A user on Hacker News recently posted a comment that set me thinking:

Something about hacker culture that never really set well with me was this—the nastiness. … I just don’t understand why people troll like they do.

I’ve thought a lot over the last couple years about the problem of trolls. It’s an old one, as old as forums, but we’re still just learning what the causes are and how to address them.

There are two senses of the word “troll.” In the original sense it meant someone, usually an outsider, who deliberately stirred up fights in a forum by saying controversial things. [1] For example, someone who didn’t use a certain programming language might go to a forum for users of that language and make disparaging remarks about it, then sit back and watch as people rose to the bait. This sort of trolling was in the nature of a practical joke, like letting a bat loose in a room full of people.

The definition then spread to people who behaved like assholes in forums, whether intentionally or not. Now when people talk about trolls they usually mean this broader sense of the word. Though in a sense this is historically inaccurate, it is in other ways more accurate, because when someone is being an asshole it’s usually uncertain even in their own mind how much is deliberate. That is arguably one of the defining qualities of an asshole.

I think trolling in the broader sense has four causes. The most important is distance. People will say things in anonymous forums that they’d never dare say to someone’s face, just as they’ll do things in cars that they’d never do as pedestrians—like tailgate people, or honk at them, or cut them off.

Trolling tends to be particularly bad in forums related to computers, and I think that’s due to the kind of people you find there. Most of them (myself included) are more comfortable dealing with abstract ideas than with people. Hackers can be abrupt even in person. Put them on an anonymous forum, and the problem gets worse.

The third cause of trolling is incompetence. If you disagree with something, it’s easier to say “you suck” than to figure out and explain exactly what you disagree with. You’re also safe that way from refutation. In this respect trolling is a lot like graffiti. Graffiti happens at the intersection of ambition and incompetence: people want to make their mark on the world, but have no other way to do it than literally making a mark on the world. [2]

The final contributing factor is the culture of the forum. Trolls are like children (many are children) in that they’re capable of a wide range of behavior depending on what they think will be tolerated. In a place where rudeness isn’t tolerated, most can be polite. But vice versa as well.

There’s a sort of Gresham’s Law of trolls: trolls are willing to use a forum with a lot of thoughtful people in it, but thoughtful people aren’t willing to use a forum with a lot of trolls in it. Which means that once trolling takes hold, it tends to become the dominant culture. That had already happened to Slashdot and Digg by the time I paid attention to comment threads there, but I watched it happen to Reddit.

News.YC is, among other things, an experiment to see if this fate can be avoided. The sites’s guidelines explicitly ask people not to say things they wouldn’t say face to face. If someone starts being rude, other users will step in and tell them to stop. And when people seem to be deliberately trolling, we ban them ruthlessly.

Technical tweaks may also help. On Reddit, votes on your comments don’t affect your karma score, but they do on News.YC. And it does seem to influence people when they can see their reputation in the eyes of their peers drain away after making an asshole remark. Often users have second thoughts and delete such comments.

One might worry this would prevent people from expressing controversial ideas, but empirically that doesn’t seem to be what happens. When people say something substantial that gets modded down, they stubbornly leave it up. What people delete are wisecracks, because they have less invested in them.

So far the experiment seems to be working. The level of conversation on News.YC is as high as on any forum I’ve seen. But we still only have about 8,000 uniques a day. The conversations on Reddit were good when it was that small. The challenge is whether we can keep things this way.

I’m optimistic we will. We’re not depending just on technical tricks. The core users of News.YC are mostly refugees from other sites that were overrun by trolls. They feel about trolls roughly the way refugees from Cuba or Eastern Europe feel about dictatorships. So there are a lot of people working to keep this from happening again.

Somehow Kanye West’s fashion show came to be the most hyped of the entire spring 2012 season, creating expectations that are often impossible to live up to, even for trained, established designers. The reviews of the show ranged from the kind (“baby Balmain,” according to Style.com), to the optimistic (“one good-looking pair of color-blocked pants in blue and coral”, according to the Times), to the merciless (“The only thing more painful than witnessing the dress was watching the model pitch down the runway in shoes so ill-fitting that her spike heels were bending at angles,” writes The Wall Street Journal). Yes, there was a lot of wrong. But there was also some right, which we are biased in pointing out because Kanye West gave us a hug in exchange for not giving us an interview once, which is more than you get from most famous people who don’t feel like giving you a sound bite.

