Desiderius: The point of flamewars was that they weren’t, you know, actual wars. No one was actually hurt.

Flonking is actually quite painful.

But IIRC, there wasn’t any point to flamewars, much less the one you suggest.

Desiderius: Unlike, say, Somalia.

What does that have to do with the price of theophylline in Sri Lanka?

Desiderius: The libertarian commitment to the open exchange of ideas in action.

I’d advert to my original statement (the one you seemed to take umbrage at):

zuch: Huh? I know that A’mur’kah invented constitutions and has the patent on democracy, but libertarians being the first denizens of the InterToobz?!?!? I suspect you have no acquaintance with UseNet….

Yes, indeed. It was “libertarians” that invented “open exchange of ideas” (unlike mere “liberals”, despite a couple centuries’ head start). Particularly, IIRC, the Objectionists. They could be relied on for many months of “open exchange” — but managed to exhaust the InterToobz’s supply of “>” characters. Some RAM chips had the pattern ’00111110′ burned in so hard that bit errors started occurring when anything else was typed.

Desiderius: The comment cleansing policies of ostensibly “liberal” blogs stood in stark contrast.

You mean in stark contrast to blogs like “Instapundit”, “Powerline”, and such, which avoided such cleansing by not allowing comments to begin with?

Cheers,

Desiderius: Don’t play dumb. I’ve heard my share of nigger jokes cracked only to be followed by furious backpedaling when the jokester was called out to recognize the malice behind your slur. Keep your Tory (yes, of course, you’re Labour, try acting it) arrogance to the local polytechnic faculty lounge, where it belongs.

I don’t listen to Rooskies.

But I think you mistake “ridicule” for “malice”.

Cheers,

Desiderius: The point of flamewars was that they weren’t, you know, actual wars. No one was actually hurt. Unlike, say, Somalia. The libertarian commitment to the open exchange of ideas in action. The comment cleansing policies of ostensibly “liberal” blogs stood in stark contrast.

I am going to add something to this. The major issue here is that very often times flame wars surface because of deep-seated differences and there is a need to exchange thoughts (sometimes in a heated way) on those differences. Additionally, one can type so fast that it is easy to give the wrong impression (have an edge where it is really the bad day you had at work, etc)…..

Even the most civil online communities I have been in have occasionally had flame wars. They happen. They are a force of nature. And often things, despite the namecalling and hostilities, the posts have real value.

I always tell folks that they should run their blogs how they would want to run a government agency…..

And yet, I find all sorts of comments, friendly and foul to be very valuable.

It’s the spam I dislike.

But while it’s not often that technology can solve social problems, I truly truly truly truly have no idea why bloggers put up with such terrible, shitty, crappy, lousy, commenting systems.

Slashdot got it right in Commander Taco’s garage years ago and none of you jerky self-important bloggers will demand of your software vendors a commenting system that is 1/1000th as good as his.

Take all your worries about censorship and stuff them where the sun don’t shine, and let random groups of registered readers mod up/mod down/hide comments, and then let another group meta-moderate those moderators.

The point of flamewars was that they weren’t, you know, actual wars. No one was actually hurt. Unlike, say, Somalia. The libertarian commitment to the open exchange of ideas in action. The comment cleansing policies of ostensibly “liberal” blogs stood in stark contrast.

As for the Somalian meme, it, well, misses the whole animating spirit of why libertarians are libertarian. The one thing we agree on is that the state should have a monopoly on coercion for the maintenance of order* (unlike, say, in Somalia), which is why we are not so excited about state involvement in walks of life that don’t benefit so much from either monopolies or coercion…

* – yeah, whatever, ask the libertarians on this blog.

“Does he think I was attacking him”

So bigotry is only execrable when one is being personally attacked?

Don’t play dumb. I’ve heard my share of nigger jokes cracked only to be followed by furious backpedaling when the jokester was called out to recognize the malice behind your slur. Keep your Tory (yes, of course, you’re Labour, try acting it) arrogance to the local polytechnic faculty lounge, where it belongs.

