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Averting Toxic Chats: Computer Model Predicts When Online Conversations Turn Sour
The internet offers the potential for constructive dialogue and cooperation, but online conversations too often degenerate into personal attacks. In hopes that those attacks can be averted, researchers have created a model to predict which civil conversations might take a turn and derail.
After analyzing hundreds of exchanges between Wikipedia editors, the researchers developed a computer program that scans for warning signs in the language used by participants at the start of a conversation -- such as repeated, direct questioning or use of the word "you" -- to predict which initially civil conversations would go awry.
Early exchanges that included greetings, expressions of gratitude, hedges such as "it seems," and the words "I" and "we" were more likely to remain civil, the study found.
"We, as humans, have an intuition of whether a conversation is about to go awry, but it's often just a suspicion. We can't do it 100 percent of the time. We wonder if we can build systems to replicate or even go beyond this intuition," Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil[*] said.
The computer model, which also considered Google's Perspective, a machine-learning tool for evaluating "toxicity," was correct around 65 percent of the time. Humans guessed correctly 72 percent of the time.
[...] The study analyzed 1,270 conversations that began civilly but degenerated into personal attacks, culled from 50 million conversations across 16 million Wikipedia "talk" pages, where editors discuss articles or other issues. They examined exchanges in pairs, comparing each conversation that ended badly with one that succeeded on the same topic, so the results weren't skewed by sensitive subject matter such as politics.
[*] Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil: assistant professor of information science and co-author of the paper Conversations Gone Awry: Detecting Early Signs of Conversational Failure. (pdf)
The technique sounds useful for non-internet conversations, too... is there an app for that?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @12:50PM (33 children)
You guys seriously think any of this is applicable here? You think conversations here, despite disagreements, don't remain remarkably civil?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @01:23PM (16 children)
There's a certain class of people on this website who just cannot stand a differing point of view; rather than debate someone's point or just move on with their lives, they insist on abusing the moderation system to collapse comments with which they disagree.
That's not civil.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @01:44PM (1 child)
Oh, you pure unique snowflake, how I pity you. (opps, I used you. And until then the conversation went sooo civil)
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Wednesday July 25 2018, @09:33PM
You people with your pity are very compassionate. And your snowflake recognition is supposedly a censorship tool? or are y'all on-point and just the ones being censored? I have trouble following these nutty theories; the lack of factual underlying basis makes them a little ephemeral for digestion.
No offense.
---
Note: This post contains a mix of actual wonder and gentle sarcasm. If you can't handle that, then please imagine that this sentence contains whatever else would offend your delicate sensibilities in the worse way. Thank you.
(Score: 4, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday July 25 2018, @01:57PM (12 children)
Register and upmod the comments then. That's why everyone gets ten points a day.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @02:11PM (11 children)
One "side" is not very civil; they have no moral qualms with silencing someone who disagrees.
(Score: 5, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday July 25 2018, @02:17PM (9 children)
If that were true, the karma of certain users would be in the shitter. TMB and VLM both have 50 though. realDonaldTrump is at 45 despite being blasted with downmods lately. Seems the asymmetry is currently favoring speech.
Certain comments deserve to be modded down. Certain users and anons will whine about being modded down. Life goes on.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @02:21PM (1 child)
You know that's nonsense.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday July 25 2018, @02:27PM
Click on any highly opinionated person's nick and have a look. Or wait a few days and I'll pull proof of how horribly wrong you are directly from the db.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday July 25 2018, @02:24PM (5 children)
Plus it's much, much easier to gain karma than to lose it. ACs can only lose one point per comment, registered two, but they can gain five points per comment, four for registered folks.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @02:43PM (4 children)
The result is that in a long-term, recurring debate (e.g., something regarding politics), those who disagree with a censorial group WILL be shut down.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:46PM (3 children)
It most certainly is not. I have long, heated debates all the time with world + dog. This would not be the case if either I or my.opponents were being shut down. Find any highly opinionated person on the site and you'll find the exact same thing. We self-correct quite well on average.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @05:33PM (2 children)
So, I just don't know what you're bagging on about. Your replies certainly don't resonate with my experience.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @05:43PM
If you're shitposting harder than TMB then you reaaaally need to take a good hard look at yourself, y'know, objectively as much as possible.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday July 25 2018, @06:31PM
I'm not bragging. I'm saying either you're posting low quality garbage or you're lying to stir up shit. Either way, up your game.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:16PM
Are you related to John Cougar, by any chance?
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday July 25 2018, @05:58PM
That's total nonsense. I'm about as left-wing as they come, the sort who thinks Bernie Sanders doesn't go far enough and descended from a guy who was blacklisted in the 1950's for his communist connections. My karma is 50 most of the time. There are a bunch of right-wing folks whose karma is also 50 most of the time.
Since you're an AC, I don't know what your actual posting history looks like, but when I've read at -1 threshold, I've found that those comments modded into oblivion completely deserved it for non-political reasons. If you want to be modded up, I suggest not posting things that aren't stupid and are more interesting than repeating slogans of whatever affiliation you've decided to give yourself.
