great writeup. in general i think you're asking for trolls by not having any sort of user moderation on t/c. the nerd sites like slashdot/reddit/hacker news all have some sort of crowd-sourced moderation. On slashdot/reddit & even digg, if you set your comment threshold to +5 or higher, what's left behind is usually pretty good conversation. And on hacker news the trollish comments are almost immediately greyed out. When I see a "tech" site that doesn't have these basic features that slashdot has had since '97, I throw up in my mouth a little. Whatever you want to call it, some sort of comment karma / reputation system goes a long way towards helping with this universal problem.
But again, excellent writeup, and excellent work with T/C. I had stopped reading that site after reading some horribly racist stuff in the comments but I've picked it up again since the little reshuffle.
Ravi U
· 6 months ago
I think the problem is that (AFAIK) there isn't any such easy plugin for WordPress (ignoring things like Disqus and IntenseDebate). Most news sites I read nowadays are powered by WordPress or another blogging engine, while Slashdot and Digg obviously run on custom CMSes with paid developers that can create such features.
As a recipient of such hateful and baseless comments before, I would love to see someone develop that kind of plugin (or have Disqus et al make it a default feature).
andrewhyde
· 6 months ago
I don't think there is a simple solution at all.
Two thoughts:
What is the reward for a positive comment? You can like or uptick this, but in the longrun, there is no real upside for a great comment. Perhaps we can talk about it later, but many times you don't know the blogger.
Perhaps adding onto what Jay has said about a system like digg. Might be an interesting solution, with up and down votes from the community, the blogger having a 10x influence on the points. A downvote would hide it from others, both killing the attention they are looking for and creating a better experience for the readers.
I remember in the early days of political forums whenever something got too heated or trolled the community responded with their favorite food recipes. A particular heated discussion followed with Apple pie recipes, which killed the trolling. And was hilarious.
OwenK
· 6 months ago
I think the best way to make likes and upvotes matter is to actively reward people for good comments. http://stackoverflow.com/ is an amazing example of that in action. Every comment on the site is useful, and the community polices bad comments itself. Trolls are literally locked out; it's impossible to interrupt the site without a long period of genuine helpfulness, and few (maybe no) trolls are dedicated enough to answer hundreds of software questions just to screw with a few people before being banned moments later. A lot of sites could learn from that system.
htsh
· 6 months ago
Agreed wholeheartedly. Hacker news also has a clever system where folks with comment karma of 100+ can downvote comments. That way, the experienced users who have contributed conversation that other readers like do the dirty work of downvoting trollish comments. Pick a random story on the site and check out the comments -- chances are you'll see a useful discussion.
In general editorial censoring of comments is disfavored in the geek community in favor of some sort of community moderation. Not only do you end up with better content, its infinitely less frustrating for the non-troll commenter and the editors I'd imagine.
Thanks for posting the link btw -- this site looks really cool (and useful).
The SO commenting system was covered in Ben Metcalfe's Core Conversation at SxSW 2009 that was attended by Kent Brewster (who I think mentioned the SO model). The topic and conversation was around the subject of how to /deal/ with trolls.
There seemed to be some indication that the SO commenting system was actually being developed as a project to address this concern overall... but I did not investigate further.
Dan Romero
· 6 months ago
I love the image choice.
Jolie O'Dell
· 6 months ago
The flip side of the troll coin is just as disgusting/disturbing/irritating/time wasting: Perv trolls.
Video blogs especially get some rather rude (not to mention entirely irrelevant) noise in the comments. And that's on top of being called stupid/boring/retarded in the most violent terms in less-pervy comments and evil/hateful/ignorant in comments on critical reviews.
While I love simple commenting systems and think the anonymous comment, when appropriately used, does have a place in the blogging ecosystem, I agree that one path to better filtering is connecting comments to verifiable user accounts on more personal services. Hell, link it to their LinkedIn accounts. That'd be hot.
The alternative, of course, is to hire midgets, children, and offshore types to go through comments by hand, along with a task force of Metalocalypse-like goons to enforce a penal code devised for the regulation of civility in blog comments.
Mike Bracco
· 6 months ago
MG: Great article and I have really enjoyed reading your stuff here and over at TC. I was the one who posted the YouTube video (MPB326) that everyone has been linking to and have gotten every single comment from YouTube to my Gmail account (over 800). I have to say that I can't believe just how stupid people are. I think it's worse on YouTube because there is an even greater culture of anonymity. Anyway, as a possible TC story idea relating to this, I heard that there are some countries that require you to officially authenticate (using your Social Security Number or their countries equivalent) in order to sign up a social network. This could be a possible solution to combat trolls. As you know, it's a little different when you are not hiding behind anonymity. Another idea, would be to apply the digg model - but instead, users could be be dugg out of the network depending on their level of douchbaggery. Anyway, as I said over on the FF thread that Scoble started, most of the people threatening Mike are probably doing so from their parents basement and are simply jealous that they haven't built a tremendously successful company and brand like TechCrunch. Best - Mike
MG Siegler
· 6 months ago
Thanks Mike. Yeah when I posted that BabyShaking app to YouTube, you can't even imagine the comments that came in on that. SSN is interesting but would never fly in this country for privacy issues alone. I've talked with people about doing a Digg-like vote up good comments thing, that may be doable, don't know.
Mike Bracco
· 6 months ago
I think there would have to be some intermediary third party that would hold the SS# or some other form of identification so that individual social networks wouldn't ever see that information. With social networks being a greater part of everyone's life, something needs to be done. I think it is quite interesting that this event happen alongside the recent news of Twitter's account verification. I think verification and identity management online are going to be huge going forward. I do feel that solving the issue at the source (making people attach themselves to their online accounts) would solve a lot of the trolling issue.
Mike Bracco
· 6 months ago
as a side note on youtube, I haven't used it forever until I posted that video because I really can't stand it but after posting this video I have to say how terrible youtube is in terms of spam. Every other comment is about a ringtone or something else.
