sue, and tim is mostly like jim, then tim is at least mostly^2 like sue. when was the last time you saw/heard mostly^2 used? :P)

  • it would also help if it categorised new members relatively quickly (your first 5 moderations match exactly to this guy, so we'll start you there)

Finally, when displaying posts, rather than taking the average of votes as the score, you take an average weighted by the similarity quotient, with respect to you. Also, rather than defaulting the rating to 2, you could default to the average rating of that member's posts.

Effectively, it's bypassing the need for meta-moderation - and would allow for emergent clique-forming, even including a venerable troll clique.

Members who make multiple accounts and inappropriately vote up posts would have their opinions ignore by all but those who agree with them.

  • didn't work by Jim Madison, 03/30/2004 10:23:14 AM EST ( none / 1)

a small comment on "horrible" option #1 ( none / 0) ( #134)

by digitaleus on Mon Mar 22, 2004 at 07:12:59 AM EST

I believe that I have the right to ignore people. Electronic means of facilitating this are consquently of little "moral" concern (moral in the sens of "what does the world become if i allow this?")

I may be a shallower person for it, but I'm under no obligation to fill the world with interesting debate for your enlightenment. in practise, people who care will get into interesting debate; it's kind of like how people continue to make art even though there's no money in it :p

there will also be some groups of people who just don't get anything out of communicating, and not simply because they disagree.

K5 used to be a lot bigger. In mid-2002 is was getting 220,000 hits per day on average. That's now down to about 100,000. DailyKos is bigger than K5 ever was, averaging 320,000 in February, and has virtually no crapflooding and few trolls.

It's not the growth of K5 that's the problem. It might be the shrinking.

More likely, though, it's neither size nor trolling, just the change of demographic. Reading K5 diaries now isn't much different to the experience of being on a bus with a bunch of 14 year old boys. "You're gay! Ha Ha! No, you're a fag! Haw haw!".

Essentially, most humour, comes from a sudden release of tension. Telling a joke for instance, usually involves creating a tense situation involving sex, danger; then abruptly releasing the tension with an absurdity. Early teens, who haven't yet come to terms with their sexuality, find it a lot easier to generate this tension in their humour, just by mentioning a sexual act or detail.

Most of their comments, such as "rusty is a cocksucking fagort" are thus neither trolling nor crapflooding, just attempts at humor, which are genuinely amusing to them and their peers.

At the end of the day they're only kids, just leave them to it.

----

Coward... Asshole... from the start you kept up the appearance of objectively posting interesting links.

& make karma cumulative so that people zeroed widely and constantly die out. Crapflooders will die out, amusing trolls will live, and after a few months we can introduce some sort of new system for people to join whereas we prevent the multiply account problem.

This is the obvious solution which most of you probably come up with. Its pretty self-explanatory: give users the ability to ignore the postings from other users that they consider trolls. In a way it's a milder version of letting rusty delete all the trolls, because it still amounts to censorship; the only difference is it's a form of censoring the information that you intake, without forcing your opinion on other people.

while I believe I understand your point here, ignoring users is not censorship. You have a right of free speech but that does not obligate anyone else to listen. If I choose not to listen to you, I haven't censored you.

Censorship is imposed by an authrity. It is a third party deciding that a first party may not hear a second party.

Look, IT'S GODDAM FUCKING SIMPLE RUSTY ( 2.00 / 5) ( #145)

by Wah on Mon Mar 22, 2004 at 11:41:19 AM EST

If I can find and link 10 threads by a user that a rational person would consider to be 'useless trolls' that account should be banned and that IP address blocked (or alternate means of public humiliation, see below).  If they continue such conversations over time it really becomes obvious whether or not outlandish comments are merely sarcasm, or useless drivel. Some people have shitty senses of humor, no doubt, but it crosses a line here more often that is useful.

If that user comes back and continues the same behaviour, he/she/it should be banned again.

