Crooked Timber comments: a big change

CT blogposts are the most intelligent and interesting on the internet. CT will continue to be my “go to” everyday regardless of whether or not you are successful in your efforts to keep the trolls, sociopaths and unhappy bigots out of the comments. I read CT because the postings are honest and provide access to real research and intellectually honest and challenging work. When I first started reading CT, some five years ago, I scoured the comments almost as thoroughly as the posted articles but in the last couple of years looking for the pony requires so much digging through the horse manure that I don’t bother anymore. If you are successful in cleaning out the charletans and lunatics from the comments so much the better but if not, as Fritz Perls said “it can’t be helped”.

I find that this site is one of the very few wherein the comments are mostly civil.
Yes, there are some who will not let it go, but compare this to e.g. Huffington Post, which devolves into a flame throwing troll fest within 4 comments.

Hopefully this will prevent me from going into moderation regularly. I assume that snark is still acceptable.
Generally, I find commentary here to be unusually civil. I know I try to be on my best behavior.

SamChevre, we’ve tried disemvowelling in the past, and Omega Centauri , we’ve also deleted comments in the past. The problem is that disemvowelling or comment deletion more often than not then results in a large portion of subsequent comments addressing the act of disemvowelling and/or deletion. It’s never pretty. This is our attempt at getting around that. To be sure, we know that many commenters play nice. We’ll do our best to monitor comments regularly so that we can let them through quickly. Timberites are spread across many time zones so we hope to be able to keep a steady flow of approvals going.

Daniel Klenbort, indeed, that would help. But we want to give people the option of commenting pseudonymously in cases where there are legitimate reasons for not wanting to out their identity. Some threads discuss sensitive topics where disclosing one’s identity may prevent people from adding important contributions to a discussion. For example, let’s say we have a thread about abuse and someone with personal experiences wants to take part, but understandably may not want their name attached forever on the Interwebs to that particular experience. We would want that person to be able to contribute even if they don’t use their real name.

Having intermittently had comments held for approval, it does tend to prevent replies. But that is also a result of the vigorous discussion between the active commentators, which means that by the time a comment is approved it’s well up from the bottom of the page and likely not relevant to the current discussion.

I would very much like to see a better stream of comments under posts here. Best wishes.

(and now I have to find the password the the email address above. CT, it’s not you, it’s all the spammers. Sorry)

We appreciate the various suggestions on how to deal with comments moving forward and will consider them. Do feel free to keep the ideas coming.

In the meantime, here is a cartoon I just came across (as I browse through dozens of cartoons searching for illustrations for my lectures) that is a good reminder of why we need to revisit commenting on CT:
http://unearthedcomics.com/comics/love-me/

I was going to recommend that you follow the practices of the blog masters at Making Light. But it sounds like you have done that and found them not sufficient to your needs. They might still have some suggestions for you. I am continually dazzled by the success of M L at reaching and remaining at a level of civility rarely seen elsewhere.

We need respectful comments? That will exclude the current politicians!

Changing the policy so that respectful -ist comments are permitted might be an interesting experiment. Sort of like the imposition of manners.

https://fee.org/articles/the-social-value-of-manners/

Your house. Your rules.

Good luck.

(1) As someone who has probably contributed — though no more than a number of others — to the atmosphere decried in the OP, I can understand the motivation behind the proposed changes. I’m not sure they’ll have the intended results, but I guess we’ll see.

(2) Daniel Klenbort @7 raises the issue of “false names” without bothering to distinguish between someone’s real initials or a real partial name (e.g., first name and last initial), on the one hand, and a pseudonym on the other. I’ve used my initials here rather than my full name for a couple of reasons. First, when I started blogging on my blog (which I no longer do), I decided to use initials and it just seemed easier to stick with them for commenting elsewhere[*]. Second, I feel that use of a full name can exert psychological pressure to phrase something just right, which in turn can detract from the tentativeness, or the thinking-out-loud quality, that was and still is one of the attractive things about some blog comments and threads. I would be happy to go with my first name and last initial, the way, for example, ‘Sebastian H.’ or ‘Peter T.’ do, but at this point I’ve commented so long under my initials here that I’m not inclined to change.

—-

[*] With one eventual exception, not worth going into.

I am a long time reader who very, very rarely comments. I don’t have any objections to changing (or more stringently enforcing) the rules, but, apropos some of the comments above, I would note that there is some academic research which suggests that sites which allow pseudonyms, rather than demanding real names, actually end up with comments which include more ‘argument’ words (in the good sense of ‘argument’ – because, etc!) I will happily admit that such research is tricky to interpret, but it does suggest that there is some advantage to not being able to google your interlocutors too easily!

The death of comment threads is not generally lack of civility as such, but intellectual dishonesty and meta-discussion. If commenter A doesn’t address what commenter B actually says, but rather a misinterpretation or misrepresentation, then real discussion is difficult. Similarly if beliefs are assumed based on false dichotomies, or on prejudices (“In my experience, people who believe X, as you do, often believe Y, so I’ll assume you believe Y). Accusations of patterns of misconduct, and defenses against those accusations, fill up threads and make real discussion difficult.

Moderation is a lot of work and I do appreciate your efforts. I have learned a great deal from CT comment threads – thank you.

To ease the work load:
– a way for commenters to flag behavior that violates guidelines. The flagged posts could be put into moderation. This way not all posts would have to be reviewed.
– as ML does, appoint some trusted commenters as moderators.

Jeff Atwood built the spectacularly successful website Stack Exchange, which is very nearly self-policing. Then he built a comment system called Discourse, in an attempt to replicate the reputation-based system on Stack Exchange. As he describes it,
” software to help online discussion communities moderate themselves. ”

https://blog.codinghorror.com/please-read-the-comments/

Unfortunately it is fee-based, for the administered version. There is a cheap version which requires self-support of the Discourse software in the cloud. I suspect that might be more work than just moderating..

If my name were as indeterminate as to actual identity as Alan White’s, I would be relaxed about using it. But as it happens, my real name is google-unique, which is one reason why I choose to use a pseudonym. But there is, I think a critical difference between pseudonymity and anonymity. A pseudonym can be consistent and, as such, attract a reputation – and since none of us can readily tell whether an apparently real name is any more or less of a real identity than the more obvious pseudonyms, those reputations are just as good or bad as any others.

And as another fan of Making Light and its moderation, I also observe that they manage civilised discourse without needing to restrict pseudonyms.

Similarly if beliefs are assumed based on false dichotomies, or on prejudices (“In my experience, people who believe X, as you do, often believe Y, so I’ll assume you believe Y).

While that’s true, there’s also the familiar “Why won’t you have an honest discussion with me about UFOs?” from the person who just wants to talk about UFOs and won’t leave it alone. That person believes X and is never ever dissuaded no matter how much not-X they’re swimming in (or how boring X might be). It’s really hard to reset the conversation every thread to grant that person what is ideally their due, an honest hearing on whatever the actual topic is.

Thank You!

As a person who works for someone whose political philosophy is the polar opposite of mine, and I am known to comment from work. I value a certain degree of anonymity. I’m sure you know a few people who feel they should be reticent in certain situations. Using a pseudonym at least
provides the illusion of safety.

CT is one of the most thoughtful sites around. I have learned much from both posts and comments although the point expressed on the OP seems reasonable.

Real names – I imagine some commenters may have professional reasons for commenting under a pseudonym. The use of a regular identifier so a commenter develops a reputation seems sufficient.

Threaded comments would be useful in a number of ways. Some posts generate several lines of discussion which can be difficult to follow under the current system. It might be useful to the contributors if they could simply delete or short circuit threads that have degenerated into ad hominem or pointless situations of commenters simply talking past each other.

Full moderation can short circuit discussion but it does have advantages. Allowing specific commenters to bypass moderation can be frustrating to those of us who comment infrequently – the NYT system can be maddening.

Whatever you do I will continue to be a regular reader. Thank you all for your time and efforts.

I follow a couple of authors who seem to manage comment threads fairly well (Charles Stross and John Scalzi), and both have long comment threads pretty often (Stross has a rule that after 300 comments the rules relax a bit… to give you some idea of how many “lots” is to him that threshold is reached frequently and looked forward to by many). Scalzi often posts a comment to the effect of “Off to bed, comments on hold”, then edits it to “I’m baaack”. Both moderate firmly, frequently and to the admiration of their readers. Reading Charlie’s “YOU – yellow card, do not bring up UFOs again” or Gamma-Rabbit’s “MRA raving deleted… goodbye” is usually more entertaining than the material removed.