Kevin
· 6 months ago
Techcrunch should definitely institute a digglike voting system for its comments. Even better, on Hacker News a comment gets greyed out if it has a negative score, so you can't even really read it, and most comments containing stuff like personal insults end up like that.
Akshay Dodeja
· 6 months ago
I think you have hit on lots of good points. I think attaching identity to discussion would be the first step. Although I do think that enforcing it will limit conversation, but i believe that you might not have any other choice.
MG Siegler
· 6 months ago
Yeah, sadly agree.
Mike Bracco
· 6 months ago
mugasha: maybe it would limit/reduce conversation but I don't think anyone should make a statement if they can't stand behind it 100%. If you don't have the guts to put your face out there and make a statement then you really don't deserve to have your voice be heard. In a sense, it is making the web more real world. You can't hide behind your statement in the real world so why be able to do it online. Cheers! :)
Akshay Dodeja
· 6 months ago
100% with you on that. I am running a small music site. We have disabled anonymous commenting. So fare the discussion has been great, although minimal. I think some big blogs, like TC might want to experiment with this for few of their posts. See how it goes?
Mike Bracco
· 6 months ago
Gotcha :) I think it would be great if somehow there was one unified service that managed comments for any given article. I don't know how it can be done but ALL comments, wherever they are posted, should be able to be consumed in one stream. I think whoever figures that out will make a lot of money. I know authenticating via FB/Twitter and services like Backtype are working towards the solution, no one is there yet.
Jack Welde
· 6 months ago
Good discussion, MG. My sense is that allowing anonymous commenting certainly contributes to the problem (and yes, I'm making an anonymous comment now, although I'm using my real name!) Simply forcing people to register to comment may curb some of the bad behavior.
Interestingly enough, many outstanding bloggers solve the problem by simply not allowing comments AT ALL, as can be seen on John Gruber's excellent Daring Fireball. Joel Spolsky and Dave Winer have also suggested removing comments altogether, among others.
And yet, you can find many blogs, such as Fred Wilson's AVC blog, in which the comments typically offer real, alternative opinions or additional thinking on an already well-thought-out post. Without the comments, my sense is that many of Fred's articles would be incomplete or less interesting.
A slippery slope, indeed... and a reminder that, often, people just suck.
Rose
· 6 months ago
TechCrunch has a huge following and reaches out to a wide spectrum of people. The odds go up to how many people will want to "say" something in response to an opinion or editorial. It's great (and healthy) to have comments that might point out a flaw in argument or oppose an opinion. However, it is much too easy to spew bullshit. It's actually so easy that commenting on the internet has turned almost into a god-given right. Well, it's not. It's a privliedge given by the site hosting the said forum.
As a student, a regular ol' folk who likes to geek it up with new gadgets, a person who will most likely use these services and products featured on TechCrunch, I'd like to know where these comments come from. Maybe some kind of verification system proving you are actually someone who can be tied to SOMETHING (Twitter/Facebook/your company, etc). Then, who in their right mind would tie blabbering, irrelevant, personal attacks to their product/identity? Or allow there to be a connection to their place of employment? Maybe help readers judge the relevance of their opinion by the given info? What's the agenda behind this nastiness?
Good luck to you and everyone else dealing with trolls - they're so damn annoying. I've learned to tune them out but I also don't have to moderate an onslaught of 'em either.
By comparison... so many great things were thrown out the window with blogs and article pressing websites that have multiple authors. I've complained visibly to numerous sites about their horrific commenting systems. All of them reflect one of two attributes that lead to failure:
1) Lack of human editors, moderators, or whatever you want to call the list mom function and responsibility
2) Overt and closed silo registration
When I think of great commenting systems I used to think that running your own show on Wordpress was the right way. Having been my own sysadmin and serial upgrade lackey for many years now I'm inclined to say: forget it. I criticized DISQUS and other outsourced comments services. Now, it looks pretty good. Then again, I gave up on contributing to my own blog and just shifted to commenting. So, now I've gotten very very finicky about what I consider to be the lowest friction method.
As much as it pains me to suggest this... Digg might be on to something. How they monetize this or pull out a squelch algorighm method is up to their developers. A Digg+DISQUS amalgam would solve 80% of the problems with the remaining 20% left to human interaction to curate or archive or stop the comments.
At the same time, I'm also of the opinion that Wikipedia should put up their mechanisms as an overlay to all commenting systems for revision control, article cache and injection to a PURL, and sustaining things that matter. While I'm not clear that 2008-era tech blog coverage and comments concerning a $0.99 iPhone application will shift the human condition to a new pax romana for all world conflicts, the methods for software with installation coupled to a best practice is just sensible.
We're not there yet. I don't know if we'll get there or be somewhere else.
What I do know is that the squelch has to be on tap and ready to be turned up like the magical spam filters that most email users today take for granted --- with all the periodic questions and complaints about why something was "missed" or something else was "flagged".
Trolling on blog comments is something akin to fuzzing software for weaknesses... only the fuzzing is against a community of the one and the many in attendance. It is an interesting problem.
Between Akismet and various other Wordpress lacking features not envisioned (i.e. bandaidware) there will have to be some method for assigning the same methods that BBS, IRC, Usenet, and prior art brought to their own troll ridden communities.
p.s. the fact that I've had my comments eaten by TechCrunch "moderation" isn't lost on me either in that I also realize that moderation isn't perfect and I'm pretty far from being a troll...
Rick
· 6 months ago
It really is mind boggling when you think about how truly messed up these people are. I mean, some of the comments I have read on YouTube are just insane.
I don't read techcrunch too much, but I couldn't possibly think of a reason to threaten anyone for their opinion(s). It's just really frustrating when you think about it.
I don't see a real solution unless we gather all of these idiots/trolls and stick them in a country without the Internet. I'm afraid we'll all have to sit here and shake our heads and their lunacy for awhile longer....
