Tony Hung argues very cogently that what’s really needed is a comments policy, not a code of conduct, but I think he’s missed the point. If you want to maintain the moral highground when you censor people who have got out of line in your comments section, particularly if you are in an argument with them at the time, or have a “history” with them, then it’s very handy to be able to point to a code that applies not only to them, but to you, and not just when you’re in the comments section. Otherwise you’re clearly at an unfair advantage. If when you point to these “principles” you can also point to the fact that a fair old number of people have subscribed to exactly the same principles, and that they were arrived at by a consensus process, then that defintely increases the height of your moral highground.
Whereas if you have a comments policy that doesn’t apply to you or your blog posts, that somewhat lowers it.
And the ability to censor people who have got out of line is the point. If you have no code of conduct or comments policy, then what are you going to do when someone posts something appalling? You either engage in ad-hoc censorship or you make up a policy in the heat of the moment (looks bad!) or if you’ve totally rejected the idea of censoring comments and it’s gotten out of hand then you might have to shut the whole blog down (as happened with Meankids and unclebobisms, which started this whole mess).
In general I see no reason that there shouldn’t be some shared principles out there that I can point to rather than having to point to my own. If there’s a badge (but the sheriff’s badge is awful, Tim, sorry) that makes it easy for commenters to spot the principles of my blogging and comments section, then all the better - just like the Creative Commons for copyright. I’m not expecting anyone come in and *enforce* anything on me, but then I wouldn’t choose to subscribe to a set of principles that I disagreed with, so if I transgress then I’ll withdraw and apologise. There are people out there who refuse to apologise for anything they’ve said, but I’m not one of them - I think if you can’t admit when you’re wrong, then people aren’t going to trust you when you claim that you’re right. More importantly, how are you going to trust yourself?
4 comments ↓
Interesting thoughts Seth, although I’m not of the opinion that deleting comments should be a moral issue — which obviates the need for taking a moral high ground on anything.
As I said in my own post, everyone has their own internal thermostat for what’s tolerable; since its their own blog, they’re welcome to set it at whatever they please.
As long as you’re consistent with what rules you’ve set out for comments, I don’t think it should be a problem enforcing it — which makes it particularly important, if you *are* going to enforce it, to state those rules publicly.
And as for it applying to comments and not posts, I suppose you’re right about that; however, its hard to imagine that someone would say “no racist or abusive comments”, and then turn around and write something racist or abusive in their posts.
I’m not sure if their audience would tolerate that kind of incongruency — nor, if the author decided to violate the spirit and letter of his own stated comments policy in writing comments of his own.
Cheers
t @ dji
I would say that most bloggers are well capable of handling any issue in their comments with relative ease. They soon enough figure out whether they need a comments policy, and in any case usually act in an appropriate fashion such that they don’t lose the respect of their audience, or at least that they keep the bits of their audience that they want to keep.
The question is whether it would be useful to create some shared policy that would help boggers deal with the edge cases that can be unpleasant and time consuming. What I’m hearing from the blogosphere is that any such move smacks of rampant conformity, censorship, and authoritarianism, and should be avoided at all costs.
The problem is that it’s difficult to figure out whether they’re against Tim’s suggested rules, Tim himself for being arrogant enough to suggest them, the very concept of shared codes of conduct, or all three (I think it’s the latter in most cases)
Here’s the endorsement Tim O’Reilly gave my contribution:
“Jon, your post at Comment Management Responsibility: A Proposal is very detailed and thought provoking, as well as way more comprehensive than anything I’d thought so far. You’ve broken things down with a lot of detail about assertions a blogger might want to make about his or her comment policy.”
Thought it might interest you as well.
Hi Jon, yep, I think you’ve done an excellent job of teasing apart the issues, and you’re clearly a thought leader on this. I will link to to it in my next post about it.
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