Cory Doctorow explains How To Keep Hostile Jerks From Taking Over Your Online Community with a metaphor:
Discussion groups are like uranium: a little pile gives off a nice, warm glow, but if the pile gets bigger, it hits critical mass and starts a deadly meltdown. There are only three ways to prevent this: Make the pile smaller again, spread the rods apart, or twiddle them to keep the heat convecting through them.Making the group smaller is easy in theory, hard in practice: just choose a bunch of people who aren’t allowed in the discussion anymore and section them off from the group. Split. Or just don’t let the groups get too big in the first place by limiting who can talk to whom. This was Friendster’s strategy, where your ability to chat with anyone else was limited by whether that person was your friend or your friend’s friend. Users revolted, creating “fakesters” like “New York City,” whom they could befriend, forming ad-hoc affinity groups. Friendster retaliated by killing the fakesters, and a full scale revolt ensued.
Spreading the group apart is a little easier, with the right technology. Joshua Schachter, founder of del.icio.us, tells me that he once cured a mailing-list of its flame-wars by inserting a ten-minute delay between messages being sent to the list and their delivery. The delay was enough to allow tempers to cool between messages. A similar strategy is to require you to preview your post before publishing it. Digg allows you to retract your messages for a minute or two after you post them.
But neither of these strategies solves the underlying problem: getting big groups of people to converse civilly and productively among themselves. Spreading out the pile reduces the heat — but it also reduces the light. Splitting the groups up requires the consent of the users, a willingness to be segregated from their peers.
The holy grail is to figure out how to twiddle the rods in just the right fashion so as to create a festive, rollicking, passionate discussion that keeps its discourse respectful, if not always friendly or amiable.
The “holy grail” is occasionally grasped by those he calls troll-whisperers:
Teresa is a troll-whisperer. For some reason, she can spot irredeemable trolls and separate them from the merely unsocialized. She can keep discussions calm and moving forward. She knows when deleting a troll’s message will discourage him, and when it will only spark a game of whack-a-mole.Teresa calls it “having an ear for text” and she is full of maddeningly unquantifiable tips for spotting the right rod to twiddle to keep the reactor firing happily without sparking a meltdown.
How do you harness a troll-whisperer?
O’Reilly built his empire by doing something incredibly smart: Watching what geeks did that worked and writing it down so that other people could do it too. He is a distiller of Internet wisdom, and it’s that approach that is called for here.If you want to fight trolling, don’t make up a bunch of a priori assumptions about what will or won’t discourage trolls. Instead, seek out the troll whisperer and study their techniques.
Troll whisperers aren’t necessarily very good at hacking tools, so there’s always an opportunity for geek synergy in helping them to automate their hand-crafted techniques, giving them a software force-multiplier for their good sense. For example, Teresa invented a technique called disemvowelling — removing the vowels from some or all of a fiery message-board post. The advantage of this is that it leaves the words intact, but requires that you read them very slowly — so slowly that it takes the sting out of them. And, as Teresa recently explained to me, disemvowelling part of a post lets the rest of the community know what kind of sentiment is and is not socially acceptable.
When Teresa started out disemvowelling, she removed the vowels from the offending messages by hand, a tedious and slow process. But shortly thereafter, Bryant Darrell wrote a Movable Type plugin to automate the process. This is a perfect example of human-geek synergy: hacking tools for civilian use based on the civilian’s observed needs.