Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Would You Pay For Websites Without Trolls?
First time accepted submitter carbon_tet writes I read two articles this week that made me wonder: "Would anyone actually pay for a website without trolls?" The first, was about web trolls and civility on the internet, and the second about the ad-based internet. It seems that public comments unavoidably have trolls, or they degrade very quickly until someone makes a reference to Hitler. So, is it impossible to have a substantive discussion online without trolls? Would you put your money where your mouth is to have a serious online conversation without them? Are there any topics that you would talk about (or prefer to see talked about) on a website where trolls were paywalled out?
There are trolls on the Internet? What, have people forgotten how to use /ignore? Do they actually join in conversations on Internet services that don't have effective ignore/moderation systems? Well, that's your fault, then.
There are ofcourse the obvious trolls, but where does someone end being a troll, and is just someone who has a completely different view?
If someone is convinced the earth is only 5000 years old, and that [insert deity] created all other history to confuse us, is that a troll? How do you prevent just creating a forum where you "discuss" things only with people who think the same way you do, and thus without opposing viewpoints since they'll eventually get removed for "trolling"?
Dice, is this your way of testing the waters?
Many slashdotters do pay to be on a web site that is mostly free of trolls. The time people give to take part in the rating system is not free.
I have met the troll and he is us.
Trololololo
That's the basic idea behind the SomethingAwful business plan. Add a nominal fee to discourage trolls to register, and when users are banned. It worked pretty well until the place was flooded by millennials. Now you can't tell the trolls from the users.
No one wants to talk seriously online to total strangers. Where's the value add? These people aren't part of your social network and with the relative anonymity of posting online, they won't be. Back in the Fido days, we'd actually know the other posters in our net and might meet up with them on a regular basis. Where's the tie-in here? It's no wonder that it's all trolling, all the time.
Only a special environment composed exclusively of people from a real life community of interest could possibly overcome this.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
There's probably a free firefox extension that disables comment sections.
Unless you want to live in an echo chamber, trolls are just something you have to learn to deal with. Besides, there's no such thing as an "anti-dickhead premium," because no matter what, if you're having a discussion with any significant group of people, it's pretty much guaranteed one of them is going to have a different enough opinion that you're going to want to stick that "troll" label on them.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Metafilter is one time pay (5 dollars) and is moderated by a paid staff who do a very good job. I think the model works well, and I happily paid my one time fee.
We are the tough geeks and will browse into that rough patch on the interwebs to get our fix of data.
We will risk malware and viruses to pirate the latest films.
We will walk into a biker bar and call the biggest pagan mother fucker a gay little bitch.
Oh wait, maybe not that last one.
Seriously though.. what is considered a troll, or offensive is subjective. If I do not want imposed censorship, I sure as shit am not going to pay for it directly.
Silence is a state of mime.
Sometimes they can have serious points.
Okay, so a troll is someone who tries to bait people into a conversation. But they may get listed as such with most, but a few, seeing the point.
Slashdot's system fixes this, by modding them down. But some people search at -1, even some mods, so there's hope. Slashdot's system is the solution I think. No need to pay.
Now, to pay to remove ads, that'd be a good idea too. Not sure how many would do it though.
Take back the name Hitler. Name your children...
Henry
Ingrid
Tyler
Lisa
Emily
Roy
however putting up a requirement for 2 step verification of identification would stop a lot of trolls quickly. Anonymity has it's price.
This is a record. Godwin's law before the comments!
http://xkcd.com/261/
One site I participated in had a great way to deal with trolls. Once your rating became negative enough, you were put on a global /ignore and no one saw your posts except yourself and others with equally negative reputations.
Slashdot could significantly reduce trolls by just making everyone login to comment.
Keep the ability to post as an AC but make these changes.
1. You still take the karma hit to your real name when you post a troll and get the good karma for good posts.
2. The ability to block the person when they are posting as an AC. The person blocking would still not know who they are blocking as it would just say AC on the blocked list.
It would not stop all the trolls but it seems like a good compromise solution for Slashdot.
BTW I do not block Slashdot ads since I want them to get paid and they have not put up any annoying video ads lately.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
... their opinions from others. On the net you can find people to agree with the most baseless and uninformed views on everything, hence "trolls".
The reality is what is a troll has so widely expanded that it has become meaningless.
Although I'm not sure 50 cents could stop Trolls, it would be enough to pay a moderator to check each single comment.
At least it would stop senseless postings that are almost as worse as Trollposts.
I would pay for such a website without trolls, sure. As an educated American with a bit of disposable income I can certainly think of worse ways to spend a few dollars every month or year. The problem is that if one is going to require payment to use the service, it will exclude a LOT of the voices that I want to hear in internet discussions. Marginalized people in my state, people from other countries, people that need to remain anonymous... the beauty of the internet is the free exchange of ideas and tremendous number of voices that one can be exposed to. Being able to pay for a website without trolls is a privilege. Unfortunately, efforts to control trolls and other voices that are deemed disruptive will (in all likelihood) exclude many legitimate voices, too. Without these legitimate voices, such sites are (probably) doomed to be generally homogeneous communities with sterile discussions.
n/t
Not everybody with a different opinion than you are not trolls by definition....
