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?
I like trolls, they're quite entertaining. It's not the horrible grammar I enjoy, or the fact that they enjoy repetitive crude remarks, it's just that...
ReplyThey unify the community AND, if I may add, quite a conversation starter. :)
what about this, you can thumbs down a comment as many times as you want but you must first get and equal number of thumbs up. If a user has 10 more thumbs down than up they are kicked out. Essentially every one is a mod with power exactly proportional to how many people approve of them.
Replyoh, but trolls are not memesfags, because troll means to be controversial, and being a memesfag is just annoying, annoying dosnt equal troll just because you hate them anyway.
Replyactually, not to bad. unique comments sounds like a good idea
Replystupid filter!? to detect someone acting mean. stupid, disagreeing? THAT IS AGAINST FREEDOM OF SPEECH! EVERYONE GETS TO TALK OR NOONE DOSE!
ReplySadly, this comment, because it does have some punctuation and is mostly correctly spelled, might make it through the Stupid Filter. It is possible that the ALL CAPS section would qualify it as stupid, along with the 'NOONE DOSE' at the end. Tragically, Cracked has not installed this filter, so we will never, ever know. Also, you need to attend your high school Civics classes and discover what 'Freedom of Speech' actually means.
Trolls annoy me greatly; but, as a libertarian, some of these proposals disturb me. #1 especially.
ReplyI like some of the solutions in here, and honestly, since I've got nothing worth hiding on the internet as far as social conversation sites go, losing my anonymity on a blog site or someplace like face book or gaia online wouldn't phase me in the slightest.
ReplyPoint of fact, I think a lot more people who would otherwise keep on following the "jerks will be jerks" mindset would turn their personality around tut suit.
Who cares if the turn-around is just superficial/fake? At least the jerks would be thinking twice or steering clear altogether.
IMO, conversations would go up in quality if assholes had a reason to fear being assholes and instead forced themselves to try and be intelligent and polite in their conversations with others.
Knowing that others would recognize them in more places than the one they were an a*****e in, and that it could have potential consequences for their reputation, would be an excellent turn-off for potential assholes.
Why not just make a super-site specifically for trolls designed to troll other trolls in a competition to see who's the alpha troll? They'd certainl f**k off other places if they're busy battling themselves... unless if bcause they're trolls they manage to instead attack everything as a super group. f**k I abandon my idea, never mind. Great article though.
ReplyWe have one: 4chan
@Reaperofsouls: That's apparently not good enough. We've still got billions of other trolls surfing around everything from Facebook to Gaia Online to Youtube, etc etc etc.
the law thing seems abit extreme dont you think??
Replyit has been shown that anonymity increases assholishness, but so does depersonifying the victim (ie, the victim hiding behind the screen name).
we have this problem, it has been shown in science, so what do we do about it? create a bunch of beaurocratic laws tailored towards making money?? cause of course the corporations are going to lobby for it.
why cant people just deal with it?? you know the term "don't feed the trolls"...?? its a similar sentiment to dont feed the seagulls. if your at a beach with a nice hot bag of fish and chips, and you throw one of those hot, salty, freshly fried chips at one of the seagulls, ofcourse your going to get every single seagull in a 10 mile radius chirping down your throat at another chance for a chip.
now replace "seagull" with "troll", "chip" with "sanity" and "beach" with "internet" (yes, you have a bag of fish and sanity)
the solution seems simple, dont give it to them, trolls are like high school bullies, they get off on reaction, stop reacting and they get bored pretty quickly (that is, unless we're talking about youtube).
i have never seen a team of moderators (sometimes coupled with a karma system) that have been incapable of dealing with petty trolls. and besides, an unmoderated online forum or comment section is kinda like a bathroom stall in a busy bar, you get stuff written all over the walls thats (mostly) unrelated to whatever s**t [chuckle] is happening in there.
I don't think the writer is actually advocating that a law be passed, he is warning us. If things get too bad on the internet, then corporate interests and parents are going to coerce the government into destroying the virtual anonymity we enjoy on the internet.
^^ Oddly enough, this is my real name :P
ReplyOnline privacy is fun because I can say whatever I want and there's no way that anyone in the world can figure out who I am.
ReplyIgnoring trolls is the only way to beat a troll. They're a form of attention whore, and not giving them that attention is key is stopping them.
