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Topic: Letters Sent to Romenesko
Date/Time: 1/20/2006 1:47:42 PM
Title: Brady, Kinsley and comments
Posted By: Jim Romenesko
 
From GLENN FLEISHMAN: I hate to be one of those folks who points fingers at the "old media," especially since I both blog and write frequently for print, but Jim Brady at The Washington Post just doesn't get it in the same way Michael Kinsley didn't get it with the Wikitorial idea at the L.A. Times.

Both Kinsley and Brady seem to think there is a finite number of people who might comment on or contribute to something at their newspaper site and that those people can be reasoned with. If they were troll-scarred veterans like those of us who used Usenet (the 80s), listservers, online forums, and blogs with comments enabled, they would recognize that the entire world is watching.

When Brady asks for civility, he's thinking about an audience similar to that which reads his print paper, not several hundred million people worldwide who might happen to trip into his forum. When Kinsley said that a few bad eggs spoiled the Wikitorial, apart from the very terrible idea that the Wikitorial represented, he also thought he was dealing with a subset of all users.

The Internet is global, folks! You can't ask for civility. You can't expect it.
If you have an open forum, you'll get "goatse" (don't ask if you don't
know what that is). If you have a forum that requires registration via email, people will create fake addresses at Yahoo or Gmail to post vandalism or vitriol. If you require more severe forms of proof of identity, you restrict the amount of participation.

There's no way to ensure a civil forum without moderation, and that moderation will always be second-guessed, whether it's collaborative like Slashdot or an iron fist of a company employee making arbitrary or non-arbitrary judgements.

There is no way to ask for civility on the Internet while maintaining the
maximum participation. [Permalink]

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