Why do all the sites feel the need to have a message board. Slashdot is OK, but the message board discussion is its thing. But for many of the news sites, these message boards are poorly managed and offer little to no insight to the articles. Just political rambling.
You don't want trolls, get rid of the message boards.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
be any trolls, wouldn't that make your reading experience so much enjoyable?
So you could be relaxed and productive as you surfed the 'net and engaged in informative and stimulating discussions with your peers.
NOW how much would you pay?
Until you can quantitatively define what a troll is, you can't do anything about it. Web forum moderators have been struggling with this question for as long as there have been online discussions.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
I would pay for a website without your fat mother.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
Betteridge headline:
No.
I didn't have to pay to post to usenet (now google groups), /, or reddit.
Only the naive (or idiots) would believe forcing people to pay would "magically" remove the trolls.
Trolling kicks ass, why would i pay to stop?
http://i.cubeupload.com/T6cyLu.png
With the exception of sites like Ars and /. comments posted are generally of a lower mentality level than the article. Save a few minutes of your life and skip the comments. Except this one.
Go SoylentNews!
Concrete example:
The Airliners.net forums are paid if you want to post something. Still plenty of trolls to go around.
I think you are asking should we pay with money via a subscription or one time payment, but its not clear. Current users of Slashdot are paying with their time and bandwidth when looking at ads.
To be honest though, I've not seen a single thing on the internet that I would be willing to pay for just to see. Yeah, I know there are many who are...but I've never been able to get my head around the idea that subscription based sites are of any real value. Add to that already cynical view of paying for any information being a stupid propisition the thought of paying to hide thoughts that you find offensive then you've really entered negative territory for the cost of wasting time on trivial matters.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
I'd pay for *bridges* without trolls.
It might keep a few out but there are people who get their jollies out of trolling and the outrage that they create and might be willing to pay a few bucks for their hobby. It's been going on at least since Usenet (mid 80's).
I do enjoy small scale discussion on Facebook. I usually limit people who can post on my comments to friends of friends and that keeps the discussions more civil and usually more relevant. Perhaps the real problem is just that the number of people who can post a comment on many discussions is just too large. There is the risk of living in an echo chamber, though. Maybe a discussion site that creates groups with a representative sample of views, etc.
BTW You are literally Hitler for wanting eliminate trolls.
Heroes die once, cowards live longer.
A site like slashdot would lose a lot of value not having trolls "weighing" in on the conversation.
Same with mass media news site, I find the comments more entertaining/enlightning than the actual contact itself !
But, it may just be me.
People like to mislabel anyone they disagree with as a troll.
This is one of the good things on this site, for the most part, the user-moderation is actually usually fairly decent.
It has its flaws though.
What I would pay for is for this damn company to open up the Slashdot comment system as a service for other websites.
Of course, that still will not fix a shitty community. The idea that moderation can somehow change bad in to good is as silly as the old legends of alchemy. Moderation won't give you gold. What will? That, again, depends. There is no "cure-all" button on fixing a websites community.
And in some cases, you cannot fix a community because it is, quite simply, a shit magnet.
I wouldn't pay for a site without trolls.
Because they always tend towards becoming shit themselves, especially the mods. (see Something Awful)
If EVERYONE was a mod, then I would consider it. (and only admins should be allowed to see IPs, who the fuck thought that was a good idea to give mods that permission?)
And I mean more like Slashdot moderation, majority votes, maximum number of votes for each category (+5, or -1), dishing out points only to various people who are active, no karma system because it is stupid and can be abused easily.
Votebanned using the same rating system, it is temporary at best. It can be reversed if more people reverse the posts score.
Only admins can perform anything above that.
You know, in a way, Facebook is the best thing to happen to web communities in years - the threads are incomprehensible and move so fast but the audience is so large that it's basically flypaper for wingnuts.
Then again, comment blockers and Ghostery make this largely a non-issue for me anyway.
People pay lots of money to troll on TV ads and run rake "think tanks." They're likely already paying people to say shit in online discussions. Some small payment per comment isn't going to slow them down at all. What it will do is send away the other commenters.
First off, no I won't pay directly for any web content. Nor will the general public at large (unless perhaps involves pron). You can remove that idea from your head right now. it won't work, because nobody will show up.
Secondly, you can't just magically fix trolling with a dumb barrier of some kind. It really takes a human to spot the difference between someone putting forth an honest opinion, and somebody trying to create chaos. Not only that, but trolls are inventive and creative, and can swamp even a seemingly large moderation team with damage to fix. So you need a surprisingly large team monitoring every nook and cranny of your website 24/7. There's just no way to do that, short of enlisting your users.
So the previous sentence is the key here: You have to enlist your users to keep your site usable. They generally want that, but they certainly aren't going to be inclined to provide a lot of help if they think they are already paying somebody else to do that job.
Right now the only decent known cure for Trolls is reputation-based postings and user moderation. Putting a paywall up front will drastically lower your moderator pool, which will just help trolls.
Doesn't SomethingAwful do this?
This recent "anti-trolls" campaign was set up to encourage governments and media sites to ban anonymity. And it definitely doesn't surprise me that it was started by the NYT.
