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Instructions on how to transform a comment troll into a human being

Mathew Ingram — Wed, 22 May 2013 16:18:57 +0000

If you write anything on the internet — or for that matter, read anything on the internet — you’ve undoubtedly experienced comment trolls, flame-wars and plenty of other bad behavior. Some blogs and news sites have tried either handing over their comments to Facebook or not having comments altogether as a way of preventing this kind of activity, but one site called Climate Desk took a different approach: they tracked down and interviewed their most persistent troll, and in the process revealed him to be a fairly normal human being.

As the Columbia Journalism Review describes in a post on the project, Climate Desk not only found and interviewed their comment troll — a 57-year-old insurance executive named Hoyt Connell — as part of a video series called “The Secret Life of Trolls,” but also profiled a scientist who spends much of her time engaging with trolls on the topic of climate change. In the final instalment, the scientist and the troll met each other via Google Hangout.

The CJR post criticizes the Climate Desk series because “it doesn’t shine as much light under the bridge as it could have,” since it doesn’t go into detail about why Connell latched onto climate change as a topic, or what drives him to comment so aggressively (fittingly enough, Connell comments on the CJR post himself to try and clear some of this up). But what impressed me was how normal this mega-troll seemed once he was interviewed.

Comment trolls are people too

I found the same thing — and I think others did too — when Gawker Media outed a notorious Reddit troll named Violentacrez last year, after attention was drawn to several offensive sub-Reddits he created. Although clearly much of his behavior on the site crossed a line, the interview showed him to be a more-or-less normal, and in some ways even sympathetic (or possibly just pathetic) character. Not that this justified his conduct, but it helped to explain some of it.

We’ve written before about how the value of comments transcends the occasional troll, and how the best way to maintain a civil dialogue is to engage with readers directly, a point blogging pioneer Anil Dash also made in a post a couple of years ago. And writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic have shown that commenters can be much more than just a noisy distraction — in some cases, they can actually become collaborators. The Climate Desk series is a good reminder that trolls are people too.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr / Jeremy King

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The future of online etiquette is already here — it’s just unevenly distributed

Mathew Ingram — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 18:07:12 +0000

As anyone who has missed an important email knows by now, modern communications etiquette is a minefield of unspoken expectations and potential anxiety-inducing behavior. If you need further proof, all you have to do is look at some of the responses to a recent blog post by New York Times writer Nick Bilton about his approach to email, voice mail and texting: some reacted with distaste bordering on horror, while others cheered his take on the topic. Part of the problem is that different users look at these tools differently — and in some cases have wildly different views of what is appropriate and what isn’t.

For example, Bilton says his father insists on leaving him voice-mail messages but the NYT writer never listens to them, so his frustrated parent eventually called his sister to complain, and she told their father to text him instead — and Bilton adds that his mother has progressed to the point where they communicate mostly through Twitter. Is this a son helping his parents adapt, or a rude refusal to meet them on their own turf? Many saw it as the latter:

We have too many ways to communicate

Author Ian Leslie noted in a response on his own blog that Bilton’s description of what’s wrong with modern communication — whether it’s voice mail or texting or Twitter — and his relationship with his parents misunderstands what communication is for. If you look at them as pure information delivery, Leslie says, then they are riddled with problems. But if you see them as a way of socializing with others who are close to us then they look completely different:

“The problem here isn’t just that Bilton unintentionally comes off as rather rude… his argument betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of communication. Writing about computers a lot, he assumes communication is all about the transfer of information from one hard drive to another. That being so, the more efficient the transfer is, the better.”

I think a larger problem Bilton touches on, but doesn’t address directly, is that we have more competing forms of communication available to us than ever before — and not only are different people at different stages in their evolution from one to the other, but people also use them for very different purposes. So for Bilton’s dad, voice mail is a great way of passing on important information, but Nick prefers the real-time nature of texting or Twitter messaging.

The NYT blogger mentions how a whole new kind of etiquette had to be developed around the telephone, and how debate raged over the appropriate way to answer (Alexander Graham Bell preferred the term “Ahoy!,” which just reinforces why we shouldn’t let the inventors of things decide how we use them). But at least people in the 1920s only had one new form of communication to figure out — we have email, voice mail, texting, Facebook messaging, Twitter and more.

