So, TAPPED comments threads are rendered useless by Specialist
I don't buy that at either TAPPED or Ezra's place (or, often, Al at MY's place). The comment threads are rendered useless by people responding to the trolls: for every one troll comment, there are six responses attempting to demonstrate how much stupider the troll is than the respondent. Trolls don't get banned or disemvoweled because people apparently like to respond to them.
It is a well known fact that as the number of comments in a thread passes 45, the chance that anyone has said anything worthwhile approaches zero (call it Alameida's Law)
I think priority goes to Brock Landers. Would link but for hoohole.
Is the Al at Saiselgy's place -- the one who went to Brown and is a big basketball fan -- the original Al?
Al went to Brown? Cripes, no wonder he's a Republican.
You're gonna make me cry, Tim. Cry like a big semiotician baby.
to 3: is there even an original Al? and didn't Emerson used to be Stalker Al?
Brown isn't very liberal at all. If Brown traumatized Al, then Al's just a big GOP pussy.
Alameida's law is much more stringent than mine- I think I allowed for 250 comments before uselessness becomes inevitable. So proof of her theorem would be a significant new step (forward?), and the credit thereof should rightfully be hers.
Although on second thought my rule applied here, whereas I think hers applies everywhere but here (and Making Light). So that's a difference. And 45 is probably right (perhaps even generous) for other websites.
Can we do it like Clint in High Plains Drifter instead?
I'm also hesitant to assume our exceptionalness, though not if we limit the realm over which we are purportedly exceptional to a relatively small number of blogs which are in a meta-community with each other, said community inlcuding what I think of as a number of the major blogs.
Also, is there anything to this story? Is it (the investigation, I mean) an obvious Republican stunt? I don't really have the time or inclination to traipse around the (other) blogs today, so if anyone wants to post answers in this thread, they'd be doing me a service.
I think the answer to both parts of seven is yes. I know the answer to one part of it is.
Finally, I went to a party small gathering last night which was hosted by a Brown alum.
The Al at "Saiselgy"'s (and I missed why we reverse that, but no never mind) has explicitly claimed to the the "original" Al from Keven Drum's, and that any current posters over there are imitators. He seems like an actual good-faith disagree-er, although depending on context that may still fall under the definition of troll. The one(s) at Drum are some kind of performance art, but they are really good at saying something so plausible-sounding (as coming from a right-winger) and yet dramaticially wrong that it's hard to not want to jump in and smash them.
Actually, I take it back: Alameida's law is nothing like mine. She proposes that "as the number of comments in a thread passes 45, the chance that anyone has said anything worthwhile approaches zer." I just said that after 250 comments or so, everything useful and interesting thing has been said and the thread is destined thereafter to spin around in unproductive circles until finally dies whimpering in the corner. These two ideas are really quite different, so Alameida's Law stands on its own. No hyphens necessary.
1)I'm not sure whether to be pleased or offended that Specialist seems to mostly leave my posts alone.
2)I strongly prefer disemvoweling to banning, although the latter is better than destroying comment threads.
after 250 comments or so, everything useful and interesting thing has been said and the thread is destined thereafter to spin around in unproductive circles until finally dies whimpering in the corner.
Brock Landers so-called "law" is nothing but rank slander against the many many great Unfogged threads that exceed, some by a very large margin, 250 comments. Some of those megathreads are, like, the best threads evar.
I therefore propose that we refer to his formulation as "Lander's Folly", and treat it with the same disdain as Lamarckism and Phrenology.
Furthermore, Brock is technically lying, not to mention stooping to Coulter's level.
I have long maintained that the way to handle trolls is to ban those who respond to them. And if I weren't too lazy to have my own blog, that's exactly what I'd do. Nyah.
I wonder if The Guardian had any idea that their Comment is Free blog would instantly become like some sort of Panama City Beach where trolls go to party and puke all night, every night. When I do make my occasional, quickly regretted forays into CiF comments, almost every single article I read is followed by comments from the same handful of Guardian-hating rightwing curmudgeons, who seem to lurch from article to article like a drunken lech following a tequila slammer girl around a bar all night. Is there a term for a condition wherein the only thing that gets you hard is telling lefties that they're morons, and the only way you can actually get yourself off is by calling Polly Toynbee a half-wit?
I don't think that ignoring works if you have a determined troll, or if you have new people coming on to the thread. I've never understood why Drum, Tapped, and Sausagely don't ban or disemvowel. Laziness, contempt for the very idea of comment threads, and bizarre and unreasonable "free speech" phobias are the most plausible reasons.
I am guilty of responding to trolls, but then I also like to curse the darkness. I just don't believe that if you ignore them they go away, and I find it annoying having to pick my way around the steaming heaps of commentary that they've laid on the floor and the rug.
