5 Ways to Stop Trolls From Killing the Internet
You might not be aware of this, but there are a lot of dickheads on the Internet.
Since this phenomenon seems to get worse with the size of the crowd, it is theorized that we will reach a critical mass; an Asshole Apocalypse, if you will. That's when casual Internet users--and the corporations who want their business--will step in.
There are ways to solve this crisis, but I'm telling you now, you won't like some of them.
But first, the problem...
Right away let me shut down everyone who's snorting derisively into their can of Mountain Dew and saying, "Trolls will be trolls!" You should know that there are billions of dollars at play here. The trolls are driving away business, and that simply won't be allowed to continue. I'm not saying I'm rooting for it--I'm saying that's the economic reality.
There are two huge, growing industries at stake: social networking and online gaming.
Social networking is at the heart of "Web 2.0," the future of the online world, the Facebook/MySpace/Twitter web where users create all the content and their parent companies make billions just for hosting it. It's a pretty sweet deal.
Or it would be, if they could only convince everybody to use it. But they're finding that lots of users will communicate online with people they know (virtually all use email and 37% use private text messaging), but only 8% use message boards or blogs or anything else that exposes them to the Internet's assheads.
Hell, look at this site. We just had an article that was read by 305,396 unique users in a few days ... but fewer than 100 of them joined the conversation down in the comments. That's .002%, folks. It's not that the Cracked comments are mostly retarded or nasty; it's that for a normal person, the memory of getting called a fucktard in public even one time is striking enough to make them avoid the comments forever, even if it was accompanied by 10 non-fucktard comments. It's human nature to remember the fucktard.
It's the same in gaming. There are reports that most people who give up online gaming aren't frustrated by the games themselves or technical issues. It's the sheer number of fuckwads they have to play with. Even on the most popular online multiplayer game, World of Warcraft, 70% of new players stay in modes where they don't have to interact with anybody else.
So there is a clear barrier to entry for the vast majority who haven't joined the Web 2.0 party, and that barrier is a moat full of dipshits. How can we bridge it? I see five ways:
#5.
Develop Anti-Troll Software
Imagine a world where you get in a heated argument in a hallway, but before even one sentence can get fully out of your mouth, a robot voice pipes up and tells you to cool it. Well, what sounds like really stupid science-fiction in real life is entirely possible online. Of all the futuristic movies to turn out to be cruelly accurate, who would have thought it'd be Demolition Man?
I'm talking about programs like:
StupidFilter:
This highly experimental piece of software is in beta and will some day be able to recognize comment stupidity the moment it's posted. They have a demo on their site you can play with.
You plug this code into your comment section and it's like a strap of tape over the mouth of every teenager who can't type a sentence without including the word "fail."
Robot9000:
This is a program invented by Randall Monroe, the XKCD webcomic guy that requires every post to be unique. If someone types "First!", no other post can ever consist of just that.
This sounds pointless to anybody who's never been in a chat room or message board before, but the rest of us know better. Mindless repetition of jokes (or "memes") is one of the primary tools of bored trolls who want to fill a thread with noise to drown out the signal. For once, many will find themselves using keys other than Ctrl-V.
Audio Preview:
Linguists speculate that no single body of written communication in the history of human language has ever been as collectively retarded and horrible as the comments under YouTube videos. After the aforementioned Randall Monroe suggested a feature to force users to hear their comment read aloud before they can post it, YouTube implemented that very thing (though only on an optional basis). Many a YouTuber has sat in dismayed silence after realizing that "lol wut", when spoken aloud, did not sound as clever a they had first believed.
Real-Time Voice Censor:
Now we're in the realm of the real Demolition Man-type solutions. Want to know how bad Microsoft wants to control the trolls on Xbox Live? They've patented a real-time voice censoring program. Yeah. You curse into your headset and it bleeps it in real time. How does it know the difference between "The cock crows at midnight" and "My cock grows at midnight"? With technology. Don't question it.
Of course, widespread use of this stuff will just kick off the same "DRM vs. pirates" arms race we see any time they try to control human behavior with software. The humans always win.
Also, the technology has to get a whole lot smarter before we can even try. Playing with the StupidFilter demo I linked earlier taught me that it doesn't find any stupidity in the sentence, "lol, wut your mom farts lolcats."
There are better ways. For instance, you can...
#4.
Start a Posse of Moderators, and Arm Them
Right now if you have a blog or forum or anything else with open comments, and you don't have a human moderator to watch it, you're going to wind up with a wasteland. As soon as more than one troll shows up, they will feed off each other until everyone else is gone. You have to control them. And don't start talking about free speech; the troll's goal is to shut down speech, to either fill the channel with noise until no one can talk to each other, or to get everyone talking about him instead of the subject at hand. He's a guy in a coffee shop screaming nonsense over a bullhorn.
And it's here where the marriage of creative software and human moderators can make all the difference. With things like...
Disenvoweling:
This is a bit of code that will suck all of the vowels out of a targeted post, so that this:
"What an unfunny piece of shit. Somebody should be fired for letting this guy write for the site."
Becomes:
"Wht n nfnny pc f sht. Smbdy shld b frd fr lttng ths gy wrt fr th st."
The theory is that it makes people slow down and try to parse what was being said and thus robs the post of its impact. Also it makes the troll look retarded.
Karma:
Geek megaportal SlashDot was among the first to use this, a way of allowing the community to moderate itself. Registered users can vote every post up or down, and each user winds up with a karma "score" that is just the sum total of all the "up" votes minus the "down" ones they've ever gotten.