The internet is supported by public and private companies and also by tax dollars. We already pay to have a troll-free internet.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Let me state the current definition of a troll: someone who disagrees with you. There is NOBODY out there posting stupid comments on purpose to cause arguments and screw with people. I've certainly never seen it.
Just because you disagree with someone, doesn't mean they're a troll.
When people pay for a service, they expect to have the ability to voice their opinion much more harshly towards it... therefore they will troll news harder if you ask someone to pay for it than if it was free... but that my opinion...
When did the definition of troll change from "someone who is rational, polite, intelligent, and articulate, but who deliberately advances a minority opinion or deliberately misunderstands an issue in order to enjoy the anger and argument this causes from others" to "someone abusive"?
I might, if you managed to convince me you had a way to actually hold them out - or even stop them from taking over the conversation.
I would also expect that this way would be completely fair to all participants, and not based on the discretion of some enlightened despot moderator.(I might still visit a monarch-run site, but I'd let the monarchs pay for it themselves!
Slashdot actually tries, on comments at least, with its moderation system which was revolutionary in its day. Other sites and tools, like reddit and disqus, try with considerably less effort - they prefer traffic numbers to quality. You'll have to do better than all of them. Then sure, I'll consider paying.
fuk u faget
Parent is a troll and his opinion needs to be ignored.
Seriously, he is advocating naming your kids as parts of Hitler's name.
Reading, replying to and sometimes baiting trolls (or indeed reasonable posters) is what makes internet discussion fun.
I most certainly do NOT want anyone else defining and banning "trolls". It's a very short trip from mods deciding who a troll is to mods censoring speech they don't like. I've seen that trip taken on many forums.
Only a very short list of very obviously unacceptable behavior needs to be banned: illegal material, obvious spam, and frequently repeated copypasta. There are many things I would rather not read from frosty piss to Obama's duke to grits but it's well worth reading those to be sure my own speech is free and the opinions I read are organically derived.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Can there be any such thing as a social (in the sense of having a community) where no one will strongly disagree with me? I'm sure Silicon Valley can package something like this as an app with a name ending in -ly.
No, I just stop visiting websites where trolls dominate the conversation (CNN, I'm looking at you).
kuro5hin.org requires people to pay like $5 or something to create an account. Now that site's nothing but trolls who paid $5 trolling each other to get their $5 worth.
Yay me! ^^
Paying for Troll-free websites would only encourage the growth of underground bot-based black trolling markets to "encourage" people to pay for a more troll-free experience...
Just ignore em, when they don't get the angered responses they're looking for, they wither up and die.
Why pay money when you can get the enjoyment of killing trolls by ignoring them.
Paywalling seldom works.
In the second referenced article, the author posits a micro-payment basis for supporting content as an alternative to our present all-ads-everywhere-all-the-time model. Nice idea, but a non-starter. First, for little Suzy and Grandma, "It's too hard!". Second, the free2play/piratetorrent/informationwantstobefree mindset rules out a segment that refuses to pay for anything, ever. Third, large hosting companies/organizations are much happier with a few big chunks of ad royalties than a slow, steady drip of micropayments.
As long as people are willing to sacrifice privacy and screen turf in return for "free" content, we're stuck with what we have.
A troll will troll and some will pay to troll. Trolling is a subjective thing, so unless you're willing to face a lawsuit, once someone pays to comment, you'd better have a friggin' tight description of what's allowed before you censor them or reject their subscription. Opinions aren't trolling.
No one wants to talk seriously online to total strangers.
Only a special environment composed exclusively of people from a real life community of interest could possibly overcome this.
I very much disagree with both points, especially with such a large generalization.
Many people want to educate others, share different opinions, show different motives for political decisions, etc... For example, the only way to educate people to how corrupt the US Government is, due to the lack of any real "news" in the US, is exactly by talking to strangers.
An easy to examine real life example is the anti CISPA/SOPA campaigns. These campaigns would have failed miserably if they were only discussed by, and for, techies. I remember a good amount of sock puppetry and trolling here on the topic. This was drown out by rational dialogue and people pointing out the bad dialogue which increased awareness. This reduced the bad dialogue and sock puppetry quite a bit, yet if people wanted to read the garbage that was their choice.
To answer TFAs question, the answer is "it depends on how it's done.". I believe that Slashdot, for example, should have a "User Moderator" checking moderation and correcting censorship (named horribly, I know). An example of their function would be to review any rating of "Troll/Flamebait" on a post for a named member. Any time they make a correction they should be required to input why they made their correction, and that should be in full view of the public. They should not have the ability to remove content, and of course corrections should help/harm people's Karma accordingly. I.E. a user moderating people negatively for a differing opinion should have a karma hit, just like a person moderated negatively successfully takes a karma hit.
The primary consideration is that censorship should not be happening on the scale we are currently seeing it, both on web sites and in broadcast media. We, the consumers that see it, need to keep calling it out and stop censorship attempts in all places.
Surely we can't fix all offensive posts or sock puppetry, and that should not be the point of moderation. Moderation is supposed to reward good dialogue, not prevent or remove dialogue.