I don't think that Y. is a troll in the strict sense. She sure was / is annoying and obtuse, though.
I don't really believe that dialogue with good-faith Republicans and conservatives is productive either, especially since Gingrich transformed the Republican Party. Engaging them in civil dialogue allows them to pretend that they're not really the bad kind of Republican, but the bad kind of Republican controls the party and sets its agenda. There's no sane person that's more influential in the Republican Party than Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh. The supposedly-sane people who are still hanging on are hapless and deluded.
"Don't feed the trolls" is harder than it sounds. Hell, I was sure Tassled Loafered Leach was a troll, and now Ben is asking for his daughter's hand in marriage. It's not easy, without hindsight, to determine when someone just disagrees, and when someone is disagreeing in order to derail discussion: it's the pattern or consistency that gives it away, so if trolls are paid, or do take their trolling seriously, they could just change their handles regularly. Being good liberals, we don't want to say, "We won't engage with arguments with which we don't already agree," and everyone draws the line of "too wrong to bother with" in a different place.
As for the proposed solution, it smacks a bit of "we're much cooler than you, let us show you how it's done." Other sites do have circles of regulars, even if not enough of them to call it a "community" and I'd feel like I was imposing if we all dropped in for a week. Not to mention that I think the trolls would follow us back here.
The way to keep trolls from derailing discussions is to have someone who has "authority" on the blog monitoring the comments around the fucking clock, in order to remind people to keep it civil, or to decide when someone is a troll and shouldn't be fed, etc. But honestly, I don't think most people care about their comment sections that much. It's just where the hoi polloi get to bark at the moon.
But honestly, I don't think most people care about their comment sections that much.
On first pass, I somehow read "most" as "should," and a bunch of biting responses, mostly involving pots and kettles, queued up in my head.
Also, the "should" I read in was after "people."
Would link but for hoohole.
Remember, folks, that Yahoo doesn't have a hoohole, you can still search there for site:unfogged.com [your search terms] and get what look to be complete results. And soon we'll have the Google problem fixed, and, maybe, the google search will be even better than before.
#1 gets it exactly right, although it's not as if a troll merely drops some inflammatory take to start the food fight. More often, the troll responds to a commenter with something like, "why do you hate America and love Mexifascism, you effete hippie fuck?" So your sense of wounded honor kicks in, and against your better judgment, you engage.
The reason those blogs don't ban trolls is that they are all promotional in nature (either a magazine or a nascent career in punditry). So it's important for them to appear to invite an inclusive public debate. That means giving RW trolls latitude, as well as engaging semi-established but unserious people like Jonah Goldberg.
I suspect those trolls aren't paid, or more precisely that what money there might be isn't a large factor. To be sure, there is probably coordination or collusion; at the very least, a chatroom or mailing list where they all strategize and exchange virtual high-fives. But mainly they do it, I suspect, for RW geek bragging rights.
To be sure, there is probably coordination or collusion; at the very least, a chatroom or mailing list where they all strategize and exchange virtual high-fives.
Wouldn't it be great if there was some sort of troll Elysian Fields or Elephant Graveyard: a mythic, secret place where they frolicked and laughed and plotted, a place that we could discover and watch? Wouldn't knowing that it existed make you happy, somehow, even if you never found it?
The Guardian trolls are really ghastly but some at least can be disarmed by dropping into the arena and talking after an article. My own theory is that they all desperately want to be journalists, and think that obnoxiousness is the way to fame and fortune. I have failed completely to persuade the authorities there to disemvowel persistent offenders. I don't know why.
I apparently am a troll at The Valve, and I have to tell you -- I do it out of love... out of love for the debtor! Who could believe it [sollte man's glauben]?
(You really should follow the link in my above comment, as I believe it to refer to the single best comment ever left, in the history of the Internet.)
Emerson's past speculations remain relevant.
I am convinced that some bloggers encourage their trolls in order to increase their traffic.
It's the only reason I can think of that anyone would tolerate it.
I am wondering if I have been banned from Crooked Timber. My first banning. I can count the number of left-wing trolls, not counting Green or Diebold spammers, on the fingers of one hand. Seth Edenbaum, maybe Emerson.
MIA just added a page of Blanqui essays! But I still think I need to look to Europe for decent socialisy material.
I am so far from engaging right wing trolls they are invisible to me.
Why thank you Bob. I oughta stop by and say hi to Seth again.
I claim to have been banned by Brian Leiter. One comment didn't make it past his filter, anyway.
27: My own theory is that they all desperately want to be journalists
I agree, and think this is why so many of the CiF trolls engage in nasty personal attacks on the Guardian journalists. Many of the former genuinely seem to think they deserve to be the latter (generally by dint of being "right" on the issues rather than through having talent and insight) - like angry little sub-Salieris bitter at a world that isn't willing to pay them for their opinions.
