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Comment Management Responsibility (CommResp)

Submitted by Jon Garfunkel on April 10, 2007
A Multi-part series about the need for a Comment Management Responsibility framework for online publishers.

 

Cyberspace is a rotten place.

Rotten is, of course, a relative term. Fresh fruit left on the kitchen counter is only rotten after another creature has beat you to eating it. What's tastiest to us is what's tastiest to molds and fruit flies. I bet you'd rather have a fresh plum right now than a manufactured corn chip. So would your average Drosophila melanogaster.

Discussion boards, email lists, and comment threads are the ripe fruit of cyberspace, attracting all sorts of constructive people. But they also bring out the virtual fruit flies and molds who have their own agenda.

The common reaction is to declare the other as some epithet ("trolls") and claim moral superiority. I prefer a much more neutral approach-- to take a step back, and try to conceive a proper framework for defining a policy for managing comments and community.

[This article has now been split into 5 parts since I posted it this morning.]

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Good ideas

Submitted by Allison_Nevitt on April 10, 2007.
I l ike this approach - a non-judgemental system of symbolic tagging. I've been watching a little bit of this flurry around "conduct guidelines" and what seems to come up in the commentary is this defensiveness around "freedom of speech". I wonder if you have thoughts on that. You talk about a vocabulary, but do get into some theories remediation. On Salon.com, where they have instituted a policy that commenters must be registered (they can still post anonymously) and have made it clear that they will delete offensive posts, commenters have posited that "offensive" is relative and can be applied to posts of dissent. (I've seen plenty of dissent on the Salon.com comment threads.) Your vocabulary is a good beginning. But there will always be lingering questions around remediation and how it is applied. Is there a dialogue anywhere, that you are aware of, that is attempting to delineate how you define "offensive" as opposed to "disagreeable"? Of course, this is what we have judges for, isn't it? But I wondered. Do you have thoughts on how to create a "clearing" space on a site. In many traditional cultures "clearing" is an opportunity for people to air their different perspectives, ad nauseum, with witnesses. In one African culture, the entire community had to sit and witness until both parties exhausted their need to express themselves. This is not reconciling, it is exhaustive venting. In the virtual world, this would be an overwhelming thing for a site host to manage. So, I wonder if there could be a useful virtual equivalent. I also wonder if early site hosts were, and future ones are, at all prepared for the fact that when they open up forums of communication they are hosting people and will have to spend a great deal of time managing relationships. If a blogger thought - "I'm starting a blog so that I can manage the relationships with my commenters" rather than "I'm starting a blog to speak my mind", we might have a lot less bloggers!
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