Troll??
· 6 months ago
you're retarded...
Just kidding! It's really amazing how nasty people are in the comments section. Divorced from their name and identity an incredible amount of people seem to spew pointless moronic negativity all over the internets. Good article.
Facebook User
· 6 months ago
You should do what Boing Boing did -- hire a dedicated community manager to moderate the comments. For too long the Techcrunch comments have been useless and the comments drag down the perceived quality of the rest of the site.
MG Siegler
· 6 months ago
Dan (TC Intern) thoughts? :)
IsaacF
· 6 months ago
Copy Slashdot - surfing /. at +2 is great and Hacker News generally makes it easy to avoid the trash as well. Crowd-sourced moderation is the best way to go.
Allie
· 6 months ago
In TC's case, I fear there are three factors creating the perfect storm.
1. Anonymity, which makes people think they don't have to be responsible for what they say. 2. Willingness to open up big cans of worms and write controversial posts 3. Willingness to participate and post responsive comments
TechCrunch pushes the envelope, that's one of the reasons we love it. You are passionate about tech and take on controversial subjects. That connects with people, both those who agree and those who don't. And since people get to be anonymous, those who disagree feel free to be ugly. And it's exponentially more tempting because they think they can bait y'all into responding. Unfortunately, from my experiences reading the comments, it sometimes works. Don't get me wrong, I love seeing you guys participating in the community, but when you respond, it makes someone feel important. To a troll, that's nirvana.
The only idea I can think of is this: require some sort of registration (even if it is anonymous) to weed out the drive-by haters. Then, (maybe temporarily) stay out of the comments. Once a day, editors/writers pick the top comments/questions and respond to them in one column. Or do a show on the CrunchCam. So people have an incentive to participate and can still get recognized, but they are rewarded for being thoughtful and genuine, not for trolling.
And trolls lose the possibility they can bait you. They'll go elsewhere once they lose the attention...(I hope)
MG Siegler
· 6 months ago
All good points, thanks. The participation thing is sad, but pretty true, I think.
Chris Cosentino
· 6 months ago
Hi MG - excellent write-up. I entirely agree. I recently sent in a tip to the TC gmail tip address which resulted in a post from Robin Wauters, and found a remarkable number of intense and angry comments, none of which really made any sense or were in any way useful (it was a pretty innocuous post). I agree that the problem has gotten so bad that you need to make some significant changes. A couple of suggestions:
(A) Currently (and I apologize if I'm just unaware of this) - I don't believe TC provides any ability to "register" as a member of the site. I would introduce this - to power (B) and (C) below. Additionally, I would NOT allow comments at all from unregistered users. You could certainly leverage FF or Fb Connect for this.
(B) As many others here have suggested, institute a Digg model, where any other user can digg up or down comments.
(C) Tie the "digg" value to the user's ID, then it should be relatively easy to create an algorithm whereby if a user gets consistently high ratings for his/her comments there can be an eBay style "feedback rating" for every user. If a user's feedback rating gets high enough it ranks the user up into a "power user" status. This could then perhaps change the format of their comments to a different color or offer them some other call-out so their comments are more pronounced. Then, perhaps you could add a toggle filter to the page whereby a reader could click "Only show power user comments" or "Show all comments" and then only those comments would appear.
Additionally on the flipside, if a user's comments are continuously being buried then their feedback rating would drop, and if their feedback rating drops far enough, perhaps you disable their comment ability for a period of, say, 10 days or so. Perhaps this last piece is too drastic, but you get where I'm going.
I think all of the above would offer users a very strong incentive for posting quality comments and encourage a quality conversation. I think the current model of having an open floodgate where anyone can post anything is causing issues, as you've very nicely summarized in this article. Obviously, these suggestions would result in overall less posts, but the ones you do get would hopefully be of much higher quality.
Works fine on 4chan at /r9k/, after an initial learning phase.
Maybe do some research before claiming to have outlined the web's next big problem. There is such a thing as blogpost trolling you know.
Johny Miric
· 6 months ago
I wrote this few times in TC comments and I will repeat here: You have to start charging for comments option. Even 5 € / year would be enough. No troll would pull out their credit card to leave nasty comment.
This would be revolutionary approach but very soon it would be followed by many others.
Tech Crunch have position to do this. Huge traffic, credibility and quality.
With this move you would piss some people off but on long therm you would gain a lot. Your commenting feature could become much more intersting and focused on subject.
Using FB connect or similar would solve only part of the problem. There are still people who are ready to leave stupid comments even under their own name.
MG Siegler
· 6 months ago
Probably not a bad idea, but only because it would filter out the trolls. Maybe a system where you put in a card but it doesn't get charged. But again, tricky and that would basically be the same as FB connect. We'll figure something out.
Johny Miric
· 6 months ago
People who pay are those who feel the value from service. And most of them are actually gaining their own traffic.
I have strong feeling that payment for commenting on big sites is future.
Can you just imagine how this would change the look of comments. Almost like team work.
Be first one to do it and mark your place in history :-) That is exactly what we expect from TC crowd. Breaking boundaries and establishing new standards.
adondai
· 6 months ago
I say go for it with heavy-handed moderating and other systems suggested in the comments here. The only people who complain about that kind of moderation are the trolls themselves. Personally i'm sick of scrolling through hundreds of comments for the couple worth reading - in fact I don't really bother anymore.
MG Siegler
· 6 months ago
Yeah that's a problem, as many have expressed the same thing.
azeemazhar
· 6 months ago
It is all about signalling and verification. As the number of people getting online increases, the sheer volume of asshattery increases too.