Here's an example of the kind of post that I would disagree with and probably reply to, but would never consider modding down:
"While this ballot initiative sounds like a great idea, it's going to cause a budget problem because there's a $10 billion price tag and no obvious way to make it up."
Here's an example of the kind of post that I would agree with, and would mod into oblivion:
"Trump is T3H SuX00RR5 L0L!"
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Wednesday July 25 2018, @09:39PM
Why not browse at -1 like most other people? That way you see everything, and get a nice bump of "yeah!" when an offtopic, trollish, etc. post gets modded down to -1 or a great post gets modded up, and you get to exercise your righteous indignation in private at seeing all these insightful, inspiring posts modded down while insipid groupthink gets modded up right along with the good comments.
The key word for you in the above paragraph is "private". Claiming that changing the number that appears beside a short online publication is somehow "censorship" just makes you look less intelligent and credible when the rest of us see you do it.
you you you.
(Score: 0, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @01:26PM (15 children)
So, let's say a user mostly talks about technical stuff, but occasionally leaps into the fray on some political issue. Well, guess what? The censorship-happy users can go down-mod the technical stuff too, and thereby cut that user out of further debate for a month (or at least force that user to connect via some VPN or Tor, which has its own problems).
It's not civil at all. In fact, it's very irritating.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday July 25 2018, @02:14PM
Register and that doesn't happen without getting reversed. ACs don't get to claim mod bombing though because nobody but staff can tell one from another, OO aside.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Troll) by VLM on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:06PM (8 children)
Usually I get (downmod) pounded when I get way off topic or make a weak argument, and rightly so by the mannerbund and I can respect and learn from that. I drink very rarely like less than once a month, but if I drink and shitpost the result is usually amateurish and awful, at least thats my weak shitty excuse.
Sometimes the more outright leftist propaganda slanted stories I'll get attacked solely in those stories for pointing out the slant.
An example would be the recent twitter political censorship story where the implied slant of what happened in Charlottesville was off the charts extreme left wing fake news talking point having very little relationship with reality, and pointing that out was NOT well received, downmodded, fuck off nazi type replies. To some extent I'm very proud of that situation, my post was so accurate and correct and factual the only political motivated response was sophistry, censorship, and name calling. If its that hard to disagree with what I write, maybe they should just face facts and agree with me? Guess I hit a nerve with laser like precision. This kind of situation is very rare, however. I'd say I get falsely downmodded around once a quarter.
I will admit that including right wing memes and call outs and dog whistles in the shitpost dramatically increases the odds of it being downmodded. Strictly fact based encyclopedic reporting ALONE is much less likely to get downmodded than if I include at the end "P.S. 1488 gas the feminist landwhales" at the end. Especially if the article has nothing to do with landwhales or monolithic quadruple RS-232 line drivers from the pre-MAX232 integrated line driver integrated circuit era. Yes I am so old that I used 1489 and 1488 chips along with shitty +/- 15V dedicated linear power supplies, those were the bad old days for sure, but nostalgia, etc. For those who don't know, thats what 1488 means; those guys carrying torches and chanting "1488" at rallys, they're good old EE boys who dindu nothing wrong and merely used old computers a lot in the 70s/80s. Pretty self referential meta there, wonder if this post will make it thru LOL...
On the other hand I recall a month or two ago finding a fake news gun control story that somehow got thru the editing queue without anyone noticing that five minutes of google work would show that the "academic paper" in the story was published in a fake journal, the only source of grant money for the "study" was an explicit gun control political action committee, the conclusion of the fake academic paper was suspiciously similar to the mission statement of the gun control advocacy PAC, the "authors" of the paper seem to be employees of the PAC, it was just the weakest propaganda fake news marketing white paper full of lies as if it were a real academic research study I've seen in awhile. And that should have gotten slammed per the previous paragraph targeting data, although it didn't. I admit I was laughing at the low quality of the propaganda effort pretty hard while posting about it, which kept me on topic.
Now what I DO see downmodded often is stuff thats so weird I can't even define it, and not superficially political, so where exactly is a comment like this not off topic, obviously someone else's drunk shitposting game is way past mine:
Like, what does that even mean? Is that even written in English? It kinda seems to be, but ...
I've also seen some pretty weird long erotic fiction on SN in some inappropriate articles get downmodded into oblivion. You'll have some article about hard drive long term survival with a comment about SMART hard drive test results over time on Linux and outta nowhere the next comment will be some bizarre BDSM erotic fic, and all I can really say about that, is you gotta expect that kinda thing after integrating systemD, I guess. Don't miss that, the grass really is greener over on FreeBSD, although I still nostalgically remember the pre-systemd linux days back when stuff actually worked.
So I guess the above is an attempt at a fact based referenced copy and pasted examples counterargument to
or rephrased, put up or shut up? I'm not saying its never happened, but the rate of it happening has been observed to have an incredibly low upper bound rate if the rate is not actually zero.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:32PM
LMAO @ 1488. I might try a hit of whatever you're smoking. Hell, you might even be more than half right, but that sure as hell isn't what 1488 means to a bunch of skinheads!
