[Pointless...]

The most difficult issue is people who, when banned, keep signing up again under a different name.

For that, I think we ought to invent a new kind of banning: the "silent alarm" ban. It doesn't prevent the person from logging in and posting, but it makes it so that they're the only ones who can see their own posts. That way, they don't know they've been banned.

There is a vast gulf between polite criticism and spam, jerry.

If you don't have faith that our host can tell the difference, many blogs minus one might be the solution to the problem you described.

That's a good idea, Josh. Joel Spolsky has a great article where he talks about that and other things in relation to having good discussion groups:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/printerFriendly/articles/BuildingCommunitieswithSo.html

(Hmm, I can't find the reference in this article to only showing the post to the poster, but there's lots of good stuff so I'll go on anyway...)

Some quotes (hope this isn't too much! and the preview doesn't have any of my line returns -- if this thing comes out all mangled, I'm truly sorry...):

On Usenet, threads last for months and months and go off onto so many tangents that you never know where they've been. Whenever a newbie stumbles by and asks a germane question, the old timers shout him down and tell him to read the FAQ. Quoting, with the ">" symbol, is a disease that makes it impossible to read any single thread without boring yourself to death by re-reading the whole history of a chain of argument which you just read in the original, seconds ago, again and again and again. Shlemiel the Painter reading.

...

On most investment discussion boards, it's practically impossible to follow a thread from beginning to end, because every post is its own page, which makes for a lot of banner ad inventory, but the latency in reading a conversation will eventually drive you nuts. The huge amount of flashing commercial crap on all four sides of the conversation makes you feel like you were trying to make friends in Times Square, but the neon lights keep demanding all the attention.

...

With that in mind, I'd like to answer the most common questions about the Joel on Software forum, why it was designed the way it was designed, how that makes it work, and how it could be improved.

Q. Why is the software so dang simplistic?

A. In the early days of the Joel on Software forum, achieving a critical mass to get the conversation off the ground was important to prevent the empty restaurant phenomenon (nobody goes into an empty restaurant, they'll always go into the full one next door even if it's totally rubbish.) Thus a design goal was to eliminate impediments to posting. That's why there's no registration and there are literally no features, so there's nothing to learn.

The business goal of the software that runs the forum was to provide tech support for Fog Creek's products. That's what paid for the development. To achieve that goal, nothing was more important than making the software super simple so that anyone could be comfortable using it. Everything about how the forum works is incredibly obvious. I don't know of anyone who hasn't been able to figure out how to use it immediately.

Q. Could you make a feature where I check a box that says "email me if somebody replies to my post?"

A. This one feature, so easy to implement and thus so tempting to programmers, is the best way to kill dead any young forum. Implement this feature and you may never get to critical mass. Philip Greenspun's LUSENET has this feature and you can watch it sapping the life out of young discussion groups.

Why?

What happens is that people go to the group to ask a question. If you offer the "notify me" checkbox, these people will post their question, check the box, and never come back. They'll just read the replies in their mailbox. The end.

If you eliminate the checkbox, people are left with no choice but to check back every once in a while. And while they're checking back, they might read another post which looks interesting. And they might have something to contribute to that post. And in the critical early days when you're trying to get the discussion group to take off, you've increased the "stickiness" and you've got more people hanging around, which helps achieve critical mass a lot quicker.

Q. OK, but can't you at least have branching? If someone gets off on a tangent, that should be its own branch which you can follow or go back to the main branch.

A. Branching is very logical to a programmer's mind but it doesn't correspond to the way conversations take place in the real world. Branched discussions are disjointed to follow and distracting. You know what I find distracting? When I'm trying to do something on my bank's web site and the site is so slow I can't remember what I'm doing from one click to the next. That reminds me of a joke. Three old ladies talking. Lady 1: "I'm so forgetful the other day I was on the steps to my apartment with a bag, and I couldn't remember if I was taking out the trash or going upstairs with the groceries." Lady 2: "I'm so forgetful I was in my car in the driveway and I couldn't remember if I was coming home or going to shul." Lady 3: "Thank God, I still have my memory, clear as a bell, knock on wood. (knock knock knock). Come in, door's open!" Branching makes discussions get off track, and reading a thread that is branched is discombobulating and unnatural. Better to force people to start a new topic if they want to get off topic. Which reminds me...

Q. Your list of topics is sorted wrong. It should put the topic with the most recent reply first, rather than listing them based on the time of the original post.

A. It could do that; that's what many web-based forums do. But when you do that certain topics tend to float near the top forever, because people will be willing to argue about H1B visas, or what's wrong with Computer Science in college, until the end of the universe. Every day 100 new people arrive in the forum for the first time, and they start at the top of the list, and they dive into that topic with gusto.

The way I do it has two advantages. One, topics rapidly go away, so conversation remains relatively interesting. Eventually people have to just stop arguing about a given point.

Two, the order of topics on the home page is stable, so it's easier to find a topic again that you were interested in because it stays in the same place relative to its neighbors.

