Commenting About Commenting:
In his 2000th post at Simple Justice, Scott Greenfield expresses his frustration with moderating comment threads:
For most high-traffic blogs, useful comment threads just aren't realistic. The two choices become an unmoderated thread or no comment thread at all. (A blog that has extremely high traffic numbers can try a Slashdot-like ranking system to try to bring attention to the best comments, but that requires enough traffic and the right reader culture to make it work.)
If I'm right about all of this, readable and useful comment threads may end up largely only on blogs with traffic in the range of around 1,000 to 10,000 hits a day. Traffic below that usually won't generate enough commentary, and traffic above that usually won't allow effective moderation. My vague sense is that we're pretty much seeing this already, although I can't say that with certainty, as I only read a dozen or so blogs regularly. But I wonder if the realities of comment moderation will cement this trend over time.
[I]t's the one aspect of this Blawg that makes me think I should hang it up. It gets unbearably tedious after a while, and sometimes painful to watch a topic veer off onto a tangent because the one commenter didn't get it (while insisting, always, that he did). . . .Blogs are still pretty new, so blog comment threads are, too. But I wonder if we're beginning to see a trend in comment sections already. As a blog becomes more popular, it becomes harder and more frustrating to moderate comment threads. There are just too many commenters out there to moderate each thread really effectively. Bloggers who try to moderate in good faith end up wasting great deal of time on a handful of individuals who feel that the world has wronged them somehow and that blog commenting is an effective form of revenge.
The comments are often as more fun than the post itself. It pains me to acknowledge this, but it's true. I enjoy the comments most of the time, and that's why I engage commenters regularly. But I don't enjoy the emails I receive after I ban someone, or delete or edit a comment, accusing me of intellectual rape. I don't need this from people who have never contributed to the discussion here and whose thoughts are, in my view, less than worthy of much discussion. I will tolerate a lot more from people who I like and have been regular contributors, even when they get testy with me. I won't tolerate much from people I don't know or don't like. That's how things work in real life, and they are no different here.
For most high-traffic blogs, useful comment threads just aren't realistic. The two choices become an unmoderated thread or no comment thread at all. (A blog that has extremely high traffic numbers can try a Slashdot-like ranking system to try to bring attention to the best comments, but that requires enough traffic and the right reader culture to make it work.)
If I'm right about all of this, readable and useful comment threads may end up largely only on blogs with traffic in the range of around 1,000 to 10,000 hits a day. Traffic below that usually won't generate enough commentary, and traffic above that usually won't allow effective moderation. My vague sense is that we're pretty much seeing this already, although I can't say that with certainty, as I only read a dozen or so blogs regularly. But I wonder if the realities of comment moderation will cement this trend over time.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Comments Off:
- Developing a Comment Culture:
- Commenting About Commenting:
I think you're underestimating the effect a community has on this sort of thing, but numbers certainly have a large impact. Although I'm not sure if you meant 10,000, 100,000, or 1,000,000
The "comments" that certain newspaper cites allow on their newspaper stories rapidly become cesspools of stupidity, racism and other trollish behavior.
The comments on this site are often contentious but are of generally pretty high quality. I would also think that the readership here is pretty large. Where you think you fall in this range.
I don't run a blog, but I'm a moderator on the similar construct that is a discussion forum. So I'm somewhat familiar with the balancing act with regard to moderating comments. You have to moderate out of control things because quite frankly trolling works. One person posts something totally outrageous and then 5 pages are taken up with everyone else talking about that. But if you moderate too heavily either the forum becomes intellectually dead because there's nothing the posters seriously disagree about, or it just obtains a reputation as a propganda forum. (IE everyone knows he just deletes comments he doesn't agree with).
As the post says, this is just another aspect of life, so friends and regulars get more leeway than newcomers and strangers. In our experience, most new commenters have accepted well a gentle correction and explanation that the tone found in other places is not allowed at our place. We do plainly post a strict "no profanity" policy. It's not that we're prudish, but we've found that smart people are able to find other ways to get their point across, while ranters are the only ones to really complain about it. Avoiding profanity at all seems to keep conversations from really descending into the muck.
