Why Trolls Win With Toxic Comments 298
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the bring-you-down-to-their-level-and-beat-you-with-experience dept.
from the bring-you-down-to-their-level-and-beat-you-with-experience dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The Web is a place for unlimited exchange of ideas. But according to an NPR report, researchers have found that rude comments on articles can change the way we interpret the news. 'It's a little bit like the Wild West. The trolls are winning,' says Dominique Brossard, co-author of the study on the so-called 'Nasty Effect.' Researchers worked with a science writer to construct a balanced news story on the pros and cons of nanotechnology, a topic chosen so that readers would have to make sense of a complicated issue with low familiarity. They then asked 1,183 subjects to review the blog post from a Canadian newspaper that discussed the water contamination risks of nanosilver particles and the antibacterial benefits. Half saw the story with polite comments, and the other half saw rude comments, like: 'If you don't see the benefits of using nanotechnology in these products, you're an idiot.' People that were exposed to the polite comments didn't change their views really about the issue covering the story, while the people that did see the rude comments became polarized — they became more against the technology that was covered in the story. Brossard says we need to have an anchor to make sense of complicated issues. 'And it seems that rudeness and incivility is used as a mental shortcut to make sense of those complicated issues.' Brossard says there's no quick fix for this issue (PDF), and while she thinks it's important to foster conversation through comments sections, every media organization has to figure out where to draw the line when comments get out of control. 'It's possible that the social norms in this brave new domain will change once more — with users shunning meanspirited attacks from posters hiding behind pseudonyms and cultivating civil debate instead,' writes Brossard. 'Until then, beware the nasty effect.'"
Re:Freeze them out. (Score:5, Informative)
One name I have heard for this strategy is a "shadow ban"
Re:F U (Score:5, Informative)
Ah, trolling.
TFA isn't even about trolling. More like "griefing", or just insults. Trolling is so much more than that.
Back in the days of USENET, it was (once) an art form.
Yes! Anyone that wants to truly understand trolling culture should read Guy Macon's The Art of Trolling. [chessbanter.com]
Re:not relevant here, fortunately (Score:5, Informative)
It's an operating system, that descended from the original versions of UNIX (and thus is a true UNIX, rather than Linux which aims to be compatible with UNIX without actually being a UNIX), that's both free and open source; there were some licensing issues at one point but those have been cleaned up now. It's used in pretty much the same contexts as Linux is, and is pretty similar from a user's point of view, but is less popular. (The compatibility means that many programs only need a recompile to be ported from Linux to BSD or vice versa; and you can even get hybrid distributions, e.g. Debian/kFreeBSD is FreeBSD's kernel with the mostly-GNU userland that Debian uses, programs that are more frequently run on Linux. Or you can run BSD's traditional userland on Linux; many people do.)
The main reason it isn't so widely known is that it's pretty similar to Linux in terms of what it can do and why you would use it, so without a compelling reason to use BSD in particular, you'd typically use Linux by default because it's better known.
Re:not relevant here, fortunately (Score:5, Informative)
Thank for the fine information - some I'd known, most, not.
I feel like a real shit, because you typed in an excellent helpful piece in reply to an early-morning toss-off meant to be humorous - JonAbbot said he hadn't seen any "BSD is dying" posts, so I thought I'd accommodate him by trying to imply that it had already died. Sorry, man.
And thanks CBravo for the Windows 'touché.'
Re:Observation about Slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
For some reason I decided to hunt through the Slashcode repository to see how moderation works, and I think you're right. To be on the list of eligible users, you have to have a certain minimum karma and a UID that's older than a certain limit. The list is then processed to select "good" moderators based on metamoderation and whether they actually use all their mod points. The good moderators are more likely to receive tokens, which eventually become mod points. I'm not clear on whether anything else can give tokens, since there are a lot of files and I'm manually reading through the repository. But it looks like you can get more mod points just by moderating fairly, which I guess was the whole point of metamod in the first place.
I didn't do anything like a full survey of the code base, so obviously take this with a grain of salt.