If people only want to see their own opinions and get/give back slaps for sharing, well, there are plenty of Reddit groups for that.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
the forums at somethingawful.com have always been this way - you pay 10$ to create an account and if you break any of the rules you will be immediately banned without refund.
of course, you could say that the somethingawful forums are nothing BUT trolls, but the framework is there.
Many people like the trolls. It's like watching bedlam as a form of circus. What I would appreciate is mandatory country of origin attach to each post though (based on geo location).
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
I used to work on a site that was just starting up that had members only forums and it was, I think, $5 a month to be a member at the time. We had people on the forums that were decently active. I think the fee actually made people post more, because they wanted to get their money's worth. The pay-wall certainly kept out the trolls and people were very grateful to be able to have an intellectual discussion online. There was only one user who was a pain. I wouldn't call him a troll, because I don't think he was doing it "for the lulz." He probably just didn't have very good social skills and thought that constantly "proving" people would impress them with his intellectual prowess.
No.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
"Troll", like the word "epic", has been used so much that it's basically lost all meaning. If anyone says something you don't agree with, if you don't like them, etc. they are now a troll.
It's impossible to escape trolls because it's impossible to live in a world where everyone thinks you are awesome 100% of the time.
I couldn't care less about trolls. I don't particularly enjoy when a non negligible % of the posts are factually wrong, but I'd rather have this than censorship any time.
Go build your website in China, Best Korea, or UK.
Forums such as Disqus are prime examples where a discussion will quickly devolve into one about political affiliation, views on gay rights or simply, Obama. I always feel like I lost time on this planet which I will never get back having read some of them - And, I feel like I less intelligent since I probably burned a few brain cells out consuming their dribble.
Here on /., it seems the common definition of a Troll seems to be someone who has a dissenting opinion to the common group think. Sometimes, do we see the discussion turn to towards political hate speech. But, more often the the tone of comments can be very denigrating and hateful. And, one can quickly find their comments downgraded to 0 or -1 by someone who simply doesn't like your point of view.
The moderation model used by /. has worked fairly well. Still, it isn't perfect. Allowing people to hide behind the mask of Anonymous Coward presents its own dilemma in dealing with trolls. A possible solution would be to require all anonymous posts to undergo moderation by several moderators (maybe 3?) before being visible and the reasons for a moderator's decision should be listed. Moderators should see a list of posts, per article, that are being moderate downwards. Posts only viewed and acted upon by a single moderator should be made visible after 12 hours to keep a single moderator from squelching the voice of others. And, moderators, themselves, should be ranked by the fairness of their actions. Unfortunately, I don't have a good model on how to do this, just some ideas. Maybe, having other moderators approve or disapprove of the moderation action of another moderator and ranking the results might be a start? It could be done on a running averages basis - allowing people who might not have moderated wisely in the past to regain trust. In some respects, it's like the concept of Karma points but for moderators.
Requiring all posters to have verified accounts linked to their real identity is another solution. AC positing would simply be an option when posting as a verified user. It's AC to the world, but still linked back to oneself. Yes, this would mean the end of true anonymity. But, it make people responsible for their actions even when they choose to hide their identity. Combined with a fair moderator system, it would all but eliminate Trolls even in a non-payment subscriber model.
Why pay? That,s stupid when the web site already has and should be enforcing its TOS. There are pay sites that don't enforce there TOS already.My complaint is web sites refusing to monitor there own sites, requiring members to have to report violations. I mean don't there people use there own site? They have code to spy on everyone,s every move to every part of the web but dont have code to catch abusers on there own site??? Hmmmm.
Jack of all trades,master of none
Just ignore him, he wants to see the world burn!
You're not Anon if your posts are tied to your identity and can be linked simply by clicking the Block button.
And having anonymous people create an account defeats the whole point.
Pay-to-post models never work because of moderator corruption. For instance, Something Awful has long charged $10 for an account there, and ever since they've been doing that there have been questions of impropriety - there were allegations for a while that the site's creator was using SA as his primary income source and was instructing his mods to ban people who were likely to buy another account so he could keep making money.
There have also been plenty of cases of paid user accounts on websites getting banned due to moderator corruption. For instance, last year (I think it was last year, anyway, might've been 2012) there was a mod on twitch.tv who added a global emoticon (which pops up on everyone's channel, even those who are twitch partners and thus paying revenue to twitch) of his boyfriend's fursona. Emoticons on twitch mean money - they're usually a paid perk for people who subscribe to various channels and controlled by the channel owners, who upload their own. A lot of people were (understandably) upset that this guy had bypassed the usual restrictions on adding things like global emotes and was giving preferential treatment to another user simply because they were romantically involved. There were hundreds of bans issued by the offending mod against anyone who dared speak out against him, even in the most non-offensive of terms (people posting the evidence showing that the moderator and the user were romantically involved). Twitch backed him up, but eventually relented after a bunch of their partners threatened to leave.
Paid forum accounts are a surefire way to attract corruption, and even if they don't, the spectre of it is always there - that the bans being issued may not be done for a reason, but to make money for the site's operator.
Free speech is in the constitution
also I don't trust the owners of this site, they might implement that god-awful BETA
What if the trolls also paid
not all AC;s are trolls
In Soviet Russia Snowden trolls YOU
Trolls will even pop up in small communities of 20 or less given enough time. All it takes is someone convinced enough in their view, at odds with the majority in the community, and stubborn enough to stand their ground and ignore rational argument (common among people backed into a corner). Human nature creates trolls, ananymity only makes the problem more visible.