As with others above, I read every CT post and comment on the ones that appeal to me (or appall me), and will probably continue to do so. FWIW Discourse and other tracking systems annoy me, and I’m less likely to comment as a result. If I wanted to sell my identity I’d do so directly, thanks.

Please take a look at the first 30 or so comments on the Locke + Nozick = Locke thread a couple of posts ago. That conversation would likely be impossible under the new regime unless moderation is nearly continuous. The OP responds to several comments. Another CT member chimes in. Regulars are interacting with the OP and each other. Likely gone. I don’t know if the proposed policy is a result of a systematic review of comments or a reaction to a troublesome few. But consider carefully what is gained and what is lost by the proposed rules after reviewing the comments to this post.

People who are pining for the civil and productive CT comments threads of yore should perhaps read a few like these:
https://crookedtimber.org/2004/11/04/shining-city-on-a-hill/
https://crookedtimber.org/2004/07/24/tariq-ramadan/

My view is that the first 40-50 comments are so in ea thread are genuinely interesting and offered in good faith and then threads quickly deteriorate with the same 5-6 characters obsessively fighting it out and rehashing the same arguments over and over again , with increasing aggressivity. Perhaps the solution is to , say , set a fixed number of comments after which a thread is automatically closed. This will force commenters to state their positions with more responsibility, urgency and clarity and provide enough fodder for everyone to make up their own minds.

See also https://crookedtimber.org/2016/08/15/against-locke-part-3/

That conversation doesn’t look likely under the new system, especially with JohnQ monitoring when most of us are asleep.

I sort of wonder which comment threads you especially think are bad ones? Or is it sort of a survivorship bias? You’ve already removed the bad comments so what remains doesn’t look so bad?

I don’t comment that much so, probably the change wouldn’t alter my commenting behavior, but I will probably read even less as I think the change will make things slower and more boring.

Also, will the policy be enforced on the poster and the other CT bloggers? I would contend I have been insulted gratuitously by the poster. I clearly must have rankled me a little as I still remember it, but not enough to complain.

In the end it is your decision, but I don’t think the problem was particularly bad but I probably won’t be around to see the results.

Yep – your house, your rules. But delay does kill a lot of good things.

And I suspect it will severely disadvantage posters and commenters from parts of the world who live in inconvenient time zones. And not just we Antipodeans – one of the things I’ve always noticed that is CT is rather deficient in non-Atlantic commenters generally.

So I’m with a couple of others – instead of trying micromanagement just summarily execute transgressing comments, with no argument and no apology.

You’ll definitely end up hanging innocents along with the guilty but your regulars will find occasionally losing a few second’s or minute’s work a small price to pay for a more productive dialogue. And this way people – both the occasionally thoughtless and the hardcore trolls – soon learn by experience where you want to set the unwritten boundaries (though it doesn’t hurt to also write them up).

Pseudonyms are essential for some of us as our employers do not believe in freedom of expression. But use a consistent one – no sockpuppets please.

And oh yes, dsquared – please come back. We miss you. An awful lot of those comments back in 2008 – including some from the hosts – should certainly have been summarily executed.

I vote for what Omega Centauri said:
“Perhaps those who have been good citizens get comments immediately posted -but still potentially deleted, that could be another method of trying to have conversational turnaround, but still moderate out the bad actors.”

Of course that depends on the capabilities of the software.

I’m an admin for a low-volume moderated Facebook group. What works for us is allowing some group members (members who have demonstrated good citizenship) to post without going through moderation (no problems so far) and making sure that we have enough admins to make moderation speedy. It helps to have folks scattered around the globe. Our admins span Honolulu to UK.

Philippe at 46
“the first 40-50 comments are so in ea thread are genuinely interesting and offered in good faith and then threads quickly deteriorate”

Why not have the OP pick the 7-10 most salient posts from the first 30-50 ones and pin them to their opening post.
Philippe is right that there seems to be a pattern. After all, how often do we re-read the OP; we are probably much more likely to read the previous 10-15 posts and assume we know what the OP was talking about anyway.
Also, rather than a single common approach for a few months, why not take a variety of approaches and review them. Reviewing our own performance in avoiding train-wreck debates would surely be more fruitful, and interesting, than thinking or reading about that other train-wreck.

Not sure I like full moderation. Cuts out negative feedback, see: without actual physical object lessons of “this person went too far, don’t be this person”, learning where the boundaries are is left to individualised exploration / self-discovery, gradually creeping away from a known-safe area into the unknown.

This is slow, of course, but it’s also stressful as fuck. Post-facto moderation leaves reasonably-accurate indicators of where the boundaries are, but also it communalises the learning experience, so that everyone can learn from the stumbles of others.

I do like JimV’s suggestion of retaining light (how about very light?) moderation for comments on a few designated posts. Perhaps two per week would be sufficient, if the comments were allowed to go on until they reached, say, the 1000-mark.

This could kill two or more birds with one stone. On the threads with more hands-on moderation, no-explanation deletion or disemvowelling of “antisocial” comments could become the norm. This ought to reduce the time and effort of moderators a little, as well as greatly increasing the pleasure of readers (the silent majority?) who don’t enjoy eristic slugfests. But if some “open threads” were preserved, there would be less justification for (and, just possibly, fewer instances of) calling such measures “tyrannical”.

And I don’t think I can be alone in both wishing that those anarchic free-for-alls could occupy much less commenting space than they do, and feeling that I would miss their energy if they disappeared entirely. I often find illumination in them, even if – or just because – this tends to come in very sporadic flashes.

Bloody hell, this is going to be a lot of work. Is it a condition for the forthcoming IPO? Otherwise it’s going to need a high level of regular input for it to work properly – presumably, not just monitoring the author’s own threads, but keeping up with all the others (whether or not you’re especially interested) to avoid excessive delays in approving comments.

Like others, I worry about the impact on conversations. I don’t comment here much, and generally my comments are allowed to pass by without further discussion, so it’s not that I’m going to miss out personally on the opportunity for a good argument – but I do read them, and often find them illuminating. If there’s going to be a substantial delay in responses being approved, there’s a clear risk of a dialogue of the deaf and of a lot of repetition; A makes a contentious point, there’s no response for x hours and then suddenly a whole batch of comments making pretty well the same point appear all at once – or no one answers it because everyone assumed that someone else would.

The best case scenario is something rather like Harry’s idea of the ping-pong seminar discussion, in which everyone addresses the OP rather than each other; maybe that’s a good thing, or at least is a worthwhile sacrifice for the other advantages of the change, but I do fear that CT will lose something important. With all due respect for the authors, for me it’s never been just about the main posts, but also the discussion around them.

This policy sounds like a lot of work for the moderators—good luck.

I would prefer to see offending commenters warned rather than summarily disemvoweled or deleted, which can feel pretty hostile, and is also mysterious.

Thanks for your efforts—I hope that whatever you decide makes the bloggers here feel like blogging more often (Belle, I miss you!)

Thank you in advance for making this move. I think the quality of the discussions here has significantly declined in recent times. It’s become about personalities and defending one’s political turf rather than (god, I’m about to sound Habermasian) engaging in a mutual dialogue centered on reason giving and achieving, together, greater knowledge and perspective. Perhaps it’s because I’m an academic, but I vastly prefer this type of dialogue than reading Plume vs. Brett Ballmore Round 93.

Can I also add my name to the DSquared Please Come Back petition. I disagree with 95% of what you say, but you do make me think.

Lee A. Arnold @59
+1 for you, sir!

Managing commenting is hard, eh?

Hope you come up with a solution that works well and isn’t too onerous.

I have come to comment a lot less than in the past (when I was a real regular, I guess.) That’s probably as much due to changing obligations as anything else, but the comments do seem to have degenerated into repeated posturing by particular posters (few of whom I’ve seen comment on this – I wonder if they know they are a problem or not?) mostly about their own political beliefs, which do not seem to be up for reconsideration in any way. That’s really, really, boring, even when it doesn’t degenerate into insults. I’d be glad if that stopped.

