Hearing about Chris Clarke shutting down his blog reminded me again of why I’m ambivalent about comments on weblogs, though not as adverse as Mark Bernstein. If a site focuses on a community, or if the readers care about reputation and relationships with the other readers, then comments can add value to a weblog.
If I understand Clarke correctly, his decision wasn’t prompted by a threat against a family pet, but disgust over the mess that comments on political blogs turn into. Not just political blogs. Look at comment threads on YouTube for another example.
Weblog comments, as well as social networking sites, are sensitive to scale. And yes, there’s exceptions to the rule such as Making Light. However, Teresa, Patrick, and Jim put great effort into keeping it from going off-road.
There’s another thing that helps Making Light: shared community. Read the thread on Mike Ford to get a feel for this.
A majority of the readers of Making Light know each other through Science Fiction fandom, we’ll see one another regularly at conventions, and there’s several hundred person-years of shared experience.
Same thing with blogs run by technology veterans. The readers are working on similar problems, with similar tools, serve on committees, and see one another at conferences.
Compare that to a comment thread elsewhere, where there’s nyms, hostility, a strong desire to count coup, or the number of people who’ve ‘friended’ you.
Meanwhile, I’ll leave comments on, but still encourage you to respond in your blogs. There’s aggregators and search engines that’ll point back to what you say.
One Comment
It’s true that ML started out with a fair number of readers who were at least glancingly acquainted from other venues: SF conventions, GEnie, rec.arts.sf.*, the Well, etc. That helped: no question about it. But our readership has outgrown that original population without a breakdown in basic conversational civility in the comment threads.
Some things I believe:
1. You can’t have a good online discussion venue without moderation.
2. After a while, your commenting readers know each other from conversations in your comment threads, as well as other venues.
3. New readers’ reactions to the venue are heavily conditioned by what they find going on there. Civil order can to some extent become self-perpetuating, provided you back it up with muscle when necessary.
4. Occasional outbreaks of brilliance are useful for keeping people on their toes, which encourages them to be on their good behavior. (Yet another reason we miss Mike.)
5. Suppressing misbehavior is a public act. Its function is only partly to suppress the misbehavior. It also tells the onloookers what does and doesn’t count as misbehavior, and how much of it will be tolerated before the axe falls.
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I had a moment of real pride in ML’s civic culture a few months back. We had a tussle going on with a guy who’s been kicked off a number of message board. He was being a jerk, and wasn’t paying attention to suggestions that he amend his behavior.
I was just coming to the conclusion that he’d have to go, when someone in the comment thread told him, “Guy, can’t you tell when you’re being lit up by targeting radar?” Another commenter cheerfully posted, “[Opens popcorn, sits back, waits for the disemvowelment.]”
My problem case promptly replied with unnecessary rudeness, and was just as promptly disemvowelled.
What was great about it was that those readers not only knew that the guy’s behavior was over the line; they knew how much and when. That’s my definition of successful moderation. The best rules are the ones people know without having to think about them.