I wouldn't pay shit for "my web". It's free, everybody can do whatever he/she/it pleases. If you don't like a certain person don't pay attention to them or take care of them if you have higher privileges.
Paying for yet another "service" is out of question for me. It's the same thing with ad's and adblocker, we don't want your fucking ad's, we don't want your fucking "services" and no vevo I won't watch
your bitch ass censored videos either.
How does a paywall tell the difference between a "troll" and someone who is legitimately just retarded?
It's quite hard to say when the stupidest argument you can imagine has already been said verbatim by a "representative" of whatever idea is being mocked.
Hell, the entire "Social Justice Warrior" branch of Feminism started as a joke. It became self-aware.
What is the difference between a "troll" and some rabid mainstream neo-fem who does actually go around insisting that all sex is rape?
Apparently $5/mo.
I wouldn't pay, nor consider taking part in even if it was free, for a website where the general community is of such low standard mentality that they can't control their feelings/emotions/sensitivities and manage trolling through willpower, rationality, comedy, or any other way than crying and making a mental fit.
First, you can't deliver on your "no trolls". Even if you somehow manage to precisely define trolling, the only way to deal with troll is by moderation.
Second, paid models inevitably fail. People don't see the value in subscription services, when inferior yet free products are available.
Part of the reason I read comments is to read comments by trolls. They can be so funny.
Hasn't this been tried before? Something Awful is filled with trolls, and posting privileges are already behind a paywall.
When "Disable Advertising" is off, all I see are a bunch of blank boxes with Flash Player logos on them. Flashblock and other browser features or extensions that make plug-ins require a click to play are probably the most effective ad-blocker that isn't specifically an ad-blocker.
I seen some places fall apart due the userbase corrupting the moderation with their own visions of "troll" and "wrong", and turning the site into pretty much a dystopian place full of rules, where you could be banned for a simple misspell or disagreeing with the mass.
This may sound like "the ideal place" at first, but the harsh limits make the place very boring very quickly.
The ideal scenario is a place where trolling don't work, the ol good "don't feed the trolls", or a place that ridicularize em effectively when just ignoring don't work anymore.
Paying to post an opinions and suggestions won't attract a crowd. Many people are ignorant and disrespectful on the internet because they can't be identified. The real solution is for users to have an identity that follows them. This way you can label those trolls not just on one site but everywhere they go. It will force these people to adjust their online behavior. For those who believe being anonymous on public forums is a right, you are wrong. The internet is still in it's infancy and as it becomes more structured you will see major changes occur including online IDs.
There needs to be accountability for people posting garbage. If you wouldn't say it in person then you should not be able to say it anonymously online.
I used to pay for a USENET subscription* and did so happily for good service. It didn't do squat about the trolls, of course, but at least I had my own viewer and a (large) killfile that helped quite a lot. Most of the groups I read didn't have much of any moderation and that worked not too badly even with the inevitable noise and abuse inherent in a september 1993 1nt4rw3b.
This unified way to export an API and expect readers to bring their own software went away, and so you see a myriad of poor webified reinventions, all different. You don't get easy access to /ignore that way. So yes, people no longer have access to, nevermind know how to use, useful filtering to forums and comment systems.
* individual.net, right up until external circumstances made paying impossible, or I'd still be paying them.
Civility is codeword for "all who agree with me"
Any site that removes comments or participation from "trolls" would most certainly end up restricting comment from those who don't agree. Take Climate Change for example. How many news sites have stated that they won't "allow" the deniers AKA those who disagree, to post.
- A Frog in a pond utters an azure cry. -
No, I wouldn't pay a single penny.
See, I'm reasonably mature, and if someone says something that I don't like, I can choose to ignore them or, if I feel like it, engage.
It's as simple as clicking away (or even just closing my eyes).
Of course, this post might be labeled as a 'troll' because I'm deliberately being condescending, but that's a stylistic choice to convey that I believe someone, anyone, who claims to have been hooked by a troll 'against their will' needs to fucking grow up.
-Styopa
A troll is someone who writes with the purpose of provoking responses. To this end they may employ various techniques, including but not limited to unpopular opinion, insults, supporting a popular opinion but with flawed reasoning, exaggerating a popular opinion, etc. A skilled troll is indistinguishable from from an honest person who is wrong, rude, ignorant, or supports an unpopular position.
Conversely, it is certainly possible to disagree while being polite and reasonable. If a site's moderation standards are high enough, only the most skilled trolls will remain, and they will all be polite and reasonable.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
It depends on what kind of troll, a mentally defective person may think they are a troll but they are just a mentally defective person, but because they are mentally defective they don't realise they are a BBS spammer and not a troll. And then there are the trolls that everybody is grateful for because they ridicule mass hysteria the one that was posted to the British, really put them in their place: "If Diana's heart was in the right place, why was it found in the glove compartment?" When that one was first posted on AOL U.K. the chat room went quiet and then suddenly you started to see "haha" and everything went back to normal. And then there are those that are called a troll, because they have proven the person or persons to be wrong. The anti-troll trolls are megalomaniacs they want to control everybody they are not content with filtering they want total control over other people.
