Outside the Beltway’s James Joyner writes about blogger burnout and writes this about comments:
My least favorite part of the “blog job,� though, is the incivility in comment threads and the occasional cross-blog flamewar. While OTB’s comment threads are quite civil compared to most blogs of comparable traffic, there are a handful of regulars who forget the number one rule of our site policies: “Remember that the people under discussion are human beings.� The follow-on — “Comments that contain personal attacks about the post author or other commenters will be deleted. Repeated violators will be banned. Challenge the ideas of those with whom you disagree, not their patriotism, decency, or integrity.� — is something that I’ve largely refrained from enforcing, since it’s a lot of work and I hate to alienate regular visitors.
That’ll likely change, though, as four or five regular visitors–almost evenly divided ideologically, by the way–who are driving down the tone of the discussion. I think I’m better off making a few folks mad than have the comments section be an unfriendly place.
Joyner’s “follow-on” is a good rule to follow — for all blogs. Too often the discussion of ideas veers off into personal attacks. Like Joyner, we’ve tried to avoid deleting comments and have only banned three commenters in more than two years. As Joyner notes, though, there is a line that can be crossed.
One easy rule of thumb: debate ideas, offer links, respond to other arguments but avoid hurling adjectives (unless you say TMV is perfect, insightful, witty — spelled with a “w” not a “sh” — and all the other things that we KNOW are true).
UPDATE: We do think Joyner’s policy is a good one: warnings, removing the actual comments that violate the policy and if it continues then banning. (We have previously just banned after several warning). Note that there is NO reason why it should come to that since any issue can be vigorously discussed on the merits, withouth personal attacks on people who write or comment on issues because they have differing views. Name calling never influences anyone’s view on an issue.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.