Paid-for-signalling would eliminate some of these. See http://azeemazhar.com/?p=282 So would some of the suggestions around comment karma.
cgerrish
· 6 months ago
MG, it's up to all of us to call out bad behavior when we see it. It's the way society works (or doesn't work when we don't). In a real time web, anonymous attacks can't be tolerated -- and when people use their own identity to launch personal attacks, we need to shine the light on them. Ultimately there's the ability to block bad actors. Speech is both a privilege and a right.
cgerrish
· 6 months ago
MG, it's up to all of us to call out bad behavior when we see it. It's the way society works (or doesn't work when we don't). In a real time web, anonymous attacks can't be tolerated -- and when people use their own identity to launch personal attacks, we need to shine the light on them. Ultimately there's the ability to block bad actors. Speech is both a privilege and a right.
Wayne Schulz
· 6 months ago
Trolls the most important problem on the web? How about Friendfeed being essentially a 2009 version of Yahoo/AOL chat rooms yet portrayed as the next huge thing on the net.
theharmonyguy
· 6 months ago
(I feel a bit awkward using a screen name to comment, but I have reasons for that. :)
Many good thoughts have been posted by you and others which I won't rehash. But one part stuck out to me: "Because it’s so easy to leave comments on FF, everyone starts running theirs mouths at a rapid pace without thinking...."
I keep finding various corners of the Web trending towards dynamic, real-time, short attention-span, less thought, more updates, etc. And I keep getting the feeling that one of the "next big things" on the Web will somehow push towards more static (as opposed to dynamic), less real-time, summarization, concision, lower amounts of content but higher quality, etc. People keep talking about reducing the noise by filtering instead of simply producing less noise.
A tangent from your main point, to be sure, but thought it was worth noting.
Dan Bayn
· 6 months ago
There's some very good psychology on this topic, particularly on how anonymity and groups combine to produce antisocial behavior. As others have already posted, the best medicine seems to be accountability. Real names and Fb accounts, however, won't do the trick. There need to be _real_ consequences for abusive behavior.
Trolls will remain on TC until you demand that only users using their FB/Twitter/Google ID can leave comments. This has been the no1 demand of TC for sometime but for some reason this has not been implemented. I know this will not eliminate every troll comment but it will remove many.
The otherside of the coin relates back to Mike Arrington. He is an internet bully who frequently writes enflamed posts to generate traffic and highly charged comments and then wonders why the trolls and death threats appear on TC.
Just as TC appears to be growing up under CEO Harde, Arrington makes the sort of bully-boy stupid comments as he did with Leo and everyone then recalls all of his other rants and raves and brings TC back to the gutter. You reap what you sow and Arrington is only getting back what he has sown. I have no sympathy with him. He has destroyed other peoples companies and lives with his bully boy postings and used the trolls to backup his thoughts with comments.
TC without Arrington would be a much better place.
Its a daunting gauntlet you've tossed down here. I like to think someone would ananlyze similarities in troll comments - as I refuse to believe they are that diverse and write some script to put into site code that would filter a lot of the offending content out without human intervention. Stuff that fell outside set analytics would need human eyes to judge worthiness but that should be considerably less than the torrent of trolls currently infesting the net.
Lord
· 6 months ago
The simplest is soft moderation, banning ip addresses after the fact deleting all such comments permanently. Barry Ritholtz has about the most direct comment policy around and it seems quite effective.
Tom Wood
· 6 months ago
Heh, logged in using Facebook Connect just to see if it works.
I went back and forth on comments for my WordPress site and eventually decided to use vBulletin instead. It seems to have a lot more moderation tools built in, including banning the IP address of offenders, plus the 'ignore' feature. Worth consideration.
TW
spryka
· 6 months ago
The greatest benefit of Facebook is that it has many groups on the site that you can join. So if you are interested in Chicago Cubs you can research Chicago Cubs in the groups section and you will be able to find friends on there that like the Cubs. This is just one example, I know that you can join groups of your favorite football team, television show, or whatever you want for the most part! If you can't find a group for your interest, you can simply create one!
Does your definition of trolling include someone asking questions about your name remaining on Venturebeat's Masthead, or your perceived conflict-of-interest relationships with companies you cover, such as Loopt or Twitter or Apple?
If so, boo freakin hoo. Wear the big boy pants and either respond to it, or stop crying.
MG Siegler
· 6 months ago
Example 1A of a troll.
No crying in baseball/blogging
· 6 months ago
Welcome to the other side of blogging, my friend. So called news reporters like yourself regularly print half-truths, anonymous source driven non stories, or outright lies---that's OK. That's first to print blogging journalism, as your boss declares.
But the flip side of this is being called out for what readers believe you are (true or not). You can't have one without the other. TC churns out tech stories like sausages without any editorial controls or personal accountability. That's OK so long as your PR buddies and fan boys agree with your point of view?
But when others DONT agree with you and print their opinions without fact or in a sarcastic manner, that's a problem?
Your bad judgment continually amazes me, MG. You think this is a big problem, wait until you get a couple of years older, want to get a raise or perhaps move up at the company. Want to have the money to buy a house (you dont), want to move into something that pays a bit better?
Write about your journey on THAT day. Then, you will really have something to complain about. You're a victim playing the role of bully playing the role of victim. And you don't even know it.
Daniel Ionescu
· 6 months ago
I sometimes just sit and read the comments on TC wondering why would readers make such harsh personal attacks. They might as well debate your ideas or criticise your work (even though that would be slightly too much if the certain post would be taken out of context).
But considering the large readership TC has, I believe it is long overdue now for a comment moderation system to be put in place. I think you guys (TC) are large enough now to enforce FB Connect or something similar on those who want to comment OR get someone to moderate full-time all the incoming comments.
Anyway, that's my two cents...
Brandon Mendelson
· 6 months ago
MG,
When my wife and I were traveling across the country, we had one woman stalk and harass us online every step of the way. On the Albany Times Union, we have some of the nastiest pricks imaginable trolling the blogs. If it were up to me, I'd just turn the blog comments off (can't do it for the newspaper, not my gig), but I've found that people who want to comment (positive or negative) will seek you out to do so beyond the blog's commenting system.
