Comment Policy: A Seminar, Not a Foodfight

I want this to be a seminar, not a foodfight. So comments that I regard as factually false or rhetorically destructive to the conversation get deleted, usually--I don't have time to moderate this properly, but I am trying.

This is the place to comment on the comment policy.

---

The smartest thing I have seen on comment policies is Teresa Nielsen Hayden http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006036.html. Here are selections (with my annotations):

Making Light: Virtual panel participation:

1. There can be no ongoing discourse without some degree of moderation, if only to kill off the hardcore trolls. It takes rather more moderation than that to create a complex, nuanced, civil discourse. If you want that to happen, you have to give of yourself. Providing the space but not tending the conversation is like expecting that your front yard will automatically turn itself into a garden. (Which I, unfortunately, don't have time to do: whatever it is, it's not a garden.)

2. Once you have a well-established online conversation space, with enough regulars to explain the local mores to newcomers, they’ll do a lot of the policing themselves.

3. You own the space. You host the conversation. You don’t own the community. Respect their needs. For instance, if you’re going away for a while, don’t shut down your comment area. Give them an open thread to play with, so they’ll still be there when you get back.

4. Message persistence rewards people who write good comments.

5. Over-specific rules are an invitation to people who get off on gaming the system.

6. Civil speech and impassioned speech are not opposed and mutually exclusive sets. Being interesting trumps any amount of conventional politeness.

7. Things to cherish: Your regulars. A sense of community. Real expertise. Genuine engagement with the subject under discussion. Outstanding performances. Helping others. Cooperation in maintenance of a good conversation. Taking the time to teach newbies the ropes. All these things should be rewarded with your attention and praise. And if you get a particularly good comment, consider adding it to the original post.

8. Grant more lenience to participants who are only part-time jerks, as long as they’re valuable the rest of the time.

9. If you judge that a post is offensive, upsetting, or just plain unpleasant, it’s important to get rid of it, or at least make it hard to read. Do it as quickly as possible. There’s no more useless advice than to tell people to just ignore such things. We can’t. We automatically read what falls under our eyes. (I think that this is the most important directive of all: trolls must be squashed quickly, or the space turns into... Kevin Drum's comment section.)

10. Another important rule: You can let one jeering, unpleasant jerk hang around for a while, but the minute you get two or more of them egging each other on, they both have to go, and all their recent messages with them. There are others like them prowling the net, looking for just that kind of situation. More of them will turn up, and they’ll encourage each other to behave more and more outrageously. Kill them quickly and have no regrets.

11. You can’t automate intelligence. In theory, systems like Slashdot’s ought to work better than they do. Maintaining a conversation is a task for human beings.

12. Disemvowelling works. Consider it.

13. If someone you’ve disemvowelled comes back and behaves, forgive and forget their earlier gaffes. You’re acting in the service of civility, not abstract justice.

Comments

[jon livesey]

Sorry, I'll stand for moderation that deletes the outright obscene, but not this policy. Its simply too subjective. My bookmark to your blog will be deleted.

[Brooks]

Brad,

Re: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/11/why-oh-why-ca-5.html#comment-91522448

Apparently Barkley can tell people to ignore me, call me a "virus", and Lee can essentially concur, and my response gets deleted. Was that due to the length of that response? The tone? The relevancy to the thread? Sure seems like a double standard, unless length was the issue, in which case I can certainly shorten it, and would like to be told to do so rather than just have it deleted without even one line of such instruction (fortunately I have the pre-deletion thread saved, as usual, for my book on blog discourse, including moderator/host deletion decisions, just as I'm saving this comment in case IT is deleted or blocked).

I'm guessing the deletion was simply because my argument was stronger and legitimately challenged the false assumptions that are popular here (as they are on the right as well) regarding SS "solvency". But I hope I'm wrong and the issue was length.

Brad, please advise.

[Brooks]

Brad,

Also, in addition to calling me a "virus", Barkley also grossly misrepresented the nature of my questions to him, people's comments to me and my replies to them, and he also falsely claimed that he had already answered my questions, all of which I was proving false by presenting the relevant evidence.

Why did you NOT delete his false and defamatory attack on me, but instead only delete my response proving his claims to be utterly false?

[Brad DeLong]

I am trying to keep this a discussion, not a foodfight. But I do not have the time to moderate this properly.

Posts like:

>Lee, Nice to see you once again missing my point, now on yet another site. I'll give you credit, though, at least you keep coming up with different ways to show you don't get it...

create a presumption that you are interested in having a foodfight.

[Brooks]

Brad,

Fair enough. I can certainly see why you would conclude that. There is a history involved, from two other sites, but I won't bore you with it, and I'm not saying that justifies the tone of that remark. If you had deleted that comment, I would not have found it inappropriate.

But what about Barkley -- also a good deal of history, but leaving that aside -- and his calling me a "virus" and proceeding to characterize my conduct elsewhere in an extremely negative way, claiming to have answered my questions already, etc.? I sought to prove that his claims about me were false on all counts, and you deleted my reply while NOT deleting Barkley's charges (you could have just deleted that portion of his comment -- the "food fight" part, perhaps with explanation). You let him slander me (albeit not my real name, but one I use widely on the blogosphere, including on blogs with communities overlapping with yours), yet deleted my rebuttal, which was offering evidence disproving Barkley's claims.

How is that at all fair?

[Brooks]

Also, I have been frustrated elsewhere -- not least by Barkley -- by people who choose the "food fight" approach (rhetoric, ridicule, baseless accusations of hidden motives, etc.) rather taking arguments on their merits and responding directly and substantively to them. To the extent that the tone in MY comments toward Lee and Barkley contained such ridicule, I assure you it is a REACTION to an abundance of such treatment by them elsewhere IN LIEU of engaging me in substantive discussion/debate.

I realize that you have higher priorities than getting into "who started it" baby-sitting, but I just wanted to provide some context and a better understanding of my goals and my preferred mode of discourse. Thanks.

[Craig Nelson]

Comment bugs?

Comments in long threads are lost. As of 9AM PST, Jan 15, the NYT Death Spiral post lists 36 comments, but the last 10 aren't visible to me. I've tried Firefox and IE; I've cleared my cache. The post commented upon and the comment authors are noted in "Most Recent Comments."

Also Firefox and IE (running on XP SP2) deliver 2 complete copies of the post and comments.

I don't know if these are generic typepad behaviors or particular to this site.

[Stan Wiggins]

There are substantial errors of first-year constitutional law in the Yoo memorandum, ably noted in diverse locales (and virally multiplying, no doubt, as I write).

I understand deLong's ambivalence about approaching the faculty senate. I suggest that a carefully written analysis of Yoo's memorandum by other faculty, subscribed to by as many as wish to, that demonstrates his analytic incompetence and humiliates him, without raising tenure or discharge issues, could be more promptly and effectively prepared, without prejudice to further actions if considered useful after debate.

During the Clinton impeachment, if memory serves, a majority of Americans in both parties favored censure and a return to more important matters, rather than full-dress impeachment. I don't minimize the import of a senior administration official promoting this stuff, but he was writing under at least implicit direction.

The most important thing, IMO, is to prepare and widely distribute a cogent analysis of the memorandum that demonstrates its conflicts with constitutional law and international treaties, and thus the faults in the administration's overall posture, rather than bogging down in an approach that will enable partisan respondents to cry "personal attack."