It’s good that you’re acknowledging that risk, but you should recognize that your actual blog post trivializes the issue. You write (primarily) about software, and you’re recognizably part of a privileged majority culture, so generally speaking, the comments on your blog are not going to be the of the “frequently misogynistic, homophobic, racist” variety that the anti-comment-reading movement is trying to avoid. (Or at least, the comments will be less vitriolic and hateful, and you personally will be a less frequent target.) The point is that in your case, poor comment quality may only amount to “so many pesky words,” but your view that this is a useful or accurate summary of the state of all unhealthy commenting communities is essentially blinkered and myopic.
I was curious if it would ever be possible to claim post we made prior to the conversion, but after looking at some of the post from my alter ego @jamesm I’m not sure I want to. There are a few of those attributed to me I doubt I would write on my worst day. One in particular manages to be both more intelligent and more crudely vulgar than I can claim to be. (ok I can by that crude and vulgar, but I’m generally not in internet discussions) And quite a few covering areas of knowledge I don’t have. I’d prefer not to take credit for either the good or that bad that isn’t mine.
Is it possible that the conversion combine any post from a user with the name James M* into one user? I know all to well that James Morgan is a common enough name that you might have more than one that has commented in the past, but that seems unlikely.
@VenTatsu, see this meta post:
http://discourse.codinghorror.com/t/how-do-i-claim-my-old-coding-horror-comments-account/1442
Actual human “moderation” is bad, because far too often moderators are on power trips, and there’s no higher authority to appeal to when a moderator is being an asshole. I had that problem a few times on boingboing (Discourse), which is why I don’t bother with them any more. So I wouldn’t say Discourse has improved this situation so far.
What is needed is a user reputation system.
Digg v3 was the only good comment system I’ve ever used, at least having upvotes and downvotes let you read only the best comments, and never see the stupid ones. I miss Digg v3.
You shouldn’t have to delete them. With a reputation system in place, people would know that “first” posts would get them downvotes.
If you don’t like quotes in a flat discussion system… you’re gonna have a bad time. Did you ever notice that my blog posts have quotes in them? They do!
Every blog of a certain size is a de-facto community. If you have 20+ regulars showing up and hanging around for just about every blog post, you have a community. For smaller blogs, that might not be true. Of course it depends what your goals are.
It has been improved, but will never be a full-bore embedding scenario. It’s more of a “here are my latest tweets!” or “here is the latest RSS!” panel. An observation window.
See this meta post.
Where did I say that? I don’t think I ever said that. I refer you to the official Discourse guidelines that ship with every Discourse instance
Downvotes have no place in systems of discussion based on opinion. They should be flagged, sure.
The knock on libertarians shows a lack of understanding of what libertarianism is about. Libertarians uses the non-aggression principle as its basis with a strong belief in property rights. So, if someone wants to moderate their comments they can, its their blog, its their property. If someone doesn’t want to moderate comments then that’s OK, it’s their property. Libertarianism recognizes the the plurality of society and has a live and let live attitude within the bounds of NAP/property rights. And when I say live and let live I am not saying that means people can’t suggest to one another better ways to behave/live/act, as long as they don’t go out of the bounds of NAP/property rights.
I like Stack Overflow but its communities has serious problems with the moderators and the way it is set up. Michael Richter articulated it best - you might have to visit the googled cached version, it seems his website was down.
Indeed, good point, I updated the graph with the proper attribution link.
Well that was the point I was making, flat discussion is not very good in my opinion (too little offtopic, confusing, hard to follow a single person train of thought). On the other hand the threading model of slashdot is not that much better either (too much offtopic). I was hoping for something better when I first heard of Discourse. Quoting works for blogs because you can easily follow the full train of thought of a single person (the blogger).
Although I have to say that Discourse implementation of quoting is superb, you can open the full post for each quote which is an exceptional feature that any discussion with quoting should have. But if you plan to go ahead with it you should allow recursive quoting like I tried to do here (and failed).
When I first head of Discourse I was hoping something new, something better. What I see is a very good implementation of classic forum-like discussion boards.
Also I suggest you make your own icons, I am tired of seeing font-awesome everywhere (said by someone who uses font-awesome extensively in his own projects). Do it or go fa fa-home.
It seems to me to be fairly clearly implied throughout your post, but I think I misunderstood the particular sentence I quoted about “pesky words.” I thought you were referring to “poor” comments being “so many pesky words,” but now I realize that may have just been a humorous way to transition to the little “esteem for humanity” graph.
I still think, however, that you are unfairly downplaying (or perhaps merely underestimating) the negative aspects of abusive comments. For instance, in what might be considered your thesis paragraph, you say:
The emphasis, of course, is mine. “Noise” is the only negative aspect of comments that you explicitly acknowledge. I generally dislike the term “privilege” (and the related phrase “check your privilege”) in this sort of context, but I can’t shake the feeling that your stance on the “don’t read the comments” issue is inextricably tied to your privileged position of being fortunate enough not to have to deal with the same level of vitriol that some other writers face.
