An interesting development in monitoring online forums:
For anybody interested, hereâs a similar conclusion from research published last year:
I find it amusing that there apparently needs to be research to show that some people are (and always will be) jerks.
People were trolling discussion groups in the 90âs, over Usenet and probably even before that, in the era of BBSâs
The difference is that on Usenet, at least in the 90âs, most users were tech savvy and knew how to configure their news readers to automatically discard all content (and sometimes also all replies to content) posted by trolls. âPlonkâ was a commonly-used word. As was the phrase âdonât feed the trollsâ.
And, of course, in the days of BBSâs, the systemâs owner would just delete those users.
Today, it seems that people on social media feel a need to reply to anything and everything they disagree with. So trolls end up creating a massively disproportionate amount of useless network traffic, driving the âsignal-to-noiseâ ratio down to virtually nothing.
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There are copious amounts of âconventional wisdomâ that turn out to be complete poppycock once subjected to scientific analysis. And then there are the many areas where the scientific method has revealed that our gut feelings are just quite poor measures of what is actually correct. There is no disadvantage from subjecting commonly held âbeliefsâ to rigorous scientific analysis. And just because the results of such analysis every once in a while end up revealing that the commonly held belief (assuming there is just one) was confirmed, does not invalidate the scientific method or devalue its application.
IMHO that is a feature, not bug. If SNR reduction from trolls leads to the demise of social media, I would book that as a net gain for society. When it coms to Facebook and friends, we keep hearing that we canât turn back the clock. Although that by itself is likely correct, if the trolls can render such âmediaâ useless as you indicate, to the point where it goes the way of Friendster or MySpace, IMHO all the better for the rest of us.
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Since it is NBA playoffs time, the debate over the âhot handâ in basketball is a great example of all thatâŚ
The hot hand in basketball: On the misperception of random sequences
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0010028585900106
The Hot Hand: A New Approach to an Old âFallacy"
https://www.sloansportsconference.com/research-papers/the-hot-hand-a-new-approach-to-an-old-fallacy
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I can confirm that this happened in the 80s, back when I was running a BBS. Flame wars were a constant headache for the sysops. It was easy to nuke and ban someone who dialed into your BBS, but it was harder when your BBS was a member of a network like FidoNet.
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