I do, for one. There’s no greater validation, when one casts a frail little paper-boat of a blogpost onto the maelstrom of teh interwebs, than to have some stranger, or even friend, respond.1 Go to any reasonably popular website, however, and it rapidly becomes obvious that 90% of comments are crap. What to do?
Theodore Dalrymple’s latest rant “Thank you for not expressing yourself” explores the strangely angry, ignorant and just plain weird world of internet comments. He offers all sorts of reasons for the vehemence and irrelevance of most internet comments, most of which seem to come down to the ease of not having to find a pen, piece of paper, envelope and stamp. And in a fine irony, the comments to that piece point out (angrily, with vehemence) that he’d made a couple of simple errors in his reporting.
Who gives a flying fuck?
The fact remains that far too many commenters and emailers have it far too easy. Each website author or publisher has to find their own solution, but some form of selection and rejection seems inevitable. And no, this is not censorship. As Dalrymple says:
Censorship is not failing to publish something, it is forbidding something to be published, which is not at all the same thing, though the difference is sometimes ill-appreciated.
Say what you like on your own website, just don’t expect me to let you say it on mine.
Somewhere this week, I read a snippet to the effect that newspapers already operate a freemium model — if you buy the physical edition you don’t need to read the comments.2 And of course, no one is forcing me to read the comments at those popular sites. But buried among the crap there may well be something of interest. Perhaps someone else will point to it.
Comments welcome, natch.
Footnotes:
Add your own comment
I just changed the commenting on mine to remove moderation for previously approved posters, an option I’d overlooked somehow. And I added the wp-spamfree plugin, which will see off most of what was getting past askismet into the moderation queue. I don’t mind few comments, but seeing a number and thinking OH GOOD, COMMENTS, and then seing that they’re spam is always a bit of a downer. Sometimes quite clever spam too. Like hearing the letterbox and finding it’s only bills.
Best of all is a comment from someone with an interesting blog, though that can be hazardous too, timewise.
I discovered a recent commenter was a serious coffee nut and was able to put him in touch with a friend who is manufacturing a coffee bean roasting machine.
Weak ties at work (I’ve forgotten the title of Granovetter’s classic paper, I think it was The Strength of Weak Ties).
I read but didn’t bookmark a fine article on, I think, the Seattle Post Intelligencer on why newspaper comments should not be moderated. Fine because it was counterintuitive if you are someone who finds being confronted with raving idiots tiresome and has ever wished for them to be excluded. (Where is the intellectual counterpart to the Godzilla cartoon which reads “You must be at least this high to attack this city”?!).
The gist of it was that without the sanculottes foaming at mouth and waving their pikes (and I suppose teabags, now) it’s all too easy for the liberal intelligentsia to have delusions about and to be in denial about what’s really out there. Confronted with it daily one has to frame policy issues differently and think harder about education, at least.
The PI no longer exists as a printed paper, so the comment free edition is gone!
All the same, I am glad Sullivan has no comments enabled at the Daily Dish.
Agreed fully about the immense downer of finding that all comments pending are spam.
One reason these thoughts struck a chord was that over at the other place we have a persistent problem with some commenters who are legit but whose establishments’ IPs have somehow been blocked by Akismet … and Akismet still doesn’t have a whitelist.
I’ll have to investigate those other options. Thanks for the tip.
In writing a blog, youare both author and publisher. No one stands between youand your audience.
As the publisher of your blog, you’re not given the option to “do nothing” with a comment. Either you believe it’s worth reading or not. If not, then you don’t publish it.
If I leave a racist, hateful, schizoid comment up on my web for all to Google for eternity, then by definition I have published it. It therefore has received my admittedly passive, tacit blessing.
Like a newspaper, you can “publish” a comment up that you obviously disagree with. It’s not tacit agreement, just the liberal philosophy at work. We need to hear all sides of the debate in order to make the rational and, supposedly, more civilized decision. It’s the essence of education.
Luckily, deleting a comment is a lot easier than, say, scrubbing a swastika off a brick wall.
And now for something completely different. . .
I’m interested in your choice of pronoun in the following: “Each website author or publisher has to find their own solution,” I prefer to bounce between “his” and “her,” but am always interested in hearing writers’ rationale for their choice. By the way, I see “their” more and more often in the NYTs –not sure if it’s an editorial drift or decision.
Ann
Thanks for your non-racist, non-hateful, non-schizoid comment, which will live here forever. Or at least as long as the internet lives.
I absolutely agree with you about the comments on a blog. If you let something through, you implicitly condone it, and I’m comfortable with that. I’m also comfortable with a different point of view, at least as long as it is a point of view about the same topic that I’d expressed my view upon.
It is the really big sites that perplex me. So many of the comments that are published are not so much hateful (though many are) as way off the point and often egregiously wrong. I honestly don’t want to have to wade through them, and I frequently don’t.
As for your final point, I’m going to take that as a text for another post. So thanks again.