If that person has so much time on their hands, and is so unhappy with themselves they come back a third time and continue with the same behaviour..ALL EFFORTS SHOULD THEN BE DIRECTED TO IDENTIFYING THE REAL NAME, LOCATION, and PICTURE OF THAT PERSON.  They should then be exposed and publicly riduculed (or possibly offered free psychiatic evaluations by another member, or local clinic).  All future comments from that user should automatically include a link to the publication of said 'Real Life' information.  The troll accounts only become 'valuable' when they become 'known' (by other trolls, not users).   By including the public case and verdict on each of user's comments, they will quickly tired of WEARING AROUND A BIG FUCKING 'T' ON THEIR CHEST.

We should make a section for it.

No, I'm not fuckin' kiddding.  The reason this site has such a problem with trolls is that Rusty is a fucking pansy about it, and tacitly encourages the behaviour.

The reason trolls feel emboldened is a combination of that attitude and the pseudo-anonymity provided by the Net.

He finds it amusing.  If you still have a subscription, that's pretty much what you are paying for (and the bandwidth of course, the trolls use an assload of it).  It certainly isn't to pay someone to spend 4 hours a day identifying and exposing useless users.

Trying to sove this problem with software is trying to solve a hard AI problem, the frickin' Turing Test.   Can you program a computer to identify people acting like other people?  On any given subject, at any given time?

No?  Well, that's not too surprising given your lack of budget and dedicated resources.  Here's a crazy idea.

Why not just do it yourself every now and again?  Nature built a hell of an AI (well, more just an 'I'), why not use it?

--

sometimes things just are that way and that's it. They're true.

Sure, Popper, et. al., may argue otherwise, but they're dead.

You get it? Yet?

Simple to implement and almost entirely without bad sides. "Ignore user" would be good.

An extended possibility might be to have a check box that lets me ignore all users that are ignored by more than x other users. This makes us able to benifit from others in the group.

OTOH if my "extended feature" is implemented, it might then be possible to create a zillion fake accounts and ignore a user to death.

Hmmmm...

There aren't many actual trolls on this site.  There's a lot of smart asses on this site.  They write smart ass comments primarily for the amusement of other smart asses.

Is there a smart ass problem?  Well, it's a matter of perspective.  If the smart asses like the site and like each other then K5 doesn't really have a problem.  There's plenty of sites on the internet.  K5 is good for being a smart ass and having stupid fun.  Husi and LiveJournal are good for talking about your feelings.  Slashdot is good for technology stories.  DailyKos and the Free Republic are good for talking politics.

In fact, since K5 caters to these other needs better than anyone else K5 is the most well rounded of the discussion sites and the others have a problem accomidating smart asses.

And to be perfectly honest, I think K5 has a problem with having too many meta articles.  They're just stupid for the most part.

I'm like Jesus, only better.

Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free grassroots news hour

or eliminate comments altogether! (plug) ( none / 1) ( #158)

by tert on Mon Mar 22, 2004 at 02:35:50 PM EST

shortjournal.org was designed to eliminate this exact problem, partially by eliminating comments. One person's troll is another person's devil's advocate. In the end comments fall into two categories: (A) those that make no sense outside of a very specific comments -- these almost always degrade into flamewars because it becomes about the "he said/she said" rather than the facts, or (B) comments that would make just-fine stand-alone stories if it weren't for the volume problem. By limiting posting length characters we can pretty much guarantee that even if someone posts worthless drivel you aren't going to waste too much time reading it, and you simultaneously guarantee that everyone sticks to the topic they're actually interested in rather than digressing into a flamewar.

I think the root cause is not the poorly-behaved users, but rather a forum that does nothing to discourage flamewars, or encourage free discourse.

I hate to beat a dead horse, but the reason for the high "signal to noise ration" is because K5 moderation sucks.

See, over at Slashdot, it's a rare privilege to moderate (I get points about once every two weeks or so), and even then, it's only for 5 comments and only for three days.  So people use it, usually to mod up the first few comments (which nearly always have good info), or mod down the trolls.  Then I browse at +3 or higher and have a great experience.