...

Q. Why don't you show me the post I'm replying to, while I compose my reply?

A. Because that will tempt you to quote a part of it in your own reply. Anything I can do to reduce the amount of quoting will increase the fluidity of the conversation, making topics interesting to read. Whenever someone quotes something from above, the person who reads the topic has to read the same thing twice in a row, which is pointless and automatically guaranteed to be boring.

Sometimes people still try to quote things, usually because they are replying to something from three posts ago, or because they're mindlessly nitpicking and they need to rebut 12 separate points. These are not bad people, they're just programmers, and programming requires you to dot every i and cross every t, so you get into a frame of mind where you can't leave any argument unanswered any more than you would ignore an error from your compiler. But I'll be damned if I make it EASY on you. I'm almost tempted to try to find a way to show posts as images so you can't cut and paste them. If you really need to reply to something from three posts ago, kindly take a moment to compose a decent English sentence ("When Fred said blah, he must not have considered..."), don't litter the place with your >>s.

Q. Why do posts disappear sometimes?

A. The forum is moderated. That means that a few people have the magick powah to delete a post. If the post they delete is the first one in a thread, the thread itself appears deleted because there's no way to get to it.

Q. But that's censorship!

A. No, it's picking up the garbage in the park. If we didn't do it, the signal to noise ratio would change dramatically for the worse. People post spam and get rich schemes, people post antisemitic comments about me, people post nonsense that doesn't make any sense. Some idealistic youngsters may imagine a totally uncensored world as one in which the free exchange of intelligent ideas raises everyone's IQ, an idealized Oxford Debate Society or Speakers' Corner. I am pragmatic and understand that a totally uncensored world just looks like your inbox: 80% spam, advertising, and fraud, rapidly driving away the few interesting people.

If you are looking for a place to express yourself in which there will be no moderation, my advice to you would be to (a) create a new forum and (b) make it popular. [Apologies to Larry Wall].

...

The more seriously a community takes itself, the more fun it is to troll there.

I've noticed an increase in rather sophisticated right-wing trolls at my own site in the last several weeks, and I'm wondering if some of them might be professionals.

What exactly does "troll" mean in this context?

What exactly does "troll" mean in this context?

Do you understand now Ottnot? Brad deleted my very reasonable post, let Scott's incredibly long Joel Spolsky quotation stand unedited, and let yoyo's defense of trolling stand as well....

He deleted it with the pejorative [pointless] intended to sway readers to his pov, yet clearly, ottnot, you didn't feel it was pointless, you felt it was worth some sort of response.

And which was spam, or pointless, or worse for the community...?

Truly, the point of that prior post was that Brad's blog, useful and interesting, is a bit too restricted for an optimal Nielsen-Hayden community to form.

"Things to cherish: Your regulars. A sense of community. Real expertise. Genuine engagement with the subject under discussion. ... Cooperation in maintenance of a good conversation.... All these things should be rewarded with your attention and praise."

and even perhaps
"Grant more lenience to participants who are only part-time jerks, as long as they’re valuable the rest of the time."

It's certainly Brad's blog, but I haven't seen this behavior on other lefty blogs (Atrios', Oliver's, Kos', ...). Sadly, it seems to be a behavior more associated with right wing blogs (rogerlsimon's, jarvis', captain ed's, totten's,...), and with the economists (Mankiw, etc.) that Brad has to report have been willing to sell their souls. And that makes me wonder how Brad himself might do in their shoes.

To paraphrase yoyo, if Brad lightened up a bit, I think his blog and his community would all be a bit better off.

Respectfully,

Jerry

I liked Spolsky's comments. I don't completely agree with all of them, so if I ever make a popular blog I won't do it exactly his way.

We have an evolutionary situation here. People who make blogs get to do it hwoever they like and people won't read the blog or post in it unless they want to. Formats that people like will tend to thrive. I enjoy giving advice about how to run a blog when blog owners ask for it or even when they don't, but I'm sure not going to tell them not to delete comments they want to delete. If they think I don't fit into their community, OK, I'll find a community I'm an asset to. If I help my blogs in some way outcompete the ones that censor me then that's fine. Another example of the net interpreting censorship as damage and routing around it. Or if I turn out not to be an asset to the blogs that accept me then I guess that means I'm more noise than signal. Oops.

My experience has been that it's far better to discuss deletions etc in email. If you make a public message telling a blogger he shouldn't have deleted you comment, he's very likely to make a public response that's mostly intended for the other readers. You probably won't like it, unless you enjoy storming off in a huff.

" it makes it so that they're the only ones who can see their own posts."

from http://www.everythinginmoderation.org/2003/10/on_stealth_moderation_or_blame_the_technology.shtml
Sunir Shah: "Quietly screwing with reality is never a good strategy."

One suggestion, to discourage paid trolls: have a "disclosure: I do/don't have a financial interest" field/checkbox which requires that they either come clean or lie in order to post.

[comment spam]