Below the line
September 17, 2015 9:43 AM Subscribe
Instead of websites shutting their comment sections, might they want to keep them in order to remain in control of the conversation?
Whoops: I also forgot rule 0: do not, for the love of Cthulhu, allow throw-away accounts, especially with image posting privs. Or if you must, make 'em go through a sign-up form and ask for an email address; that step alone deters about 98% of spammers and most griefers, even if no address checking takes place.
posted by cstross at 10:04 AM on September 17, 2015 [8 favorites]
posted by cstross at 10:04 AM on September 17, 2015 [8 favorites]
There are many different theories, but they all boil down to three core points.
1) You have to spend a lot of time tending the comments.
2) If you are the main content creator, you have to also spend time engaging, to set the tone.
3) You must not tolerate assholes.
We don't really have #2 in play here because we're the content creators and the commenters. But if you look at places where the comments are safe to be in, by and large -- cstross's blog, jscalzi's blog, Making Light, here, they all boil down to those three things. Tend, interact, toss assholes over the side as soon as they become even close to unredeemable.
I've always wondered about TNH's "You can allow one, but not two" -- but it does seem to work here. There are a couple who've danced along the line, and even gotten timed out, but even quonsar (well, Mark II quonsar) is still here. Eventually. But if they act in concert? Out comes the ban hammer -- and of course, there are lines that must not be crossed and if they are, there's no mercy, it's instaban time.
But really, I think it boils down to proper banhammering. You need to interact and tend to know when to banhammer, but if you ain't going to banhammer, you've already lost.
posted by eriko at 10:16 AM on September 17, 2015 [3 favorites]
1) You have to spend a lot of time tending the comments.
2) If you are the main content creator, you have to also spend time engaging, to set the tone.
3) You must not tolerate assholes.
We don't really have #2 in play here because we're the content creators and the commenters. But if you look at places where the comments are safe to be in, by and large -- cstross's blog, jscalzi's blog, Making Light, here, they all boil down to those three things. Tend, interact, toss assholes over the side as soon as they become even close to unredeemable.
I've always wondered about TNH's "You can allow one, but not two" -- but it does seem to work here. There are a couple who've danced along the line, and even gotten timed out, but even quonsar (well, Mark II quonsar) is still here. Eventually. But if they act in concert? Out comes the ban hammer -- and of course, there are lines that must not be crossed and if they are, there's no mercy, it's instaban time.
But really, I think it boils down to proper banhammering. You need to interact and tend to know when to banhammer, but if you ain't going to banhammer, you've already lost.
posted by eriko at 10:16 AM on September 17, 2015 [3 favorites]
Don't forget #4, which is "Charging $5 gets rid of a lot of the assholes, making #s 1–3 much easier"
posted by caution live frogs at 10:27 AM on September 17, 2015 [6 favorites]
posted by caution live frogs at 10:27 AM on September 17, 2015 [6 favorites]
cstross: With regards to your second point, that still requires people to read/see intolerable comments/gifs though. Maybe you don't get the hard-core-porn-level vitriol that the staff at Jezebel do, but having to read/see this stuff day-after-day has got to take a toll. Sure, you can farm out some of the duties to share the load, but those people are sharing, essentially, a load of the smelliest shit around.
But I agree that precluding anonymous-ip accounts combined with email-address verification could cut this back for the staff at Jezebel. However, I still don't think that it will reduce the pile of manure to an insignificant level. Asshats are going to be asshats, and there seem to be new asshats appearing over the horizon every single day on the internet. I read one or two troll-ish comments on women-centered pages and I've got steam coming out of my ears and an impotent rage and sadness about the world. I couldn't imagine having to encounter that on a daily basis. For my job, no less.
tl/dr: I think your suggestions are certainly good ones, but the kind of stuff that staff at Jezebel are subjected to -- I conjecture -- is both quantitatively AND qualitatively different from what you get on your blog. And so I still fear that their implementation would be insufficient to thwart the onslaught of internet slime.
