What tools are available to identify trolls?
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Posted Aug 28, 2019, 1:44 PM UTC
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lightweight doxing will lead to full-blown doxing. i wouldn’t recommend it, especially since it took 2 minutes to find that you’re from south africa
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That's not the tool's fault. The info is out there. That's just me not being careful. South Africa's a big place. I move around a lot. A lot a lot.
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Eother way, I am more interested in a tool that can track the health of a subreddit. Show that the users who are involved in conversation has changed dramaticaly recently. I.e. 6 months ago, 80% of comments came from people who have a niceity score over 50 or who have more than a certain comment karma or are this controversial. The nature of the subreddit changed "this" much in the last 6 months. That should be able to give mods/community some objective figures to base discussion of their subreddit on.
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This comment has serial killer vibes
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nah bud, i wear a white hat
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I generally don't help people who can't find such tools on their own: it's more or less an automatic competence filter that keeps advanced profiling in the hands of the elites.
I'm only half-kidding. Learn or hire. Start with the Reddit API.
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If you answer me with: the mods have access tp great tools provided by reddit and this is more or lesswhat they guess, I'll be happy. I dont want these tools. I just want functioning communities. Seeing one go to pieces makes me wonder whether the mods have these tools or not.
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The Reddit API is provided by Reddit.
If (super)mods were given access to private account metadata, that would be a scandal. I wouldn't be entirely shocked, but it would still cause outrage.
So, the tools are out there, and they make extensive use of several APIs, among them the Reddit API, through the Python library PRAW.
Whether or a mod has advanced "tools" or not depends on their technical competence. It really is that simple. It could get academic paper-level advanced if necessary. Sure enough, plenty of social network analyses have been published, usually Twitter, but Reddit as well. I don't have a list handy for you, but you could probably find some pretty fast using Google Scholar and SciHub.
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Thanks 👍 Like I say, I am not looking for the tools for myself. I want to knos that they exist. I dont think uou need more private data than what is available in the public domain. Its about understanding onsite behaviour, not who someone is at home.
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No problem. Just to illustrate though:
- ASONAM 2016 - Troll vulnerability in online social networks (Includes Reddit)
- Mount Holyoke College - An Analysis of the Discourse of Internet Trolling: A Case Study of Reddit.com
- IEEE - Troll detection by domain-adapting sentiment analysis (Includes Reddit)
And that's in 5 minutes.
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I couldn't mod without r/toolbox (browser addon), it gives you a history of where the user posts, where they comment, and where they get their karma, among other things.
r/RedditProTools is another addon, and its purpose is explicitly to tag users based on some preset criteria (which can be configured). Specifically, there's a "troll" tag that's applied to users with negative karma, and "sub-troll" for having negative karma in the current sub.
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Reddit doesn't. That's an entirety different discussion though.
Honestly, if you hold so many unpopular opinions that you end up with negative karma, then what's the difference?
For modding, I evaluate each user independently when needed. For regular redditing, I don't really care why they got so many downvotes, I simply don't engage.
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Is it though? I might care more about the difference for the purposes of scientific study, but as a user, I only care about the net-effect.
In other words, if everyone you know refers to you as an asshole, you might be an asshole. It doesn't matter if you're trying to be an asshole, or doing it accidentally, you're still an asshole. Same for trolls.