The threads engels linked to above were troubled by trolls, of course – abb1 (whom I think is sometimes still around under his 5th or so different name), and D^2, who is able to troll his own blog (though not his own post in that case) like few others when he wants to. Of course, that’s not all that he does. Those are problems, of course, but somewhat different than the ones suggested here, I think. I’m not sure if the changes would make me comment more now or not, but I hope we can at least get some more interesting threads, rather than the same incredibly dull shows of political purity and the like from the same tired group of 4-5 guys we mostly get now.

I respect the management’s decision to change things, but I would prefer that the change be minimal, even as minimal as more frequent moderator warnings like “I’m giving *you* one more chance to make your point and then I’m shutting you down” or “You two – take it outside.”

“Also, rather than a single common approach for a few months, why not take a variety of approaches and review them. Reviewing our own performance in avoiding train-wreck debates would surely be more fruitful, and interesting, than thinking or reading about that other train-wreck.”

I like this idea. You could see what moderation techniques work better than others that way.

Thinking about how the threads sometimes get sidetracked a bit, or taken up by a tangentially related argument that comes up (I know I am guilty of this sometimes), John Quiggin has quite a good technique on his Australian blog where he has an open thread and he sometimes asks commenters to take arguments to the open thread to stop the argument sidetracking the main thread on his topic.

Okay, 80 comments in and the thread has yet to get interesting. There ain’t no real arguing goin on, and I don’t feel no feeling here, not nearly as much as the FPers are showing and deserve in response. All very civil and restrained, polite and measured, as if we were strangers or distant colleagues.

Some of us have 15 years of daily presence here.

So what do we y’all want here? Peer-review academic forum? An adjunct providing feedback for your day jobs? Do you see yourselves doing this 5 ten years from now, if so why, what has been fun or useful here? Do you want to see the same ole friendly faces in your comment sections, everybody growing old affectionately with each other? That could be nice.

The reddit thread I lurk, r/anime, seems very successful, with regular posts getting 300 comments, and popular posts getting thousands. Uses that democratic ranking system to hide troll posts. It is a community of shared values, including sadly overt objectification and other sexisms, arguments and insults, jokes, mutual assistance.

Do you want to pin a “Values Statement” at the top of the blog?

Three in a row, can I get some amae here?

Okay yeah, that reddit I lurk, r/anime, is also 93% male.

I get it.

I also lurk LGM and Making Light, reading every comment and visit places like Jezebel and Slate/Salon, and many others, reading all the comments. A weird hobby, but I find comment section styles, interesting, because it is essentially observing communities. Fun! I can work up a booklist.

r/anime is almost entirely young median 20-year-old men, wildly international, community-moderated, and would probably be intolerable for many of the feminist inclination. I find r/anime interesting, besides anime, because these educated multilingual adventurous kids are although offputting in their aggression cursing casual sexism libertarian politics are also constantly and energetically in their own limited way fighting the good cause, among others, against sexism and misogyny.

So CT bosses have a community here. Sorry, here we are. Do you want to trade it in, ala Brecht? Get a sparkling pretty new one, all civil and useful? Like LGM? Jezebel? Is there a menu?

Shall we vote?

Thank you thank you thank you. I used to read CT every day I could, and in as much depth as I could manage. But the insulting comments had begun to resemble the US presidential campaign more and more. And while I feel it necessary to monitor ill-humour in the campaign, I cannot bring the same grim determination to CT, even though CT is always more informative and thoughtful between the dyspepsia than the campaign has been. So yes, please, moderate freely. In whatever way is best and easiest for yourselves. Thank you thank you thank you.

Just saw this post and thought: Hallelujah! It’s long past due. Maybe I’ll take to reading the threads here more often on account. I miss them.

I’m not sure that there are too many problems with the comment threads on here. I’ve seen much worse elsewhere for a blog with a wide-ranging focus, and many of the people who moan about the etiquette of other commentators don’t seem to be put off commenting frequently themselves, or adopting an unfriendly tone in their own posts.

One of the advantages of the internet is that people feel that they can let themselves go sometimes. I think moderation such be akin to a boxing referee, and resist stepping in unless things are getting too dirty. (Personal abuse, deliberate misrepresentation, etc.)

sounds good. I also agree with 46 – limit number of comments per post. Maybe at the 100 point. If there are a lot of comments on a post past 100, maybe this means the content of the post is of such interest that another post might be in order. That would make the comments more useful to the CT-ers, I think.

Engels, of course you are right. No one else will know. I was thinking of other experiments.

I also agree with 46 – limit number of comments per post.

I dunno, some of the book events threads have been long and contained a lot of good stuff. Here, though, I think I’m wishing for endless stores of energy from the moderators.

This seems to have been an issue for a long time, for example you can find intermittent “cleaning up the comments ” posts going on a decade. Such a deep seated, consistent problem would imply it’s not an issue with “4 or 5” commenters.

Several people have mentioned that commenters, instead of searching for the truth collectively, simply express their political positions and never change their minds. IMO, there is no clear boundary between the two – in both cases, commenters express their opinions and put forward arguments on the subject discussed, and these arguments may or may not convince their readers (other commenters or lurkers). This is valuable regardless of whether other commenters end up being convinced by these arguments or not. A public debate doesn’t need to end in the participants’ reaching consensus to be informative and useful; the very fact that the arguments have been presented gives everyone the opportunity to consider them and make up their own mind as to ‘the truth’. I also don’t think that people can reasonably be expected to change their minds easily when it comes to their core political beliefs or issues that they care strongly about, all because of a relatively brief online discussion. And, of course, such an expectation would be even more unrealistic if applied to those who post only a single comment or a couple of comments and don’t participate in the discussion any further for various reasons, including lack of time.

Eh.

Moderation will kill this community, I’m pretty sure.

Like many, I’m an occasional commenter who has seen the quality of CT comment discourse descend from its normal heights recently. But personal insults haven’t been the problem, for me; as someone else noted above, it’s the same damn people having the same damn arguments in any thread that’s even slightly related to the US election. The Bernie vs. Hillary debate has been done to death, and people still can’t let it go – you know who you are. Have the conversations been polite? Not so much. Have they been a YouTube-level festering swamp? No. They’ve committed the cardinal sin of being boring.

Also, can you fix the comment reference number problem, finally? Someone above suggested using hex codes, but that’s crazy; ordered numbers that humans can read are crucial. Just stop removing and renumbering comments after they’re posted, for heaven’s sake. If you have to remove a post, just replace the body with “this post has been removed” or something. I can’t tell you how many comment threads I’ve lost because of this.

The Bernie vs. Hillary debate has been done to death

Maybe it’s just me but it seems like Sanders has hardly ever been discussed with any real interest or depth.. My impression is that the most furious and drawn-out battle has been between people (including some OPs) who have been about 90% full-on for Hillary and a smaller but prolific faction who have been perhaps a bit unjustly labelled the ‘Trump curious’—two sides I have found almost equally unappealing, as Ive said elsewhere. (I’m aware that a lot of people have said that given the choice they’d vote for Sandees but imo that really hasn’t come across in the comments. Granted I’ve only skimmed most those threads although I’m sure I’ve contributed to the snark.)

More firmly enforcing house rules seems like a good idea but I don’t think this requires putting everything into auto-moderation – just being a bit more vigilant about enforcing the rules when arguments get excessively personal (or, more often, just long and boring).

More generally, like some other commentators here, I don’t really think personal insults or intemperate argument are a major problem with most commentators or in most threads. It is more that on a few recent topics (i.e. Brexit and the US election) a few people are ceaselessly prosecuting the same arguments. A bit of this is fine but it just goes on and on and is really boring and crowds out other voices.

That said, I really don’t like the white-listing idea that some people have suggested: there isn’t a major problem with trolls or bad faith commentators here. Most of those who have recently been monopolising the comments with their endless rehashing of the same arguments about the US elections also make insightful comments (especially on other topics). They just need to shut up once in a while. In the past this has been accomplished by moderators stepping in and asking them not to post again that day – this seems to work just fine.

Thinking about it I agree with shmoo @100 – its the monomaniacs, not the rare trolls, who are the trouble on this particular blog. But they’re not really big trouble, and I think you’re overreacting.

If you’re going to note why posts are deleted “Comment deleted – heard it all before” or “Comment deleted – evidence free rhetoric” ought to be more common than “Comment deleted – personally insulting”. And the very occasional “Comment deleted – TL;DR” wouldn’t hurt either.