So I know it goes counter to the conventional wisdom of blogging, but screw it, I say shut it down and provide contact information (email, ect.) At least this way you can take action against the trolls if they do come knocking, and discuss with those who enjoy the content.
rafer
· 6 months ago
There's no reason that an FB-like system can't also shield the users' identity while letting people tag them as a troll. It puts FB in possession of huge privacy info, but nothing new there.
adamjackson
· 6 months ago
MG, I'd like to finally introduce you to my year long war on trolling. I've been vocal about Trolling and offering advice / solutions to others in an effort to finally fix this problem once and for all.
I'm slowly working on building an alliance among bloggers in an effort to finalize a solution (whatever that may be) to rid the Internet of this kind of behavior. We shouldn't allow it and it bugs me that we let trolling loose like we have.
I call Bullshit!
· 6 months ago
Moron Alert:
It appears to me that MG's definition of a troll is someone who he doesn't like or agree with, who may be pointed in his comments, regardless of how accurate those comments may be. It's not the song so much, but how they sing it.
In a previous post: MG was asked a simple question: Why does his name remain on the Venturebeat masthead. Did MG answer? Nope. Why? Is it an offensive question? Should the readers simply not ask? He was given a Viking sendoff by his former boss, wishing him good luck? Yet his name remains on VB's masthead?
Why? Is that an unreasonable question? My guess is it's tied to pay. But MG is too cool for school to respond. Perhaps that is trolling?
Also: MG got caught with his pants down, writing a favorable story about a company that employed his then girlfriend. Valleywag caught him on this, yet he thought there was nothing inappropriate about his decision to do so. When people commented about that, MG dismissed them as trolls as well.
And this is why: MG is a blog reporter. Not a newspaper reporter. Not a television journalist. Heck, not even a radio guy. A blog reporter. He works in a world where stories are posted one minute and taken down the next. Where sources are friends and friends are sources. Where certain companies are favoried and others are damned--presumably because the favored advertise and the damned aren't afraid to sue.
MG makes sausage. He doesn't own Oscar Meyer. He's just the latest guy hired to work the disassembly line. Hendrickson before him. Joe Schmo before him. And so on, and so on and so on....
Like sausage making, the blogging world, has a dark side to it. A side he would rather you not see. It's the comment section. A section that was created to blindly validate, or expound on, the subject of the story. But similar to the lack of control of the content--or its accuracy--MG and his boss often are called on the carpet for their inaccuracies, their failure to disclose conflict of intersts--remuneration and acceptance of free goods in exchange for favorable coverage.
And they don't like when the sun shines on their little enterprise. And they call those people trolls.
But they aren't trolls. They are the buying public. Consumers. And sometimes, these consumers cry out to MG and his boss when they see rat hairs in the sausage. They complain about its unbaised coverage. They tel him they aren't "buying" what he is grinding out and throwing onto the counter.
And MG hates this. But he has little control--because he is simply a worker bee. Like Hendrickson, Like Owen Thomas, Alaska Miller, Paul Boutin, and dozens and dozens of others...
Sausage makers...in a non union shop.
Good luck with that, MG.
Adam Hitler Jackson
· 6 months ago
Hey Adam:
What are you going to call your "alliance"?
The Hitler Youth, perhaps?
Gotta love simpletons like this douchebag above me. Who gives you the right to patrol the internet, simply because you don't agree with the point or tone of someone else? You want their name and phone number? Perhaps their bank account? Perhaps you can list their names in the town square?
All that is great until YOU become the guy on the other side of the argument. Then what, fella? Not such a good idea then.
Freedom of speech is allowed for blowhards like Arrington and worker bee enablers like MG. Why isn't is for trolls as well? After all, you get what you pay for.
fredwilson
· 6 months ago
i don't moderate comments at AVC in the traditional sense
i accept them all and never delete them unless they are comment spam or hate speech
but i do engage heavily in the comments (as does techcrunch) and we've done a pretty good job of keeping the trolls out
they show up occasionally but they are not welcome
it also helps to have a bouncer. i started with my brother (aka jackson) and now its kid mercury.
he's awesome
fred
Anonymity Often Prudent
· 6 months ago
This may be a bad idea because sometimes the best comments are either politically incorrect (but interesting and relevant) or otherwise not meant for attribution. You may throw the baby out with the bath water if you force everyone to necessarily id themselves for every topic. On a larger scale, this attitude about identifying oneself is why too many Americans are doing nothing about government attempts to end Internet anonymity and real laws that exist requiring background checks to communicate online.
Not everyone feels that every comment they make on every topic needs to become part of their Google record. Think about it. Some topics scream "Off the record please".
Meanwhile, few of us have the problem of having so many comments that it would be too much work to quickly delete some spam as a moderator. A few seconds and some thick skin may be all that is needed.
WhoIsTheTroll
· 6 months ago
Has it occured to you that you with your mostly meaningess Twitter stories are actually a troll yourself? Can you answer this honestly?
Water meter
· 6 months ago
The image so funny.
Bill Cammack
· 5 months ago
This is the predictable future of linkbaiters running around for the last couple years saying whatever they wanted about whomever they wanted and suffering zero consequences. More and more people are going to join the "Me Too!!!" bandwagon and the situation will continue to escalate.
It's not an increase in rude behavior. All this stuff was already being said on the back-channel. It's an increased perception amongst the masses in the fishbowl that there will be zero repercussions because of behavior like this, so anything goes.
ivanpope
· 5 months ago
First
Chris Wheat
· 5 months ago
I agree trolls and the mob can get out of hand, but I hope you don't consider every negative comment troll comments... There are plenty of valid negative comments on TC (You get allot of them) and while you might not agree with the comments that does not make them trolls.