Proprietors' presence in the comments is the biggest indicator of useful comments. Drum is only occasionally there, hence the quality of the sections. The Tapped folks, I think, get on with writing the next post. As for Wehttam S., probably a combination of technical disinterest and some sense of increased traffic.
There's a great Making Light post on how to build good community, unf the bookmark is on the other machine, but the gist of it is that a comment section is like a garden and must be tended.
I'd also be interested in learning whether the notorious trolls are paid, but I have neither the techie chops to do the work myself, nor the grant money laying around to pay someone to do so. Maybe I'll ask for an answer for Christmas. And a pony.
Some trolls are tolerated by blog owners because of unspoken personal connections. Not all, hell no, but more often than you might think. (How do I know? I've asked.)
As for Making Light, um. PNH likes picking fights -- as someone once put it, he has a "more in sorrow than in anger, fuckwit" routine going -- and then TNH does her schtick. Unpleasant, and thoroughly fannish (a word I use as a pejorative). Christ, there's a subculture that needs cleaning with the steam hose.
Anyway, back to the game.
I fully support the PNH troll policy. Like I said, you don't have to pick your way through steaming piles of troll-doo there.
And of course, there's nothing wrong with picking fights.
I actually have no idea what you think is wrong with Making Light.
I don't feel like my blog is, in fact, beset by trolls (I don't thinkt he local version of Al qualifies) and that's why I don't take anti-troll action.
For a site like Tapped that's published by a journalistic institution, editing comments is a dicey proposition. If you look at (say) the letters to the editor section of our magazine (or any other magazine) the ones we choose to print get, among other things, fact-checked. If we screw up and publish something that's wrong, we run corrections. We don't have the resources to do something like that with our blog comments.
That means we either need to not have the comments at all, or else make them a totally open forum where we're not editing things. If we started editing the comment, then it would be like our letters page where we need to take responsibility for the accuracy, etc., of everything we don't remove.
Well, duh. I almost quit going there because there were too many trolls, and now there aren't any any more. I guess the real troll was me. Mea maxima culpa.
Hrm. This isn't my area (and clearly not anything you personally can do anything about, Sausagely), but I wonder if that isn't lawyer-driven overcaution. I don't see that banning trolls for any or no reason would mean as a necessary consequence the publication had taken responsibility for the accuracy of other commenters; it's not clear to me that a statement of the form "Comments are the opinions of the commenters only, and do not express the positions of [the publication]. Further, any facts contained therein have not been checked for accuracy and are not vouched for by [the publication]. While individual commenters may be asked at any time to stop commenting because, in the opinion of the editors, their comments are dull or esthetically displeasing, this does not constitute any endorsement of the accuracy of the remaining commenters," would be ineffective.
And Emerson, your standards for what constitutes a troll are pretty expansive. While I went off hard on Y. this weekend, I did it because I thought she was a troll by the narrow definition.
Can anybody else get Crooked Timber open? All my other blogs work. Saisegly and Arze haven't banned me yet. Have I been banned at CT or not?
They are thin-skinned about leftist criticism there, like DeLong and some of the academics. Them marching Stalinist hordes are more dangerous because, because...whatever.
I don't think I explicitly called for syndicalist violence, tho I was very nasty about liberals.
I doubt they'd ban you without mentioning it explicitly, don't you think? And considering who they don't ban, I can't imagine why they'd ban you.
CT seems to just be down; I can't load it either, and I'm sure I haven't been banned.
I can access neither The Poor Man nor CT? Bob, didn't Henry write a post specifically for you in the not too distant past?
Unrelated: I'm trying to make polenta for the first time. Advice accepted.
I'm trying to form an opinion on Faces by listening to a four disc box set of theirs which I downloaded just because I wanted a copy of their one major U.S. hit. Being told what opinion I should hold accepted.
48 - Low cooking heat for longer than I expected. If it isn't too late for a pre-cooking step, I liked to wash the raw polenta in cold water first, so I didn't get clumps when I poured it into hot water.
50: Thanks, low cooking is coming to an end right now, I think (it's very thick right now). For future reference: wash it? Like, soak it in water and stir it a lot?
right now…right now
Oops. That Van Halen's really getting to me.
If your recipe doesn't already involve grating cheese into it, cheese is good.
Can anybody else get Crooked Timber open?
CT's definitely broken.
53: Grated romano as the garnish is the plan. Yes?
Stirring it in, so that the polenta is permeated by general cheesiness, is excellent.
56: On it. There's still time. Thanks.