You're taking this all way too seriously.
I paid my $5 to sign up on MetaFilter and have been having rational troll-free discussions for years.
.... what would websites pay ME not to troll?
(OK, I'm sure that was a trollish comment to at least a few people.)
We don't need a payment system. We need a whitelist. If I see a new alias I should have the option to peek at your posts prior to adding you to my whitelist. If you're a civil human poster, I add your alias to my whitelist and I look forward to reading your comments. If you're a troll or spammer, I never add you to my whitelist and I never have to waste eyeball on your diatribe or sales pitches again.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
If you ask me all Slashdotters are morons who just haven't figurued yet out just how right I am.
That ten dollar charge stops a hell of a lot of trolling, so I'd say yes. You get banned you lose ten bucks.
The entire business model of facebook depends on people who need someone to pay attention to them.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Why are you assuming that trolls will not pay money to troll?
I don't know how many magazine sites that I go to (often science ones) where many of the comments are "blah blah made $8,500 in one week, blah blah."
/r/Python section and saying that either the 3.x version or the 2.7 version is an abomination; there are few healthy discussions on that topic.
Interestingly enough I think that it is ironic that this article is being promoted on slashdot where the worst trolls are not that bad. Usually the worst trolls here are either being deliberately obtuse or are just dumb, "Linux probably won't exist in 2016".
Unless the fees that are being spent are used to have 100's of highly skilled moderators, all I can see from a pay site is the same old crap but now with the administrators reluctant to turf paying members.
My quest is for the avoidance of group think, which most voting systems tend to reinforce. Try going to the reddit
I pay money to Metafilter - a mandatory $5 account creation fee, and now a buck or two every month since they added an option to do this. This goes in part to their fabulous team of moderators.
I also donate my time to helping to moderate a webcomics forum, because I want to have a nice place to talk about making those.
It's not so much that trolls are paywalled out, it's that there is a definite culture in place in these places that is anti-troll, with enough people wandering around the site with 'keep things civil' in the back of their mind. Sometimes a mod has to step in and delete a few posts that are turning into personal attacks, and politely remind everyone to please chill out and remember that there's humans on the other side of the screen. It works. I have had civil discussions with people who passionately believe the opposite of my views, and we have kept it polite, because both sides know they're in a forum that expects certain behavior, and that stepping outside of those bounds gets posts or accounts deleted.
(Neither of these places has a real names only policy, by the way; MeFi even has a modest cultural expectation of elaborate usernames that are unique to the site.)
egypt urnash minimal art.
Wasn't this question pretty much answered by the tepid success of sites like "The Well"? The answer seems to be: "very few will. most gravitate towards community moderated sites, while the 14 year olds go to places like 4chan".
(Top down moderation leads to a feeling of censorship, which methinks kills a site over time; as it turns off the people with the most interesting things to say.)
Removing tonality and body language from a discussion makes it completely inefficient to determine the seriousness and point of view of a speaker. If you want to have a good discussion do it in person. This solves the problem of self-created viewpoint bubbles too. At some point we need to face the fact that the internet is not a magic solution to every problem and in many cases makes all of us dumber and less human.
That idea won't be effective at all. All that this will do is become another forum for sanitized mediocre groupthink.
The problem is that on most public websites, someone genuinely posting a polite, well-reasoned yet strongly contrary viewpoint will often still get marked as flamebait or trolling just because there are apparently a surprisingly high percentage of closed-minded people that just can't abide even the existence of any viewpoint that is much different from theirs, or the social norm.
You don't even need to leave this site to find plenty of great examples of that effect in action.
If you give those people even more power, they would just delete everything that doesn't fit their wold view, so the only thing left on the website would quickly become just all the uncontroversial politically correct unintelligent mush.
I go to forums for other viewpoints, not what is already in my head, I have that, why would I waste my time?
"Troll" used to mean someone who cared more about provoking emotional reactions regardless of opinion, not "disagrees". Someone trolling would, even if they agree, post in a manner to incite a reaction in their victim.
It seems most are defining "troll" as just someone else with a differing opinion, IE, most of the population. What is worth paying for, is someone who has information I don't have yet, or an opinion that leads to a new insight that was previously lacking: constructive dialog.
However most people participate in forums purely to stroke their own ego and feel better about themselves (the same reason they pursue most activities), not to actually engage with others.
You gotta pay the troll toll http://vimeo.com/18386919
Trolls are a lesser evil. What I'd consider paying for is a website without idiots.
Hitler!
There, everyone can shut up now.
No matter what you do people are still going to troll. You can try to do everything in your power to stop it, you may be able to reduce some of it, but people will troll right up to the line you put in the sand. I don't care enough about any forum to pay for it. There are plenty of civil forums out there.
I mean, this is slash-fucking-dot and 90% of people don't seem to have a faintest clue about what's a troll. Has it been so long already?
In my experience, trolls will gladly climb the paywall to be able to troll.
So a paywall will not help a lot, methinks.
- Here's to everyone with no signature!
I would pay for websites that have highest grade trolls.