People flaming you calling names, or cursing at you, or threaten to do harm would be trolls/mob... People telling you they don't like your fact checking prior to publishing, or choice of content to cover are not trolls they are people given criticism in hopes it will change the direction TC is going.
Things can spiral out of hand quickly, and it appears to transcend offline into the real world like people spitting on your boss, it’s scary that the mentality leaves the interweb and people take actions in the real world....
Manifest Money
· 5 months ago
I don't think there is a simple solution at all.
electricbicycles
· 5 months ago
very good!
Traveller_Adventure
· 5 months ago
What I can say is very nice and helpful as well as informative post...really help me very much more!! Thanks.. Cheers, Buat Duit Dengan Blog
gutter_guard_reviews
· 2 months ago
I'll back again for sure, thanks for great article :D
All Comments
But again, excellent writeup, and excellent work with T/C. I had stopped reading that site after reading some horribly racist stuff in the comments but I've picked it up again since the little reshuffle.
As a recipient of such hateful and baseless comments before, I would love to see someone develop that kind of plugin (or have Disqus et al make it a default feature).
Two thoughts:
What is the reward for a positive comment? You can like or uptick this, but in the longrun, there is no real upside for a great comment. Perhaps we can talk about it later, but many times you don't know the blogger.
Perhaps adding onto what Jay has said about a system like digg. Might be an interesting solution, with up and down votes from the community, the blogger having a 10x influence on the points. A downvote would hide it from others, both killing the attention they are looking for and creating a better experience for the readers.
I remember in the early days of political forums whenever something got too heated or trolled the community responded with their favorite food recipes. A particular heated discussion followed with Apple pie recipes, which killed the trolling. And was hilarious.
In general editorial censoring of comments is disfavored in the geek community in favor of some sort of community moderation. Not only do you end up with better content, its infinitely less frustrating for the non-troll commenter and the editors I'd imagine.
Thanks for posting the link btw -- this site looks really cool (and useful).
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/130654/how-d...
The SO commenting system was covered in Ben Metcalfe's Core Conversation at SxSW 2009 that was attended by Kent Brewster (who I think mentioned the SO model). The topic and conversation was around the subject of how to /deal/ with trolls.
There seemed to be some indication that the SO commenting system was actually being developed as a project to address this concern overall... but I did not investigate further.
Video blogs especially get some rather rude (not to mention entirely irrelevant) noise in the comments. And that's on top of being called stupid/boring/retarded in the most violent terms in less-pervy comments and evil/hateful/ignorant in comments on critical reviews.
While I love simple commenting systems and think the anonymous comment, when appropriately used, does have a place in the blogging ecosystem, I agree that one path to better filtering is connecting comments to verifiable user accounts on more personal services. Hell, link it to their LinkedIn accounts. That'd be hot.
The alternative, of course, is to hire midgets, children, and offshore types to go through comments by hand, along with a task force of Metalocalypse-like goons to enforce a penal code devised for the regulation of civility in blog comments.
Interestingly enough, many outstanding bloggers solve the problem by simply not allowing comments AT ALL, as can be seen on John Gruber's excellent Daring Fireball. Joel Spolsky and Dave Winer have also suggested removing comments altogether, among others.
And yet, you can find many blogs, such as Fred Wilson's AVC blog, in which the comments typically offer real, alternative opinions or additional thinking on an already well-thought-out post. Without the comments, my sense is that many of Fred's articles would be incomplete or less interesting.
A slippery slope, indeed... and a reminder that, often, people just suck.
As a student, a regular ol' folk who likes to geek it up with new gadgets, a person who will most likely use these services and products featured on TechCrunch, I'd like to know where these comments come from. Maybe some kind of verification system proving you are actually someone who can be tied to SOMETHING (Twitter/Facebook/your company, etc). Then, who in their right mind would tie blabbering, irrelevant, personal attacks to their product/identity? Or allow there to be a connection to their place of employment? Maybe help readers judge the relevance of their opinion by the given info? What's the agenda behind this nastiness?
Good luck to you and everyone else dealing with trolls - they're so damn annoying. I've learned to tune them out but I also don't have to moderate an onslaught of 'em either.
Usenet (yeah...)
Slashdot karma/sorting/thresholds
LiveJournal hierarchy/screening/IP monitoring/etc...
Digg digg / buried / sorting / thresholds
By comparison... so many great things were thrown out the window with blogs and article pressing websites that have multiple authors. I've complained visibly to numerous sites about their horrific commenting systems. All of them reflect one of two attributes that lead to failure:
1) Lack of human editors, moderators, or whatever you want to call the list mom function and responsibility
2) Overt and closed silo registration
When I think of great commenting systems I used to think that running your own show on Wordpress was the right way. Having been my own sysadmin and serial upgrade lackey for many years now I'm inclined to say: forget it. I criticized DISQUS and other outsourced comments services. Now, it looks pretty good. Then again, I gave up on contributing to my own blog and just shifted to commenting. So, now I've gotten very very finicky about what I consider to be the lowest friction method.
As much as it pains me to suggest this... Digg might be on to something. How they monetize this or pull out a squelch algorighm method is up to their developers. A Digg+DISQUS amalgam would solve 80% of the problems with the remaining 20% left to human interaction to curate or archive or stop the comments.
At the same time, I'm also of the opinion that Wikipedia should put up their mechanisms as an overlay to all commenting systems for revision control, article cache and injection to a PURL, and sustaining things that matter. While I'm not clear that 2008-era tech blog coverage and comments concerning a $0.99 iPhone application will shift the human condition to a new pax romana for all world conflicts, the methods for software with installation coupled to a best practice is just sensible.
We're not there yet. I don't know if we'll get there or be somewhere else.
What I do know is that the squelch has to be on tap and ready to be turned up like the magical spam filters that most email users today take for granted --- with all the periodic questions and complaints about why something was "missed" or something else was "flagged".
Trolling on blog comments is something akin to fuzzing software for weaknesses... only the fuzzing is against a community of the one and the many in attendance. It is an interesting problem.