We have little enough traffic that we put all comments from unregistered users into a moderation queue prior to them being visible on the blog. Our standards aren't that high for approving the post, but if it's a decent comment, we'll also post a note encouraging the commenter to register and thus avoid the moderation queue.
The hardest thing, for me, is when you have one or two regular commenters who insist in some thread on engaging some topic other than the one you want to engage upon, which pulls everything away from the main issue at hand.
But that obviously takes resources.
How this works re: those folks' being able to do so is I guess largely a function of the blog software.
Another possibility is to host a separate blog which provides comment threads for each post. An ObWi commenter did this (on my joking suggestion, IIRC, tho I didn't have anything else to do w/ it) for commenters who wanted somewhere to vent about Charles Bird and who were dragging down otherwise good ObWi threads.
But I don't understand the sense of having *no* comments. Those who don't like 'em, don't have to read 'em; and those who read 'em, evidently find some value in doing so.
One possibility which I'm sure is done in some places, is to authorize some of the more diligent &responsible commenters to serve as moderators.
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This is exactly the right idea. But if you are going to implement something like this, then Lindgren really does need to go. He is just as bad a troll as some of the commenters.
i feel so 3l33t. it's very "meta"
My guess w/r/t this blog is that the comments are probably not worth the headache. Every now and then, a comment adds to the discussion or injects a welcome bit of humor into the discussion. More often than not, though, the commenters' main contribution seems to be supercilious rage.
I vaguely recall a few past comment threads where VC conspirators would converse with each other in the comment threads, or Marty Lederman would chime in and discuss something he and Prof. Kerr were both knowledgable about. In those rare instances, I'd use the search feature of my browser to read the comments by the "informed" posters while skipping all of the rest.
Uh, Malthus, EV at least has pretty good credentials as a nerd.
(1) Nesting. Part of what drives away quality commenters in well-circulated blogs but that does not bother serial trolls or flamers are in-line comments (like we see here and in many, if not blogs). There are two reasons why I think this is. First, quality commenters see their thoughtful, edited, and sometimes lengthy comments largely ignored when comment threads get lengthy and unwieldy to read. Second, trolls have no issue with comment-thread length because they usually comment so frequently that they can easily scroll to the bottom of the thread in order to catch up to where the discussion is.
You can see this kind of end-of-thread emphasis in the way the comments develop in this blog. You don't get as many trolls here as you could, but even the quality commenters will not read full threads when they reach an unmanageable length, and they will instead often re-hash discussions that began (and ended) upthread.
Also, nesting provides a kind of basic structure to the comment thread. Troll comments can be seen and avoided easily, while interesting, substantive comments can initiate long discussions that are easy to find and to return to.
(2) Rating. I'm not sure how well rating has worked for sites like YouTube, but giving your readership a simple up/down option for any comment can help alert side administrators to problematic posters or problematic content, without requiring a great deal of attention or time to weed them out. It's hard to assess how this has worked on YouTube, since YouTube as a general rule attracts a lot of kids and the comments are structured so as to make meaningful discussions very difficult to engage in.
What's great about rating, though, is that it's easily scalable. That is, moderation shouldn't become more or less difficult as traffic increases; if anything, it should become more effective, so long as commenters rate regularly, because then the true stinkers will emerge with striking clarity relative to the "noise" of vindictive counter-rating. Of course, encouraging such a habit would be difficult (free-rider problem), but it would be an effective alternative to community-based moderators or doing it all yourself.
(3) An "ignore" feature. As an alternative to rating, you could give registered users the option of ignoring comments posted by particular commenters. That could make comment threads easier to navigate, for those who care. It could also provide an incentive to register, for people who aren't especially committed to commenting anonymously.
I think your basic judgment is correct: if comment threads aren't changed in some way, they become effectively useless in highly-trafficked blogs. But I think a good deal of the problem here tends to the structure of comment threads, not their traffic. I think our current set of conventions with respect to comment threads were formed at a time when people did not necessarily foresee them being a real source of community-building, and so now the default form of a comment thread retains the features one would expect of a superficial comment system. We can change those features, though; we can re-form the way comment threads work, in order to make them work more effectively.
