venting
Much (perhaps overly so) has been made of comment moderation, flaming and other aspects of administering online fora recently. Obviously, this is a great time for me to weigh in and reduce the signal to noise ratio even further.
See, I deal with more than just weird comments on my own site, I also need to play guardian of truth and light (such as it is) for other people’s entries via Ach. With varying results.
Some stats first. Since the last time, there has been a bit of an explosion in tagging.
I personally account for roughly 6.6% of the tags that have appeared on Ach2 since its inception. That’s an uptick from last time- but not significantly so. Unsurprisingly, the percentage of anonymous tags has climbed – around 20% of the total now. It’s strange and somewhat weird, but there are still (oblivious) people out there who believe I do all of the tagging on Ach. Not that it unduly bothers me unless they call out a contract hit on me because I tagged them the wrong way but uh… I’d need to be crazy to spend that much time reading Sri Lankan blogs.
Er. Actually, guilty secret. I do spend quite a bit of time reading the entries that appear on Ach but at least one thing holds true. Tags (made by other people) give me useful hints and allow for some selectivity about what I decide to click on. In fact, the all too rare nice tags probably drive less traffic than nasty ones. Make of that what you will.
One quick statistic – 12% or so of all tags submitted thus far have been deleted. You may have seen them briefly in the pending tags area, but they get sent into oblivion pretty fast. They’ve included overtly personal references – and if you’ve seen some of the tags that have remained, you know that it takes a fair bit to disqualify a tag on those grounds. They’ve also included stuff which tries to be funny but in my snap judgement, crosses the line by a considerable distance. In fact, that’s probably the most common cause for deletion. Occasionally, I’ll delete an anon tag that’s already against a heavily tagged post – since dead horses need only be flogged so far. Occasionally, you get the truly bizarre tag that I really don’t know how to handle. Unfortunately, it might be really sophisticated humour but there is a fairly thick barrier to entry – me. If you’re an anon tagger and I don’t get the joke – you’re not going into the system. That’s probably a shame – I’m sure there’s anonymous wit aplenty out there, just that I don’t get it.
I should enjoy an increase in tagging since that’s one of the main purposes of Ach. However, like pretty much every other online fora – I’m increasingly being called upon to play Anubis – ie: decide the ultimate fate of a tag that is entered into the system. (Yes, I totally stole that line from Spam Karma. Sorry, DrDave). There is some truly weird stuff that gets thrown in each day and I read all of it. So it’s not like I haven’t thought about the issue of anonymous hate at length.
My basic conclusion is that it’s extremely difficult – perhaps impossible – to control what anonymous taggers can get upto. To be perfectly honest, measures that I’ve seen advocated elsewhere seem to miss the point in this respect. Blanket generalizations about an IP to Nation plugin making intimidation go away? I thought enough people knew about TorPark to stop seriously considering IP based behaviour measures but it seems I was wrong. Even if you take Sri Lankan based hate-comments alone, the dynamic IPs periodically dished out by SLT make IP based measures all but useless.
Let’s explore another idea, shall we? Ajax based moderation that turns a box red when there are there are obscene or flagged words. Quite apart from the hit on the server when you need to keep posting content across while it’s being typed, why would anyone who is intent on flaming worry about a box turning red or whichever colour? From my personal experience with tags, some of the worst stuff has had no obscenities attached to it at all – I think that is mirrored in the most vicious of personal attacks everywhere. You don’t need to swear to be nasty. I am frequently nasty to people online but I rarely need to swear. Obviously, this example applies to me, so I’m making the mistake of generalizing from my own experience – but I cannot see how dynamic language moderation can either scale or be made to work for long. How typo resistant will this list of flagged words be? V1agr4 instead of that other drug name? Fcuk instead off (sic) that other word?
Finally, I personally think it’s inaccurate to say that regular users won’t flag comments they find offensive. Allowing such flagging does encourage groupthink and other minor vices though, but perhaps it isn’t an unreasonable compromise to make. Groupthink already exists in some blogs without any external flagging mechanism. Allowing regular users to vote comments up or down merely makes it overt instead of covert.
On 22-Feb-07 at 3:19 am,
elric wrote:
Re. all the fuss and bother about comments etc.recently – I think the whole “patient martyr suffering the outrages of lesser beings” persona helps with the image being projected. Some of those posts reek of playing to the audience as did the proposed solutions – “whoa, red boxes…that’s incredible”.
On 22-Feb-07 at 11:14 am,
Tez wrote:
Dude, red boxes!!! Why are you people not more enthused about this?
On 22-Feb-07 at 11:19 am,
drac wrote:
I would have been sold if he had made references to fetching pastel tones and earthy hues. As it is, red. Ewww. Red is the old pink.
And I’m not missing the irony inherent in that my comment textbox (at least on Firefox) has reddish outlines on focus. Every comment you guys type in here is obscene! And horrible! And all so very mean to me. And that plainly includes my own comment.
On 22-Feb-07 at 12:34 pm,
Psy wrote:
It’s more of an orange-ish red and a brown-ish red for me. Perhaps we’re mere shades of obscenity?
On 22-Feb-07 at 7:24 pm,
Darwin wrote:
I don’t think you can win. I’m pretty new to this whole hate community thing so correct me if I’m wrong; I notice that certain bloggers out there seem to generate a lot of negative tags (some downright mean) regardless of the actual contents of their post. So no matter what they write about, they get nasty tags.
When you allow voting for anon tags, the voters could also be the people who have a personal vendetta against those particular bloggers. So the voting would be biased too. Really, it’s a no-win situation, and as Ach is getting more and more popular, it’s only going to happen more often.
Negative comments or tags have never been and never will be a problem for me, but I’m not so sure if every other blogger out there has sufficiently thick skin for it. Meanwhile, we all look to Anubis for inspiration:P
On 23-Feb-07 at 1:07 am,
elric wrote:
I suspect some bloggers attract negative tagging as much for the tone and manner of their writing as for the content. You could write about a topic that tagger is interested in or indifferent to, but do so with a heavy-handed pomposity or with a slathering of phoniness (for example) that induces negative tagging. Essentially, style as much as content being responsible for the tag. This is obviously personal to the tagger and well as to the tagged.
On 23-Feb-07 at 10:41 am,
drac wrote:
Darwin: in general, voting of any sort is open to ballot stuffing and even individual bias. There are technical measures that can prevent less sophisticated vote rigging attempts but quite frankly, I’d rather expend my energies elsewhere. So, you’re absolutely right. I don’t think voting by itself is a good deterrent.
Anubis probably is
but individual bias includes my own. That’s what I’m trying to prevent. On occasion, I feel strongly about a specific topic or tag and I’d prefer a sanity check – which I hope voting will provide. At the same time, I’d then want to positively reinforce people who voted the same way – so the best way to do this is by giving them a virtual “reward” of karma.
Accumulate enough karma and you get the capability to do some deciding of your own – basically, the judgement over a few tags is delegated to you, should you choose to accept it (you can simply ignore the fancy additions to the Ach interface that appear next to tags. no harm done).
elric: That’s spot on and I think the diversity of opinion is what I actually like. Some people will go visit an entry they like and say “good post”. Others may flame the post. Tagging just constrains them to something short and witty, which in my case at least, is preferable to a verbose point by point rebuttal.
One thing that has been promised, but has not yet materialized is a tagging war between the snark and the “no, it was a good post” crowd