Between Akismet and various other Wordpress lacking features not envisioned (i.e. bandaidware) there will have to be some method for assigning the same methods that BBS, IRC, Usenet, and prior art brought to their own troll ridden communities.
p.s. the fact that I've had my comments eaten by TechCrunch "moderation" isn't lost on me either in that I also realize that moderation isn't perfect and I'm pretty far from being a troll...
I don't read techcrunch too much, but I couldn't possibly think of a reason to threaten anyone for their opinion(s). It's just really frustrating when you think about it.
I don't see a real solution unless we gather all of these idiots/trolls and stick them in a country without the Internet. I'm afraid we'll all have to sit here and shake our heads and their lunacy for awhile longer....
Just kidding! It's really amazing how nasty people are in the comments section. Divorced from their name and identity an incredible amount of people seem to spew pointless moronic negativity all over the internets. Good article.
1. Anonymity, which makes people think they don't have to be responsible for what they say.
2. Willingness to open up big cans of worms and write controversial posts
3. Willingness to participate and post responsive comments
TechCrunch pushes the envelope, that's one of the reasons we love it. You are passionate about tech and take on controversial subjects. That connects with people, both those who agree and those who don't. And since people get to be anonymous, those who disagree feel free to be ugly. And it's exponentially more tempting because they think they can bait y'all into responding. Unfortunately, from my experiences reading the comments, it sometimes works. Don't get me wrong, I love seeing you guys participating in the community, but when you respond, it makes someone feel important. To a troll, that's nirvana.
The only idea I can think of is this: require some sort of registration (even if it is anonymous) to weed out the drive-by haters. Then, (maybe temporarily) stay out of the comments. Once a day, editors/writers pick the top comments/questions and respond to them in one column. Or do a show on the CrunchCam. So people have an incentive to participate and can still get recognized, but they are rewarded for being thoughtful and genuine, not for trolling.
And trolls lose the possibility they can bait you. They'll go elsewhere once they lose the attention...(I hope)
(A) Currently (and I apologize if I'm just unaware of this) - I don't believe TC provides any ability to "register" as a member of the site. I would introduce this - to power (B) and (C) below. Additionally, I would NOT allow comments at all from unregistered users. You could certainly leverage FF or Fb Connect for this.
(B) As many others here have suggested, institute a Digg model, where any other user can digg up or down comments.
(C) Tie the "digg" value to the user's ID, then it should be relatively easy to create an algorithm whereby if a user gets consistently high ratings for his/her comments there can be an eBay style "feedback rating" for every user. If a user's feedback rating gets high enough it ranks the user up into a "power user" status. This could then perhaps change the format of their comments to a different color or offer them some other call-out so their comments are more pronounced. Then, perhaps you could add a toggle filter to the page whereby a reader could click "Only show power user comments" or "Show all comments" and then only those comments would appear.
Additionally on the flipside, if a user's comments are continuously being buried then their feedback rating would drop, and if their feedback rating drops far enough, perhaps you disable their comment ability for a period of, say, 10 days or so. Perhaps this last piece is too drastic, but you get where I'm going.
I think all of the above would offer users a very strong incentive for posting quality comments and encourage a quality conversation. I think the current model of having an open floodgate where anyone can post anything is causing issues, as you've very nicely summarized in this article. Obviously, these suggestions would result in overall less posts, but the ones you do get would hopefully be of much higher quality.
Best of luck, and keep up the good work!
Works fine on 4chan at /r9k/, after an initial learning phase.
Maybe do some research before claiming to have outlined the web's next big problem. There is such a thing as blogpost trolling you know.
This would be revolutionary approach but very soon it would be followed by many others.
Tech Crunch have position to do this. Huge traffic, credibility and quality.
With this move you would piss some people off but on long therm you would gain a lot. Your commenting feature could become much more intersting and focused on subject.
Using FB connect or similar would solve only part of the problem. There are still people who are ready to leave stupid comments even under their own name.
I have strong feeling that payment for commenting on big sites is future.
Can you just imagine how this would change the look of comments. Almost like team work.
Be first one to do it and mark your place in history :-) That is exactly what we expect from TC crowd. Breaking boundaries and establishing new standards.
Paid-for-signalling would eliminate some of these. See http://azeemazhar.com/?p=282
So would some of the suggestions around comment karma.
Many good thoughts have been posted by you and others which I won't rehash. But one part stuck out to me: "Because it’s so easy to leave comments on FF, everyone starts running theirs mouths at a rapid pace without thinking...."
I keep finding various corners of the Web trending towards dynamic, real-time, short attention-span, less thought, more updates, etc. And I keep getting the feeling that one of the "next big things" on the Web will somehow push towards more static (as opposed to dynamic), less real-time, summarization, concision, lower amounts of content but higher quality, etc. People keep talking about reducing the noise by filtering instead of simply producing less noise.
A tangent from your main point, to be sure, but thought it was worth noting.
I've got an article that explains the research...
http://knol.google.com/k/daniel-bayn/anonymity-...
--Dan Bayn
The otherside of the coin relates back to Mike Arrington. He is an internet bully who frequently writes enflamed posts to generate traffic and highly charged comments and then wonders why the trolls and death threats appear on TC.
Just as TC appears to be growing up under CEO Harde, Arrington makes the sort of bully-boy stupid comments as he did with Leo and everyone then recalls all of his other rants and raves and brings TC back to the gutter. You reap what you sow and Arrington is only getting back what he has sown. I have no sympathy with him. He has destroyed other peoples companies and lives with his bully boy postings and used the trolls to backup his thoughts with comments.
TC without Arrington would be a much better place.
I went back and forth on comments for my WordPress site and eventually decided to use vBulletin instead. It seems to have a lot more moderation tools built in, including banning the IP address of offenders, plus the 'ignore' feature. Worth consideration.