I don’t think I’m being disrespectful by pointing this out, so I’m not sure why you’re referring me to the guidelines page.
I’m a little surprised that this Discourse instance, associated with Jeff’s own site, isn’t connected to the username registry. I’ve noticed that it hasn’t been used for many installations, but assumed that Jeff’s installation would want to show off that capability.
No, I am not. What I “said” was these guidelines:
http://discourse.codinghorror.com/faq
Which are documented here.
This is what is built into Discourse. That’s the goal. That’s what I said, that is what is documented.
Is there any reason a theoretical community of transgender people could not adopt this proposed set of guidelines – and the tools to make enforcement of said guidelines easy and automatic and crowdsourced in Discourse?
codinghorror said:
Downvotes have no place in systems of discussion based on opinion. They should be *flagged*, sure.Rammstein said:
get them downvotes
That’s some great inside the box thinking. Downvotes are for the quality/politeness of the post, not disagreeing with the opinion.
Huh? I distinctly remember that being what they get used for. It doesn’t matter what the instructions say: given the design of the software, people use downvotes for disagreement.
Discourse’s flags have options for dealing with the politeness and quality of the post: Inappropriate, and Notify User.
And if you disagree, write a reply. As I’m doing right now.
Why not the on same page though? This feels a bit more like commenting about a blog on Hacker News/ reddit for example rather than directly to the blog itself.
There are no links that encourage the user to make a comment or reply to another comment. Just the vague “continue the discussion” link.
For me there’s also one disadvantage: one needs to host discourse engine and usually the small hosting that can power WP cannot power Discourse. Disqus has obvious advantage here: you can get it for free and hosted somewhere else. All depends how much traffic you have I think…
Both directions can be harmful on different levels.
Strong moderation protects the community from bad behaviours, and makes people who agree to the rules stronger together.
On the other hand, the stronger and more strict you impose rules and moderate, the more you aim your community to the “self-centered jerks who kick outsiders between the legs”. So you have a risk of closing the community on itself and losing in popularity for the external world.
Examples that come to mind : posting a topic for the first time on a random phpbb, and getting a set of the following:
- ‘you didn’t say hi/please’
- ‘new users should post in the new user topic to present themselves’
- and any other collection of hoops to jump through before you can actually say what you want to say
Other example: superuser.com
It went from the wild west at the beginning for the lack of moderation (lack of enough appointed moderators and early community not having access to the tools yet)… to, well, this:
Super User is for computer enthusiasts and power users. If you have a question about …
- computer hardware,
- computer software, or
- personal and home computer networking
and it is not about …
- programming and software development,
- video games or consoles,
- websites or web services like Facebook, Twitter, and WordPress,
- electronic devices, media players, cell phones or smart phones, except insofar as they interface with your computer,
- issues specific to corporate IT support and networks,
- asking for a shopping or product recommendation,
… then you’re in the right place to ask your question!
In short, you can ask whatever computer question you want, except, well, all that. (Oh, and don’t you DARE asking a question someone asked two years ago, even if you would get updated answers.)
Don’t get me wrong, I love the SE sites. But while it’s nice to have kept them from becoming wild west yahoos, it would have been nicer if people on some of them didn’t become so stingy about what newcomers can or can’t do.
Because if a newcomer gets the door slammed on his face the first time he shows up, he probably won’t bother coming back. (Well, except scientists)
I find that a little rich given this from your post:
There’s no end of websites recreating the glorious “no stupid rules” libertarian paradise documented in the Lord of the Flies …
Maybe you meant to write “anarchic paradise” instead? And the lifeguard cartoon – libertarians are, as a group, fine with shirking their duties and allowing people to die? I don’t think you understand libertarianism.
Are both fine because they’re not part of the comments?
The vision for Discourse sounds awesome but I find the UI a bit confusing at the moment.
- I don’t like leaving the blog post page to see the replies to comments, I did this a few times and ended up with lots of tabs open
- I’m not sure where I’m meant to click to add to the top level discussion around this blog post. I’m confused because under “I find the Don’t Read The Comments movement kind of sad” on Please Read The Comments it says “1 Reply”, which when clicked on shows a overview of links to other blog posts instead of a reply. So now I’ve clicked the “Reply” button to the right of “1 Reply” I’m confused as to what will happen. Lets see…
EDIT - now I see the bottom of the page - I never reached the “+ Reply” button at the bottom because I didn’t know where the infinite scroll would end and gave up, of course I’ve sinced noticed the up and down buttons on the counter widget to take me there.