It doesn’t here.

“Maybe not everyone values this “common good” the same (if at all). Which would ‘justify’ different levels of investment/participation.”

:D

When I blog, I don’t delete comments. I do reserve the right to *edit* them. [insert evil cackling here]

Eric Rasmusen: There is another, fundamental, difference. If the owner is deciding on a comment policy, he knows whether he is benevolent or unfair. If he is unfair, he’ll be unfair and it doesn’t matter what his stated policy is, because he can violate it with impunity. If he is benevolent, then he should exercise his benevolence by deleting comments as appropriate. I can’t see why someone who thinks they are fair should hold back, unless they believe they are too unconsciously biased to be able to tell whether *any* post is useless.

How is this a fundamental difference between government censorship and blog comment moderation?

I am sure that Prof. Somin realizes that whatever is good for him is good for the Volokh Conspiracy ;-) (See the exchange with Prof. Kerr above.)

The differences are not in nature, but in the fact that the blog owner MUST cultivate a valuable resource to draw folks in (who vote with their feet by showing up). This is where the check against abuse occurs. Abuse leads to failure. Success is a good indication of either a lack of options or a lack of abuse.

“The only difference between owner censorship and government censorship is that one can easily vote with one’s feet and avoid problems. Hence dictators must be benevolent if they want to succeed or folks will just go elsewhere.”

There is another, fundamental, difference. If the owner is deciding on a comment policy, he knows whether he is benevolent or unfair. If he is unfair, he’ll be unfair and it doesn’t matter what his stated policy is, because he can violate it with impunity. If he is benevolent, then he should exercise his benevolence by deleting comments as appropriate. I can’t see why someone who thinks they are fair should hold back, unless they believe they are too unconsciously biased to be able to tell whether *any* post is useless.

[zuch]: Huh? I know that A’mur’kah invented constitutions and has the patent on democracy, …

But once again, I don’t understand the reason for any such conclusion. Does he think I was attacking him (and the other proud A’mur’kans that aren’t otherwise engaged in Nashville)? To be sure, I have no idea if Desiderius is an A’mur’kan. “Desiderius”…. isn’t that a Soviet name?….

Cheers,

Desiderius: Mattski,

[zuch]: “I know that A’mur’kah invented constitutions and has the patent on democracy”

Should I bust out my Cockney, or would that be as ludicrous as Zuch’s latest turd?
Still trying to figure out what he thought his gratuitous slur had to do with my original point…

It might help you a bit if you didn’t snip the rest of my friggin’ sentence:

zuch:

[Desiderius]: Back when the interwebs were a libertarian playground and conventional liberals like Atrios, BillMon, Brad DeLong, et. al. first entered the scene, …

Huh? I know that A’mur’kah invented constitutions and has the patent on democracy, but libertarians being the first denizens of the InterToobz?!?!? I suspect you have no acquaintance with UseNet….

I was just pointing out some other popular misconceptions….

Cheers,

mattski:

[Desiderius]: see Zuch’s execrable bigotry, and utter lack of self-awareness 

W[hat]A[re]Y[ou]T[alking]A[bout]???

Desiderius seems to be trying to establish the limits on moderator tolerance for ad hominem attacks. I think that’s all he’s really about here.

Cheers,

I think Mattski’s ‘question’ referred to the ascription of ‘execrable bigotry’ to Zuch.
I know Zuch annoys some people, but I agree with Mattski that the ascription just seems.. over the top and off the mark. (Bigoted about what, for example?)

That said, it seems to me that a regular reader can decide whose scomments to ignore. I cannot agree with fjfjfjfjfjfjfj (?) about distributing the effort. Why should the VCers have to moderate more than they wish to? They are already providing a service that, it seems, many of us appreciate. If I come to the conclusion that commenter X usually writes offensive or foolish things, I can just skip over her/his comments.