TW
James
http://EmailCharger.com
If so, boo freakin hoo. Wear the big boy pants and either respond to it, or stop crying.
But the flip side of this is being called out for what readers believe you are (true or not). You can't have one without the other. TC churns out tech stories like sausages without any editorial controls or personal accountability. That's OK so long as your PR buddies and fan boys agree with your point of view?
But when others DONT agree with you and print their opinions without fact or in a sarcastic manner, that's a problem?
Your bad judgment continually amazes me, MG. You think this is a big problem, wait until you get a couple of years older, want to get a raise or perhaps move up at the company. Want to have the money to buy a house (you dont), want to move into something that pays a bit better?
Write about your journey on THAT day. Then, you will really have something to complain about. You're a victim playing the role of bully playing the role of victim. And you don't even know it.
But considering the large readership TC has, I believe it is long overdue now for a comment moderation system to be put in place. I think you guys (TC) are large enough now to enforce FB Connect or something similar on those who want to comment OR get someone to moderate full-time all the incoming comments.
Anyway, that's my two cents...
When my wife and I were traveling across the country, we had one woman stalk and harass us online every step of the way. On the Albany Times Union, we have some of the nastiest pricks imaginable trolling the blogs. If it were up to me, I'd just turn the blog comments off (can't do it for the newspaper, not my gig), but I've found that people who want to comment (positive or negative) will seek you out to do so beyond the blog's commenting system.
So I know it goes counter to the conventional wisdom of blogging, but screw it, I say shut it down and provide contact information (email, ect.) At least this way you can take action against the trolls if they do come knocking, and discuss with those who enjoy the content.
There are only a few posts that I've written on the subject. http://blog.adam-jackson.net/?s=anonymity
I'm slowly working on building an alliance among bloggers in an effort to finalize a solution (whatever that may be) to rid the Internet of this kind of behavior. We shouldn't allow it and it bugs me that we let trolling loose like we have.
It appears to me that MG's definition of a troll is someone who he doesn't like or agree with, who may be pointed in his comments, regardless of how accurate those comments may be. It's not the song so much, but how they sing it.
In a previous post: MG was asked a simple question: Why does his name remain on the Venturebeat masthead. Did MG answer? Nope. Why? Is it an offensive question? Should the readers simply not ask? He was given a Viking sendoff by his former boss, wishing him good luck? Yet his name remains on VB's masthead?
Why? Is that an unreasonable question? My guess is it's tied to pay. But MG is too cool for school to respond. Perhaps that is trolling?
Also: MG got caught with his pants down, writing a favorable story about a company that employed his then girlfriend. Valleywag caught him on this, yet he thought there was nothing inappropriate about his decision to do so. When people commented about that, MG dismissed them as trolls as well.
And this is why: MG is a blog reporter. Not a newspaper reporter. Not a television journalist. Heck, not even a radio guy. A blog reporter. He works in a world where stories are posted one minute and taken down the next. Where sources are friends and friends are sources. Where certain companies are favoried and others are damned--presumably because the favored advertise and the damned aren't afraid to sue.
MG makes sausage. He doesn't own Oscar Meyer. He's just the latest guy hired to work the disassembly line. Hendrickson before him. Joe Schmo before him. And so on, and so on and so on....
Like sausage making, the blogging world, has a dark side to it. A side he would rather you not see. It's the comment section. A section that was created to blindly validate, or expound on, the subject of the story. But similar to the lack of control of the content--or its accuracy--MG and his boss often are called on the carpet for their inaccuracies, their failure to disclose conflict of intersts--remuneration and acceptance of free goods in exchange for favorable coverage.
And they don't like when the sun shines on their little enterprise. And they call those people trolls.
But they aren't trolls. They are the buying public. Consumers. And sometimes, these consumers cry out to MG and his boss when they see rat hairs in the sausage. They complain about its unbaised coverage. They tel him they aren't "buying" what he is grinding out and throwing onto the counter.
And MG hates this. But he has little control--because he is simply a worker bee. Like Hendrickson, Like Owen Thomas, Alaska Miller, Paul Boutin, and dozens and dozens of others...
Sausage makers...in a non union shop.
Good luck with that, MG.
What are you going to call your "alliance"?
The Hitler Youth, perhaps?
Gotta love simpletons like this douchebag above me. Who gives you the right to patrol the internet, simply because you don't agree with the point or tone of someone else? You want their name and phone number? Perhaps their bank account? Perhaps you can list their names in the town square?
All that is great until YOU become the guy on the other side of the argument. Then what, fella? Not such a good idea then.
Freedom of speech is allowed for blowhards like Arrington and worker bee enablers like MG. Why isn't is for trolls as well? After all, you get what you pay for.
i accept them all and never delete them unless they are comment spam or hate speech
but i do engage heavily in the comments (as does techcrunch) and we've done a pretty good job of keeping the trolls out
they show up occasionally but they are not welcome
it also helps to have a bouncer. i started with my brother (aka jackson) and now its kid mercury.
he's awesome
fred
Not everyone feels that every comment they make on every topic needs to become part of their Google record. Think about it. Some topics scream "Off the record please".
Meanwhile, few of us have the problem of having so many comments that it would be too much work to quickly delete some spam as a moderator. A few seconds and some thick skin may be all that is needed.
Can you answer this honestly?
It's not an increase in rude behavior. All this stuff was already being said on the back-channel. It's an increased perception amongst the masses in the fishbowl that there will be zero repercussions because of behavior like this, so anything goes.
People flaming you calling names, or cursing at you, or threaten to do harm would be trolls/mob... People telling you they don't like your fact checking prior to publishing, or choice of content to cover are not trolls they are people given criticism in hopes it will change the direction TC is going.
Things can spiral out of hand quickly, and it appears to transcend offline into the real world like people spitting on your boss, it’s scary that the mentality leaves the interweb and people take actions in the real world....
Cheers,
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