Andrew Coyne has shut down the comments section of his blog:
I don’t like to be in the censorship business, or picking and choosing which comments to allow and which to reject, and I don’t have the time to monitor hundreds of comments every day. I hesitated to do this, particularly during the momentous events of the last few weeks, not least because the best of the comments are far superior to anything I might post. But they have been drowned out by all the other crap — low-brow, insult-filled, intolerant of opposing views, and unspeakably tedious. I have no desire for this site to serve as a clubhouse for hard-right wackos, usually anonymous, with way too much time on their hands. Nor can I allow them to obscure the site’s vital mission and cause: personal vanity and self-promotion. I spend enough money underwriting my own incoherent ramblings without subsidizing others’.
And here’s why I care.
This actually comes up frequently when I’m talking with clients about possibly adding community features to their web presence, even something as simple as a discussion board, comments area or shout box. They worry that they’ll be held accountable — legally or politically — for offensive or embarrassing content. At the very least, they worry their investment will be wasted as useful dialogue is driven away by the din of ranting yahoos.
That’s no small concern, especially for people working in contentious issues. It isn’t hard to imagine people posting compromising or libellous material to your web site, whether out of spite, malice or some deep-seated personal issue. Taking on the responsibility to police your message boards is a huge commitment of time, and opens you to accusations of bias, favouritism and censorship.
There are ways of dealing with that, however. Inviting online communities to self-police, for example, with prominent links for reporting offensive or abusive material, can ease the workload. You can include policy statements that clearly state the content of a community area has been posted by participants, and is not intended to reflect the views of your organization.
But you should also be ready to respond, should inappropriate material become a public issue. The news media has come a long way, but many reporters and editors still don’t seem to get how the web works, let alone how online communities function. (Newspapers still occasionally run breathless stories about how some government web site is only four clicks away from a porn site!) Having a pithy statement ready that explains your online community and its policies can help keep a bad story from taking off.
It’s still work. But the benefits include giving members, supporters and the public a place to meet, discuss the issues (or your products and services, or the news of the day, or their cats), find common ground and possibly even to act collectively in support of your goals. For many organizations, that’s easily enough to outweigh the risk of an embarrassing comment or two.
I’m not sure if AC fell into a trap and let the comments get out of control, or whether he attracted too many nuts to his sites and he didn’t have a few trusted enforcers who are as reasonable as he usually is. There are blogs where the blogger’s associates police the comments; unfortunately, they seem to govern themselves more like LGF (no link for obvious reasons) or Tim Blair, where “policing” extends to banning people who aren’t cheering the right team. Tim Lambert had a series of posts on his experiences with the other Tim’s enforcer a while back
(http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert / cgi-bin / blog/2005/01#noarguments)
Also, there’s a hell of a difference between a few idiotic comments and _hundreds_, which is what AC had to deal with.
An intersting contrast is Wikipedia, where the culture does place a premium on cooperation and collaboration, and flame warriors tend to burn out and quit. For proof of that, check out the talk page on the Canadian sponsorship scandal. It’s short and civil, and shows what happens when a Freeper tries to inject commentary into the article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Sponsorship_scandal
No question Coyne had a big problem on his hands. I’m not sure how I’d have handled it myself; shutting down comments would certainly have been an option, especially if creating an online community wasn’t that high a priority.
Question: how do you foster a culture that supports cooperation and collaboration and values those attributes more than ideology and the entertainment value of vituperation? I suspect having a project (e.g. creating a useful Wikipedia entry) beyond simply mouthing off has something to do with it…
(We now return you to my mouthing off, already in progress.)
Aaahhhh, yes.
The Project.
Did you ever read the Julie/Julia one.
Now that was fantastic for posts and comments both.
Tough one. Andrew Coyne had an insanely large # of comments compared to most bloggers. I think the solution to nastiness in comments is to have some trusted helpers, as was mentioned. Maybe we will see more commenters at the blogscanada egroup.
Yeah, I think Wikipedia’s goal of actually building a useful referece site influences how its contributors act when dealing with facts and ideas that don’t necessarily mesh with their own personal beliefs. Most current affairs and political blogs don’t have that purpose, so it becomes simply a game of trying to either out-argue one’s opponents or (more likely) out-flame them or just keep on typing and replying obsessively to drown other voices out until they just plain give up. (The way the blogsnobs responded to Warren Kinsella’s legal threats to a couple of bloggers is instructive; the “pure” bloggers thought that any mention of defamation was some sort of fundamental assault on the blogosphere, and they out-typed those who took the attitude that publishing is publishing. Out-typing, though, is not the same as putting up better arguments.)
The BlogsCanada comments are low-volume enough (usually 25-50 comments per post) but they have gotten increasingly nasty over the last couple of months. The anonymous trolls (mostly right-wingers) tend to be the worst offenders when ti comes to lowering the tone. This seems to have been the case at the Ventura County Star, which had to suspend its commenting features after some discussions were trllled out of control. I wonder if requiring community members to identify themselves, or at least be known to the site admin, is one way to curb the number of knuckle-draggers?
If Jim at BlogsCanada does need to get trusted help to steer the comments, he’s got one advantage — reasonably long relationships with many level-headed folks that would likely be more interested in keeping the discussion reasonably civil.