CT is actually pretty good on all these compared to other fora, which is why people stay in the community. Some clear guidelines, a regular open thread to divert commenters’ obsessions into (JQ’s really works well), and a willingness to shut a thread down if it goes off the rails badly is all that’s needed. IME hardcore trolls are not a problem here but if they do appear just summarily delete ’em.

You know who else moderated comments?

(C’mon, the thread is over 100 comments, its practically mandatory)

https://crookedtimber.org/2016/10/19/crooked-timber-comments-a-big-change/#comment-696062

I’m just trying the linking thing – thanks hadn’t thought of that before

I don’t think complaints that some people’s comments are boring should have much weight. It is too easy to skip a comment. I mean, it’s perfectly obvious where it ends and the next begins. And people think others agree with them on what is boring, but it is rarely so.

Abusive comments are a legitimate issue, though, and have been a real problem here.

OK, that didn’t work.

Try something such as <a href=”https://crookedtimber.org/2016/10/19/crooked-timber-comments-a-big-change/#comment-696074>Guy Harris</a&rt;.

Thinking about it I like the threaded comments idea in a lot of ways, I think WordPress blogs are capable of threaded comments 2-3 deep.

Also I have been cyber stalked on Crooked Timber and am trying to get the police to investigate at present, so why I understand why some commenters don’t use their real identities — and I currently only use my initials myself — I also want to point out that Crooked Timber isn’t actually at present a safe or secure site if you have issues with persistent cyber stalkers.

If you have a Google account, use blogger.

Blogger has a nice little editor, which will let you format your little heart out, including, of course, creating links to Guy Harris @ 115 or Guy Harris @ 113.

Still hard to know exactly what it will look like.

As someone who has militated in the past for a discussion of Comments policy, I am disappointed with how the discussion has been framed.

My biggest problem with Comments up to now has not been with commentators but with what seemed to me overly controlling behaviour by moderators. Their deletions, or threats to delete, seemed to me to stifle legitimate debate. Other people have said, “Your house, your rules,” but I do think this should be up for discussion. Because the corollary of this is “Their house, their rules, I’ll stay home.” There is something of a two-way street here. Instead, it sounds like there will be even more controlling behaviour, and so I guess some of us will simply be staying home.

I have more of an aversion to boring comments than most I guess, and this probably puts me again against the desire of CTers. After putting in the work to write a long and thoughtful post, the poster understandably would like to see comments to the effect of, “What a wonderful way to put it,” or, “I admire you.” While the expression of approval by someone who usually disapproves has interest, otherwise, these kind of comments are just boring.

As to the part about “racist, sexist or homophobic” comments, I fear this is too open for abuse. “You slut” for me obviously should be forbidden, but someone who writes, “Women (or for that matter men) should not have equal rights” has said something far more interesting than the normal, and *my* regret is that when people do make comments, however thoughtful, of this nature, they are shouted down with insults or likely to be deleted by moderators.

Anyway, my two cents…

The fact that ‘your house, your rules’ could be uncritically and even joyously accepted by most members as the normative framework for approaching membership decisions and speech rules for a supposedly left-wing political discussion forum is perhaps itself worthy of another thread. (Just a couple of threads below this there’s a post attacking Locke—hmmm…)

James, plenty of people manage to maintain the sequence in both of those ways- We all know excellent sites which use one or the other, but I don’t think leaving the name is a good idea, nor in keeping with what I understand to be the FP posters’ intention with this change. I would have the effect of hanging the commenter out to dry, which might not matter in the case of a committed troll, but would be unfortunate if a comment was simply phrased badly without malice aforethought or if somebody simply lost their temper on a single occasion.

Chris is, I notice, applying ex-ante moderation here, which puts him in company with Mary Beard, the best company you can keep. I infer that this is the approach the owners of this place have decided on, and good luck to them.

Also I usually find the comments more interesting than the original post. I wouldn’t visit CT if there were no comments, and I don’t think I’m the only one of this persuasion.

Is it really possible to have a civilized discussion (in the way the OP describes) between people that are convinced the other side is Evil?
Would you (Chris Bertram, but also the commenters) “abjure ostentatious displays of contempt towards other participants in the thread and … not write in a manner that clearly presupposes that they do not believe the person they are engaging with is deserving of intellectual engagement” with someone e.g. advocating that women are inferior to men and should not have be given the right to vote?

I also agree with what has been said before: what makes reading tiresome is not the occasional barbs and squabbles, but the repetitions of the same few points over and over (and I plead guilty on all counts).

Manta, I can “abjure ostentatious displays of contempt” towards people holding views I consider odious because such displays are superfluous to and detract from any argument.

@128 Manta raises a good point. As I noted earlier and elsewhere, I do not think people producing OPs need to self-censor, or otherwise avoid any topic. Chris Bertram offered a provocative description of a significant subset of Brexit voters as ‘racist.’ I can’t frankly think of a more cutting, or hurtful charge.

I’ll go further and suggest that those on the receiving end of such an accusation might well believe that Chris painted with an extremely broad brush in his if the shoe and the pain fit – wear it OP. The resulting discussion was illuminating in many ways all the same.

The banality of ordinary invective clutters threads. The more inventive is a delight. There’s far too much of the former, most would agree. As I noted earlier, I really don’t see any amount of lipstick changing the fact that we’re living through some of a pig of times.

I really do believe the best solution is to increase the number of people producing OPs – the Science Fiction post is a good example. I like Corey’s stuff, but I’m not that happy when he uses his posts to promote his books. He can do better. Double the number of regular contributors and, perhaps, try to broaden the content either as series, or as theme-based posts.

Providing better, more focused and better-researched OPs on a broader range of topics by different authors will help.

a) You don’t have to be a radical anti-propertarian to agree strongly with with engels. It beggars belief that anyone who’s studied the internet and blog culture would pronounce ‘your house, your rules’. I assume this wouldn’t be open to public participation were that the case. The btl is, to be generous, at least as important a draw for traffic as the OPs. It is what actually defines this space. Doubtless, this makes commenters co-responsible for ensuring a space that both atl and btl producers treasure and keep returning to.

b) It isn’t yet clear to me what the problem to be fixed is. A set of examples of offensive conduct might be useful, as would nudges and warnings in the course of a debate. Even the most excessive bloviators and trolls want an audience and should, I think, be saddened to read that there’s many who’re put off participating. It is important that we value the old internet norms that sought equality, freedom and breadth of community.

c) As with long books, papers, so with long threads and repetitive arguments. No one’s quite in control of when they can read or contribute, or when their interlocutors make comments that draw the best responses. I’ve sometimes found long debates useful, or thought to post my contributions really late in the thread. If it is accepted that btl commenters are (as) valid contributors, and that atl contributors mightn’t post as regularly as they wish, long threads are an important way that the community is sustained, and that content keeps getting generated, no matter how unfresh some might think it. It’s unclear by what means anyone’s forced to read comments after a point. The burden ought to be on those who’re bored to stop reading, rather than on those still willing to engage to be silent.

d) FWIW, I don’t think the problem is personalisation or aggression. The OPs permit themselves considerable latitude when shooting at the enemy, and that agonistic culture is vital for the life of a political space on the internet. With Manta, I think the elephant in the room is the stark, internal, ideological difference here. Unlike kidneybeans, I’m certain there’ll be tears of joy and celebrations when HRC wins.

Likely, as with BHO, his regime’s policies and actions, there’ll be a rehearsal of the rages, and hatreds here and elsewhere for the next 4-8 years – particularly between liberals and the left. This is by no means inevitable. It may be useful to accept how great a chasm this is, and so emphasise persuasion over pugilistic displays, attempts at conversion instead of the vitriol and enmity reserved for the perfidious comrade.

e) On reflection, I think a bit of solidarity and kindness towards besieged commenters, even across ideological faultlines would help. It isn’t always easy, but a little generosity when another is distressed would help to ward off the ugliness.

It seems like a lot of these problems are symptoms of inadequate tools for managing comments and commenters. I remember that some years ago CT had previews for comments — they were often flawed, but better than nothing. Instead of getting fixed the preview functionality was eventually removed. The eternal comments-renumbering issue also seems to rely on human effort to make up for flawed software.

