Comment sections are a fascinating topic for me, as I’m very interested in the new dynamics that comes with online interaction and the change in media.
Anyway, I made a Storify of some Tweets after a boring, persistent and verbose commenter I banned here followed me (?) to a game site I write for.
Oh man, I’ve seen Pitchguest’s work before! He sure does seem to get around. Must have lots of free time to write.
The examples posted here are certainly benign, if totally wrong, misguided, and rambling. I recall him writing some pretty nasty stuff elsewhere, so erasing his stuff is definitely not a bad thing.
Good ol’ obsessive, reactionary Pitchguest! I’m amazed he had time to digitally stalk you, given how much he loves flinging his feces around on various Patheos blogs and a number of other FtB blogs.
I think you make the case for moderation very well.
I noticed this a while back – a lot of people expressing justifiable indignation without knowing the right way to communicate it.
As I’m sure you recall, FTB went through a phase (which still isn’t really over) where you had the “plussers” against the “pitters” and one of the main charges leveled against many of the top-tier FTBers was their gratuitous usage of the ol’ “Banhammer”. Some bloggers are more notorious than others (I was pre-emptively banned from one blog’s comments section because I deigned to disagree with the crowd in the comments section of a different blog) and some have reasonable moderation policies, but the criticism leveled at the ban-happy bloggers was that they were somehow trampling on “free speech” (hence the “Freeze Peach” meme). Those bloggers and their commentariate would correctly point out that free speech isn’t an issue in a private blog. The bloggers are fully with their right to ban whomever they like.
And that’s true, and it’s all fine and well. But the problem was misidentified. The problem here (as you’ve pointed out) is not a free speech issue, the problem is that when you have a blogger that immediately blocks dissenting commenters, you have a situation where the blogger is engineering the conversation on their blog. Dissenting voices are silenced, supportive voices are praised. This isn’t a mere intellectual party foul… this is antithetical to the free exchange of ideas. This is the behavior of dogmatists.
No one can simultaneously engineer the conversation they’re a part of while claiming to be a rational skeptic (or a “freethinker”, if you will). So the spectacle of a blogging community called “Free Thought Blogs” in which the most popular bloggers routinely, and as a matter of policy, engineer every conversation that takes place within their realm is not only amusing in its irony, it’s also alarming in its audacity.
Now, am I suggesting you shouldn’t moderate your blog? Not at all. Moderate away. Deleting posts… eh, I guess that’s a personal decision – not one I would make. But you care certainly under no obligation to abide trolls, ALL CAPS, personal attacks, to say nothing of threats, etc…
Just be sure you don’t allow yourself to fall into the all-too-easy trap of using your administrative “power” to engineer the conversation, else authentic skeptics will lose all respect for you as they have many of the top-tier bloggers on this network.
>> “Just be sure you don’t allow yourself to fall into the all-too-easy trap of using your administrative “power” to engineer the conversation, else authentic skeptics will lose all respect for you as they have many of the top-tier bloggers on this network.”
I don’t believe I asked for any suggestion or advice and am quite capable of making my own mind up, thanks.
Also, I don’t know nor care about what transgressions you’ve had with other FtB bloggers. This is a weird comment, dude and a little patronising.
True, you didn’t. What I was doing was sharing my thoughts after having read the thoughts you posted… “commenting” in your “comments” section if you will. I was unaware that comments required solicitation. But if the only comments you want are those that stroke your ego with no original ideas attached (hell, you didn’t ask for those, right?) then all I can say is congratulations, you’ve been fully assimilated.
Don’t worry. I’ll go away quietly so you can continue getting only the comments you’re comfortable with. I wish you well, and your official FTB Engineer’s cap should be in the mail soon.
I have no idea what you’re on about, but I’m not exactly weeping at your leaving. Bye.
kacyray
You are short on details and rather vague about incidents at FTB. You are obnoxiously free with advice. Tauriq has made a thoughtful statement about when to moderate comments. I feel no need to tell him what to do or not to do.
I do need to add that I have made the mistake of thinking my opinions are so wonderful that I needed to share them. I realized later that it just made me look like I was just full of myself. I am still learning when to contribute and when to just shut up and listen.
It’s impossible to have a conversation on the Internet without doing some level of engineering. Any truly unmoderated forum is going to be overrun by spammers and trolls, and all the people who want to have an actual conversation are going to get fed up and go someplace else.
Also, note that most forums are intended to allow discussion within a community, not to host a meta-discussion about whether the community should exist or not.
For example, if I’m hosting a general politics blog, then I might encourage posts from Democrats and Republicans while banning Nazis and Al-Qaeda supporters. But if I’m hosting a blog specifically about issues within the Republican party, I might periodically say, “Arguments about why Democrats are better than Republicans are off-topic here. Please, either stay on-topic or find another discussion forum.” That doesn’t mean I’m not a free-thinker; it just means that there are already a million places on the net where people can do partisan sniping, and I’d rather focus on something else.
So, coming back to FreeThoughtBlogs: The culture is basically humanistic secularism, so arguments like, “But what if some humans don’t deserve equal rights?” or “But what if there really is a God?” are arguments that this community shouldn’t exist, and so they aren’t likely to lead to any kind of productive or even polite discussion.
I’m not sure what you mean by “authentic skeptics”. Most of the denunciations come from Libertarian pseudo-skeptics. (They like to use the rhetoric of skepticism, but they’re unable to actually apply it to real-world problems.) It’s easy enough to get people like that to respect you – all you have to do is never tell them that they’re wrong about anything – but why would any sensible person want their respect?
I’m very familiar with Pitchguest. This may sound strange but I actually enjoy dissecting his comments as an exercise in analyzing reasoning and logic in comments involving social conflict. This is no attempt to convince anyone to let him comment, I like it when bloggers enforce their preferred social etiquette on their comments for many reasons. I’m just informing about my experience with the prime example in the post.
His tactics go much deeper than that and it’s hard to know how much of it is conscious and how much is just how he they learned to disagree. My best guess on the sheer volume is that it essentially drowns out the signal of the person that the commentator is responding to with noise. I can admit to using a lot of words myself but I work hard to make them all relevant rational and logical.
Pitchguest also uses many different means of trying to shift all of the burden of proof onto the person they are spewing at. Directly asking Pitchguest to provide relevant, rational and logical links that support what they believe, and even asking for explanations that detail why they believe something are extremely hard to pry away. When I finally get things to the point where they will look terrible if they don’t give me something I have been consistently disappointed by what they finally offer.
I would love to see places with comments suffer a visible reputation hit from the content that they choose to allow. The purpose of a free exchange of idea is to find the best, the correct, and the new. There is speech worth shaming when it is discovered that it is toxic corrosive or incorrect. There is no perfect formula for this, but controlling the content of comments is a good tool.