My real question: how do I know that it's done. It sort of looks like polenta, so if I just let it settle here for a few…
49 -- I got a copy of that box set after seeing it get glowing reviews and having liked the ronnie lane/pete townsand collaboration. I was underwhelmed. I couldn't even point to specific flaws except that nothing in the songwriting/musicianship/recordings seemed exceptional to me. I like the spirit, I suppose, but that wasn't enough to convince me.
I have been meaning to go back and listen to bits of it again and give it another chance.
58 - Taste it. There's a wide range of "done", as long as it doesn't taste raw (like uncooked corn flour) or have hard centers to the grains.
I swirl the raw grains in water, so that when I pour it into the hot water, I don't get dry clumps, in which the outer layer of the clump is cooking and forms a surface that the cooking water can't get in. Saves me going after them with a fork.
Also, mixing in the cheese improves any savory gruel (polenta, risotto, grits...).
Plenty of butter is good too.
Thanks a lot, LB and Megan. You've made my live-commenting polenta experience that much better. The arriving guests thank you, too, even if they don't know it.
Thanks, redfox. Butter added.
And now, back to your regular, scheduled unfoggery.
49,59:"Five guys walked into a bar" ??
For fans who want to remember to falling-down drunk party nature of the band. Really really loose and sloppy is the point. I like the studio albums better.
I don't like blogs where the owners delight in posing as ill-used martyrs while their hordes of fanatical devotees play the part of the mob storming the castle of Frankenstein because of a vital issue like criticism of said blog owner's punctuation.
65: That's what I'm referring to. I assume it's the only four disc set, and hence also the one NickS is referring to.
I think the washing step isn't needed at all, so long as you slooowly pour the raw polenta into the milk/water in a thin stream, while whisking constantly (using an actual whisk) with your other hand. you can get someone else to do the pouring if you like, for finer control. polenta, being degerminated, is already not the nutritional powerhouse of all time, and I can't help feel that, as with rice, washing may remove whatever nutrients are left. back to the lumps, I think this is a little like how people complain about lumps in gravy: just stir like a madman and it'll be fine. there used to be those ads for gravy in a jar, "just like homemade--but no lumps!" and as a young person I was like "what lumps? what are they talking about?" OTOH, if you do tend to get lumps, sounds like megan's solution might be good. finally, CT is indeed down, like, all the time.
Hell, I was sure Tassled Loafered Leach was a troll, and now Ben is asking for his daughter's hand in marriage.
Christ. I start skimming the comments and shit like this happens.
I start skimming the comments
Passive-aggressive people are the most fun to beat up, SB.
Remember, folks, that Yahoo doesn't have a hoohole, you can still search there for site:unfogged.com [your search terms] and get what look to be complete results.
Blessed are you, ogged, child of a lesser hoohole. Just the other day Yahoo was giving me z3r0 h1tt0Rz for some vaguely memorable blog text.
Ah, crapola, then. When we get the new server up, I think we'll also solve the hoohole problem.
I was looking for the comment I had written illustrating the use/mention distinction by talking about Fallingwater and was unable to find it with yahoo or google.
Passive-aggressive people
I hate it when people won't say what they mean.
I really can't think of any lefty counterparts who relentlessly troll right-wing blogs. Are there any?
It's been a while since I lasted visited the site and leftieness is in the eye of the beholder, but I believe the commentariat at Protein Wisdom consider "actus" their resident troll.
I'd like to note that the interesting thing about Alameida's law is its relativistic effects. you might think that the later comments could have no effect on the earlier ones, but in fact their mass redshifts prior comments into the stupid. thus it's not merely that there are many stupid comments in a 114-comment long Kevin Drum thread--there are also zero intelligent comments. even though it would seem logically possible that early in the thread's history, say when it only had 16 comments, someone said something intelligent.
15 misunderstands the nature of the beast. I am not blaspheming the unfogged megathreads of yore. The point is that any good thing that happens in a thread past comment 250 was destined to happen anyway. If that comment thread hadn't existed (or had been capped at 250), the late-stage good parts would have simply made their way to other comment threads. Like matter, they can change form but cannot be destroyed. The slop and gruel that make up most of the late-stage comments, on the other hand, is purely gratuitous byproduct, and if the threads were capped would simply fail to materialize. And the world would be an unmabiguously better place.
Go ahead, call it "Lander's Folly"--you will not perturb me. They laughed at Galileo, too.
The result of Stanley's efforts at making polenta, here.
I don't feel like my blog is, in fact, beset by trolls (I don't thinkt he local version of Al qualifies) and that's why I don't take anti-troll action.
Better to ban the fuckers before you're beset--at that point it's too late. It's kinda nice to get a reputation for banning trolls.
CT was down for most of yesterday due to some internal server fuck-up - we've been having a lot of them recently and they are getting worse. We hope to figure this out Real Soon ...