Commenting
At the end of last month I wrote a post, Enough!, about a female technology blogger who received death threats in her comments over a post.
A couple of days ago Steve Bates felt compelled to restate his commenting policy as a result of some Trolling.
Today Watertiger covers another “blogger ethics panel call” in From the “How Wonderfully Redundant” files.
Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media and Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia should read what they publish on blogs and blog comments. We don’t need another version of PICS for blogs. I’m still trying to get the rating for my current gravatar changed from X to G, which is why it shows up almost nowhere.
There are plenty of existing rules and laws to deal with the situation, and for technical people to even consider adding something new, reinventing the wheel, without even trying the existing system is disheartening.
I hear people talking about anonymous comments, sorry, that’s a mythical creature. The ‘Net has to know how to reach you before you can see anything on it, and that information is recorded. If you annoy someone who understands the Internet, you will be located.
If you threaten someone in comments and that individual wants to take the trouble, there are existing, state and Federal laws that can make your life an expensive living hell.
In comments on Steve’s post, I didn’t explain my position very well. This issue has nothing to do with “free speech,” because speech isn’t free on most blogs. Comments use bandwidth and storage. Hosting companies charge for both. Your right of free speech does not include a requirement that I pay for it. Newspapers aren’t required to print your letters; TV and radio stations aren’t required to broadcast your views. The owner of the blog has every right not to post your comments, or to remove them after they have been posted, otherwise my comments would be filled with thousands of spam messages.
In summary, we don’t need little icons to warn people of content; there is no right to comment; people who threaten others should be prosecuted under the existing laws.
3 comments
You said it ! Great post. I have given this a great deal of thought since I’ve noted people backing out of (live) events due to death threats and such. People are so crazy. Crazy to say stuff. Crazy to believe it. Crazy to not believe it. I commend you for taking a stand. I agree and if I can figure out how to link your post I’ll be doing so.
Excuse me, but… calls for civility be damned, no matter how famous in their respective occupations the callers are. They’re using the old “some people” and “some prominent bloggers” garbage to sanctify their call for their proposal… names, please? Who among prominent bloggers agrees with O’Reilly and Wade? Right: “some people.” Uh-huh.
Death threats are matters for law enforcement, not blogger ethics committees or comment rating schemes. As to the rest, as watertiger emphasized, can’t people moderate their comments? Good grief. The notion that I am responsible for the content of my comment threads, but simultaneously prevented by “free speech” considerations from pruning them, is so much crap. It’s not that there’s no problem here: it’s that the solution is plain to see, and it doesn’t involve any rating committees or icons.
The primary virtue of the blogosphere is its diversity of individual opinion, style and quality of discourse, in the face of a nearly complete collapse of every other major public forum for actual discussion of our critical societal issues. We do not need another venue in which the Thought Police are checking who uses how many obscenities, who posts how much snark, who coins derogatory nicknames for which opposing bloggers, who puts up parody blogs, etc. We need more obscenities, more snark and more nicknames… not for their own sake but as an inevitable byproduct of a wide-open, full-throated airing of individuals’ opinions.
My objection to trolling is hardly that trolls disagree with me, or even that they can be uncivil, though I find that unpleasant. My objection is that a troll’s objective is disruption, pure and simple. As you know, I answer all their whines about “free speech” with one statement: “git yer own damn blog”; they’re cost-free from at least two services.
I’ve had enough of watching the mainstream channels of discourse bought out, co-opted, astroturfed, filled with pundits having no understanding of journalism, and otherwise abused: it’s time for individuals to let it all out on their own blogs. This isn’t elementary school… we don’t need any goddamned fucking hall monitors.
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Afterthought: If they think today’s bloggers are uncivil, they really have short memories, because both of those guys are old enough to remember the flame wars of 20+ years ago, before there was a web. Now THAT was incivility, with a vengeance and with a flair!
Thanks, Voxpop.
People should wander through Deja News [now owned by Google] to see what was going on in the mid 1990’s on the news groups when almost everyone was tech savvy, willing to use that knowledge for their own ends, and bringing down a mail server was a point of honor.
Godwin’s Law was a description not a rule.
If they want uncivil, they should look at what was said about the Clinton administration, Waco, Ruby Ridge, etc.