Please Read The Comments

That lifeguard cartoon… Ugh. Good moderation improves the signal/noise moderation. Sadly, too many moderated communities get hijacked by a wilfully ignorant majority who use it to censor any form of dissent, respectful or otherwise.

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Mary Elizabeth Williams (and most of Salon) is famous for showing enormous disrespect in her columns to groups of people she dislikes. Then she faints at the comments she receives.

Anil Dash may be a great guy, but he too frequently shows enormous disrespect to people, than he tells us a good community needs heavy handed moderation.

My own experience is that in the best online communities, very light moderation is what is needed. What is fundamentally important is that the blogger interacts, respectfully, with the commentariat in the comments.

GOOD communities are interactive conversations with dissenting, but respectful opinions. In those communities, group norms keep abuse to a minimum, and violators are often chastised and dealt with by members of the community who would otherwise agree with the violator.

BAD communities form when people are spoken down to, and then abused. And that explains the Salon experience.

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I finally have a good reason to use Discourse!

But I think that putting a barrier between your content and the comments (and it’s a somewhat significant barrier: not only it requires you to go to another website, you have to LOG IN (Oh, the horror!) on it) is kind of contradictory with your argument on how important comments are. If they are really a continuation of the conversation started by the post, doesn’t make more sense to have this conversation actually happening on the same page?

I think it is great that we are making strides in online discussions like this. When I make a comment, I want to be heard, so thinking that the content creator is just ignoring comments is a sad thing to imagine. I believe it is the content creator’s desire to foster relationships, so it is extremely important to listen as much as they speak. What is great now, is that the community can deal with abusive users rather than putting that responsibility on the content creator’s shoulders. Now they can focus on the content AND fostering discussion; i.e. building relationships. This is very exciting!

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I am not sure I agree here. In general communities are destroyed by lack of moderation, not too much moderation.

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I talked a bit about this here: Commenting powered by Discourse

Only minor point of disagreement I have with @codinghorror is that I think he should be including the full blog post content on the Discourse side, to make it easier to quote and comment on the blog post. Really hate having to windows open.

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If there was a wordpress plugin, I would try it. Is there one? Will there be one?

Oh, I’m not disagreeing necessarily, just lamenting the fact that communities tend to devolve into complete pits of horror with too little moderation or successful islands of groupthink with moderation. There are just too few good moderators.

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There is! GitHub - discourse/wp-discourse: WordPress plugin that lets you use Discourse as the community engine for a WordPress blog

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You do want some “toddler sized” barriers in front of commenting. Otherwise you get an influx of the bored people who really don’t care about your community or anyone there. Commenting – and joining communities – should be a little bit of work to keep out the people who don’t care.

Examples?

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One of the reasons I’ve been paying attention to the Discourse project from early on (aside from my professional interest in Ruby, Rails, and Javascript applications) is because I agree with the basic premise that the only viable online community is a moderated one, and it looked like Discourse would provide good tools for that. Also because forum software in general has long-needed a kick in the tuchus!

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That’s a good argument. Please wait while I think harder to find a reason to disagree.

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@k_stricker I’m going to be a contrarian here for a moment, and suggest that a community doesn’t have to allow dissent if it doesn’t want to. This is, IMO, one of the fallacies of the modern Western world, that all discourse (pun not intended) must be open and free and allow all points of view. Many discussions are better that way, but “better” does not equate to “necessary”.

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I already have half-a-million tabs open at any given time. What’s one more? :smile:

I agree that not every discussion has two sides. When discussing discrimination against black people, “they deserve it because black people are stupid” is certainly NOT a valid point that should be allowed in the conversation.

But censoring contrary opinions is not a way of enriching any discussion. It is rather a way of letting people with similar views to just keep agreeing with each other, without being ever exposed to a different point of view. I think some balance and diversity of opinions is necessary in almost every discussion, so, if anything, we are erring on the better side.

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An internet full of echo chambers of different stripes confirming and validating their hostility toward those who disagree with them isn’t really a healthy or desirable thing either.

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I think very few discussions have two sides. And way too many discussions have a bunch of internet commenters whose interest is not in contributing to the discussion that is desired. For your example, you’re likely to get a bunch of “there is no such thing as racsim” and “racism doesn’t exist any more” comments, plus inevitably “I’m a white dude and someone was racist to me”. None of them are “the other side” that you mention, and they simply don’t have any place in a discussion of discrimination against black people. Anyone taking part has already heard those comments, probably multiple times.

The question I want asked is “does this comment help the discussion?” If the answer is no, the comment should be deleted or at least moved to a different thread.

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Selective quoting appears to be broken, and “sorry, new users cannot upload images”

I also can only add three replies. So I’m editing in my reply: Firefox 27.01 on Win8.1. Interestingly I’m now seeing just the selective quote. It appears to be a timed “full view”, which (obviously) I found confusing.

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Selective quoting should work. What browser, version, and OS?

New users are prevented from posting images by default, yes. There is a bit of new user sandboxing. Spend some time reading topics here and that restriction is automatically lifted.

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I really like the downvote options on SO/SE sites, and think they add a lot to comment threads too. And I’m not convinced that replying to every single idiotic post with a reasoned explanation of why it’s a bad post is going to work. I mean, this post has a bunch of stupid “first!!” comments at the top. Should I reply to those explaining why I think that habit is a bad one that lowers the value of every comment thread that it infects? Would that really help fix the problem? I’d love to see the statistics behind your affirmative answer.

And I second the “great, you just doubled the number of tabs I have open” problem. The lack of any connection between the two windows is especially annoying if I open a tab or two while reading the post, then open a tab to add a comment. I suspect that hurdle is intentional, you’re trying to discourage comments unless they’re worth the extra hassle. Not convinced (having recently enabled disqus and jumped through their hoops to comment on a different site, that’s something I will very rarely do - the little “click to let disqus track you” button effectively hides the comments entirely).