I just noticed this comment and you touched on an interesting point. I use the term "flamebait" because it doesn't imply anything about intent—only effects. If someone drops a lit match in a dry forest, that's flamebait (because it increases the probability of a fire), but that doesn't mean it was arson. It could just be negligence.
"Trolling", on the other hand, does imply intent. If you ask someone not to troll they will usually reply "but I wasn't", meaning that they had no intent to derail discussion, and since there's no way to refute that, it's a moderation dead-end. So I tend to only use that word in the most blatant cases.
The important thing for moderation is that intent doesn't matter much—what matters are effects. Our goal is to preserve and develop community, and for that it doesn't much matter whether a flamewar was intentional or unintentional. The important thing is to keep the site from burning in the first place.
Intent is almost useless for moderation because it's impossible to read: only you can know what your intent was, so if you say "my intent was X", no one can prove it wasn't. More deeply, basically everybody believes that their own intentions are good, regardless of how badly they behave. Whatever darker forces may be motivating us, we keep them in the shadows, so we can sincerely say "I was just trying to do $benign-thing" regardless of what the outcome was. Everyone feels themselves to be innocent this way.
The solution is to say: everyone who posts here is responsible for the effects their comments have on the thread. This goes against atomic ideas of responsibility. Most people would say "wait, how am I responsible if others react badly?" But in fact you are, because the mechanics of internet discussion are largely predictable. It's each commenter's responsibility to learn enough about those mechanics for their posts to likely have good effects, rather than likely bad effects. (By 'good' and 'bad' I mean in keeping with the site guidelines or not: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.)
This is what led to the principle that the goodness or badness of a comment is the expected value of the subthread it forms the root of: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... In other words, you actually are responsible for the effects your comments produce—not in a deterministic sense, but in a statistical one. (By 'you' I of course mean all of us.) If others respond badly in a way that could have been anticipated, the bulk of the responsibility lies with the root comment.
I think this principle is interesting because while it points to a notion of communal responsibility which is counterintuitive in our culture, it didn't originate with that. It originated purely out of moderation practice—just observing what works vs. what doesn't work while trying to have an internet forum that doesn't suck.
"Trolling", on the other hand, does imply intent. If you ask someone not to troll they will usually reply "but I wasn't", meaning that they had no intent to derail discussion, and since there's no way to refute that, it's a moderation dead-end. So I tend to only use that word in the most blatant cases.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
The important thing for moderation is that intent doesn't matter much—what matters are effects. Our goal is to preserve and develop community, and for that it doesn't much matter whether a flamewar was intentional or unintentional. The important thing is to keep the site from burning in the first place.
Intent is almost useless for moderation because it's impossible to read: only you can know what your intent was, so if you say "my intent was X", no one can prove it wasn't. More deeply, basically everybody believes that their own intentions are good, regardless of how badly they behave. Whatever darker forces may be motivating us, we keep them in the shadows, so we can sincerely say "I was just trying to do $benign-thing" regardless of what the outcome was. Everyone feels themselves to be innocent this way.
The solution is to say: everyone who posts here is responsible for the effects their comments have on the thread. This goes against atomic ideas of responsibility. Most people would say "wait, how am I responsible if others react badly?" But in fact you are, because the mechanics of internet discussion are largely predictable. It's each commenter's responsibility to learn enough about those mechanics for their posts to likely have good effects, rather than likely bad effects. (By 'good' and 'bad' I mean in keeping with the site guidelines or not: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.)
This is what led to the principle that the goodness or badness of a comment is the expected value of the subthread it forms the root of: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... In other words, you actually are responsible for the effects your comments produce—not in a deterministic sense, but in a statistical one. (By 'you' I of course mean all of us.) If others respond badly in a way that could have been anticipated, the bulk of the responsibility lies with the root comment.
I think this principle is interesting because while it points to a notion of communal responsibility which is counterintuitive in our culture, it didn't originate with that. It originated purely out of moderation practice—just observing what works vs. what doesn't work while trying to have an internet forum that doesn't suck.