It’s easier for software systems to track things like the time frame and number of comments posted by a particular identity and flag its comments as not requiring manual review in the future once enough have passed the initially require manual review. Only new or proved-troublesome commenter identities need to be manually reviewed every time. (For CT, I think identity is the private email you attach to your comments.) A moderator should easily be able to reset/revoke trusted status, of course. It should also be easy for a moderator to issue a time-limited or permanent ban to a certain identity, optionally with the side effect of deleting comments.

I had to make changes to software like those I’ve outlined above to deal with link spam and abusive commenters on a discussion forum I’ve run since 2002. Without software tools to help my moderators they were going to get burned out and either let all the trash through or let nothing through. Now it’s a comparative pleasure to deal even with the most obsessive rage-posters. Someone keeps re-registering with a new email just to call me names? Fine, I can permaban that identity and delete all of its posts and comments with one click. (Actually, at first it’s just a “soft” deletion that hides all of their data from public view; a cron job makes the deletion permanent after a month. I did this in case someone ever accidentally deleted a legit account and we needed to undo.) I can nullify the efforts of jerks faster than they can acquire new IP addresses and valid email addresses to register with. Dealing with this sort of antisocial behavior used to be exhausting before I had proper tools to counter it.

MetaFilter gets along without threaded comments but it does have Preview so it’s easy to tell if the link to a previous comment is correct.

Watching the moderators handle the large, contentious election threads has been instructive for me. During catchup reading it isn’t unusual to come across a comment like [couple of comments deleted: we don’t need to re-litigate the primaries, talk about Twitter being down, make it personal, etc.]. That is, the mods make their presence felt and provide a brief explanation for the takedown. It may be easier for TPTB here to moderate that way instead of bottlenecking the site. Whatever, best of luck and I’m sure I’ll keep checking CT.

Test – this is just a test!

First past the post?

Front page posters, I assume.

I’ve mostly stopped commenting on threads for two reasons. One is that too many threads simply tend to lose the plot after the first few dozen comments. I realize that this is inevitable to some degree, but it’s still disappointing when e.g. Corey posts something interesting about Hobbes and instead of talking about Hobbes we’re relitigating the primaries. The second, and related, reason is that this derailment often turns into endless back-and-forth between various small cliques who have it out for each other; it’s pretty tiresome to try and tackle a 500-comment thread that consists mostly of interpersonal sniping whose roots go back to other threads I haven’t even read.

I don’t know if enhanced moderation will fix these problems, and wouldn’t presume to suggest that anyone should change their comment policies based on my personal experience. I’m just throwing this perspective out there as another thing that our blog hosts might care to take into account.

@Guy Harris: FPP = Front Page Poster (?)

I think the changes will be an improvement, for the most part. I do have my doubts, however, about the feasibility of one-hundred per-cent moderation.

So, it has come to this. (see also http://xkcd.com/1022/ )

More seriously, as a matter of simple, non-partisan observation: I have seen this movie a few times before and it usually doesn’t end well. That is, I’ve seen websites that I used to read regularly start instituting active policies to weed out trolls, personal attacks, vile and assaultive language, vitriol, etc., often necessitating bans on a range of commenters. While these changes were, I believe, usuallyh undertaken in good faith and with the desire to have thoughtful and productive commentary flourish in a more welcoming milieu, the result was never what they wanted: within a few months, at most, the site had devolved to little more than an echo chamber, where nearly all comments were variations on agreement with the OP or declarations of mutual support for other commenters. Yes, these things were not bad, in themselves. But the sum product was essentially empty, with all vitality was drained out of the operation and no longer worth the time to read.

Now, I’m not claiming to understand any cause-and-effect relationship in these cases. Maybe people erred greatly on the side of self-censorship to keep out of trouble, like the old East Germany. Maybe the trolls and pugilists packed up and left, as requested, and then many of the “moderate” commenter/readers found they missed the gladiatorial verve and went elsewhere. Maybe some amount of “uncivil” behavior is actually necessary in order to flag the appropriate level of severity when someone else has really committed an egregious act, and the really passionate writers couldn’t work without it.

(As a related point, who will moderate the moderators? I’m not naming any names right here, but in my experience reading the site for a number of years some of the worst, most bigoted and offensive comments in certain threads were written by the CT poster/authors themselves. I don’t think an ethic of “I get to say whatever I want, but you are restricted in reply; my site, my rules” is going to attract and hold a very thoughtful or intelligent crowd.)

So in the opinion of one pseudononymous reader and only very occasional commenter, for whatever that’s worth, I predict this will change will result in a CT that is much less interesting and much less valuable, and ultimately much less worth the time to read, at least in the comments portion. It’s not a sure thing, and I hope you are spared this fate, but that’s the way I would bet at the moment.

bianca steele,

“I absolutely would not comment here if commenters were asked to declare that they were using their real names.”

I hope you keep commenting — I always think your comments are thoughtful and there are too few female commenters.

My issue with being cyber stalked doesn’t really mean that onscreen names have to be people’s real names — but I would like the emails to be linked verifiably to a real person’s identity so the bloggers have commenters real names even if they don’t appear on screen. At the moment the bloggers don’t even know the real identities of people.

To be honest I would not go into a real world public venue to discuss politics or academic things like this, when its like a masquerade ball and you don’t know who people are and you can’t identify them by faces or something.

I know this isn’t actually possible at the moment with how the internet is structured, since not everyone has access to an email account that is verifiably linked to their real identity.

Possibly making this a site with a charge like someone suggested could help with proving people’s identities, since its harder to get a credit card with a fake name, than get an email address with a fake name.

Seconding Jerry Vinokurov @143 re threaded comments. I think I’ve called them the Zika of comment threads in the past, and I’ll stick to that.

Frankly, I welcome this change (as I’ve already noted above). I’m already more inclined to look at and participate in comment threads here than I have been in recent weeks, even months (tho of course I have participated in that time). Yeah, it’s a slower process, but… you could think of it as an extremely fast epistolary exchange. Maybe?

The bitter political arguments on CT recently haven’t been about ‘relitigating the primaries’. They’ve been between one group of people who broadly think that class/ income inequality/the wealth and power of corporate America is the central political issue, and another group who actually agrees this is a central issue, but also asserts that racism and sexism are equally, if not more, important (in my case, ‘more important” only in the sense that I think historically sexism and racism precede and create the grounds for income and wealth inequality).

Unfortunately the first group has used the argumentative technique of presenting themselves as the true left and their perceived opponents as “liberals”/”neoliberals”/practitioners of “identity politics”/”dopey”/stupid/not worth reading, etc.

I think you are broadly correct, but I’m referring to more than those debates. In general, any thread that’s touched even tangentially on the US presidential election has been unbearable. I don’t want to call posters out by name; I just think that these threads could be more focused and less rancorous, and such disagreements as arise can be settled without immediately assuming the worst things about one’s interlocutors. Most of the people posting here probably deserve some measure of interpretive charity, long-time trolls and drive-by threadshitters notwithstanding.

I’m not the referee here and I don’t expect people to necessarily adopt my discursive norms. I just think it’s really hard to carry on a conversation when there’s a lot of crossfire going on. Like, we could actually probably have a really good, serious conversation (I hope!) about a topic like “identity politics” and the discourse around it, but we don’t, we just have fights over whether voting for Clinton is tantamount to personally enlisting in the front ranks of the enforcers of American empire, or whether third-party voters are actually secret fascists who love Putin. That’s the kind of stuff that I think is totally unproductive, in the sense that no one is being moved anywhere by these arguments other than toward retaliation. Maybe this will all die down after the election.

it is just a test because the intertubes were built on chaos and the idea that everybody could write anything – and in any whichway one likes – and then – the grammar and moderation police showed up – and that was a good and a bad thing.
A good thing – because moderated websites tell so much about the moderators – think NYT – and a bad thing – because there is not much fun and creativity in a moderated comment sections if the moderators are not creative themselves – and reading the comment section of this blog for years -(without ever commenting) – it’s the repetitions which have become so… do I dare to say ‘boring’?

So just moderate away every comment which doesn’t have anything new to say – now I would like that – perhaps?

Jerry Vinokuroff

I think you are underestimating the complexities here, particularly the ‘staying on message’ and ‘mud sticks’ complexity.

Almost 20 years ago, when I was an adviser to the Labor party here in Victoria, Australia, the political principle of ‘staying on message’ was explained to me by a funny, warm, witty woman mamed Julia Gillard*, who put it in roughly these terms ‘about the time you feel you’re going to vomit if you say this one more time, is about the time the general public starts hearing it’.