We use this in the Cracked forums (where each member's karma score is visible to other members at all times). You can only vote once per day, so even a coordinated karma voting campaign couldn't change a score faster than the rest of the community could correct it.
Yes, it works. Everyone claims they don't care what their karma is, yet any time a person sees an unexplained drop, I get an email complaining about it. You just can't ignore a number right next to your name that announces what the community thinks of you.
But we're still thinking small, on a site-by-site basis. After all, assheads will simply migrate to places where security isn't as tight. If this is an Internet-wide problem, we need to think big. But how?
Jesus, dude. Does someone hurting your feelings with four letter words and crassness really upset you so much that you're seriously advocating what would essentially be the end of the internet?
ReplyShit...Maybe it's YOU.
At least persistent ID's may put a stop to spambots; once they're blocked the company that owns them needs a new persistent ID to open a new account on the site.
ReplyI can roll with all of them except the persistent ID's and ending anonymity. Well actually I take that back. But I would not want my family knowing about my posts on the pro suicide websites. And if my name and information were tracked with every post they could find out and possibly try to stop me. Since this stuff will not happen until a decade from now, I have nothing to worry about as I will be ending my life next year after spending a year blowing money like a playboy.
Replywell i dont know about most people but i found ways around it pretty easily in the rok which in authors terms korea. i just used an ip scrambler and was surfing the web like back in the states. Alot of koreans do this so it doesnt really stop them either. In retrospect even if the government did do this it would only lead to the same consequences of prohibiton on marijuana. Which is Jail Time and a hefty fine and more over crowding and would end up causing more harm then good. Even though those people did harm themselves over internet harassment they could have also been only a factor to their particular situations.
ReplyWell THAT was physically painful to read...
Anonymity is to the internet what the executioner's hood was to the Guillotine
ReplyThere's no nation called "Korea".
ReplyIt is near china.
Most of these articles on Cracked are great, but this was just f*****g terrible. That last point is going very close to SOPA's path. In fact, the entire article is insisiting that anyone who disagrees with the author is a troll. Grow a pair, and deal with it. You're pretty much suggestin the Internet become some socialist fantasy world simply because you do not want to see critisism. Or as this article refers to it, trolling.
ReplyYou want a fantasy utopian community? go back to the 1800s and try living in a Transedalist "utopia" community. They never lasted king for a reason.
Read it again, idiot. He was pointing out that if we, the current internet community don't start shutting out trolls ourselves, the government will get involved, and it will suck.
I must say that #1 could be quite horrible. The point of internet is that it is free and anonymous, and you can't control it. On the other hand the benefits of having a non-anonymous internet could override the bad sides. We just have to make sure that no abuse of power happens.
ReplyRight, can't see 'abuse of power' happening at all... It's such an easy thing to avoid and all. We'll be fine.
Cracked needs a report user/report comment button. I want to get the guy who spams about Brazilian horse porn banned
ReplyTrolls arnt exactly in danger of killing the internet, their just a minor annoyance.
Reply*they're
I can't believe I only just stumbled onto this article today after wondering why the hell my karma score in the forums was -2.
ReplyEnding all internet anonymity is probably a good idea since so many of the trolls will be gone and they'll lose the ability to troll without some social repercussions. I look forward to an internet with less and less horrid troll communities like /b/. I think that'd be an awesome future to behold.
Yeah, an internet without places such as /b/ or 9gag would be a really nice thing to have.
But remember, no pirating. And, nobody will want to watch porn online. Thus dies the internet. Plus, some filthy, greedy fat cats will get enough money to buy their next couple of summer homes.
Number 1 is a horrible idea. Internet Anonymity is a great privilege and is one of the joys of the Internet. If it were taken from the individual, that would be the most tyrannical censorship I've ever seen.
Replyyou're not anonymous on the internet even on 4chan because it still asks for your email and sometimes you upload a file from your compjuter
If people are just going use their anonymity to virtually harass others on the internet, then they don't deserve the privilege.
I think I'm gonna go pick outa ridiculous hat. People will be people, and wherever they gather, be it the park, or the chatroom, there'll always be that one jackass. The idea suggested by #1, it has been pointed out, I'm sure, could become a much bigger animal than we are capable of handling. I don't think I need to point out the obvious. It'll seem like a lot less of a good idea when sitting in a cell for speaking out against social ills.
ReplyA lot of these articles are making me depressed. A future with no p2p is not a future i want my children to live in, thank you very much.
ReplyMr. Wong, why are you so much better than me? :D
ReplyYou know a troll fails when they start using the weakest method of trolling: being a grammar nazi. What i would do is say "this is me giving a f**k: *put something here* :D
ReplyI have absolutely no idea who Zach Parsons is, but I would absolutely spend $10 to call him - or anyone else - a fart zeppelin.
ReplyGood, I'm not the only person who now wants to use that at the first available opportunity.
Demolition Man has already had one prediction become totally unexpected reality: "Governor Schwarzenegger Library". He had shown no intention of ever going into politics at the time and no-one was more surprised than the writers when it came true.
ReplyMinor nitpick: It was "President Schwarzenegger Library".
The end of internet anonymity is pretty scary, especially since its basically the only place that offers it anymore.
ReplyThe problem with this is porn. I think most teenagers already watch porn, so if you destroy anonymity so everybody knows about them, there is going to be a riot.
Replythey'll just have to go back to stealing it from their uncle's stash like us older folks had to do when we were teens...and if your over 18 and too embarrassed to say you watch porn or go into an adult video shop, your probably too embarrassed to ever get a decent woman that would show you any kind of a real good time.