I think SCOTUSblog's comments policy (full names only) worked well for a while, until it became unmanageable.
Very few blogs have consistently "good" comments threads. I can't think of any offhand. Leiter's rare posts where he opens comments on a limited basis are sometimes good. Prawfs is sometimes good, as their audience seems to be mostly professors rather than random cranks, but even their comments threads are mostly examples of how O'Donnell needs to get his own blog.
I understand the irony/potential hypocrisy of an anonymous commenter trashing the value of anonymous comments, but so be it. I don't think my comments have added very much, but I don't think I've been one of the particularly bad offenders either.
I'd like to see the VC close comments. Those who are informed, genuinely engaged in the subject matter of the posts and have something to contribute are free to e-mail the posters.
I would urge you to not feel at all bad about closing comments or wrestling control of the conversation away with some judicious deletes. It is your blog--those who comment recognize they're at your dinner table. If they want to hijack conversations, or find their own thoughts so important, point them to blogspot.com and let them have at it.
And I would second Simon P.'s suggestions.
Speaking as a blogger, I generally prefer to deal with comments rather than email because: (a) one doesn't feel as much of an obligation to respond (if I am busy, tired, etc.); (b) it is much easier to respond to a group of comments collectively. Email is good for certain purposes, such as information that isn't appropriate for publication, raising a tangential point that might trigger an unwanted deviation from the theme of the post, etc., but for the kind of thing that most commenters have to say most of the time, comments are more convenient. And for those occasions on which one is actually soliciting information or ideas, comments are better because commenters may feed off of each other.
The best commenters are given "stars" that keep their entire comments open. Otherwise, comments that aren't recent or replied to are collapsed to one line with the option to open fully. Comments are nested like suggested in a previous post.
Guests, on the other hand, can submit comments to a "combudsman" for review to be published. Guests who frequently contribute can apply for their own user account.
The latest feature (although still being tried out) is to allow anyone to comment through facebook. This circumvents the combusdman and saves time, but is still an effective deterrent against trolls, who would expose themselves to personal ridicule through the facebook link.
The unique culture of the Gawker Media websites may not translate readily to other sites, but it's incorrect to say comments are unmanageable. What's important is to come up with a system that plays to the strengths of the community.
The commentators I find most tiresome are the ones that post on the theme of "how dare you post on that topic" or "how dare you have that opinion" without even engaging on the merits of the post. That should be an automatic banning.
Sentencing Law &Policy had good traffic once (I don't know what it current gets) but the comments weren't whacko.
Once you start making political posts, though, you invite the kooks.
Of course, subject and readership and related. The more hard law/substantive analysis a blog has, the less readers it will have. Politics draws readers, who are often morons.
Orin Kerrr was a fantastic blog; but I'm confident that it never would have reached a 10,000 daily readership. It was too smart for the blogosphere.
The VC's comments have gotten much worse as there have been more and more political posts. But the traffic has grown.
Is it normal?
At orinkerr.com, I spent about 45 minutes a day, every day, just moderating comments. It was one of the reasons I quit the blog.
Private regulation of a person's own private property not equal to government regulation of other person's private property.
But I hope not!
Comments are organic. If commenters take a thread off in some weird direction, it's because that's what the commenters, i.e., the readers, want to talk about. It may not be interesting to the blogger, but it is interesting to them.
So I don't have a solution. Overall, the place seems to work pretty well, even if some threads do get uninhabitable.
Saying "get the hell out of my yard" isn't quite a "desire to regulate" --- although I suspect the difficulty with that distinction may be worth an essay in itself.
On the more general question, I suspect that requiring a verifiable email address, and registration with a real name, are two steps in the right direction. I don't necessarily oppose using handles for open display, but introducing a degree of accountability would help quite a bit, I suspect.
That might be extended with an OpenID scheme of some sort.
Actually the comment is quality on this site is pretty high too, especially the subject is legal/issue-based rather than political.
I disagree. I'm a moron, and I look at the law/substantive analysis posts.