Posting is a vastly more productive activity than moderating (at least once moderating goes beyond more than a very minimal investment).

Don’t be too sure of that. My prediction is that some time in the future people will realize that the comments sections of blogs can be even better than the posts themselves, and bloggers will come to act more as editors than as authors. When I used to read Commentary (and perhaps still–I just got out of the habit), I found their letters to the editor section as good as the articles, because they’d print interesting (if often wrong) letters and then have the article author do a wrap-up reply to them all.

But that requires very heavy comment moderation. To have a truly good comments section, the blogger would have to throw out at least 2/3 of current comments– which would take him little time, actually– since most comments are by people with no real information or knowledge and displaying no wit or thought. That’s OK– that’s the current expectation, but I hope for a better set of commenting customs.

I left a comment about this at Althouse’s: preview.tinyurl.com/ylz43o2

And, of course, I’ll be posting about this on Monday and harping on it for a long time.

public_defender: A little opacity is fine with me. If a drunk crashes a party I’m at in someone’s home, I’m grateful to the host if he or she can escort the person out without the rest of us noticing.

And I don’t think the Conspirators come even close to “abusing” their power. I’ve sometimes made harsh comments, and I’ve never seen them deleted. All of the Conspirators who allow comments seem to welcome them. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be Conspirators on this blog.

I also suspect that they generally are a little harsher on people they agree with than disagree with. They are here because they like to debate and argue, and you can’t do that with people who always agree with you.

I don think that lawyers and law students have a little bit of an advantage because the conspirators are lawyers and law professors. There is an art to making a tough legal argument. And a tough argument framed in the way lawyers are framed is less likely to get deleted.

In the end, I enjoy reading thoughtful comments, but I won’t wade through a bunch of name calling. The Conspirators are a little likely editors at a newspaper. They keep thinks on topic and worth reading. There are plenty of places for free-for-all’s. I’m glad this isn’t one of them.

First, I never said the Conspirators abuse power. In fact, I would hope it was clear from my post that I thought they did an excellent job. I don’t see my approach as the One True Way so much as being different and hence useful regarding food for thought.

One thing I see Illya saying in these posts is that if it becomes a problem, a harder line will be towed. This is reasonable. Some conspirators (Cassel, Bernstein) tend to be better at provoking incivility than others, while others (Kerr, Somin, Volokh) tend to be better at avoiding such provocation.

The eventual goal of all moderation efforts is to ensure that the long-term noise-to-signal ration is minimized. Nobody (neither myself nor the Conspirators, despite our different styles) would want to see a blog overrun by namecalling. The question is fundamentally “what works.”

It’s one thing to be a dictator in North Korea where citizens usually can’t get out. It is something very different to be a dictator in an online community where folks can easily vote with their feet by going somewhere else. In the former case, you can be as brutal as you think necessary. In the latter, if you aren’t really good and deserving of your dictatorial powers, and wise in how you use them, folks simply desert. The success of the VC blog shows the conspirators are not abusing power.

I actually mentioned this because it tied into many of Illya’s previous posts and might provide more thoughts regarding philosophy of governance. After all, it means that in a society of open borders, dictatorship becomes a lot less threatening because the people have an upper hand in bargaining…. It means further that “voting with feet” explains this difference here as well.

“I know that A’mur’kah invented constitutions and has the patent on democracy”

Should I bust out my Cockney, or would that be as ludicrous as Zuch’s latest turd?

Still trying to figure out what he thought his gratuitous slur had to do with my original point…

I suppose that’s true of all free-riding: Not spending resources on a common good frees up resources that can be spent in some other way the person prefers.

I think there are a couple other issues here that go beyond simple “free-riding”:

1. I have a more tolerant approach to moderation than Orin does.

2. I would prefer to spend more of my time posting and less time moderating even if that meant that no one would do the latter. Posting is a vastly more productive activity than moderating (at least once moderating goes beyond more than a very minimal investment).