posted by Halo in reverse at 10:49 AM on September 17, 2015 [1 favorite]
But I agree that precluding anonymous-ip accounts combined with email-address verification could cut this back for the staff at Jezebel. However, I still don't think that it will reduce the pile of manure to an insignificant level. Asshats are going to be asshats, and there seem to be new asshats appearing over the horizon every single day on the internet. I read one or two troll-ish comments on women-centered pages and I've got steam coming out of my ears and an impotent rage and sadness about the world. I couldn't imagine having to encounter that on a daily basis. For my job, no less.
tl/dr: I think your suggestions are certainly good ones, but the kind of stuff that staff at Jezebel are subjected to -- I conjecture -- is both quantitatively AND qualitatively different from what you get on your blog. And so I still fear that their implementation would be insufficient to thwart the onslaught of internet slime.
posted by Halo in reverse at 10:49 AM on September 17, 2015 [1 favorite]
I spend a lot of time on a popular website with comments, and over the past decade, one thing has become clear: comments don't work, especially if you're just looking for a used car.
posted by blue_beetle at 10:56 AM on September 17, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by blue_beetle at 10:56 AM on September 17, 2015 [2 favorites]
Maybe you don't get the hard-core-porn-level vitriol that the staff at Jezebel do, but having to read/see this stuff day-after-day has got to take a toll.
Actually, I don't get that. Like I said, creating a chilling climate for trolls by instantly deleting their effusions destroys the reward for trolling. So for the most part they don't even bother trying.
Now, I will admit that I stand atop a steaming heap of white male privilege and Jezebel's staff don't -- but it sounds to me like the Gawker comment platform is broken by design insofar as it allows this kind of bad behaviour in the first place. Of the past month's guest bloggers on my blog, two thirds have been female SF/F authors saying unkind things about the sexist climate in publishing. We have had to wield the ban hammer a few times. But overall, the level of vitriol has been extremely mild for a web forum -- at its worst the stuff we've been deleting has been about on a par with stuff The Guardian allows through in their comments.
If you permit a chilling climate in comments for women/LGBTetc/non-white people, you get trolls. But the converse is true, and if you establish a chilling climate for trolls, the trolls steer clear.
posted by cstross at 11:27 AM on September 17, 2015
Actually, I don't get that. Like I said, creating a chilling climate for trolls by instantly deleting their effusions destroys the reward for trolling. So for the most part they don't even bother trying.
Now, I will admit that I stand atop a steaming heap of white male privilege and Jezebel's staff don't -- but it sounds to me like the Gawker comment platform is broken by design insofar as it allows this kind of bad behaviour in the first place. Of the past month's guest bloggers on my blog, two thirds have been female SF/F authors saying unkind things about the sexist climate in publishing. We have had to wield the ban hammer a few times. But overall, the level of vitriol has been extremely mild for a web forum -- at its worst the stuff we've been deleting has been about on a par with stuff The Guardian allows through in their comments.
If you permit a chilling climate in comments for women/LGBTetc/non-white people, you get trolls. But the converse is true, and if you establish a chilling climate for trolls, the trolls steer clear.
posted by cstross at 11:27 AM on September 17, 2015
I used to be on the old Guardian Talkboards, which started in the late 90s, well before Comment Is Free (it was known on GUT as OALA - opinions are like arseholes). It got shut down abruptly a few years ago. The likely reason - we were never told, even after people had been on there for years, even meeting, marrying and having kids - was a lawsuit. The 'International' forum was one of the most troll-imfested sections on there (only Crosswords was more cut-throat) with posters from right wing websites regularly turning up to debate the niceties of, say, why we should'nt just bomb the Arabs anyway. One guy on there, who was particularly unpleasant, got mocked for being a middle-aged white dude in Bangkok and for banging on about the more unsavoury reasons why a middle-aged white dude might settle in Bangkok. He threatened the Graun with a libel suit and presumably it seemed safer to pull the plug.
That said, I don't envy the moderators on there, especially given that (and this was pre-Yewtree) there were certain celebrity names that, if uttered, would put you on the express train to bantown, such were the scurrilous rumours people liked to post. And the time when one poster threatened to fight another for 1000euro because he was accused of being a 'babyrapist'. Or the guy in the film section who liked to post about how Jennifer Aniston was not a dutiful wife and a poor example of Western womanhood.
