Comments Require Registration
August 12th, 2007Behind the scenes, there are problems with trolls/idiots/lunatics. Most people don’t abuse open comment systems, but this isn’t about most people.
I never intended comments to become a vector for trolls/idiots/lunatics to spread their rat poison, but that’s what they’re trying to do here. Filtering this nonsense out has been requiring more time lately. I need to get it under control.
If you have something to say that substantially adds to the understanding of a post, by all means, submit it. Those are the only comments that will appear from now on.
I actually read an excellent argument for turning comments off:
Even if you never read a single thing Dave Winer wrote in his 439 years of blogging, it’s worth taking time to study his ideas about comments on blogs (he doesn’t allow them).
“…to the extent that comments interfere with the natural expression of the unedited voice of an individual, comments may act to make something not a blog…. The cool thing about blogs is that while they may be quiet, and it may be hard to find what you’re looking for, at least you can say what you think without being shouted down. This makes it possible for unpopular ideas to be expressed. And if you know history, the most important ideas often are the unpopular ones…. That’s what’s important about blogs, not that people can comment on your ideas. As long as they can start their own blog, there will be no shortage of places to comment.”
The important thing to notice here is that Dave does not see blog comments as productive to the free exchange of ideas. They are a part of the problem, not the solution. You don’t have a right to post your thoughts at the bottom of someone else’s thoughts. That’s not freedom of expression, that’s an infringement on their freedom of expression. Get your own space, write compelling things, and if your ideas are smart, they’ll be linked to, and Google will notice, and you’ll move up in PageRank, and you’ll have influence and your ideas will have power.
When a blog allows comments right below the writer’s post, what you get is a bunch of interesting ideas, carefully constructed, followed by a long spew of noise, filth, and anonymous rubbish that nobody … nobody … would say out loud if they had to take ownership of their words.
So, we’ll see how this goes.
First Post under new facist regime!
But seriously. i think this is good. keeps the riff raff out. And also makes it that much easier for the shock troops to prosecute you for your comments when his isp gets raided and turns over their records.
P.
And perhaps, under the circumstances, registration requires a comment…
I can’t agree more with Mr. Winer and his perspective on the standard addendum dangling largely useless beneath the vast majority of online forums, from the good ol’ days of burning Usenet bandwidth in pre-chat era “posting storms” to the contemporary Blog-O-Sphere.
Under the right (read: controlled) circumstances the owner/moderator can cultivate that elusive Internet buzzword of the late 90’s, a “community of ideas”. Most of the time, however, it’s not much more than the proverbial social onion. An outer orbit — or several, if a famous or popular source — of loosely affiliated individials, surrounding a stinky cloud of those not (yet) admitted to the inner circle of true sychophants.
Found myself in and out of “inner circles” more than once over the years, including one surrounding a dinosaur era band of some musical repute. Now you want a CLOSE-UP look at a grouup of sychophants, cozy up to the fans of any fair musical group and get out your perspex.
Outside these all-too-familiar addled realms of misplaced hero worship, there do exist small spaces where intelligent input catalyzes, triggers and condenses ideas in such a way as to attract self same out of the ether — and here we shake hands with fellows like Sheldrake.
There’s still wiggle room for such a space here Kevin, here in the narrowest section of Comment Canyon. Such a role will always require hands-on moderation, but there do remain the occasional rewards of insight, fellowship, wisdom and even (very rarely) actual friendship.
Good move.
Its a shame people just can’t behave themselves sometimes. Great site BTW.
Kev, I agree the registration probably is a good idea to keep out the garbage & the weirdos
Wow. I love the little secure intro screen with the “w” on it. I feel like I am getting into a secret secure site with hidden information about the government and stuff.
Actually, I wouldn’t have told anyone I was changing it. I would have changed it and let people come up with guesses as to what was actually happening.
That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard… only joking. I always thought comments were a bit of a dead end, but it’s also useful to preserve the potentialities for social synergy the interweb provides. So yeah, just put up whichever comments you like. You could even be like Joe Bageant and just exegesise on other people’s emails instead of bothering to write your own posts. It reminds me a bit of what Hakim Bey says in Immediacy:
“So the modern Tong cannot be elitist – but there’s no reason it can’t be choosy. Many non-authoritarian organizations have foundered on the dubious principle of open membership, which frequently leads to preponderance of assholes, yahoos, spoilers, whining neurotics, & police agents. If a Tong is organized around a special interest (especially an illegal or risky or margin interest) it certainly has the right to compose itself according to the ‘affinity group” principle. If secrecy means (a) avoiding publicity & (b) vetting possible members, the “secret society” can scarcely be accused of violating anarchist principles. In fact, such societies have a long & honorable history in the antiauthoritarian movement, from Proudhon’s dream of re-animating the Holy Vehm as a kind of ‘People’s Justice’, to Bakunin’s various schemes, to Durutti’s ‘Wanderers.’ We ought not to allow Marxist historians to convince us that such expedients are ‘primitive’ & have therefore been left behind by ‘History.’ The absoluteness of ‘History’ is at best a dubious proposition. We are not interested in a return to the primitive, but in a return OF the primitive, inasmuch as the primitive is the ‘repressed.'”
You know, I have mixed feelings about the issue of responses. First, if you’re only posting your thoughts then a Blog becomes nothing more than an online diary, a vain personal kvetch, a sandbox of one. But on the other side you have debate, and where one voice sharpens the other so your arguments can be refined or shown to be faulty. That, if all participants were mature, would be the best path. The former I simply don’t understand because there just is too much damn hard work put into it these things to only hear ones self. And that’s coming from a guy who has set up several forum systems with countless folks bitching at each other so I know from experience.