Thus, it’s not simply a matter of free-riding on a public good. It’s a genuine difference of opinion on 1) the scope of the good in question, and 2) how valuable it is relative to the opportunity costs of producing it.

I try not to lose sight of the fact that we have some 40,000 readers per day, of whom only a fraction write comments and/or read them in detail. I want to devote the lion’s share of my effort to the majority of readers who mostly or exclusively read just the posts.

Readers who are that afraid of reading bad comments can simply stick to reading the posts, which is what many readers probably do anyway.

I’m afraid you’ve wrenched that quote out of context!

Desiderius: see Zuch’s execrable bigotry, and utter lack of self-awareness

WAYTA???

Chris Travers: The only issue with deleting posts is that it makes the censorship opaque. This leads to two things which (where I moderate forums elsewhere) I would just as soon avoid:

1) There is a bit of a feeling of being personally targetted and the loss of the post means the individual can’t come back later and re-evaluate.
2) It isn’t clear to anyone except those who pay close attention to the forum what actually happened, so you lose some deterrent value.

A little opacity is fine with me. If a drunk crashes a party I’m at in someone’s home, I’m grateful to the host if he or she can escort the person out without the rest of us noticing.

And I don’t think the Conspirators come even close to “abusing” their power. I’ve sometimes made harsh comments, and I’ve never seen them deleted. All of the Conspirators who allow comments seem to welcome them. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be Conspirators on this blog.

I also suspect that they generally are a little harsher on people they agree with than disagree with. They are here because they like to debate and argue, and you can’t do that with people who always agree with you.

I don think that lawyers and law students have a little bit of an advantage because the conspirators are lawyers and law professors. There is an art to making a tough legal argument. And a tough argument framed in the way lawyers are framed is less likely to get deleted.

In the end, I enjoy reading thoughtful comments, but I won’t wade through a bunch of name calling. The Conspirators are a little likely editors at a newspaper. They keep thinks on topic and worth reading. There are plenty of places for free-for-all’s. I’m glad this isn’t one of them.

Desiderius: … see Zuch’s execrable bigotry …

Really? Where? I just don’t see it. Of course, I am labouring under his debility:

Desiderius: … and utter lack of self-awareness, …

Thank goodness for InterToobz diagnosis. Might you put that talent to better use elsewhere?

Cheers,

Arkady: othing I’ve ever read in blog comments comes close to the glorious infernos one would encounter on, say, comp.sys.macintosh.advocacy

I dunno. Maybe comp.sys.micro$oft.sux?

But alt.fan.karl-malden-nose was always — ummm, “interesting”, as were the Meowers on alt.flame. They’d put the best trolls here to flame/shame.

Then there’s Riley M. Sinder. ;-) “Riley” was famous for quasi-’legal’ argumentation, and would fit in well here.

Cheers,

public_defender: I suspect that, almost every time, a Volokh blogger who deletes a comment is doing the commentator a favor by removing the record of something the commentator will (or should) regret.

The only issue with deleting posts is that it makes the censorship opaque. This leads to two things which (where I moderate forums elsewhere) I would just as soon avoid:

1) There is a bit of a feeling of being personally targetted and the loss of the post means the individual can’t come back later and re-evaluate.
2) It isn’t clear to anyone except those who pay close attention to the forum what actually happened, so you lose some deterrent value.

In general, the Conspirators do a pretty darned good job of moderating fairly here. I have watched exactly two people get banned where I could see what was going on.

However, I have been involved in online communities which were NOT fairly moderated in the past though, and a little transparency would have helped everyone see what was going on much faster. I remember being silently (and without warning) being silently banned from the SQL-Ledger lists (SQL-Ledger is an open source project aimed at providing small-business financial accounting software) with no warning or message simply because the moderator thought I was a threat to his control. He wanted a captive audience and I didn’t want to see that, so I tried to work with him on opening up things….. I ended up becoming a far greater threat simply because I was shut out though.