ReplyI think the death of online privacy, would be a truly sad thing. Some of us don't want our friends or family to potentially find out everything we are doing. We should institute programs to control trolls, or simply teach people to ignore trolls . Ignoring them starves them. I know this was all mentioned above, but god, I really want my privacy. :)
ReplyI'm not up on my internet technology, with your "failcats" and whatnot, but what if sites simply had a thumb-up/thumb-down system - as seen on Cracked and YouTube - and users who consistently have a high thumb-down ratio are banned. Obviously there would be a lot of leeway given, because some people do legitimately have contrasting opinions to most people (and they ARE thumbed down, because NOBODY likes others thinking DIFFERENTLY from them, for some strange reason). The multiple account thing is still a problem, but what if the I.P. was also blocked, stopping that user from ever accessing that site. I'm not sure if that's possible, so just take this as a thought, rather than a suggestion.
ReplyI think the blocked I.P. thing could work, because you don't want assholes on your site anyway, especially when they are driving away your recurring viewers.
The problem with IP blocking is 1) many people could be using the same address (like an internet cafe, or the fact that most ISPs periodically shuffle their customers' IP addresses for some reason), and 2) what's to keep the troll from finding another location (like going to a different Starbucks)?
Wikipedia (and most MediaWiki-based sites) have a fairly decent compromise: Both anon and registered edits are allowed (certain kinds of pages only allow registered users to edit). An IP ban only applies to anons (and in many cases, prevents account creation from that address); registered users can still edit from there. An account ban prevents that person from editing from ANY address, though it's usually only short-term (the permabans tend to also anonblock the address the registered user most often used). If someone tries to edit or make a legit account from an anonblocked IP (like a Tor node), they can contact an admin to help them make an account manually. Everyone wins! (Except the trolls)
Am I the only one a little disappointed that the comment section for this article wasn't a massive posting of troll after troll after troll?
ReplyI can't think of a faster way to get everyone to leave the internet en masse than to enforce #1.
ReplyAnd with everyone having left the internet a sterile wasteland with nothing but animated tumbleweed rolling across the screen, what would be the point of investing in the internet anymore? All those young, impressionable teens wouldn't be there to see your advertisements or update their s****y profiles and keep your site running.
God bless the protection of some little egos.
I urge the world to man up a bit.
I do not think there will be any kind of mass exodus. More probably we would see homogeneous populations using the web for the most specific and narrow things they browse for in the first place. These users would likely keep to just porn or just social sites. This would of course lead to decreased profits for advertisers and ad supported sites. Honestly though I hardly believe trolling will have any kind of bearing on the end of online anonymous users. After all even the damn trolls bump site hits, but hey I'm just speculating.
No matter how hard we try, we'll never rid the internet of trolls. Sure we can try to filter out the idiots, but then we overlook the ones who do their trolling within the rules and just silence the firstfags and lolcats uploaders
Reply"lol, wut, ur mom farts lolcats"
ReplyAs stupid as it is, I actually find that amusing
i dont care for the government to be involved more in my life then it already is. i can see both sides of the issue, but i still like to have the freedom to say what i wish to say, even if sometimes im sarcastic. its a difficult issue and i dont think anyone will come to a satisfying answer.
ReplyI love you CTOOTHMAN
Trolls killing the internet?
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesTrolls make the internet a fun place to be, they provide entertainment for those us with a sense of humour at the expense of people who suck, as well as telling those people who suck that they suck, hopefully allowing them to see their flaws and better themselves as a human being.
It's the removal of trolls that make the internet a bad place, just look at /b/ once 4chan was forced to clean up their act due to mainstream attention: it started sucking, horribly.
Same happened at Blabbermouth, and a number of places. All start going down the drain once trolls had to be removed to "clean up the place".
That being said, I am all for the removal of idiot/wannabe trolls, the ones who think they're trolling by non-stop spamming of stupid, overused memes as if they're 14 year old girls who just discovered 4chan, have failed to realize it's sucked for years, and think "cool story, bro" is the best way to refute an argument while feigning moderate internet literacy. Trolling is a art, and they are not artists.
An interesting perspective to be sure, but I still consider trolls internet parasites, contributing nothing of value and feeding off the passion and emotions of others.
True, there are people who deserve to be trolled, but is trolling them really the best way to "allow them to see their flaws and better themselves as a human being?" Hell no. Trolls aren't a righteous band who are out to improve the internet by letting "those people who suck [know] that they suck," they are just contributing there venom to incite anger.
Trolling may be an "art," but that doesn't make it good.
actually thats not so true internet trolls are now taking down some youtube channels and vids with a simple false copyright infringement flagging
Trolling is the douchebag who pants you in middle school. That said, I know some real world trolls, some of them are just ass garbage, but some of them ate just really desperate for attention...just like the rest of us on the Internet.