The problem can be solved by making people post in their own names and cities. When posting the usual social pressures will be somewhat involved in attaining some level of self moderation. How one would go about enforcing this, I don't know. But there are probably ways to set the bar very low so that anyone who wants to comment can, but you still get some way of verifying identity. Maybe charge $1 on a credit or debit card (not prepaid debit of course) for two months worth of posting rights. That way you'll have names and addresses associated with accounts and the vast majority of them will be accurate. If you need to ban someone it seems like it would be non-trivial to get around. Also when people do manage to get in under false pretenses, in the event that the person ever is identified, go ahead and attach that to their posts as well ("this post was posted by Joe Blow of Nowhere, Nevada, who was posting with a stolen identity.")
Take the money and use it to offset hosting charges or donate it to goodwill charities (Shriners, or Ronald McDonald House) but avoid political organizations so that people aren't scared off from commenting to avoid donating to a cause they don't believe in.
Not to whistle past the graveyard, cf: the impossibility of moderating the comments to DP's and RK's pre-election posts. They were a cautionary tale for anyone who might have thought there's some kind of natural limit to obnoxiousness on a site with intelligent readership.
Nesting and rating might help. And I wouldn't be surprised if posts like this and your recent one on the comment policy improve behavior marginally by focusing attention generally. I'd also suggest a post on the costs/benefits of civility. I'm sure some commenters (e.g., Sputnik) see the comment policy as authoritarianism to be resisted or tolerated grudgingly. Though I agree with your refrain that those needing explanations are least likely to take them on board, I could see some being responsive to an explanation of how civility serves utilitarian as well as normative ends.
(And, no, of course JL doesn't "need to go" any more than DP or RK needed to go despite the uproar on their election threads that they should be drawn, quartered, fileted and roasted, and then go.)
Slashdot's moderation system works well for that site, but it probably is not implementable at The VC. I take my moderator points at Slashdot seriously, and consciously stay away from threads I have deep opinions about; but there are others who use their moderator points to promote their own biases. Slashdot also has a rate the moderators system that is good at filtering out those who do this, and users who score well in this are more often given moderator points. It takes a substantial percentage of a site's user base willing and able to expend extra time to facilitate this rating system. Additionally, Slashdot provides an escape valve for users who feel moderation has been compromised. Every user has their own personal posting space.
One simple and effective moderation method is to just add a "report abuse" form button at the end of every response. This seems to have worked at a few sites that have hit the critical mass user base wall. It serves as a 1st level filter minimising the number of responses that a site's moderator(s) need to view.
DO NOT OPERATE THIS BLOG IF YOU ARE STUPID.
That said, I've been involved with professional- and interest-related fora where everyone used real names and could conceivably meet in real life, do business, etc.; nonetheless, there was trolling, dumb commenting, incivility, etc. I don't think "accountability" is a panacea.
As a non-member of the legal fraternity, but fairly regular follower of this blog, I would really hate to see that. There have been many threads where the comments have provided follow-up that gave me further insight to the subject at hand.
That said......
* I can fully understand why any blogger would choose to close comments. The time spent moderating can surely be put to better use.
* It does **seem** the number of posts on non-legal topics has increased in recent times. And my take is that those have largely been of a political bent. Maybe that's simply due to the presidential election cycle and will decrease with time. While there's certainly nothing wrong with that if the Conspirators choose to use their voice in such a manner, I would guess it does draw more contentious commentary requiring even more of someone's time to moderate.
I find the initial posts to be very high quality, in line with good journalism; but it's *extremely* high quality, if compared to all free online content.
However, I find the comments to be simply average, with a huge standard deviation. So much so, that it's tiring, and actually disturbing at times --- seeing the same tired jokes/cliches/troll-posts in response to the good original writing.
I find better comment threads where the new Web 2.0 ideas are in use. (Which the original article doesn't address, with its simple dilemma.) For example, Slashdot, Digg, and DailyKos.