And eventual referencing to Hitler is NOT a trolling. Hitler had solution to most problems modern society is plagued with. And I'm not trolling now. Just think about savages attacking and looting ebola virus hospital.
Sounds great - almost worth the money. Except for the likely possibility that some trolls are so full of themselves that they'd pay to be able to keep on doing it - so let's trumpet how we're all gonna DO this & then quietly leave, letting the trolls feed on themselves.
What is being called trolling here is inherent to web based discussions, and pretty much all moderated discussions. The reason it is inherent is that there cannot be an objective definition of trolling (or, to use web forum terminology, offensive posts) that is meaningful. It is inherently subjective, and to be enforced, there must be enforcers, i.e., moderators. And moderators are a biased as anybody - and everybody is - and the moment there is more than one moderator, the "trolls" will play them off against each other.
What you end up with, and I've seen this every single time in every single forum, no matter how lightly or heavily it is supposed to be moderated, is that people the moderators like - those who suck up to the mods - are allowed to do things that people the mods don't like. Every. Single. Time..
I saw a guy in one forum banned for refusing to say something that would have gotten him banned - the mod acknowledged this in the post announcing the ban. I've gotten an account suspended for reporting offensive behavior (by one of the mod's bootlickers) in exactly the say that mod had told me to do.
This isn't a problem with web forums, though. It's a problem with human nature. You get a group of people over a certain size, it will fragment in to cliques, and they will come in to conflict with each other. That's how people are. So any attempt to create an online forum with no trolls is either a pie-in-the-sky fantasy by someone without a clue, or it's pure snake oil. Either way, it's doom to fail, fail, fail, and then fail some more.
Butthead: Then why does so much stuff suck?
Most newspaper comment sections are dogged by groups that complain and have removed any content that is scientifically true but politically incorrect. All that is left are the trolls and goof comments, leading the newspapers to demand that the government cut off all access to news content except that provided by the news vendors.
Sometimes Trolls are the only honest posters; or even real people.
Go ahead, play along with the CIA/NSA's plans for a totally censored world. Let them play on your emotions a little more. Let them censor everything in the name of your personal feel-good-about-yourself security.
"Wahhhhhhh I'm a little baby who can't stand a 'troll', I need someone to censor this from my precious little eyes FAST, WAHHHHHH SOMEONE HELP ME"
oh and 9/11 was an inside job.
A troll is someone who posts a comment for the sole purpose of getting a negative response. The opinion they express is not one in which they are intellectually invested. This is distinguishable from someone who makes a point -- however different from your own -- passionately, and with conviction.
It only becomes difficult to distinguish between the two when a passionately-argued point happens to be baseless because the commenter is stupid. In this case. Erring on the side of trolling is appropriate, since there's no reason to reply to either type of commenter.
The business model over at Linux Weekly News (lwn.net) seems to work pretty well.
Any parasite like me can read the comments, but if you want to post, you need to sign
up and pay for a subscription. Signal to noise ratio is pretty high.
Would you pay to round up all the trolls into troll internment camps that have no internet access so that nobody could troll you on the internet or IRL anymore?
No, I wouldn't pay to avoid trolls. I consider trolls to be an important part of the Internet. They are the ultimate devil's advocate. A troll will always take the other side of an argument even if no one else will. This becomes a very useful thing when the herd mentality takes over, and everyone is on one side. Trolls make you think.
No, seriously, as others have alluded to in this thread as well, the term "troll" is subjective. And some commenters on /. seem to be particularly sensitive to anyone posting anything they disagree with and deciding it's trolling.
OK, suppose you set up a public web forum with 1,000,000 users where trolls are banished for life based on a consensus opinion from other commenters. How long do you think it would take before they reached a total number of 1 commenter? That's by a combination of #1 - banishing each other as trolls and #2 - users leaving because the resulting commenters are so afraid of being labelled trolls that they daren't write anything against the consensus and therefore all the discussions become bland, blithe, agreeable, re-iterations of the already accepted and established consensus view.
Or am I just trolling? ;)
Metafilter has been around for over a decade and is still hanging in there. People pay $5 to get an account and it has moderation of comments. Just about every post will still have arguments but there is a lot less noise in the comments than other sites.
Since your UID is smaller than mine, I can only conclude that you're trolling. -s20451 (410424)
Comment sections on websites are easy for me to ignore.
I would gladly pay for adults only game servers. I frequently suspect that the players that ruin games are most frequently someone's asshole 12 year old. DotA or Battlefield servers that charged a nominal fee ($10 or $20 a month?) would certainly go a long way towards weeding out the type of person that I do not enjoy playing a game with.
I prefer to decide for myself who I think is a troll and who isn't. I also don't look forward to my own political, religious or other controversial views resulting in my being barred from participation because someone who is paid to screen for trolls disagrees with me. Hell, no. I'm not going to pay for that.
I would prefer that all sites offer the option of registering with your real name via a charge to a real credit card, NOT a debit or gift card. The money could go to the site or even to a charity. Then, if I had registered in such a manner, I would have the option of filtering out all non-registered users and even threads proceeding from their comments. It should be easy to click a button to turn the filter on and off, directly within the reading interface.
Then I could block most of the trolls when I want and easily see other comments if I am willing to weed through the trolls.