Increasingly feel like I don’t want to live in @nickbilton’s future.
—
Jim Maiella (@jimmaiella) March 10, 2013

It gets worse when the person you are trying to correspond with uses all of these tools: I’ve tried to contact someone I know fairly well by email, voice mail, text message, Twitter direct messaging and everything short of smoke signals, and I never know from one day to the next which of those methods (if any) are going to work. We have more ways than ever to communicate, but sometimes that just means more ways to miss each other.

Not every tool works for every purpose

In a lot of cases, I think the problem boils down to one of asynchronous vs. synchronous behavior and expectations. Part of the reason why many people (particularly geeks) dislike talking on the phone is that it forces both sides to be present at the same time, instead of allowing a user to consume or respond to the information at their own pace — or multi-task while they are doing so. Phone calls also have no natural time-span.

The other conflict is over what the purpose of the communication is. Someone who sends a long email or leaves a voice mail asking you to call them back may wish to have a long, rambling conversation purely to socialize, and get offended when you send a curt response (or no response at all). Similarly, if you only ever text or use Twitter direct messages with someone, you may be communicating really efficiently but you miss a lot of the personal nuances that still make up much of human communication.

And then there are the obvious age-related issues: I have tried valiantly to get my mother to use Facebook, arguing that this is a great way to keep in touch — however transiently — with her grandchildren, none of whom has any interest whatsoever in using email or talking on the telephone. But for my mother, email and the phone are her primary means of connecting with the world, and the former was something that took ages for her to get comfortable with. And now that she has grown comfortable with it, no one is using it any more.

All I think we can really say for sure is that this state of affairs is likely to continue, if not get worse. As William Gibson said in a different context: “The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed.” And so we are all at different stages of adapting to this new communications future. Perhaps the one thing we need most is to be patient with those who aren’t where we are.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock / Steve Woods and Arvind Grover

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Badgeville looks beyond gamification, launches a behavior platform

Ryan Kim — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 13:00:33 +0000

Badgeville has been synonymous with gamification, the idea of incorporating game mechanics to motivate employees and consumers to do specific tasks. But the company says it’s not stopping with gamification; it sees a future in shaping behavior through a combination of game mechanics, private social networks and reputation and rank.

It has bundled its services into what it calls a behavior platform, building off its Social Fabric technology that allows any website to build a social network out of its community using a new behavior graph. The behavior graph helps track a user’s interaction within a social context on any site, application or product.

The idea is to provide corporate clients with a suite of services that can help them apply “behavior management” to their own employees or consumers. Kris Duggan, the CEO of Badgeville, said the company has evolved beyond just gamification to social, reputation and analytics, which can all work together to influence and manage behavior. Said Duggan:

We think there’s a new category called behavior management. Individual things such as analytics, social, gamification, private label social networks. It’s all scratching this issue. We focus on how to turn it all into a platform that allows any type of company, anyone with an audience, to use these techniques for user behavior.

Deloitte Digital, PayPal and eBay’s X.Commerce, CA Technologies, Samsung, and Rogers Communications are among the dozens of Fortune 1000 companies who have signed on to use Badgeville’s behavior platform. Some are implementing specific pieces while others are deploying the full suite.

The new behavior platform will potentially pit Badgeville against some enterprise social networking tools like Chatter, Yammer and others. But Duggan said it’s also working to integrate with those services so the behavior platform can incorporate actions on these channels into its larger reputation and rank system.

Badgeville is now up to 50 employees, and it counts more than 100 customers, who pay a few thousand dollars per month to use its products. The company, which launched a year ago, raised $12 million in July. I think this is a logical step for Badgeville, which is not simply playing in the gamification space. It’s about working on loyalty, behavior and engagement, and gamification is just one tool for that. By combining game mechanics with other tools, it can try to be a go-to behavior engine for enterprise clients. I still have to see how this plays out, but it makes sense. And it shows that gamification, with the right collection of other behavior tools, can be useful to corporations.

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Is Twitter Like Speech or Like Writing? The Answer Is Yes

Mathew Ingram — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 19:02:46 +0000

Is Twitter like a spoken conversation, the kind you would have with friends and/or strangers in a bar? Or is it more like a written discussion — like online forums or chat rooms used to be in the early days of the Internet? One of the things that can make Twitter hard to define, particularly for new users, is that it can be both of those things at the same time. In some cases, the “rules” of Twitter and the expectations that people have seem to be more like the etiquette of speech, and in other cases — particularly when it comes to legal concerns around libel, etc. — it is a lot more like writing or publishing. In reality, it’s a blend of both.