There is one area where I disagree with Illya though:

I disagree slightly with Megan’s analogy between comment moderation and government censorship. The latter is far more dangerous than the former.

Good governance is good governance, and online communities must be governed like tiny countries. Some are run by dictatorial juntas (as in here), some by dictators (Linux used to be, but is becoming more republican as time goes on), some are democracies (Debian), and some (like the LedgerSMB project or the PostgreSQL project) are outright republics. Many of the dictatorships can be benevolant, so this isn’t meant as a criticism of the VC bloggers.

The only difference between owner censorship and government censorship is that one can easily vote with one’s feet and avoid problems. Hence dictators must be benevolent if they want to succeed or folks will just go elsewhere. (Indeed dictatorial and republican models generally work better than democracies on this scale, where folks can so easily vote with their feet.)

A good way to think of the internet is as a bunch of tiny countries with perfectly or nearly perfectly open borders.

I suppose that’s true of all free-riding: Not spending resources on a common good frees up resources that can be spent in some other way the person prefers.

The newest libertarian slogan: Free ride and call it a free market.

Had we libertarians murdered your brother, no doubt your spark would burn more brightly…

Well, in the particular case of my brother….

“I have this feeling Lenin would handle a situation like this much more firmly.”

Heh. Had we libertarians murdered your brother, no doubt your spark would burn more brightly…

LM,

“‘One will always find most outrageous those people who disagree with one’s own pet notions. If I started deleting comments, the net effect would be to pull the comments section towards agreeing with my particular brand of libertarianish, market-loving philosophy.’

I don’t think that’s true if one is really intent on pruning only for civility. The most offensive comments seem to come as often from like-minded defenders of the ideological realm as from critics.”

Well, it’s as much about temperament as ideology (see Zuch’s execrable bigotry, and utter lack of self-awareness, for instance; likewise with, say, Dangermouse). A market-loving tilt would not be lessened by letting go the haters, even left-haters.

(tick tick tick…)

phew!

zuch: Huh? I know that A’mur’kah invented constitutions and has the patent on democracy, but libertarians being the first denizens of the InterToobz?!?!? I suspect you have no acquaintance with UseNet….

Ah, nostalgia. Usenet, comments, and flamewars. Nothing I’ve ever read in blog comments comes close to the glorious infernos one would encounter on, say, comp.sys.macintosh.advocacy. The nearest thing I’ve found to those in this new age of the internets is some of the comment threads on musical Youtubes. Alas, the quality of those comments is decidedly lower than what I recall of the mac/pc flamewars of yore, pathetically lower. Sad.

fjfjfjfjfjfjfj: Allowing bad comments in comments threads has dramatically harmed the quality of discourse on the entire blog because it forces readers to spend much more of their own time filtering out bad comments. Busy and productive readers tend not to have time for this, and thus tend not to comment. So valuable comments are lost.
In other words, it’s not that relevant whether it takes more of Somin’s or Volokh’s time to moderate. What matters is whether it is efficient for one moderator to read a bad comment once, and delete it, whether by contrast a thousand people each have to read and disregard the bad comment. Obviously the former option is more efficient and should be chosen.
It’s true in the early days of blogging and the web there were social norms operating that tended to limit comments to being halfway reasonable. Those days are long gone. 

Indeed. And I have my candidates for removal. You might cavil, but you’ll have to do it someplace else. ;-)

Cheers,

Cheers,

Orin Kerr: Not spending resources on a common good frees up resources that can be spent in some other way the person prefers.

Maybe not everyone values this “common good” the same (if at all). Which would ‘justify’ different levels of investment/participation.

Cheers,

I suppose that’s true of all free-riding: Not spending resources on a common good frees up resources that can be spent in some other way the person prefers.