So if, for example, I want people to realise that income inequality is bad for health and wellbeing, I have to keep saying it again and again. But on the other hand, staying on message can be used in a completely different way, in terms of association of ideas. So if you keep connecting ideas that have no necessary logical association, some people will see them as related. So for example, if Trump keeps saying ‘Crooked Hillary’, even if he doesn’t produce any evidence that she’s crooked, the association will influence people – mud sticks, in other words.

So if someone here repeatedly says that my comments are dopey, anti-Semitic, neoliberal and not worth reading, I’ve got limited options. I can ignore it, knowing that some of the mud will probably stick and some people will associate ‘Val’ with dopey anti-Semitic neo-liberal. I can contest them, knowing that some people will see it as boring “crossfire”. I can appeal to the moderators, knowing that the thought of having to trawl through 1000s of comments trying to work out who is right and wrong will be as appealing as cold porridge. So what would you do?

In that context I think slowing things down and subjecting comments to pre-moderation for a trial period is reasonable, because then the CT bloggers could see whether there is any justification for those kinds of claims.

(*Not trying to name drop by mentioning Julia Gillard, but it’s just that she was subjected to a lot of the same stuff as Hillary Clinton, and even though I criticise many of her policy positions from the left, I do like to point out that she was a funny, nice person)

I am strongly against the blog owners/moderators doing any more work! It will kill their spirit. It was obvious that some of them haven’t been posting here because of the “dumpster fire” of comments which sometimes ensues. Ask them to do more than post at the top? This will be the end of it!

Instead they might approach it like teachers who have somewhat unruly students. The best way around this is simple rules, easy enough for teenagers. A Style guide with a list of simple suggestions which encourage good thinking and good writing and are palpable & easily identified, such as:

1. Don’t write more than 2 or 3 things a day. (And next, since this may encourage logorrhea:)
2. Don’t write more than 1000 words per comment (which is about the maximum length of a newspaper op-ed).
3. Don’t use the first person singular “I-me-mine” more than once.
4. Don’t use an abstract neologism, without your own definition.
5. Don’t repeat your points.
6. Don’t advocate for a political candidate more than once.


Breaking a rule ought not constitute sin. But, if a commenter is distracting or annoying, he/she coincidentally may be breaking such rules (or other ones which way be simply identified). If so, then the other commenters can bring it to the attention of the moderators — and only then do they need to become involved: a warning, then banning.

It is perhaps a sad state of affairs that the standing “Comments policy” needs to be amended, but consider that this blog was started by academics.

Academics have a somewhat curious view of the world! They tend to think that, after people have found the classroom door, then people are intellectually capable of walking in and finding a seat — and that people do their homework, and that people are here to learn and not preach. Ain’t so! The internet thwarts the hope for a civil classroom conversation.

The internet makes the world a different place in many ways, and it is still panning out, obviously. Here are a few ways we don’t think about much, when in combination — but which Crooked Timber combines, and so it needs to keep in mind:

A) For the grad level and upwards in many academic subjects, new thinking and lateral thinking is taking place via blogs. B) The internet also allows accessibility to the public, without responsibility. C) There have always been independent intellectuals, intellectuals-in-training, “diamonds-in-the-rough” who never made it to school or else never fitted in and the world never heard of, and they can now emerge and shine — yet they still need to learn how to think and express themselves clearly.

Thus it is, that Crooked Timber is running at two levels at once: a discussion among seasoned academics and a new kind of school for a new kind of matriculant.

So therefore, make a new kind of Style guide, to add to the Comments policy. List things that most people already follow, but which are nuggets hard enough to capture the understanding of the newby, the unruly, & the recalcitrant.

Have a periodic “Open Thread”, much less restricted, for people who wish to pose side topics, ask new questions, or who need/want a lot of give-and-take in lengthy public conversation.

Instead of chasing away top posters, Crooked Timber may even find more good academics who want to join their collective!

‘I can ignore it, knowing that some of the mud will probably stick and some people will associate ‘Val’ with dopey anti-Semitic neo-liberal.’

If you believe that ‘the mud’ is discrediting any writer who throws it – you probably would welcome it as much as I welcomed ‘the mud’ Trump was throwing.
(especially the ‘nasty woman’ comment) –
And there is a lot of evidence right now -(especially on the internet) – that funny, warm and witty ‘staying on the message repetitions’ can be counterproductive -(if they are not as cute as cat or dog pictures) – and please excuse the cynicism – but as Trump completely destroyed himself -(thank’s god) – the most joy a lot of readers now get from reading comment sections on the internet – is commenters deconstructing themselves -(especially if it is done in a ‘creative’ way) – and why would you save such commenters from themselves?

basil: “Even the most excessive bloviators and trolls want an audience and should, I think, be saddened to read that there’s many who’re put off participating.”

I wonder if that’s true. I’d like to think so, but I doubt it.

Lynne, without having given it a whole lot of thought, I think a vaguely democratic approach might be to:

– have an open, egalitarian discussion of the problems different members of the community are facing
– agree on a clear statement of them and a new policy to address them
– enforce it first of all by pointing out violations, then by escalating sanctions in a way that is transparent to the community rather than arbitrary and secretive

I’m sure that could be improved upon but it’s already a pretty stark contrast to what’s being done imo.

@Guy Harris: ‘what is a “front page poster”? ‘

See the list of “Contributors” in the right margin of every CT page.

William Berry:

@Guy Harris: ‘what is a “front page poster”? ‘
See the list of “Contributors” in the right margin of every CT page.

I.e., it’s a longer way of saying “contributor”. OK.

engels@163:
“have an open, egalitarian discussion of the problems different members of the community are facing”

But the problem they are trying to solve (as far as I understood it) is mainly how to make an “open egalitarian discussion” possible (and maybe how to attract and retain new commenters)

Manta #165: “deemed a “dumpster fire”… the OP started with some unspoken assumptions and went from there, while many commenters strongly disagreed with and about those assumptions”

Not sure I understand this. There are ways to disagree without the hypothesis that the other side is Evil (#128).

Meanwhile, the current Comments policy already forbids “advocating that women are inferior to men and should not have be given the right to vote” (your example #128) in the third sentence of the policy, “If your comments are blatantly racist, sexist or homophobic we will delete them and ban you from the site.”

I think there are only about 10 people who regularly engage in destructive, annoying and/or obsessive behavior, and maybe another 10 who do so from time to time. (Add to that 2-3 OPs). It’s really not very hard to identify them, so why not save yourself a lot of trouble and put them into auto-moderation now. Or do so immediately the next time they fight dirty. You can always lift this restriction once they play nice (and of course add new offenders). I think moderation for every poster is neither fair nor feasible.

engels @ 164 I agree with your point three, as I’ve already said. I do think there is a need for some change: do you? I think your first point would be interesting, but since this is a private blog with guidelines already, I can see why the posters didn’t do that. I tend to think this two-week period of everyone-in-moderation is probably an experiment, and will be so much work that the bloggers will do something different at that point.

Collin, I think a lot of people here have been abusive because this has in fact almost always been tolerated. Most people can refrain from that, but won’t necessarily if they don’t have to, because they derive pleasure from being snotty.

Collin Street, but is anyone complaining about people posting useless shit? I see complaints about a particular social dynamic that has developed amongst a few people on a few specific topics.

Thanks engels, interesting that you have picked people who have crossed swords so much (well I haven’t with RNB, I agreed with or at least saw his point of view most of the time, even though not agreeing with the mode of delivery) – I guess if we all had a chance to put our respective views without fighting it might be much better! However I should put something on my own blog really – I have a bit but not in depth really- about some of the contentious issues, such as why I think patriarchy is an important category of analysis that is generally overlooked on ‘mainstream’ blogs such as this.

It would be a lot of work and possibly people could get a lot of it from Wikipedia if interested (I’ve looked at Wikipedia on patriarchy, it’s not too bad) but I have often thought even a time line covering things like monotheistic patriarchal religions, couverture, married women’s property acts, rape in marriage laws, proportions of women in parliament etc would be useful – stuff that I would think most people here would be aware of in a general sense, but not necessarily front of mind. Anyway that’s just musings but it would be useful to refer to in discussions of how the history of patriarchy affects contemporary ideology and epistemology I guess.