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 3, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday July 25 2018, @05:47PM (6 children)
what happened in Charlottesville was off the charts extreme left wing fake news talking point having very little relationship with reality, and pointing that out was NOT well received
Yes, just screaming FAKE NEWS over and over again is Redundant.
If you're going to lie about video we all saw with our own two eyes, in the face of an indictment that could carry the death penalty [npr.org], you should probably expect to get modded down.
Now, if you cared to enter a debate in good-faith, stopped lying, and chose to argue that he is innocent until proven guilty, you probably wouldn't get the same treatment.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @08:16PM (5 children)
You make his point for him. What happened in Charlottesville was not limited to one single reprehensible incident. You choose to focus only on that and justify the down modding while overlooking all other activities from both sides. That was his point.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @11:51PM (4 children)
So focusing on the vehicular murder is the wrong thing there? You are insane.
We could argue all day about which violent group was how wrong, but in the end the neo nazi running people over with is car was the most important part. Saying "both sides" is stupid and we're tired of hearing you defenders of Nazis.
VLM is well known for spewing hateful lying garbage he gets from whatever nutty outlets, that is just a fact at this point.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 26 2018, @09:33AM (2 children)
When the right wing death squads emerge and begin the new holocaust, should I be there to defend you?
Maybe I should focus exclusively on the preceding terror attack from "your side" and simply accept that this response was inevitable.
You people are well known for spewing hateful garbage you get from whatever nutty outlets, that is just a fact at this point.
(Score: 2) by Oakenshield on Thursday July 26 2018, @01:19PM (1 child)
When the left wing death squads emerge and begin the new cultural revolution or Khmer Rouge purge, should I be there to defend you?
Maybe I should focus exclusively on the preceding terror attack from "your side" and simply accept that this response was inevitable.
You people are well known for spewing hateful garbage you get from whatever nutty outlets, that is just a fact at this point.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 26 2018, @07:10PM
The left wing death squads are already here. We've seen what they can do, and it's nothing.
When the right wing death squads appear, you will be very aware.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 26 2018, @01:55PM
Painting everyone on "the other side" in broad strokes based upon the actions of one nutcase is the wrong thing there, yes. Should ALL progressive movement proponents be judged based upon the actions of Yvette Felarca, Nasim Aghdam, Eric Clanton, or any of the violent extremists that associate with them? Just because you disagree with the ideology of "the other guy" doesn't mean that the actions of one murderer is representative of everyone.
Look at it this way. When a Middle Eastern person drives over a bunch of innocent people and "the other side" paints all Middle Easterners as terrorists, do you jump up and down screaming "Nuh Uh"? Or do you say, we shouldn't have any Middle Easterners here because they are all like those Islamist murderers in Toronto, Columbus, Boston, New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Barcelona, Ft Hood, Orlando and everywhere else these things occurred? Maybe they didn't all participate in the action, but "They all agree with the philosophy." This is exactly how the left is behaving.
When everyone who disagrees with you is a "Nazi" you ought to realize you are not seeing clearly. Take a good look in the mirror and maybe you will see that you are blinded by your own ideology.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:26PM (4 children)
Not so. I've tried to explain this elsewhere, let me try it again.
I'm a somewhat hi-vis person here. Some of the lefties hate me, some of the lefties dislike me, and of the remaining people, I think most are close to neutral, with a few people liking me. I have no fear of jumping into a conversation, and I reap the downmods from those who hate me the most, plus I get some from the people who dislike me. And, TBH, sometimes I get downmods from neutral people, and even a few from people who probably like me.
But, unless you make an effort to be censored into oblivion, there are enough moderators who are rational, and fair, to pull your stuff out of obscurity.
Just because 3, 9, or even 12 people mod me a troll, does NOT mean that my post becomes invisible.
Somewhere, back in the mists of time (meaning more than a couple days ago) TMB posted the list of the recipients of the most troll mods. TMB and I were both near the top of that list. Neither of us has disappeared, or dried up and blown away as a result.
If you are contributing meaningfully, don't worry about detractors. Keep up the good work, and people will show their appreciation.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @04:12PM (3 children)
Oh, gosh. I was hoping you'd be sleeping your hangover in a sewage drain and let me be spared of your babble. You can't abstain, can you?
In your dreams perhaps. It's the visibility of an annoying mosquito in a hot tropical night.
Hardly can call most of your posts a "conversation" Mostly noise, like those short wave russian stations bleeding into a neighbouring frequency.
This assumes your post having something worth saving - a big assumption when it comes to your posts. But yeah there are weird people with a fetish for bullshit.
It doesn't make it bear a meaning either. I suspect those who save your bullshit from oblivion are doing it to have some examples to teach their grandkids how not to behave.
Ironic, ain't it. All this thread starting from a whiny AC post. Meaningful contribution indeed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @04:47PM (1 child)
Jelly?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @10:30PM
Nope. Jerky
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @05:49PM
I disagree with Runaway all the time and believe he makes lots of shitposts without fully being aware, yet your little tit-for-tat list there is the height of lame bitchy whining. It is no surprise what part of your personality is causing the downmods.