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.

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

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.

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.