What causes flamewars? How can we tone them down (or cause more and more)? I propose a study that creates a big matrix of features and then searches for fora that have each combination of features, and then calculating the percentage of messages that are flames. After doing this, it should be easy to tell if there are any features (or lack thereof) that cause people to be more likely to fly off the handle.
The two biggest problems are:
- Ensuring that there is a broad enough range of topics in each board so that we don’t end up comparing the number of flames in the pro-ana chat board with the number of flames in the zen buddhist chat board.
- Reliably classifying messages as flame or not flame.
But it sure would be nice to know what features help people be nice and what features encourage people to be assholes. The creation of a healthy online community is currently a black art. It would be nice to add a little science to the process.
