Arthur Silber on blog comments:
For the time being, I am disabling comments on the blog for new posts. There are several reasons for my decision. Not too often, but often enough to annoy and anger me, there are comments here that I find offensive and poorly thought out. I realize that a comment is not the place where people will tend to offer reasons and explanations for their views — but I still find that no excuse for a lack of thoughtfulness and simple politeness, especially since this is my place, and not the commenters'. In any event, I came to find it an irritation more than a pleasure, and it's easy enough to avoid the problem. I may reconsider my decision at some point, but probably not for a while. I still hope to hear from readers, but I also figure that if it's important enough, you'll send me an email. And people tend to think a bit more about emails. They take more time and effort, and that's probably a good thing.
I can understand what he's talking about. I was tempted to do the same thing recently after a spat with a recent poster who entered multiple postings with different names and email addresses. (Word to the wise, if you're going to pretend to be 5 different people, don't write all your posts in the same style.) After an exchange of emails it became clear that the individual in question failed to grok a few basic facets of free speech and private property.
Everyone has the right to their own opinion and they also have the right to express that opinion. However, said right on their behalf does not create an obligation to subsidize such expression on my behalf. Nor do I "owe" you my time and bandwidth to debate my opinion with you if you disagree with me. Simply put, you can believe what you want and say what you want, but I don't have to let you do it on my private property (website). It's time that some of these folks posting comments in the blogosphere realized that simple fact. They're perfectly free to go pay for their own domain name and fork up monthly hosting fees. Come on folks, it's time to be grownups.
TANSTAAFL
Phooey, Landrith. You’re full of it. :))
A few times in the last couple of weeks I too have considered disabling comments on my blog. But I don’t want a few bad apples to ruin it for the many people who post good comments.
I’m not so sure that disabling comments is much in the spirit of blogging. One might say, that’s not intercourse; that’s self-gratification.
Not that there is anything wrong with that.
Leonard, a ratings system sounds interesting. I think Patrick Ruffini has some sort of ratings system on his blog.
5/26/2003 7:13:00
Trolls will always exist as long as it is cheap and easy to do, and there is free publicity to be had by leaching off of popular sites.
The ultimate solution will be technological. What blogs need is a comments system that allows ratings, ala slashdot. (I wonder how hard it would be to run a normal blog using slash… well, not for me anyway as I am not forking for hosting.)
Anyway, it seems that one useful way to deal with trolls is to treat ’em as the parasites they are: cut off their blood supply by disabling comments. But I think that is overkill. All you need to do is turn off the comments for a while, and the trolls will stop reading your site. Then you can turn them back on — but only for a while. Eventually trolls will notice you have free lunch available and come back in. (Or you will post something good and get instalinked – same effect.) And then you turn off comments again.
Eternal vigilance, ya know.
5/26/2003 11:44:00