Sociologist and researcher Zeynep Tufekci was one of the first people I came across who looked at this dual nature of Twitter, in a recent post about how a lot of social-media tools represent a return of sorts to an earlier “oral culture.” In Tufekci’s view, the way that services like Twitter allow us to comment and respond and converse with others in real-time is a lot more like talking than it is publishing, and therefore it represents a move away from our Western print-based culture (Andy Carvin of NPR has talked about what he does in curating news via Twitter as “preserving oral history.”

Twitter: A return to oral culture?

Tufekci noted that those who are more familiar with oral cultures — users from Eastern Europe, for example, or African-American users — often seem more comfortable with the transient nature of social media, the inability to pin things down, the fact that information is constantly changing, and so on. Those are things that we are accustomed to when we speak to others; but when we type on a computer we often revert to thinking about writing as publishing, and expect things to operate the same way they do in print: namely, that we can save content somewhere, refer to it and so on (as Megan Garber discusses in her excellent piece at the Neiman Lab).

Tufekci is not alone in making this kind of connection between online behavior and oral culture: she mentions the research of Walter Ong and his concept of “secondary orality” as it applies to media, and when I mentioned Tufekci’s post on Twitter, Nancy Baym — a friend who is a sociologist and expert in online culture — noted that there has been a fair bit of work in that area (including some she did herself). Anthropologists have also started looking at how people use Facebook and applying some of the thinking related to oral cultures and groups in order to understand how they work.

From a behavioral point of view, one of the unusual things about Twitter is that it is “asymmetric,” in the sense that you can follow people (and be followed by others) without knowing them. Facebook is a very different kind of network, because you have to approve and be approved by those you become friends with. That makes Twitter much more chaotic in a sense — since you can talk to anyone you wish — and more like a conversation with a group of people in a bar or some other public place.

The other defining factor with Twitter is that there aren’t any rules. Some conventions have emerged over time, such as the @ mention — which users developed themselves and then Twitter adopted — and the retweet. But even there, confusion reigns: if you post a message that starts with the @ symbol and someone’s Twitter name, only people who follow both of you can see that message. To get around this, some users put a period at the beginning to allow everyone to see it. Unfortunately, that “breaks” the conversation mode in a lot of Twitter clients, and so people can’t click and look at previous messages in the thread.

When print expectations meet vocal behavior

That’s a perfect example of when the conventions of print — i.e. the ability to scroll back in time and see more of a person’s tweets — clash with expectations that are more rooted in conversation (such as the ability to ignore others if they are talking about something you aren’t interested in). I’ve also had people get upset when I used their tweets in a blog post, because I think they saw their comments more as conversation, and therefore not likely to show up in print. But things change when you are having a conversation that can be read by thousands of people, most of whom you don’t know.

This confusion extends to other things as well. I’ve had people complain that I retweet too many things, the implication being that I am filling up the conversational stream with too much additional “noise” (in the early days of Twitter I had debates with others about whether retweeting was appropriate at all, and now there are different kinds of re-tweets, which makes it even more confusing). In a way, retweeting doesn’t make any sense if you think of Twitter as a conversation — we wouldn’t expect someone to constantly repeat things the person beside them just finished saying — but if you see it as an information network, retweeting items of interest for others seems like a natural thing to do.

To take another example, my colleague Stacey Higginbotham recently asked whether a retweet meant that someone endorsed the idea or statement they were retweeting. My answer was “it depends.” And when Stacey asked her followers on Twitter the same question, she got a variety of answers — some people retweet simply as a way of passing on something interesting, while others only retweet if they agree. Some like to add their own comments at the end, others at the beginning. I’ve seen the emergence of the term “MT” meaning “modified tweet,” to indicate that someone edited the original, which some users seem to think is fine and others criticize as verboten.

In the end, Twitter is unlike either speech or writing because it is a fusion of both. We are speaking, but with computer keyboards — and we are talking to thousands of people, some of whom we have never met, which simply wasn’t possible before the Internet came along. So in a very real sense, we are making the rules up as we go. Which tends to make things a lot less predictable, but also a lot more interesting.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Groupon

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