I just heard Cory Doctorow - science fiction writer, former EFF activist, and well-known blogger - give a speech at MIT. This is part of Cory’s big Boston visit of 2006, which will culminate with his appearance at Boskone this weekend. Listening to Cory in person is just as entertaining as reading his prose. He talks at seven miles a minute and you can just feel the ideas washing over you. It makes me want to write.

One thing Cory talked about was that the blog he helps to run, Boing Boing, has no comments. Apparently it once had comments, but they were forced to turn them off when the hard-core trolls showed up. Once a dozen such trolls had the site targeted, they were able to flood every new conversation with a stream of noxious comments that poisoned all future conversation.

The Boing Boing folks thought about a technological solution to this problem: a user moderation system for comments and commentors. The most famous such system is the one that runs Slashdot. Cory observed that while these systems do manage to control trolls by keeping them below the threshold of visibility, they also destroy conversation by putting everyone on the site into an overly critical frame of mind. People become focused on judging others and fail to converse. “I have never seen a Slashdot thread,” said Cory, “that felt like a conversation”.

That sounds about right. Another aspect of this problem is that all the moderation - combined with the fact that Slashdot comments can be commented upon, ad infinitum, to create an ever-expanding and complex tree - makes it hard to read a Slashdot thread in strict chronological order. That screws up the conversational aspect: I find myself reading posts that respond to other posts that I have never seen.

Cory says that he still doesn’t know a good solution to the troll problem, which eventually threatens to overwhelm any site that grows beyond a certain critical size. The only working solution I know of is the Nielsen Haydens’ solution, which relies on careful moderation of comments. Perhaps Cory rules this out because there is no moderator willing to take on the task.