Wearing Out Their Welcomes: Commenters
Some people don't know where to start, while in the very same enterprise, other people have no idea of when to stop.
Not long ago the articles on one of the longtime leading progressive sites, Common Dreams, weren't accompanied by comments. When the practice was allowed a year or two ago, in the eyes of many of their readers the comments weren't a blessing, and it looks as if, as time has gone on, they have become even less so.
So Common Dreams has just sent emails to its registered users, notifying them of new policies that they are now setting into place. From now on the comments will be hidden, only to be brought up by clicking on something. Also all commenters have to re-register, and the Dreams management spoke of other changes that would soon be instituted to better control the commenting.
At first I was impressed by the comments I saw there, and I placed several myself, before I began feeling like a goldfish in a tank full of sharks, In general, for a progressive site, the attitude was surprisingly hostile to anything said in support of Democrats, while being considerably easier on what I consider to be the authors of all the evils, the Republicans, and Cindy Sheehan and Ralph Nader were the absolute deities. If this reflected the true attitudes and perceptions of progressives in the country, then I thought they really were at risk of badly marginalizing themselves in the country's thought processes, just as quite a few rainbows were doing in their newfound and incredibly bitter hatred of the Clintons, for little more that I could detect than that she was running strongly and unapologetically against their man, B. Obama. And this promised that they would allow their fury to render them even more null and void should Obama become President and they discover that he isn't about to apply the Putney Swope Principle.
My reference there is to an almost forgotten and somewhat over the top but still interesting 1969 film in which a Madison Ave ad agency's board of directors finds that, in their desire to avoid voting for their adversaries and instead trying to be satiric about the whole thing, they have all gotten the same idea and have outsmarted themselves. They have all voted for their idea of the most unacceptable choice for the new CEO, their one rainbow member, whereupon the movie's most memorable moment comes when the shot suddenly changes from that nearly all-"white" boardroom to a nearly all-"black" one.
Sometimes, however, I thought the comments contributed in a constructive way to the Common Dreams articles, as I also felt in regard to the Angry Arab News Service, which threw its comments along with a huge contingent of avid and even rabid regulars overboard a while ago and has never looked back. Common Dreams has not gone that far, but I wouldn't be surprised if they do.
What happens are classic cases of the good driving out the bad. The carefully written, thoughtful comments that are posted at first are soon replaced by short, dionysian remarks put there by regulars who think they are in a frat house or something and anything goes. And even when they are warned, they think that nobody has the right to deny them their freedom of speech, and they keep right on cavorting in whatever ways they please, and then suddenly--
People are like that. Against all warnings, they refuse to stop. They keep working at something for all they're worth and it's worth, till they've caught the last cod, chopped down the last redwood, pumped the last barrel of oil and the last bucket of water, sapped the soil of all its fertility, and so forth. Then, like a swarm of locusts, they take wing, confident of being able to find fresh resources to exhaust elsewhere.
In the case of the Angry Arab, his posts are too numerous and suffer from an air of being too cryptic and incomplete, without comments filling them out once in a while. The situation is different at Common Dreams, because their articles are fully fleshed out and able to stand their own so well that, as often as not, the comments actually obscured and distorted things.
Not long ago the articles on one of the longtime leading progressive sites, Common Dreams, weren't accompanied by comments. When the practice was allowed a year or two ago, in the eyes of many of their readers the comments weren't a blessing, and it looks as if, as time has gone on, they have become even less so.
So Common Dreams has just sent emails to its registered users, notifying them of new policies that they are now setting into place. From now on the comments will be hidden, only to be brought up by clicking on something. Also all commenters have to re-register, and the Dreams management spoke of other changes that would soon be instituted to better control the commenting.
At first I was impressed by the comments I saw there, and I placed several myself, before I began feeling like a goldfish in a tank full of sharks, In general, for a progressive site, the attitude was surprisingly hostile to anything said in support of Democrats, while being considerably easier on what I consider to be the authors of all the evils, the Republicans, and Cindy Sheehan and Ralph Nader were the absolute deities. If this reflected the true attitudes and perceptions of progressives in the country, then I thought they really were at risk of badly marginalizing themselves in the country's thought processes, just as quite a few rainbows were doing in their newfound and incredibly bitter hatred of the Clintons, for little more that I could detect than that she was running strongly and unapologetically against their man, B. Obama. And this promised that they would allow their fury to render them even more null and void should Obama become President and they discover that he isn't about to apply the Putney Swope Principle.
My reference there is to an almost forgotten and somewhat over the top but still interesting 1969 film in which a Madison Ave ad agency's board of directors finds that, in their desire to avoid voting for their adversaries and instead trying to be satiric about the whole thing, they have all gotten the same idea and have outsmarted themselves. They have all voted for their idea of the most unacceptable choice for the new CEO, their one rainbow member, whereupon the movie's most memorable moment comes when the shot suddenly changes from that nearly all-"white" boardroom to a nearly all-"black" one.
Sometimes, however, I thought the comments contributed in a constructive way to the Common Dreams articles, as I also felt in regard to the Angry Arab News Service, which threw its comments along with a huge contingent of avid and even rabid regulars overboard a while ago and has never looked back. Common Dreams has not gone that far, but I wouldn't be surprised if they do.
What happens are classic cases of the good driving out the bad. The carefully written, thoughtful comments that are posted at first are soon replaced by short, dionysian remarks put there by regulars who think they are in a frat house or something and anything goes. And even when they are warned, they think that nobody has the right to deny them their freedom of speech, and they keep right on cavorting in whatever ways they please, and then suddenly--
People are like that. Against all warnings, they refuse to stop. They keep working at something for all they're worth and it's worth, till they've caught the last cod, chopped down the last redwood, pumped the last barrel of oil and the last bucket of water, sapped the soil of all its fertility, and so forth. Then, like a swarm of locusts, they take wing, confident of being able to find fresh resources to exhaust elsewhere.
In the case of the Angry Arab, his posts are too numerous and suffer from an air of being too cryptic and incomplete, without comments filling them out once in a while. The situation is different at Common Dreams, because their articles are fully fleshed out and able to stand their own so well that, as often as not, the comments actually obscured and distorted things.
posted by Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) | 10:00 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home