Trolling for Trolls.

timwinters

Ejection Handle Pulled
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Being the ever supportive person of the MC that I am, I thought they might find this article useful and entertaining:

Report: Trolls can be detected early on.

Moderns trolls aren't found under bridges. They take up residence in online discussions communities and create a lot of havoc. Those people often wind up getting banned from sites.

A new study has discovered ways to detect trolls early. According to an 18-month study of online communities, scientists can determine which community members are going to be banned with an 80-percent rate of accuracy.

The report, Antisocial Behavior in Online Discussion Communities, stated that such people can be identified after reading five to 10 posts.

Researchers from Stanford University and Cornell University examined three large online discussing boards: news site CNN.com, political site Brietbart.com and gaming site IGN.com.

Disqus, the platform that hosts comments on the three sites, provided the scientists with "a complete timestamped trace of user activity from March 2012 to August 2013, as well as a list of users that were banned."

Among the report's findings, the posts of future-banned users, among those popularly known as trolls, exhibit notable differences from other users. Their posts are more difficult to understand, contain more negative language, including profanity, and use positive or conciliatory language less often. They "make less of an effort to integrate or stay on-topic," the report said.

Trolls tend to post in individual threads and receive more replies than users on average, "suggesting that they might be successful in luring others into fruitless, time-consuming discussions," a phenomenon known as "feeding the troll."

Users who will eventually be banned also post more frequently before they are silenced. "A typical FBU (future-banned user) makes 264 posts, but an average user makes only 22 posts," the report stated.

The posts of trolls gets worse over time, and as time goes on, more of their posts are deleted by moderators for not adhering to community guidelines.

Communities also become less tolerant of a person's inflammatory posts over time.

"Through a combination of crowdsourcing experiments and machine learning, we show that not only do they enter a community writing worse posts than NBUs, but the quality of their posts also worsens more over time," the report noted. "This suggests that communities may play a part in incubating antisocial behavior."

The researchers said that toxic commenters take part in a community for a long time before moderators finally ban them. "On CNN, FBUs write an average of 264 posts (over 42 days), with 124 posts deleted before they are finally banned," the report stated.

However, the report advised moderators against throwing the book at antisocial commenters for minor infractions because the perceived unfairness may just exacerbate the person's antisocial online tendencies.

Researchers suggested that instead of banning apparent trolls just on the basis of their research, "a better response may instead involve giving antisocial users a chance to redeem themselves."

The report seems to support the less scientific observations of people who have seen the destructive power of a troll in an online community.

"Many of the study's findings could have been anticipated by anyone who has ever had a comment thread hijacked by an interloper who seems more intent on causing disruption and friction than participating in a reasonable discussion," wrote Martin Anderson, editor of The Stack.

The report, which was released this month, was funded in part by a Google Faculty Research Award.
 
Send those angry cop dudes to the trollhouses that'll fix em right.;)
 
This defines Captain to a "T", except no mention in the article of being a drunk. Maybe they left that part out. :D. ;)
 
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I got banned from a solar power website. My first banning. Not long after I joined, I objected to a post from a long time contributor. I showed him three ways he was wrong, and he kept trying to wiggle out of it. I would have let it go except what he was talking about was engineering, and it bugged me.

So, one day I try to log in and - banned. I emailed the admin, and he said I was 'combative'. I replied that might be true, but at least I was right. He didn't care.

So, I came back here to troll for a while. :wink2:
 
Everyone didn't.

Wait... Did he leave again? I can't keep up, sometimes more drama in PoA than a van full of drag queens on their way to a wig sale.

I have a cpl drag queen friends, funniest people ever!
 
That is just it the authors claimed to have picked trolls but a lot of trolling is just having a different opinion and not handing out mutual appreciation. fortunately we are so awesome being pilots that stuff doesn't bother us.
I got banned from a solar power website. My first banning. Not long after I joined, I objected to a post from a long time contributor. I showed him three ways he was wrong, and he kept trying to wiggle out of it. I would have let it go except what he was talking about was engineering, and it bugged me.

So, one day I try to log in and - banned. I emailed the admin, and he said I was 'combative'. I replied that might be true, but at least I was right. He didn't care.

So, I came back here to troll for a while. :wink2:
 
This defines Captain to a "T"

Actually, it describes Henning better. Looking at the bullet points.

*Their posts are more difficult to understand... check

*contain more negative language, including profanity... check

*make less of an effort to integrate or stay on-topic... check (actually a "hell yes check")

*tend to post in individual threads and receive more replies than users on average, suggesting that they might be successful in luring others into fruitless, time-consuming discussions, a phenomenon known as "feeding the troll."...check

*and post more frequently... check (and counting down from 50k...rapidly).
 
If that author can get paid for writing that report, I want MY share for all of my Internet hack.
 
Actually, it describes Henning better. Looking at the bullet points.

*Their posts are more difficult to understand... check

*contain more negative language, including profanity... check

*make less of an effort to integrate or stay on-topic... check (actually a "hell yes check")

*tend to post in individual threads and receive more replies than users on average, suggesting that they might be successful in luring others into fruitless, time-consuming discussions, a phenomenon known as "feeding the troll."...check

*and post more frequently... check (and counting down from 50k...rapidly).

:D :thumbsup:
 
To a serious point, I've said this before: We have a troll problem on this forum, and they are allowed to stay. That's lost many of the best members on here, and is a big part of why I don't hang around as much as I used to.

The MC would do well to ban early, ban often.
 
To a serious point, I've said this before: We have a troll problem on this forum, and they are allowed to stay. That's lost many of the best members on here, and is a big part of why I don't hang around as much as I used to.

The MC would do well to ban early, ban often.
Agreed, but ban too soon and it looks like you ban for making grandpa mad, like Cowboy's post about getting banned from the solar site. There's a line between being combative, and arguing a point. Maintaining a position on a matter and not agreeing with a long time member isn't being combative, but I don't know what was said there. Even so, banning should be for a trend of bad behavior, not being "combative" in one thread.
 
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