At K5, the rating system sucks, it's not used nearly as frequently, and it's confusing - encourage what? people to read it? what's a hidden comment? how many people have to mod a comment before it shows up?  Too damned confusing.

By fixing moderation, the community will police itself.  But someone once said people don't value something that comes free.  And K5 moderation is a good example.  If I browse at a higher level, I'll miss a LOT of content.

Interesting Thoughts, But It's a Moot Point... ( none / 3) ( #170)

by cribcage on Mon Mar 22, 2004 at 06:59:39 PM EST

I'm surprised by the number of people saying they enjoy the trollings of Joyce, Jackson, Moore, Tex, Hamster, etc. I didn't realize that self-respecting posters actually paid attention to these antics, let alone considered them valuable. I guess you learn something every day.

Personally, I don't understand why Rusty bothers. Every few weeks, he deletes someone's account, or suspends someone's privileges. But it's always an isolated event, usually affecting a single user. If he wanted to fix the problem, he'd simply eliminate the few dozen accounts we all know to be trolls, and institute a few IP blocks. I can understand why he doesn't choose to do this -- but I don't understand continuing to block individual users. It never achieves anything, yet he keeps doing it. There's an old adage about that being the definition of insanity.

I think K5 is probably lost to those who would like to see it as a legitimate discussion site. Consequently, I suppose if the trolls can make it their corner of the 'net, then maybe we should wish them well.

It's a shame. K5 provides a good model for people of diverse interests to share their passions. Every so often, a wonderful article will still pop up in the queue. And although K5 hasn't gotten so bad that worthwhile articles will automatically be voted down, the discussions are quickly tainted by quips from children about bathroom humor, or how Saddam gassed his own people.

If Rusty wanted to fix the site, I think he'd have to block dozens of users, permanently. He'd have to seriously revise the moderation scheme, to prevent trolls from nullifying legitimate "hides" (and vice versa). The current audience would have to be tailored, and that would require altering the mechanics of the site. And frankly, since I don't think Rusty cares enough to bother, I don't see much point in even brainstorming the idea.

My two cents.

crib

Please don't read my journal.

First, bring back untrusted users. Everyone with karma below 1 is untrusted and doesn't have voting/story posting/diary posting privileges. Now all new users start untrusted. Presto, no more problem.

Now: why does this suck? I know all moderation schemes have to suck, i'm just not really sure why this one does...

---

When free speech is outlawed, only criminals will complain.

I got banned.

I am Arduinothor The Vile

I have had a story hit FP. You can't say that I do not contribute.

I am banned. I am muzzled. No comments. No stories. No diaries.

Arduinothor The Vile

- I rest my case.

  • I'm sorry? by tiamat, 03/23/2004 09:54:45 AM EST ( none / 0)

I think trolls can be quite interesting. Well done trolls can be quite effective. The problem comes from crapflodding. We could have users who get too many of their comments zeroed kicked off k5. New users should have to get at least a few comments rated up by users above certain karma. New users, who haven't achieved a certain karma wouldn't be allowed to rate comments.

We perfect it; Congress kills it; They make it; We Import it; It must be anti-Americanism

First, Rusty as one of the editors is responsible if someone posts shit on this site if this shit is legally crap too. So Rusty or someone will always have the privilege of deleting something.

I think making vote -1 equal "ignore postings from this author", combined with an accumulation and evalution of the votes a user gets is a good idea for finding out who is a pest.

To prevent people from rejoining under a different name and posting the same crap, it would be interesting to have a filter, maybe a bayesian, that filters out crap (like GNAA, three of four keywords should be enough to filter such a post). But I realize such a filter may be too complicated to make and deploy on kuro5hin right now, esp. if you want it fully automated.

To take the load of the editors, trusted users could be given the option to read and unhide hidden comments, but I really don't believe unhiding would happen often.