No, I was being serious. I think you’ve all got interesting ideas and lines of critique which aren’t touched on by the OPs and probably wouldn’t be heard here if you weren’t around. It would be good to see them presented in a more structured and self-standing way, and in a more respectful environment (assuming you were able to moderate your own posts or have someone sympathetic moderate them).

Of course the ‘libertarian’ rejoinder would be ‘put it on your own blog’. I find that glib because those blogs don’t have the same networks of readers and commenters CT has (and part of the reason CT has those networks is because of the informal labour of its commenters over the years…)

Kidneystones, apologies for misunderstanding you. I think ‘notables of international stature’ is setting the bar a little high—despite having a high opinion of our hosts, I don’t think it’s true of all of them, and personally I wouldn’t want it to be. If you do want to invite a (relatively) well-known (and very interesting) academic I’d vote for JW Mason, who commented here anonymously for many years.

The fact that ‘your house, your rules’ could be uncritically and even joyously accepted by most members …

In no way was this assertion made ‘joyously’ by me (can’t/won’t speak for derrida derider).

If I don’t like the results of this policy, I will (regretfully) stop coming. Last I checked this wasn’t an anarcho-syndicalist commune, and frankly I don’t have the time to participate in one (other might -good luck to them).

People put time and effort into blogging here – I like reading their posts and participating in the comments. How they want to run the place is their business.

So far, the moderation is…curious. My comment made here by mistake, mentioning Le Guin and intended for a different post, was approved. My followup comment apologizing and explaining for that comment, not approved. My comment for the “secret masters of fandom” post was approved quickly. My utterly innocuous comment for the “mystery behind a group of electoral maps” post is still in moderation after at least six hours; a later comment for that post has meanwhile been approved. Commenting here looks like it will be a haphazard and unpredictable process.

Val,

I haven’t read any Marilyn Waring (tho’ had heard the name via her well-publicised views on government census & official statistics etc), but another feminist economist well worth reading is Nancy Folbre, e.g. her overview of the history of economic thought, Greed Lust & Gender. I do think it would be good if the Crooked Timber management invited you to write a guest contribution from time to time.

Also second the suggestion that occasional commenter JW Mason be invited to contribute, though he does have his own blog that economists at least might be aware of.

More generally, a new CT commenting policy is worth trying as an experiment, but I tend to be pessimistic about the future of commenting in websites with large readerships. Sometimes I think there needs to be an equivalent of a “Tobin tax” to inject a bit of sand into the gears.

I read CT (I subscribe via RSS feed). I sometimes skim the comments and rarely comment. (I have often seen that my comments have been moderated for multiple days such that people responding to the most recent comments probably don’t see mine.) I rarely come here for the comments. I’ve guest posted a few times. I post under my own wallet name but am a supporter of commenters’ ability to use persistent pseudonyms particularly in systems where it’s easy to look at a commenter’s comment history.

I’m super glad that the people who run this blog are trying out mod-everything-by-default. I often have found comment threads here unattractively replete with tedious bad-faith arguing.

I like it when a range of potential kinds of conversations is possible, like sharing of personal experiences, teaching each other, persuading each other, and more. I don’t think “people agreeing” equals “boring”. As a MetaFilter commenter said, “I guess if you go looking for some kind of debate in every single thread you pop into, it can be pretty disappointing to see people just, you know, *talking* about the subject at hand.” That comment is pretty interesting and you should consider reading it.

Thanks again, CT bloggers. I hope the new policy helps you feel more welcomed, more motivated, and more supported.

+1 JanieM (and good to see you). I just clicked through to Sumana’s link. ‘Just talking’ isn’t the only kind of ideal thread out there, but it describes the ones I’ve learnt most from and changed or enriched my thinking on the topic at hand.

In so many ways, and ever more as I get older, I object to the idea – so thoroughly woven through our culture and especially prevalent online – that the only noble activity in life is convincing other people to see it your way.

Could you point to one comment out of the previous 190 that you interpret as advancing the point of view that ‘the only noble activity in life is convincing other people to see it your way’?

For the record, I agree that not ‘everything should be a debate’. I could be mistaken but just had a quick look at the six threads on the front page prior to this post (and the change in policy)—only one in fact appears to me be a debate.

PS. I think one idiosyncrasy of CT is the way the blog jumbles about four categories of threads initiated a dozen different people. Roughly speaking: politics, academic, personal and open threads. Very different norms are appropriate for each and some of the friction has been a result of crossed wires about which is which. It is perhaps reasonable to eject someone from a personal thread if you don’t like them for example; it isn’t in a politics discussion; it’s reasonable to restrict contributions to an academic discussion to those who have the necessary understanding of the subject; it isn’t for an open thread; etc. Distinguishing them more explicitly from each other and the kind of behaviour expected for each might be an idea worth considering. Just a thought.

RINO economist – thank you. I will also add Nancy Folbre to my reading list. Btw is RINO in your nym an acronym for ‘Republican in name only’ (I googled it)? As an Australian/non-American I find some things about your political culture strange and intriguing …

Sumana H – I also clicked on the thread you linked to and found it interesting. There was one comment from a guy talking about how he’d sometimes like to just say what he thought/felt and that too much internal filtering made comments like processed cheese, that made me think about ‘freedom to’ and ‘freedom from’. A lot of concerns expressed about moderation are about freedom to – like that guy’s comment – but what I’ve been experiencing at CT since the moderation change is ‘freedom from’ which isn’t talked about so much, but I’m really enjoying it.

I was experiencing so much misrepresentation and personal insults that I was getting quite anxious here. I didn’t want to stop commenting because that seems like being chased out of public spaces, but I was feeling anxious and a bit depressed about the seemingly endless denigration and misrepresentation. Knowing that it is very unlikely to happen under the current moderation does give me a real sense of freedom. All I need to do now is try to ensure that I stick by the rules (knowing that I too don’t always do the right thing), rather than either continually trying to defend myself against unfair attacks or giving up altogether. It’s liberating.

Get rid of the rugby match and turn it into a quilting bee.

Oh wow that sounds AMAZING. I would love that! I literally just two days ago got out my sewing machine and remembered how to thread the lower bobbin (with help from online videos). A friend came over and we worked on sewing projects together and helped each other out. I have never been to a quilting bee but I am super jazzed about the idea of working on my own patch of stuff, and connecting it to other people’s work in a collaborative environment, and teaching each other, and showing off the cool stuff we’ve made, and maybe even having some friendly competition about, like, stitches-per-inch or fancy designs. And people can come in and out, form “teams” or not, and you get to know people by making stuff together. How awesome that sounds!

Well now I can’t post at all it seems. No explanation. No moderation message. Nothing.

I like the irony of engels demanding who JanieM has in mind as being all obsessed with conflict as the essence of commenting and then immediately Bob shows up to act conflict as the essence of commenting.

JanieM: Good to see your handle again, and to see great comments under it.

Of course the bloggers do this for free, its not a business like a restaurant is. But in public spaces in real life often people have ID or you can identify them by their faces.

Speaking of sewing bees, I have fond memories of evenings crocheting while friends did their own handwork—crocheting, sewing, knitting, cutwork. And once we were making an afghan for charity (details are hazy), so many women knit or crocheted squares, and I was one of the people crocheting the squares together—a challenge!

Thanks Lyn, I was thinking about it today and about the fact that I’m readily identifiable, and how I’d feel if my students read that stuff. I remember another thread when I had just started teaching in the climate change and health unit and there were some people on CT suggesting that I didn’t really understand climate change and was just interested in individualistic solutions and virtue signalling. I think I lost it a bit in that case, but it was humiliating to think of my students potentially reading that stuff.

Anyway I think I’ve probably talked about this enough at present, but it does reinforce the issues around vulnerabilities in commenting under a real name. I don’t know if I’d do that again, but I feel it should be possible.

(Come to think of it, in ten years of commenting I don’t think I have once suggested that any of the OPs suffered from a ‘character flaw’ or ‘moral deficiency’… But yeah—like Lupita, Bob, Basil, Dax, Landru and others, I’ll take a break.)

Evidently, engels had made a number of objectionable comments in this thread, which had gotten pre-moderated out. This resulted in complaints from engels that his comments were getting blocked. engels apparently lacked the self-awareness to realize he was enacting the very behavior under discussion here. He didn’t get it. I would guess he gets it now.