What Kanye Got Right
• The critics. Every major one, from the Times, Style.com, the Telegraph, etc., were present to witness West’s fashion line’s debut. As much as they hated on the clothes he showed, they evidently took the show seriously enough to show up at all. After all, they could write equally unkind things about the Kardashians’ Bebe collection, which showed in New York once, or Avril Lavigne’s Abbey Dawn line, which showed in New York this season, but they don’t waste their energy.
• The designers. Also populating West’s front row was Azzedine Alaïa, DSquared2’s Dean and Dan Caten, Olivier Theyskens, Jeremy Scott, and the Olsen twins. Sure, maybe they all went just to feel a little bit better about their own work as designers, but even so, Alaïa doesn’t go to a fashion show for just anybody.
• That one pair of color-blocked pants. See intro paragraph above.
• The staging was “impeccable,” according to Style.com. Which it ought to be, since Kanye’s main job as a performer is to stage things well.

• He’s sat front row at enough fashion shows over the past five years or so years to ingratiate himself in the fashion crowd. “I did not want to miss it,” Bergdorf fashion director Linda Fargo told the Times. She sat next to Kanye at a show once: “We had a running commentary throughout the whole show, and he was really into it. Everything I was reacting to, he was reacting to.” 
• He speaks in vagaries, as designers tend to. “I had a lot of ideas about colors and shapes I wanted to express,” he told the Times.
• His inspiration was not the most popular among celebrity designers — “what I would wear.” And you can’t even say that’s just because he made lady things, because he wears women’s clothessometimes.
• He had a few all-white looks. At least he’s on trend in that way!
• The model cast. He had Karlie Kloss, Anja Rubik, Chanel Iman, Izabel Goulart and many more of the best models working in the business.
• The show wasn’t boring, and you can’t always say that of many established designers.
• He didn’t call it “Kanye’s Kollection.”

What Kanye Got Wrong
• The clothes did not fit. Maybe that’s because he supposedly made them in three days with the help of Central St. Martins students in a makeshift atelier in London, which is a whole other set of problems.
• In their write-up of the show, The Wall Street Journal referenced Lindsay Lohan’s disastrous debut at Emanuel Ungaro. To be fair, Kanye didn’t show any glitter pasties in cutesy shapes or cry when he took his bow at the end.
• Well, according to the Telegraph: “Kanye West’s fashion debut was like being subjected to an hour long MRI scan — but not as much fun.”
• The collection didn’t look like he allowed a real designer to do a bulk of the work for him. Lots of celebrities have real, trained designers designing their clothing lines behind the scenes. In fact, probably anyone who was an actress or singer before their name was on a clothing label does. The result for them is they get a collection that can sell and works as clothing normal people might actually want to wear. In this way, the clothing business isn’t fair, since it’s much more difficult for designers to flip careers and pretend to be rappers.
• The dresses with the deep, deep, deep plunging necklines. I’d guess the average woman with disposable income for high-end designer clothes is about as interested in showing that much skin as they are in being Snooki.
• Lindsay Lohan was at the show, wearing a truly unflattering blush-pink look. 
• The metallic pants. No one can wear metallic pants and look good. Maybe Karlie Kloss and Anja Rubik can. So: no one.

Many of my favorite Steve Jobs stories feature his anger, as he unleashes his incisive temper on those who fail to meet his incredibly high standards. A few months ago, Adam Lashinsky had a fascinating article in Fortune describing life inside the sanctum of 1 Infinite Loop. The article begins with the following scene:

In the summer of 2008, when Apple launched the first version of its iPhone that worked on third-generation mobile networks, it also debuted MobileMe, an e-mail system that was supposed to provide the seamless synchronization features that corporate users love about their BlackBerry smartphones. MobileMe was a dud. Users complained about lost e-mails, and syncing was spotty at best. Though reviewers gushed over the new iPhone, they panned the MobileMe service.

Steve Jobs doesn’t tolerate duds. Shortly after the launch event, he summoned the MobileMe team, gathering them in the Town Hall auditorium in Building 4 of Apple’s campus, the venue the company uses for intimate product unveilings for journalists. According to a participant in the meeting, Jobs walked in, clad in his trademark black mock turtleneck and blue jeans, clasped his hands together, and asked a simple question:

“Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” Having received a satisfactory answer, he continued, “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?”

For the next half-hour Jobs berated the group. “You’ve tarnished Apple’s reputation,” he told them. “You should hate each other for having let each other down.” The public humiliation particularly infuriated Jobs. Walt Mossberg, the influential Wall Street Journal gadget columnist, had panned MobileMe. “Mossberg, our friend, is no longer writing good things about us,” Jobs said. On the spot, Jobs named a new executive to run the group.