Each blog's tolerance is different. I like this blog's overall policy -- it's a big internet. Quoting Glenn, "Indeed."
http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=182390
I post semi-anonymously because I take positions that do not always mirror the organization for whom I work (and on whose dime I ocassionally post comments when taking a break from more mundane stuff).
That said, it wouldn't take a rocket scientist to figure out who I am (and Professor Cassell could do it in about five minutes since he teaches at my law school alma mater, I have previously posted the year I graduated, and have stated that my first name is indeed "Dave" and my last name starts with "N").
Frankly, I enjoy the comments and I try to engage in civil discussion--even if one of my earliest posts here was deleted by Eugene because he did not like me calling an argument "sophistic" (though I still think I was right in its description.
I would like comments to stay open. I have just learned to ignore those whom I consider trolls, while occassionally finding common ground with liberal commenters with whom I usually strongly disagree.
Nesting comments might help--but overall, I like VC the way it is.
The problem with nested comments is that they eventually end up to be two characters long. (When the conversation is good, this is a bug, not a feature. ;) ) If there's a way to limit the nesting to one or two indents, that would be nice. Another possible method of helping people to respond to specific comments is to number them; blogs that do that tend to get commenters who reply to each other (e.g. "John at 24").
A quick javascript trick: Use jquery to attach a hide/show feature to every comment's "div class='info'" in the HTML, so that clicking the user's name shows/hides every comment by that user on that page.
Group comments into a shallow hierarchy with disclosure buttons. Good and great top-level comments should be initially expanded; others should be collapsed. Make the hierarchy browser such that children can be exposed without exposing the body text of a parent; this way good or great sub-comments can be exposed w/o exposing the body of the parent.
Add a pop-up pie menu that allows users to quickly characterize a comment. Make the available characterizations qualitative and substantive, otherwise the system will turn into a "five star rating system." Using the pie menu makes it possible to put a large number of characterizations within easy reach of the user, so very specific tags can be available (e.g., "logic/fallacy/conclusion assumed by premises", "argument/invalid/ad hominem", "etiquette/language/coarse usage", etc.).
That said I'd miss the comments, I've learned a great deal from them and hopefully not added too much to the chaos. As a non-lawyer I'd be fine with giving up the right to comment if you wanted to restrict the commenting to those with legal training, although I would miss the ability to ask questions and perhaps some of the trolls are themselves lawyers.
WP and NYT also have rating systems. I like the way NYT lets you sort comments by rating. Like digg.
I think rating systems will eventually become fairly ubiquitous. I also think they will evolve in the direction of letting a reader easily see a summarized ratings history for a particular commenter. This is similar to the concept of 'reputation' at eBay. This encourages good behavior, and it helps readers avoid wasting time paying attention to people with a history of bad behavior.
I think a good system makes it easy for a reader to avoid 'bad' comments, without erasing them entirely. Ironically, useful information can be found in a 'bad' comment, and there are situations where a reader might specifically want to read 'bad' comments. A crude example: nuts vote, so it can be valuable to understand how nuts 'think.' I think we're probably better off, and less complacent, when the nuts aren't totally hidden in the woodwork.
Also, a blog community with perspective X might generally rate as 'bad' comments that are anti-X. And a reader might have a specific interest in hearing arguments that are anti-X.
So I think the situation is more complicated and interesting than just saying 'trolls are bad, so let's ban them, but it's a lot of work.'
david warner:
I appreciate the compliment of being placed in that company (even though you said 'even').
We are all doomed.
I disagree.
Look at comment sections on abcnews.com, cbsnews.com, abovethelaw.com, etc. Comment threads on these high-traffic sites quickly descend into absurd name-calling, conspiracy theories, and bitter, hateful statements.
The problem seems to be that commenting platforms are quickly overrun by those with crazy ideas who need a personal soapbox -- most likely because nobody will listen to them in real life. It's sad, but those who actually enjoy intelligent, calm discussion quickly get pushed away by those who prefer third-grade name calling. Look at the three sites that I mention above and ask yourself: Why would any sane person want to participate? It always seems that the crazies have way more free time on their hands than people who might want to drop in quickly and say something intelligent.
I don't know the solution. Some type of moderation is necessary, but I'm not sure how to implement it.