No that isn’t what happened—they never went into moderation, just vanished, and were less ‘objectionable’ than the one that went though.

> I would guess he gets it now.

You can’t introspect your way to correctness, at least not reliably enough for it to be worth the effort: no matter how many times you think about it you’ll come to the same answers, whether they’re right or wrong, and nothing about “thinking it over again” will flag the conclusions that are errors.

Which means: to work out what your mistakes are you need the help of other people. But what if you don’t listen to other people?

[most of “intelligence” is learned skill, not talent]

“Get rid of the rugby match and turn it into a quilting bee.”

I have no interest in rugby matches *or* quilting bees, in real life, or metaphorically in comment threads. I dislike attempts to “win” by making personal attacks on others, then whining when they respond, and other such tactics. I don’t have much interest in comments that only agree with other comments; too often such agreement amounts to “yes, is horrible”. I like discussions that challenge me to think more about the topic, and to come up with substantive reasons for my opinions. I don’t like arguments from anecdote about claims for which there is data.

engels, I could see why you would be flattered, but I am not following you. I read the thread and you are in it. You are the only one, I believe, who earned an explicit call-out from one of the moderators. The call-out was something worthy, I thought, of comment in itself – because of what it suggests for the policy, not because of you. I looked back over your comments in this thread. In 131, you say that two more comments in addition to the first have gone missing. And then in 191 claimed another, which you reposted within another comment. In 204, you said you couldn’t post at all. In 213, you claimed about 30% of your comments had been rejected. That’s why I thought it was more than one comment you were complaining about. Presumably “disappeared from moderation” is what is supposed to happen under this policy when a comment is rejected, maybe immediately if the moderator is reading as it is posted. I wouldn’t expect the moderators to just keep it in “awaiting moderation” indefinitely.

Shorter dax: “It’s fine to question the worth of more than half of humanity, so long as you’re polite about it. And women who comment at CT are obliged to take such an assertion seriously, rather than object to it as the bigoted garbage it is.”

I simply can’t imagine why more women don’t comment here. I suppose you’d be okay with dragging the “human biodiversity” sewage in as well, so long as it were argued “civilly”?

As for any dude here about to start harrumphing about “defending unpopular opinions” or “challenging the status quo” or “echo chambers” — the alleged inferiority of women is the status quo, and it is far from an unpopular opinion.

I’d also like to say I’m surprised that John Holbo is stomping on engels, and if indeed engels has written a lot of offensive comments in this thread, I haven’t seen them (presumably they’ve been modded out). The one JH earmarked sounded to me like exasperation after many of his comments didn’t appear.

If you would prefer commenters not opine about your moderating experiment, maybe you should close the thread.

Since my comment is still in moderation, maybe I can edit it?
If so, this is definitely an advantage of the new policy: comment editing!
Here is the new (and hopefully improved) version:

I don’t understand if the aim of the new comment policy is more politeness towards each other, or if Origami@224 and engels (@27 and others) are right, and its aim is mainly to restrict the range of allowed opinions.

I don’t understand if the aim of the new comment policy is more politeness towards each other, or if Origami@224 and engels (@27 and others) are right, and its aim is mainly to restrict the range of allowed opinions.

To be clear, I don’t think that’s the aim (at least for most people, Sumana and a few others above seem keen on their not being disagreements in future) but I think it will inevitably be used that way in the heat of an argument and will also deter people who are of a different political persuasion to the OPs from commenting in the first place, because getting into a debate with someone on these terms is a mug’s game.

Anyway, I think it’s quite clear at this point that none of those exercising this power will be drawn into any kind of discussion of it (apart from a few paragraphs of parenthetical snark from Holbo–participatory democracy FTW!) so I’ll leave it there.

Lynne,

“This is the perfect time to highlight what someone said upthread, which is that posts by women seem to regularly attract a high degree of hostility, which I would imagine is indeed exhausting as well as disheartening to moderate. I miss Belle’s posts, and Tedra’s, and if this reality has anything to do with their not posting so much, it is indeed a shame (though I assume they are also busy with other things).”

I agree with this, and also miss Belle’s and Tedra’s posts. I thought Tedra got a really hard time from people actually sometimes when she used to post. Belle gets a hard time as well but I do miss her comebacks almost as much as her posts I have to say, now she isn’t posting as frequently.

I like engels and hope he keeps commenting, he isn’t that offensive but he is a stirrer, I think John Holbo maybe just got fed up

I also mentioned above a technique John Quiggin has on his blog, which is running open threads that he can move arguments and commenters too. I think this works really well on his blog, and also means commenters don’t feel shut down as much as if they are just told to stop commenting on the thread. He just says X and Y take your argument to the open thread please.

At obsidisianwings we used to make one day bans fairly frequently, with a quick note about why the ban happened and discussion about the ban happening only via email to the moderators. We didn’t have serious problems except during the last presidential election (Obama II).

I agree that we haven’t gotten it right yet and would be in favor of things like open threads that function as a kind of curse wall if people feel the need to yell about something other people are using their inside voices to discuss in some other thread.

The Kafkaesque moderation mechanism, such as it is, is purely a function of which CT author is awake and checking the comments at the moment. I suppose we have different ideas, we CT’ers, so that isn’t exactly a recipe for consistency.

“This is the perfect time to highlight what someone said upthread, which is that posts by women seem to regularly attract a high degree of hostility, which I would imagine is indeed exhausting as well as disheartening to moderate. I miss Belle’s posts, and Tedra’s, and if this reality has anything to do with their not posting so much, it is indeed a shame (though I assume they are also busy with other things).”

I don’t intend to pick on Lynn specifically, because I always enjoy Lynn’s comments. But this really doesn’t seem true to me. The posters who have received the most abuse (rightly, a lot of the time) seem to be male (dsquared, Corey). The main poster whose threads often go most off topic (encouraged by him, mostly) is John holbo. Female posters might get certain types of hostility (specifically the “why are you posting about x when there are people starving in the world”, x generally being a “feminist related” issue ) buy I don’t think they get more hostility , on average.
Indeed I don’t think the posters get more abuse and condescension than the commenters(for example, since the new guidelines we’ve had a clearly good faith interjection by a commenter on another thread get written off as “classic mansplaining”), so I’m not really buying the premise of the OP and following comments anyway. (I also don’t buy engels overwrought theorizing about the decline of participatory democracy in comment threads, but that’s a different story)

To back up a bit, to a claim made above about the treatment Val received on other threads. What happened in that case was that arguments made in support of a position (ie that the threat from trump was overstated) were responded to with ad hominems (white male privilege etc). This is a common enough theme among liberals these days, to imply (or outright state) that someone’s position (no matter how coherent or well supported) is a result of their x,y and z privilege, not the fact that they’ve thought about the issue and come to a different conclusion. This is exasperating and extremely patronising. The responses by some commenters to this line of argument was to show how easily it could be reversed(I’m.a Jew, you’re making arguments that could be construed as dealing in anti Semitic tropes, therefore you’re driven by anti semitism). So I think this is a two way street, tbh
People(myself most certainly included) tend to overestimate the insightfulness of their contributions and how civil they are. There can also be a thin line between being perceived to be talking down to someone and genuinely trying to make a point/ask a question that might (to others) seem trivial, hostile etc. I don’t know how you counter that. I personally find a lot of liberal rhetoric(not necessarily here) incredibly patronising (either stating banal points as incredible insights or asking you to engage in an unreasonable, quasi religious, amount of self reflection/or engage in group apology rituals to cleanse yourself of the sin of having a slightly different viewpoint ). This is good for creating group solidarity and policing group boundaries, but less for engaging in a conversation (and I.assume most of us aren’t looking to join a cult) And there are quite clearly OPs which are more or less designed to get a hostile, or at least spirited, reaction. The fish does rot from the head, (as a literal matter. As an analogy, you could say it rots from the head 50% of the time)
So , imo, everyone, not just the usual suspects, could afford to not to think more highly of himself than he ought. As the bible says.

Oh, and thanks for the kind words, Ronan.

Just to be clear: I have indeed just stopped turning on comments for this thread, be they of whatever quality. An eight hour cooling off period, let’s say, after which Chris – author of the OP, hence proprietor – may announce last call. Or turn on your comments and let y’all hash it out. I leave it to him. I’m gonna go off now and learn a Father John Misty song. Seems the right thing to do.