The only forum I know of that still has that wild-west, no tickers, no huge signatures, it's-acceprable-to-call-Cameron-a-cunt thing is, weirdly, Mumsnet. Which also predates most comment sections. I'm sure the actual child-related fora there are huggy and fluffy, but the AIBU section is an excellent place to see articulate swearing about biscuits.
posted by mippy at 11:33 AM on September 17, 2015
That said, I don't envy the moderators on there, especially given that (and this was pre-Yewtree) there were certain celebrity names that, if uttered, would put you on the express train to bantown, such were the scurrilous rumours people liked to post. And the time when one poster threatened to fight another for 1000euro because he was accused of being a 'babyrapist'. Or the guy in the film section who liked to post about how Jennifer Aniston was not a dutiful wife and a poor example of Western womanhood.
The only forum I know of that still has that wild-west, no tickers, no huge signatures, it's-acceprable-to-call-Cameron-a-cunt thing is, weirdly, Mumsnet. Which also predates most comment sections. I'm sure the actual child-related fora there are huggy and fluffy, but the AIBU section is an excellent place to see articulate swearing about biscuits.
posted by mippy at 11:33 AM on September 17, 2015
Also, the XOJane comment sections these days are 90% people taking the piss out of the authors. It's a female-focused, very SJW (is that a pejorative term these days? I don't intend it to be such) site - they employ s.e. smith fer chrissakes. Yet people seem to hate the content to the point of acxusing the site of regularly posting clickbait. And then you get people in the comments posting popcorn gifs and the page views shoot up.
posted by mippy at 11:37 AM on September 17, 2015
posted by mippy at 11:37 AM on September 17, 2015
Actually, I don't get that. Like I said, creating a chilling climate for trolls by instantly deleting their effusions destroys the reward for trolling. So for the most part they don't even bother trying.
I think the difference in magnitude between a personal blog and a commercial news or entertainment site makes this not quite so simple.
On your site, the posts being criticised and defended are your opinions, the costs of doing so are bourne by you and the benefits accrue to you. It is meet, then, that the judgement about where the line is and when to swing the ban hammer fall to you.
Divide those parts and it seems to me things become muddled. Writers for a big have far less control over what gets written about and when it gets posted. The benefits to the site of having lively comments sectionare clear, the benefits to the writer less so. If I'm paying reporters I want them out reporting, not spending big chunks of their day as mods. Even in a case where the writer does have that control and would be overseeing the response to their own opinions --- a TV critic, say --- well, I need hardly point you to the legions of instances of sock puppetry, fueds and back biting generated by the thin skin of critics.
So then you're down to hiring professional mods, enforcing some codified set of standards. But this creates the space for disagreement between mod's judgement, editor/owner judgement, and writer's judgement, about where the line is. It creates the room for hesitation, decisions by comittee.
posted by Diablevert at 12:10 PM on September 17, 2015
Diablevert, my blog is one of the five biggest single-author blogs in the SF field. I get roughly 12,000 uniques a day, serve on the order of half a million to two thirds of a million hits per month.
This is at the lower end of the sort of traffic level that gets you buyout offers from the likes of Gawker Media.
(Also note about 75% of the content on my blog over the past month was written by people other than myself -- guest bloggers while I was travelling overseas and recovering from blogger burnout.)
posted by cstross at 12:28 PM on September 17, 2015
This is at the lower end of the sort of traffic level that gets you buyout offers from the likes of Gawker Media.
(Also note about 75% of the content on my blog over the past month was written by people other than myself -- guest bloggers while I was travelling overseas and recovering from blogger burnout.)
posted by cstross at 12:28 PM on September 17, 2015
I did not intend to imply that your blog was not widely read, I'm sure it is. But however big it is or gets, it's still 100% yours, and what you say goes, and the readers of your site understand that when they're reading it. You get to use Ridcully's org chart ("me, what does the telling") to borrow an image from Pterry.
I think that when you're attempting to foster a community that creates an entirely different dynamic than when you have bunch of writers over here and a bunch of mods over there, both of which are being asked to obey somebody else's abstract mission statement and/or the legal department's very concrete and specific notions of liability.
posted by Diablevert at 3:11 PM on September 17, 2015
I think that when you're attempting to foster a community that creates an entirely different dynamic than when you have bunch of writers over here and a bunch of mods over there, both of which are being asked to obey somebody else's abstract mission statement and/or the legal department's very concrete and specific notions of liability.
posted by Diablevert at 3:11 PM on September 17, 2015
TNH has done a lot of excellent work (both in terms of moderation and in general). However, the use of "disemvoweling" as a moderation technique stinks on ice.