As to comments, off or on would be fine. Sites like normblog and that insta guy rarely if ever allow comments and they are consistently informative and thought provoking, whether one agrees or disagrees. Of course comments could also be turned on more selectively, or even intermittently.
DiversityHire: That javascript trick sounds like a winner. I don't think any poster who goes on at great length about Obama's birth certificate in post after post is likely to say anything worthwhile.
Interestingly, a lot of my favorite posts have nothing to do with law (or politics). For instance, brainteasers on language and some of the song posts. Sasha in particular posts a lot of interesting tidbits.
That's very kind. Thanks and likewise.
The moderation system used by Slashdot would make the Conspiracy a magnificent site. The moderation system at Digg is better than nothing, but it fails pretty badly in comparison to Slashdot. Study the differences to find out what makes Slashdot work so well. I think the main difference is that the ability to rate comments is restricted to a filtered set of readers. The meta-moderation and karma systems keep down the abuse and keeps the quality of moderation higher.
I think the result is somewhat more like a forum or message board than the comments here, and, though the diaries irritated me at first, they seem to serve their purpose (which is to drive traffic). It appears to have resulted in a fairly robust community, and moderation is fairly light.
At some point, certain viewpoints drop below honest debate and simply become a waste of everyone's time. As noted above, a thread that devolves into a discussion about Obama's birth certificate will never recover. Now that Blagojevich is here, there will be at least two possible ways threads to devolve into nonsense. And it can only get worse.
It's funny that this thread comes along because I was just considering writing a note to Eugene and Orin to say the above. I would love to see the return of Orinkerr.comm by the way.
I understand how you feel. Not long ago I had the reciprocal experience, and it felt a bit disorienting. Who knows, maybe it's that 'change' thing that's going around.
I agree. In the age of Google, I would not be interested in commenting if some comment it took me two minutes to write would be there for a client to see 20 years from now. Personally, I change my 'handle' semi-regularly to avoid leaving breadcrumbs (though it will be hard to beat Snaphappy Fishsuit Mokiligon).
Some of the technical "solutions" suggested by others above don't thrill me personally -- "ratings" as used by the Washington Post and some widely-read blogs I read seem to have no effect on the Trolls. I suspect even the "report abuse" toggle on some of these blogs draws a lot of spurious hits and wastes a lot of moderator time, because of irresponsible people who "report" opinions they simply disagree with. Nested posts where the reader has to manually open comments following the initial one on a topic are kludgy to use, but at least let one view only those sub-threads one is interested in. Nested posts where all sub-comments are exposed by default seem little better than VC's current in-line comments and certainly haven't had much of an effect on the mindless mudslinging at places like the Huffington Post.
At bottom, I suspect the quality of the readership is more important than any technological fix. How to keep quality up as popularity expands, however, may be an almost impossible task.
I think the Digg one stinks, honestly. You can vote, comment, and never even see a hint of a bad comment with no idea what the subject was. I think your readers are comparable to the Slashdot readers - educated and interested in these subjects vs kids looking for video game reviews, poop jokes, or Youtube mashups.
I work at a large law firm that is very PC and I express some very un-PC comments here. If you post under your real name, you never know who will be reading your comments. Things like that can come back to bite you.
The law community is actually quite small and its memory is long. There is no way I could post under my real name.
Same here. Even though many of the main articles are very good, a bunch of smart people talking to each other is usually more interesting than one smart person talking.
zippy:
Maybe so, but they still help the reader skip troll comments. I think that's valuable.
lighten:
I agree that they have an impressive system.
Speaking of 'mod points,' dKos does something like that, in a manner that is not particularly visible. What slashdot calls 'karma' is called 'mojo' at dKos, and involves the concept of the 'trusted user.' Details here. Further details here explain the benefits of keeping the mojo system relatively invisible (as compared with how slashdot works).
Concur 100%.
There were flamers and name-callers. There were braggarts and unintelligible folks. There was thread drift.
But the result happened to be that a restricted number of folks became regulars because others didn't want to bother with that subject or thread, or with wherever it had drifted to.