All sites should have downvoting but also have mechanisms to detect and de-register malicious downvoters, whether working alone or as an organized mob. Unregistered people should not be able to downvote registered people.
Sites should also offer white-lists, both manual and automatic. Only someone with good karma or badges or whatever should be able to vote at all.
I'm seriously thinking of droppping /. And doing all of my forum messaging through StackExchange.
I've said for years that you need to charge people to speak. Even charge them to read. Ideas are only useful to the degree we agree with them and all dissent must be crushed.
All Hail All Hail All Hail our liberal overlords.
Now who would like to pay to write lame comments without being bullied by big nasty sarcastic evil trolls? WTF!! Quit your asbergers medicine and get a life or get laid or somthing, just try it for once. Get out of moms basement, perhaps it is in the middle of the day?
I work at a Certain Silicon Valley Tech Company and we recently had an employee fired for trolling.
Essentially, she claimed the right to park in handicap lots (despite not having children for "200 years"), wanted to bring her dogs to work (other people bring their "disgusting kids"), and complained she was severely overworked. Everyone on the thread posted pics of "facepalm" and inviting her to maybe not use the company-wide email list for such things, but she kept on trolling. The next week, someone commented on the thread to note she "no longer works here". Ouch.
Etiquette is as important for most jobs and human interaction as skill set.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Aren't you a bright one.
Now, ask yourself some questions:
1. Was your "fuk u faget" remark random or was it in response to what he said?
2. Does your comment have an intended effect of making him rethink his comment or where you trying to emotionally rouse him?
3. People learn the public definition of a word through context. They also learn the the meaning of a sentence through context.
The context of your sentence and those of alleged trolls is the same. The intent is to promote further thought, doubt, and so on.
Do you really think you easily proved him wrong? Don't you see what you've done? You proved his point...
News broadcasts focus too much on delivering entertainment. The integration of social media and commenting services creates an environment in which consumers has too much of an active role in shaping the news. These platforms encourage narcissistic behavior and shrill comments which make little difference in focusing on the facts.
No, i would not pay to get a website free of trolls.
Nor would I pay to have a city free of homeless people.
You need to have the parts of life you don't like to remind you why you are better then them.
Be seeing you...
I have seen the accusation "Troll!" used more often to reject a person offering a challenging point-of-view or idea than I have seen genuine trolls and it is for this reason that I a very hesitant to support any form of exclusion to control the small number of true trolls.
What next, banning ugly looking people from posting photos of themselves on the web or having photo sharing on social networks apply ugly filters?
Any system that allows the full or partial censorship of people by any means will eventually become corrupted and fall under the control of a singular mindset to the detriment of anyone holding a dissenting point-of-view.
So why would I want to subscribe to such a inevitable tyranny?
Exactly what I pay for movies online: $0.
Like it or not, this simple idea is lost. The very idea tht you can have a free and open discussion while segregating and censoring "only the negative stuff" goes against the very concept of open participation.
A paywalled, anti-troll site will ultimately fail and those who ponied up will be yet another example if Internet suckers.
Stop trying to censor speech. Regardless of its content (or your opinion of it). It's just stupid.
I should pay the site owner to censor people, who do not share his opinion? Everybody has another opinion, what a troll is, most people just call other people, who present an other opinion and do not shut up if the site owner says "but but but i am right" trolls. So i want to read ALL of the comments, especially those not agreeing with the article, to make an own opinion.
There will always be trolls. Its impossible to catch them all. By definition a troll only works when at least one person doesn't understand that its a troll.
a good troll might even fool the mods.
This has been the status quo on the Something Awful forums for 13 years. You pay $10 for a "lifetime" account on the site. If you're banned for trolling, you can create another account, but it will cost you another $10. This isn't a new idea, and it seems to work beautifully.
But I would pay for an Internet without the people who started using it after the year 2000.
I absolutely would not pay for a website without trolls. Trolls are an important part of the internet, their services are indispensable. Trolls are extremely good at exposing shills and those who see their viewpoint in religious terms. The end effect is that the rest of us have a much better idea of who not to listen to.
I will say it yet again, the power of trolls and other abuses is magnified on blogs because blogs lack the structure needed to contain their influence. If blogs had change of topics with sub-threads and contextual reply, these problems would be mitigated just like they were on text USENET 30 years ago and in any decent mail system since. The fact that Facebook and Google decided to strip out structure is the cause for these problems, and that is because of their Big Data business. Either their engineers need to learn how to write better regular expressions or users who get burned by the normal human abuse of conversation ought to avoid social media.
A few days ago it was a story about how trolls are here to stay. Today it is about paying to get rid of them.
/.?
Is Slashdot about to launch a *premium product* - a sanitised version of
Why should I have to pay? What WOULD be nice is a button on Discus to IGNORE certain pests. Maybe there is one. I just don't pay them enough attention, tho' when the Troll booth is green, it takes some patience to wade thru to the kernel of good comments. Sometimes the trolls keep me abreast of the latest assaults on reason, so that is a small service, I suppose. Live slowly and share prosperity!
PlaynBass
I have met the troll and he is us.
The best answer ever.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Tai Game Ban Ca Offline