Your weekly liberal muppetry.

[hirez]

Dear Guardian/Observer

If your execrable weblogging c0dez hadn't been broken as designed, you wouldn't have this problem.

I would imagine that the thinking parts of teh internets have been trying to tell you that this is a solved problem 'til they're blue in the face, but your sort of wooly liberal probably likes daily proof that the lumpenproletariat are a horrid bunch so you can have some public hand-wringing and feel superior.

Of course, you can't fix social problems with code, but you could, I don't know, demonstrate some minor understanding of the problem-space.

Sort it the fuck out, there's a love.

Comments

[nalsa.livejournal.com]

I thought there was an interesting use of "going viral" in the article, but in the end couldn't be arsed with the whole shebang.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

'Interesting' as in 'wrong', I think. I believe the correct term is 'a bit of a pile-on'.

[hazeii.livejournal.com]

Guardian readers...shrug.

[aoakley.livejournal.com]

Having RTFA, I'm still none the wiser - was the competition "winner" the son of the Guardian's travel writer or not?

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Son of a chap who sometimes freelances for the Grauniad, in point of fact. So in strict terms, no.

The point here is that this is far from the first time some pillock ex the Guardian has used their 'news' pages to whine on about how weblogs are terrible because the commentariat are nasty to everyone. That in the specific case of the Guardian-run weblogs there is no (useful) moderation function seems to pass them by.

They Do Not Get It and asking people to play nicely Does Not Work.

[aoakley.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was just trying to figure out whether the whingers were justified. It would seem that they were, and that ergo, their whinging was entirely predictable. Which makes having no comment moderation even more stupid.

However, I'd have thought that the usual "Guardian staff past or present and their families may not enter" would have also solved this problem. I'm sure that rule applies to Future Publications, including their freelancers.

The problem with the Guardian is that whilst it is written by naive tossers, it is very well written by very interesting naive tossers. If I buy something that mainly agrees with my personal politics, like the Telegraph, I'm invariably bored to tears and don't read much of it. If I buy the Grauniad, I'll happily sit there reading from cover to cover.

[badnewswade.livejournal.com]

I heard about this on Sunday - if they don't want the lower orders to answer back when they print drivel, why the hell did they have comments enabled? Did they seriously expect praise for this?

I don't agree that they are naive, I think the correct term is corrupt. The Gogarty-spawn effectively stole that gig from someone who can actually write. It's unfair, and as aoakley says, could easily have been solved by doing what non-crooked competitions do, which is to ban staff and their families from entering.

All in all, the Graun has proved itsself to be run by a bunch of tossers with a sense of entitlement that would do the Clinton-Bush clans proud. I hope their crappy vanity published rag goes out of business.

</RANTS&rt;

[(Anonymous)]

Siobhain Butterworth != Georgina Henry. The Readers' Editor and the Editor of Comment Is Free are not the same person. Which is presumably also why they're incapable of sharing basic lessons about access control for fora (old money), and, indeed, are less good at determining if a comment is acceptable than a peleton predelicted Peelite programmer person. Of course, this would probably also require them to acknowledge that "new media" isn't, and then the papers might stop wasting their money and hire some journalists and, maybe, report some news.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I bow to your superior wisdom in re. the internal structure and lack of communication inside the Guardian organisation.

However, I disagree with the notion that being able to spot unfortunate content is necessarily a hacker-only skill. In fact, I suspect that the technical sorts are the ones least able to make that determination. See, for instance, the entire history and functionality of the Usenet.

[(Anonymous)]

USENET owes much of its functionality (and to be fair most of its mindset) to Letters Pages. Perhaps never before has so much of the DSM-IV had the opportunity to attract the attention of other candidates for spurious self-diagnosis, but there are centuries old Holy Books surrounded by hypertextual commentaries that spend as much time attacking other commenters as they do commenting on the matter at hand.

I think the biggest problem is that most "blog" comments don't appear in cramped handwriting and green ink.

More power to your organ, etcetera.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Ye-es. Certain wedges of Usenet and (for entirely random instance) Cix are/were the precursors of 'speak your brains'.

(And I've an entire piece lined up about grim Little Englander attitudes and how the EU has managed to virtualise the notion of statehood, which seems to be an odd side-effect and a Good Thing. Anyway.)

Without wishing to sound like Doc Pillock and his Cluetrain chums, this weblog business ought to be about conversations, rather than pronouncements handed down as if from on high (and having mixed with journos, the emphasis is very much on the 'as if') and reactions grudgingly turning up a few days later, as you correctly point out, in the Letters Page.

That's the wrong model. However, it's what the newspapers understand and what people who read newspapers are used to. Thus when they read newspapers online that have comments sections, that's how they react.

Also, since the majority of Alligator Station webloggers are pulling their cues and clues from the op-ed sections of the newspapers they read, that's the model they're using too.

Equally wrong.

The most interesting weblogs are the ones (Boing^2, Making Light, Pandagon, Feministe, Jalopnik) who have worked out that the comment thread is of equal importance to the post that kicked it off and endeavour to keep the Loud, Confident and Wrong away from the nice people with interesting things to say.

If anyone wants to do this stuff right, they could start by hacking out a weblogging platform that contains threaded comments and integrated moderation tools as standard. After that, pay careful heed to anything that tnh says about being a moderator. Pretty basic stuff, it seems to me.