It just took time.
Within the thread, some smaller number of commenters could carry on a discussion simply by scrolling past the names of those not involved in the discussion.
It was fun, with the usual caveats. Pointing out that Clinton lied meant you were a hater. That sort of thing.
The expense was, afaict, part of the AOL fee.
All you had to do was ignore the posts that didn't interest you. No biggie.
I understand the cost-benefit analysis you bloggers must go through, and would understand if it just became too time consuming for you to moderate the comments. but I have to say that this is my favorite blog; you and Prof V are my favorite bloggers; and the real value to this site is not only your posts, but your participation in comments. I doubt I would make my daily visit(s) if there were no comments.
I recall that in law school, professors encouraged different discussions from the experienced night law school students (who, in D.C., might be making the laws discussed in a class; happened more than once to me). So my default is in favor of open comments when you don't know what might come in. But I also understand the concern about swamping good posts. I find that I am often one of the few here who actually comments on the law as it is, with citations and quotes from briefs. As a working constitutional lawyer, that type of post would the most helpful to me; it's just how we think, since we have a lifetime of judging the value of opinions on similar topics. I just skim over the IANAL posts, as they almost never have information other than unsupported experientially-based opinions. I skip any thread with more than 70 posts or so.
My impression is that your prediction of "readable and useful comment threads may end up largely only on blogs with traffic in the range of around 1,000 to 10,000 hits a day" will apply only to general blogs. My impression is based primarily on the fact that "readable and useful" will vary according to blog, reader, and topic. I believe it will be largely self-correcting, both from posters and moderators.
The question is whether the moderators will find enough motivation to stay with it long enough to drop the trolls. Again, I think the more focussed the blog, the more likely that is to occur.
Thus, Darwinian forces might refine your prediction to apply principally to general topic blogs, without a specific focus and/or moderators who enforce the foci.
Here is what we decided to do on one of the software projects I work on:
1) Adopt the Ubuntu code of conduct
2) delegate out moderation (nobody moderates replies to their own posts). If I feel there is a civility issue with a reply to one f my posts, I have someone else decide whether it warrants a reprimand and if so, do it.
3) Never delete posts but instead operate transparently. If there is a problem, we warn the person that the behavior is out of bounds and let people see the post as an example of what not to do. If the person persists, we ban that person. In the two years the project has been running, we have had to issue a handful of warnings, but not yet had to ban anyone from the email lists.
4) The one exception to the above rules which has resulted in bans from the web site is posting spam comments. When this happens, we ban the person without warning and delete the spam.
Now, accounting software might be fundamentally less contentious than law and politics but you would be surprised and the number of holy wars that result. The cliche ones (VIM!) don't usually come up, but arguments about data model theories, financial rules, etc. tend to be just as serious.
The Facebook-commenting experiment there is interesting, but at least it requires a real name, and at least on Deadspin the approval guy Pete wields a heavy banhammer on the Facebookers who don't abide by the rules for commenting there (above all, be funny, but certain other actions will get you banned too).
But the auditions allow for anonymous commenting while weeding out the idiots who add nothing substantive. And the closed-with-auditions method gives some measure of pride to those who are "let in" and has built somewhat of an actual community. I've been to a couple baseball games with commenters, as well as a beer fest. If I don't have something useful or funny to say, I don't comment as a result.
Every commenting regime has its advantages and disadvantages, both for the forum moderators and for the commentariat. At a pronounced ideological site like Kos it makes sense to have a "rating system" since one of the uses it is put to is to filter out not only spammers and rabble, but also probative dissent. Hence the most obtuse or the most venomous among the commentariat will - to the extent they toe the party/ideological line - be approved, while dissenters, regardless of and even because of the probative quality of their comments, will be denounced.
For those and related reasons, at a "centrist" and libertarian site like The VC, I prefer comments on or off and occasionally moderated, but not subjected to censure by others among the commentariat. Meta-battles are not qualitatively different from more overt battles on the surface, hence transparency affords everyone the ability to weigh what is being said, absent those more covert meta-tactics.
So, other considerations still, among the overall mix.
