Free of the need to be free
At the risk of sounding like a bad standup -
Here's a comment I posted today (and it says something that I think I'm giving it a wider distribution by posting it here):
I find myself in the weird position of both agreeing and disagreeing with you. I agree with you that there is a problem. The comment threads on CiF are a complete and utter mess; I'm approaching the point of giving up on CiF and posting anything I want to say about CiF/Graun content on my blog, just like I used to.
What I don't agree with the way you describe the problem. I found the tone of both this and the previous 'Less is more' post really startling - offensive, even. You [addressed to Georgina Henry] seem to genuinely hate a lot of the comments posted on CiF; not all of them, of course, just the ones you describe as 'pointless chatter', 'slanging matches', 'quick-fire insults', 'mindless irrelevant chatter' and indeed 'rubbish'. That doesn't necessarily mean you hate the commenters, but I imagine your attitude to anyone who positively values the comments you hate would be pretty tetchy.
But how can you sustain this opposition between the pristine blog and the spoilsport commenters? In other words, when did CiF exist in the form you think it ought to have, before the invasion of the pointless chatterers? I wasn't watching CiF all that closely over the first couple of weeks, but I strongly suspect the answer is 'never'. This is your blog: this is how you designed it. The comments threads would look very different now if you'd required real names to be printed; or if you'd required commenters to display an email address or a blog URL under their name - or even if you'd allowed email addresses or URLs to be displayed. It would look different if you hadn't thrown open commenting rights to anyone who applied; it would look different if you hadn't allowed talkboard users to inherit commenting rights. And it would look different if all CiF content were written by journalists with a personal interest in blogging, rather than consisting very largely of rebadged opinion columns.
All of these are design decisions. The decisions which you (or your blog advisors) made created CiF as it is now.
One other thing leapt out at me from the previous piece.
To sum up, the reason CiF almost immediately became a high-volume, high-polarisation, Harry's Place/LGF scratching-post isn't that it's a blog. The reason is that it's a blog designed by people who don't understand blogs, and written by people who don't like blogs.
Mark Thomas: ...this - thing - that’s really tepid and bland and moulded to fit this Lego model of comedy... seventies gag, TV presenter gag, difference between cats and dogs, difference between men and women, have you ever noticed at a dinner party...- have you ever noticed, right, you know that Comment is Free site? It's not very good, is it?
Here's a comment I posted today (and it says something that I think I'm giving it a wider distribution by posting it here):
I find myself in the weird position of both agreeing and disagreeing with you. I agree with you that there is a problem. The comment threads on CiF are a complete and utter mess; I'm approaching the point of giving up on CiF and posting anything I want to say about CiF/Graun content on my blog, just like I used to.
What I don't agree with the way you describe the problem. I found the tone of both this and the previous 'Less is more' post really startling - offensive, even. You [addressed to Georgina Henry] seem to genuinely hate a lot of the comments posted on CiF; not all of them, of course, just the ones you describe as 'pointless chatter', 'slanging matches', 'quick-fire insults', 'mindless irrelevant chatter' and indeed 'rubbish'. That doesn't necessarily mean you hate the commenters, but I imagine your attitude to anyone who positively values the comments you hate would be pretty tetchy.
But how can you sustain this opposition between the pristine blog and the spoilsport commenters? In other words, when did CiF exist in the form you think it ought to have, before the invasion of the pointless chatterers? I wasn't watching CiF all that closely over the first couple of weeks, but I strongly suspect the answer is 'never'. This is your blog: this is how you designed it. The comments threads would look very different now if you'd required real names to be printed; or if you'd required commenters to display an email address or a blog URL under their name - or even if you'd allowed email addresses or URLs to be displayed. It would look different if you hadn't thrown open commenting rights to anyone who applied; it would look different if you hadn't allowed talkboard users to inherit commenting rights. And it would look different if all CiF content were written by journalists with a personal interest in blogging, rather than consisting very largely of rebadged opinion columns.
All of these are design decisions. The decisions which you (or your blog advisors) made created CiF as it is now.
One other thing leapt out at me from the previous piece.
persistent breaches of our talk policy ... pointless chatter that litters threads ... degenerate into back-and-forth slanging matches ... try our talk boards. Alternatively, as some have done, they can start their own blogs (we're happily linking to quite a few) and continue the quick-fire insults in their own space.Leave blogs out of it, eh? I could name several blogs where the quality of the debate is in a different league from CiF - where it's something like how I imagine the Platonic ideal of CiF debate, even. But none of those blogs was widely advertised and immediately thrown open to all their readers - and none of them was written by high-profile journalists with a record of ignoring their critics.
To sum up, the reason CiF almost immediately became a high-volume, high-polarisation, Harry's Place/LGF scratching-post isn't that it's a blog. The reason is that it's a blog designed by people who don't understand blogs, and written by people who don't like blogs.
posted by Phil at 4:56 pm
2 Comments:
I have to admit that I sometimes enjoy descending into the CiF bearpit simply because it's a bearpit. It can be cathartic, sometimes, to exchange insults with the (alarmingly large number of) very right wing creatures who infest it. This probably makes me a bad person, but still.
My suggestion is comment moderation (a la Slashdot). Yes, it stings a bit to have the CiF editor make a few critical remarks, but this, I reckon, is as nothing compared with the high handed disdain generally operative in the production of the daily print edition.
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