Moderation in moderation is a good thing.

This is a policy and enforcement issue. ( 2.40 / 5) ( #207)

by ninja rmg on Tue Mar 23, 2004 at 02:29:34 PM EST

Rusty needs an explicit policy on crapflooding ( not trolling -- they are different and trolling must be protected in the interest of free speech). That policy must be strictly and fairly enforced. If this means Rusty getting more volunteer editors, then by golly, that's just what he'll have to do.

From the Post Comment page:

Spamming is not tolerated here. Any comment may be deleted by a site admin, and all spammers will be deleted. This is fair warning. If you don't know what spamming is, then you're probably not about to do it, so don't worry. But you can read the definition in The Jargon File if you were wondering (particularly number 2). :-)

This message is extremely unclear. The Jargon File definition of spamming is very broad and very different from what most people think of when they hear the word "spamming." Now clearly (to me), crapflooding is spamming under the definition given, but that isn't clear enough (to most people) right now.

This can be fixed very easily. Ammend the message on the Post Comment page as follows:

Spamming and crapflooding are not tolerated here. Any comment may be deleted by a site admin, and all spammers and crapflooders will be deleted. This is fair warning. If you are unsure of what is meant by "spamming" and "crapflooding," you are probably not about to do it. You can find out exactly what we mean here.

Or something like that. Incidentally, as an expert on the subject, I'd be happy to write up a full definition of crapflooding with examples for inclusion in the FAQ. I think it would be best to use the obvious definition of spamming, rather the Jargon File one.

Also, the same needs to be done for diaries. The current message gives a _carte blanc to crapflood.

This is your diary. There are no rules, you can post basically anything you want here. This is your spot to tell the rest of the community what's on your mind, or what's going on in your life, or just anything really.

Unlike the rest of the site, this area is not subject to peer review, so don't fear the voting masses. Just tell us what's up with you.

Please Note: There's no strict rule on how often you can post diaries, but please be aware that your diary will show up with everyone else's on the Diary page, and it's considered bad form to post more than two in a day. Please be considerate of others with your posting.

First of all, there are rules. If you page widen, you're gone, etc. This gives the people who get nailed for doing stupid shit ammunition to come back and claim they've been wronged. That is a bad thing. It needs to be clear that there are rules and those rules must be made clear. In particular, no crapflooding.

Second, there needs to be a strict limit on the number of diaries per day, but it must be enforced by editors, not software. Posting multiple diaries per day is simply a cagey form of crapflooding -- we've seen it with Spencer Perceval, many of the recently deleted crapflooders, and with the "college class" that posts diaries all the time (which I happen to know is just an elaborate crapflood). Such activity drives away real diarists.

Finally, action needs to be prompt. Warnings just cause commotion. They are not necessary. Those who feel they've been treated unfairly can simply email the editors. As long as the editors are reasonable people, this will work fine. Rusty likes to give people the benefit of the doubt, even if what they are doing is clearly and obviously in violation of the rules (for example, there was a guy a few months back who posted nothing but ads for his marijuana mail order site for three days before Rusty even said anything, and even then it was only a warning). That needs to stop. Benefit of the doubt is an invitation for exploitation -- it is only for borderline cases, not clear violations.

I realize people like to think this place has no rules or whatever, but that only works when no one is fucking things up. Now people are. If you want to regulate the site (and I think people see the value of doing so), then in the interest of fairness, there must be clear cut rules and even application of them. So far, there has not been. That needs to change. Normal users won't even have to worry about these rules anyway -- it will just like normal. It's just miscreants like myself and a few others who might run up against them.

... that was too long...

