I had the pleasure of attending a launch celebration for Alyssa Rosenberg's move to ThinkProgress. Despite the hiccups of the new facebook based comment system, I think it's a great move and look forward to reading more from her now that she's blogging full time. Thankfully, her cordial and thoughtful comment community seems to have survived the transition to a large venue known for its trolls and flame wars.
I definitely learned a few things about serious blogging and community maintenance, but I'll try to restrict this post to a few ideas of my own that have been improved through quality conversation. When discussing problematic comments with older generations, anonymity is regularly blamed as the source of all the vitriol. There's something to that, but I've seen multiple communities with pseudonyms get by just fine. I consistently blog and comment under my name, but others lack that freedom and still can be great contributors.
The problem instead is a bit simpler: on the one hand, most blogs and the like come with comments by default while maintaining a healthy comment community of any real size takes both skill and hard work. We've developed our technology for allowing communication to a far greater extent than we have our methods for building communities. That's not really a surprise; despite problems with spam, communication has a far easier time scaling up. In fact, I'd argue that the labor requirements mean that quality moderation is often a result of necessity and not design. I've found many feminist blogs can have great discussion areas. I suspect that this is a side effect of needing to protect themselves from harassment, anti-feminist trolls, and explicit misogynists. Of course, heavily moderated communities have their own risks as the ban hammer is of course a blunt instrument and there's always a risk of group think.
On the whole, I think we do a bit better against spam than against trolls. Why is that? I think it may be that community management requires gaining and maintaining legitimacy. Thus a blog author would have a much easier time doing it than would, say, a full-time staffer. The technical ability to ban is important but perhaps not as powerful as the ability to reply directly to critics which encourages them to switch to person-to-person mode rather than broadcast to the internet mode. If larger organizations want to have safe comment communities, perhaps they should work on finding ways to give staffers the authority and discretion to build their own legitimacy as moderators. This can be scary, but I think it may prove an better alternative than comment anarchy or simply going without.
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