Beyond that, it's pretty clear that the posts that get the most vitriolic comments are the most explicitly political posts. That's not a sufficient argument for making fewer such posts (and I wouldn't try to tell the conspirators what to post even if I thought it was). But you kind of know what you're getting into in a "Did Bush [or Obama] Lie About Something Important / Do Something Unconstitutional?" thread.
More generally, I'm all for the moderators and conspirators moderating however they choose, and I hope they err on the side of encouraging civility.
Don't ban bad typists!
That's either dry wit, or you think it's "judicious" to say things like this:
And you think it's "on point" to say things that end up getting replaced with text as follows:
I applaud your mastery of satire.
DailyKos has a policy statement that indicates, explicitly and bluntly, that the purpose of the site is to get Democrats elected. If you actually pay attention to the way comments are rated there, you'll notice that there's plenty of room for "dissent," but not room for people who obviously have an agenda at odds with the goal of getting Democrats elected.
A remark characteristically devoid of "substance," that.
Then again, maybe your point is to sneer at the idea that Democrats would take the liberty of gathering in a way that consciously and explicitly excludes enemies of Democrats. But I don't know if you pose as a libertarian, so I don't know if this view makes you both an enemy of liberty and a hypocrite, or possibly just the former.
I would add that big righty sites, in general, just don't allow comments. Leading righty blogs like Malkin, LGF, Instapundit, and Hot Air either allow no comments, or are closed to new commenters. VC is a very commendable counterexample.
Power Line didn't allow comments for years. Then they opened a forum, but they sometimes scrub entire threads they don't like, and then hundreds of comments disappear without a trace.
In contrast, leading lefty blogs like Kos, TPM, Think Progress, Crooks and Liars, Washington Monthly and Eschaton are all open to new commenters.
This is a pretty stark contrast, and it's usually not mentioned when rightys complain about how they were allegedly not welcomed at a lefty blog. It's pretty silly for a righty to complain about their alleged poor treatment at Kos, when the big righty blogs won't even let me step inside.
And because of the explicit policy statement, at Kos there is no pretense that it intends to host all sorts of wide-ranging theoretical discussions about politics. Or that it intends to be open to all views. If your comments suggest that you are not a Democrat, and that you have some goal other than electoral victory for Democrats, then you are a troll, by definition.
So Kos should get credit for allowing absolutely anyone to show up and post at least one comment. Because all the largest righty sites don't even allow that. And then there is nothing wrong with Kos banning you once it's clear you're a troll, as defined by their policy statement.
A grossly inaccurate characterization.
I've seen the way dissent it dealt with at Kos and there's a great deal more venom and selective editing of comments there when it comes to dissent. Too, given my earlier comment, for example stating a preference that comments either be turned on or off, you additionally miss a basic point. I not only didn't complain about sites where comments are turned off, I positively commended them.
My thoughts on the matter are largely in my 12.15, 6:43pm comment, in addition to the preference for either on or off. My own preference and that's all I was forwarding.
Have any proof? I realize you think none is needed when you can resort to name-calling instead.
I said what I wanted to say with my 1:33am and 6:43pm comments.
But if your substantiation was substantial, then I would look like a fool, at that point.
As usual, you're bluffing. You're long on wind and short on proof.
Nope, not bluffing in the least. For example, you evidenced yourself as a malevolent "fool" when it came to the arsonist who spread accelerants around the exits of the church in Wasilla, igniting his fire while people were in the church.
If you're willing to forward a moral and intellectual obscurantism on behalf of an arsonist, there's no reason to take your own bullshit and bluff any more seriously than I have.
If you have a comment about spelling, typos, or format errors, please e-mail the poster directly rather than posting a comment.
Comment Policy: We reserve the right to edit or delete comments, and in extreme cases to ban commenters, at our discretion. Comments must be relevant and civil (and, especially, free of name-calling). We think of comment threads like dinner parties at our homes. If you make the party unpleasant for us or for others, we'd rather you went elsewhere. We're happy to see a wide range of viewpoints, but we want all of them to be expressed as politely as possible.
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