First I think that it might be a good idea to have more than one way to read the comments posted, each using different metrics, here are some suggestions

  1. Seeing all comments, for those that like no filtering.

  2. Filtering based on moderation for the post only.

  3. Filtering based on moderation + global karma of the posting user + karma based on how much the viewing user has liked or disliked previous posts of this user. If this were done by having an automatic adjustment of coefficents of these three variables based on the number of child posts it generates from different users, you could have a system that allows for people who disagree to see each others posts, debate the points and still keep the troll posts seen to a minimum, if you really wanted to be flash you could throw in a random serendipity factor or use some cute adaptive algorithms like simulated annealing.

I think banning people might be counterproductive, the trolls are as likely to be vindictive and create more accounts as slink away, I think if the last filtering option could be made to work trolls could troll to thier hearts content, and never really be seen by the rest of the community.

Once a bunch of assholes decide to troll or crapflood or in some other way render a forum unuseable for people intrested in legitimate discussion, there are two possible outcomes:

The trolls/crapflooders/etc. will get bored (or find another target) and leave.

or

The forum becomes a wasteland of useless noise.

And if 1 doesn't occur, no amount of administrative action will prevent 2; at best, administration can only delay #2.  And, as often as not, administative action against the assholes only causes them to redouble their attacks.  Witness the wasteland that is usenet thesedays.  Or, a bit closer to "home", just how much have taco's efforts, over the years, have done to eliminate those who would disrupt slashdot?  Little to nothing.

If you implement strong moderation (that, for example, can hide a comment), the trolls/crapflooders/etc. will simply moderate each others' comments up; or use dupe accounts to do the same.

If you implement killfiles/bitchslaps/etc. they'll just use said dupe accounts to post.

If you ban accounts, they'll use dupes.

If you ban IPs, they'll use proxies.

If you add the domain linked to in brackets after a link, they'll use HTML tricks to send people to goatse.cx anyway.

If some prude gets goatse.cx taken off the web, they'll recreate it in ASCII-art, and post that.

Really, I hate to be pessimisitc.  I hate to sound like a "K5 is dieing" whiner.  And, honestly, I *DO* have enough faith in Rusty to believe that he'll be able to delay #2 long enough that I'll still be able to enjoy K5 for some time longer.  But much of what used to make K5 special is already gone.  And the outcomes of the battles against those who would ruin other forums, such as usenet and slashdot, don't exactly leave me with much hope that it is possible to overcome such a determined attack by those who would seek to ruin K5.

cya,

john

Imagine all the people...

All I want is a killfile and a delay on posting for accounts.  This wont fix every problem, but boy it would go a long way for my own sense of well being.

I dont care if it causes factions and cliques in, i dont want to hear from certain people ever. Ever. ever.

I agree with you that "ignore user" would be a bad idea. You'd just have a bunch of wankers patting each other on the back, agreeing with each other.

A "clique" wouldn't work either. I'd want to be in the clique with dickheads like James AC Joyce and kitten, BECAUSE I DISAGREE WITH THEM.

Every time they speak I immediately lunge at the reply link to abuse them, but then, I stop. I have to actually THINK about why I disagree. That's why I like this site. People here make me think. I don't always agree, but I want to here what they have to say.

Of course, they probably wouldn't want me in their clique, because I call them dickheads, so that idea wouldn't work.

To be honest, if you can't just ignore someone you think is crapflooding, there's something wrong. K5 has nowhere near the crap other sites do. And if you don't like a story that gets posted, don't vote it up.


This sig in violation of U.S. trademark

registration number [2,347,676.](https://web.archive.org/web/20090522061059/http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entry=75502288)

Bummer :-(

I agree with Cyberdruid. If someone is pissing you off or irritating you, select "ignore user" and the problem goes away. Hell, you could even use this to tailor your reading experience to a particular religious bent or political view. Multiple dimensions!

I would hate to see the Metafilter effect happen here. I like reading the stories at Mefi but I am just a fly on the wall there. Very frustrating when I have something to add. The upside is that the mefi subscription management system would be REALLY easy to code:

_While Kuro5hin goes through another bout of growing pains, it's time to regroup and reprogram to better handle the crowds. During that time all new user signups are closed._