Brutal, right? But those flashes of intolerant anger have always been an important part of Jobs’ management approach. He isn’t shy about the confrontation of failure and he doesn’t hold back negative feedback. He is blunt at all costs, a cultural habit that has permeated the company. Jonathan Ive, the lead designer at Apple, describes the tenor of group meetings as “brutally critical.”

At first glance, this cultivation of anger and criticism seems like a terrible idea. We assume that group collaboration requires niceties and affirmation, that we should always accentuate the positive. Just look at brainstorming, perhaps the most widely implemented creativity technique in the world. In the late 1940s, Alex Osborn, a founding partner of the advertising firm BBDO, outlined the virtues of brainstorming in a series of best-selling books. (He insisted that brainstorming could double the creative output of a group.) The most important principle, he said, was the total absence of criticism. According to Osborn, if people were worried about negative feedback, if they were concerned that their new ideas might get ridiculed by the group or the boss, then the brainstorming process would fail. “Creativity is so delicate a flower that praise tends to make it bloom, while discouragement often nips it in the bud,” Osborn wrote in Your Creative Power.

But maybe this is a big mistake. Maybe Steve Jobs was on to something when he refused to hide away his disappointment or displeasure. That, at least, is the takeaway of a new paper by Matthijs Baas, Carsten De Dreu, and Bernard Nijstad in The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Their first experiment was straightforward, demonstrating that anger was better at promoting “unstructured thinking” on a creativity task, at least when compared to sadness or a neutral mood. The second experiment elicited anger directly in the subjects, before asking them to brainstorm on ways to improve the condition of the natural environment. Once again, people who felt angry generated more ideas. These ideas were also deemed more original, as they were thought of by less than 1 percent of the subjects.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that anger is a cure-all, or that nastiness is always wise. For one thing, anger is exhausting and “resource depleting.” Although angry subjects initially generated more ideas, their performance quickly declined. By the end of the idea-generation session, they were performing at roughly the same level as everyone else.

Why does anger have this effect on the imagination? I think the answer is still unclear – we’re only beginning to understand how moods influence cognition. But my own sense is that anger is deeply stimulating and energizing. It’s a burst of adrenaline that allows us to dig a little deeper, to get beyond the usual superficial free-associations. In contrast, when our mood is neutral or content, there is no incentive to embrace unfamiliar possibilities, to engage in mental risks or brash new concepts. (Why rock the boat?) The absence of criticism has kept us in the same place. And this is why anger makes it easier to think different.

The larger story here is about the surprising benefits of negative moods. While sad subjects in this new study underperformed on the creative generation task, previous research has demonstrated that sadness increases creative persistence, allowing subjects to work harder for extended periods of time. (In other words, melancholy is bad in the short-term, but good for the long haul.) Consider a recent paper, “The Dark Side of Creativity,” led by Modupe Akinola. The setup was very clever: she asked subjects to give a short speech about their dream job. The students were randomly assigned to either a positive or negative feedback condition, in which their speech was greeted with smiles and vertical nods (positive) or frowns and horizontal shakes (negative). After the speech was over, the subjects were given glue, paper and colored felt and told to make a collage using the materials. Professional artists then evaluated each collage according to various metrics of creativity.

Not surprisingly, the feedback impacted the mood of the subjects: Those who received smiles during their speeches reported feeling better than before, while frowns had the opposite effect. What’s interesting is what happened next: Subjects in the negative feedback condition created much prettier collages. Their angst led to better art. As Akinola notes, this is largely because the sadness improved their focus, and made them more likely to persist with the creative challenge:

Previous research has shown that negative feedback can lead to increased subsequent effort, as long as the task is not perceived as too difficult to be mastered (Locke & Latham, 1990). This is consistent with research indicating that when individuals experience negative affect in a situation that requires creativity, this negative affect may be interpreted as a signal that additional effort must be exerted for a creative solution to be discovered. In contrast, positive mood coupled with a situation that requires creativity may be an indication that the creative goal has been met, reducing the amount of effort exerted on the task.

To be honest, I find this data a little depressing. I’d rather have a brain that, as Osborn believed, always performs best when content and carefree. Unfortunately, that’s not the brain we’ve been stuck with. (Although don’t forget that watching stand-up comedy can improve performance on insight puzzles. Happiness isn’t completely useless.) I’m afraid the novelist J.M. Coetzee was at least partially right: “Always move towards pain when making art.”