I say that because it is, in effect, attributing words (well... text) to someone that said person did not write. It's intellectually dishonest -- like a weird converse of plagiarism.
Yes, the alert reader will know that's not the original text. Yes, the alert reader can usually deduce what the original text was. It's still crossing a line. If a post breaks policy, delete that post. Don't publish something else entirely under the byline of the original poster.
posted by sourcequench at 5:55 PM on September 17, 2015
I say that because it is, in effect, attributing words (well... text) to someone that said person did not write. It's intellectually dishonest -- like a weird converse of plagiarism.
Yes, the alert reader will know that's not the original text. Yes, the alert reader can usually deduce what the original text was. It's still crossing a line. If a post breaks policy, delete that post. Don't publish something else entirely under the byline of the original poster.
posted by sourcequench at 5:55 PM on September 17, 2015
Yeah, TNH's moderation style at BoingBoing was roundly criticized at the time, here and elsewhere, for being imperious and obnoxious - charges which stuck, imho - and her tenure there shouldn't be used as an example of moderation gone right. That said, everything else cstross said is right on target.
posted by mediareport at 6:45 PM on September 17, 2015
posted by mediareport at 6:45 PM on September 17, 2015
But I agree that precluding anonymous-ip accounts combined with email-address verification could cut this back for the staff at Jezebel.
Combine this with a fee, such as Metafilter has, and you eliminate a great deal of the riff-raff.
The whole thing is similar to the economics of spam - since sending spam is so cheap, people can do it, even though a microscopic percentage of people respond. If each spam email cost a penny, no one would send spam.
Anything that increases the cost of making comments, also increases the cost of making junk comments (by definition). At a certain price point, the value of making a junk comment is exceeded by its cost.
The opposite problem is when there's no engagement with articles. If the registration process is too onerous, no one will do it, and there will be no conversation at all.
posted by theorique at 5:38 AM on September 18, 2015
Combine this with a fee, such as Metafilter has, and you eliminate a great deal of the riff-raff.
The whole thing is similar to the economics of spam - since sending spam is so cheap, people can do it, even though a microscopic percentage of people respond. If each spam email cost a penny, no one would send spam.
Anything that increases the cost of making comments, also increases the cost of making junk comments (by definition). At a certain price point, the value of making a junk comment is exceeded by its cost.
The opposite problem is when there's no engagement with articles. If the registration process is too onerous, no one will do it, and there will be no conversation at all.
posted by theorique at 5:38 AM on September 18, 2015
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(The last-but-one blog entry just set a record with over 1170 comments to date in a one week period.)
Controlling the conversation is easy:
First, make sure there's a visible moderation policy (something like this).
Second, get to know your commenters and recruit a handful as
hall monitorsmoderators, and give them moderator privs. (Ideally these should be people you know in the real world and who check in on the blog every day, and preferably from different time zones.)Thirdly, let it be known that griefers, trolls, and ass-hats won't merely be ignored: their comments will be deleted as if they'd never polluted the discussion in the first place, thereby making time spent on such activities fruitless.
Fourthly—and this is hardest—engage with the comments. If you start a conversation you should stick around to host it; at a minimum, ride herd on the first 50-100 comments on a given article closely. This sets up a climate of discussion in which a community will eventually emerge: if you can make it a welcoming one for constructive engagement and a chilling one for abusers, it will mostly perpetuate itself.
Fifthly: find enough things to say to keep people coming back weekly or daily. Otherwise you won't generate a community, and if you don't have a community you don't have community standards.
Did I say this was easy? I exaggerated a bit: it took me 15 years to get my blog to where it is today. But it's remarkably noise-free compared to most comment areas on the web, which is a win because it draws in readers who want to engage but who are repelled by the typical hostility of web discussion fora. (These rules of thumb also emerge in conversation with other web forum moderator/maintainers, notably Teresa Nielsen Hayden—who was BoingBoing's first comment moderator—whose own philosophy of comment moderation can be found here.
posted by cstross at 9:56 AM on September 17, 2015 [26 favorites]