insomnia posting
Can't sleep. Been up since 4. Happens once in a while. I've been catching up on my blog reading, which I've been very lax about. I've gone through every category but 'law', which I usually save for last. That and I'm jamming to a couple new CD's (on headphones given the time) I bought cheaply and hadn't gotten a chance to listen to yet. I highly recommend 'Rockin' the Suburbs' by Ben Folds. So as far as insomnia bouts go this is a fairly pleasant one.
Anyway, I'm reading along, and I get to the bottom of the 'econ' category, and I check out this post, which is just a brief comment on illogical disparities in vending machine prices for soda. Trust me, I do have a point I want to make here... patience. When you write a post like this, you're bound to get a bunch of people chiming in with their soda-price life stories. There were a few funny jokes too, and there were also a couple particularly inane comments by the same guy; those served as the actual inspiration for this.
Here's the point, in preview: unmoderated (or moderated only for obscenities) blog commenting is almost universal, and I don't know whether or not that's going to be feasible in the long run. Any time you allow a lot of people to participate in something without any semblance of a screening process, some people, whether through deliberate maleficence or mere idiocy, will come along and make the whole experience ... well, let's just say, much less pleasant than it would be without them.
Major bloggers, including Atrios and Daily Kos often put up 'open threads', just to allow their user community to converse with each other, and these can be terrific reads, because there are a lot of people with a lot of interesting facts and opinions to share, and they can't all maintain their own forums (and if they did we might not read them). But there are also bloggers who have had to disable comments entirely or use work-around systems to avoid spam (automatic programs which track down blogs and automatically insert advertising messages as comments) or, even worse, trolls, individuals who persistently post negative personal attacks on the blog host.
The ideals of these user communities are outstanding. The raw mass information exchange that blogging has led to is phenomenal (as evidenced most recently by the CBS 'leaked memo' scandals; I can track a link down if anyone's interested). And blogging wouldn't be the same without comments, either. I don't think people would read blogs as much if they couldn't comment, though I could be wrong about that. Haven't thought about it enough.
I guess I'm wondering at this point if there's a better way to do this, a better way to provide feedback to the blog writer and to exchange that feedback with others, one which can filter out some of the deadwood. I think the solution here is a peer-to-peer moderation process, something like what Slashdot does on its comment posts (a set group of administrators have permissions to rate posts on a scale of -1 to 5, and viewers can restrict the comment display to ranges of ratings). Maybe their system is enough, and maybe bloggers with big fan bases like Atrios could institute something similar. Again, though, would you have to use some sort of super-user to perform the moderation, or could anyone do it? There are problems with both approaches. And on political blogs moderation of comments could be used for bad purposes.
A lot of these questions are made more interesting by thinking of them in terms of peer-to-peer systems, and by comparing them to the 'client-server' systems of major news media web sites. This is starting to sound like my doctoral research. All I need to do is come up with a media equivalent of our supervised peer-to-peer overlay networks.
But perhaps I'm rambling incoherently because I'm trying to blog during an insomnia bout. I'll let you be the judge.
Anyway, I'm reading along, and I get to the bottom of the 'econ' category, and I check out this post, which is just a brief comment on illogical disparities in vending machine prices for soda. Trust me, I do have a point I want to make here... patience. When you write a post like this, you're bound to get a bunch of people chiming in with their soda-price life stories. There were a few funny jokes too, and there were also a couple particularly inane comments by the same guy; those served as the actual inspiration for this.
Here's the point, in preview: unmoderated (or moderated only for obscenities) blog commenting is almost universal, and I don't know whether or not that's going to be feasible in the long run. Any time you allow a lot of people to participate in something without any semblance of a screening process, some people, whether through deliberate maleficence or mere idiocy, will come along and make the whole experience ... well, let's just say, much less pleasant than it would be without them.
Major bloggers, including Atrios and Daily Kos often put up 'open threads', just to allow their user community to converse with each other, and these can be terrific reads, because there are a lot of people with a lot of interesting facts and opinions to share, and they can't all maintain their own forums (and if they did we might not read them). But there are also bloggers who have had to disable comments entirely or use work-around systems to avoid spam (automatic programs which track down blogs and automatically insert advertising messages as comments) or, even worse, trolls, individuals who persistently post negative personal attacks on the blog host.
The ideals of these user communities are outstanding. The raw mass information exchange that blogging has led to is phenomenal (as evidenced most recently by the CBS 'leaked memo' scandals; I can track a link down if anyone's interested). And blogging wouldn't be the same without comments, either. I don't think people would read blogs as much if they couldn't comment, though I could be wrong about that. Haven't thought about it enough.
I guess I'm wondering at this point if there's a better way to do this, a better way to provide feedback to the blog writer and to exchange that feedback with others, one which can filter out some of the deadwood. I think the solution here is a peer-to-peer moderation process, something like what Slashdot does on its comment posts (a set group of administrators have permissions to rate posts on a scale of -1 to 5, and viewers can restrict the comment display to ranges of ratings). Maybe their system is enough, and maybe bloggers with big fan bases like Atrios could institute something similar. Again, though, would you have to use some sort of super-user to perform the moderation, or could anyone do it? There are problems with both approaches. And on political blogs moderation of comments could be used for bad purposes.
A lot of these questions are made more interesting by thinking of them in terms of peer-to-peer systems, and by comparing them to the 'client-server' systems of major news media web sites. This is starting to sound like my doctoral research. All I need to do is come up with a media equivalent of our supervised peer-to-peer overlay networks.
But perhaps I'm rambling incoherently because I'm trying to blog during an insomnia bout. I'll let you be the judge.
1 Comments:
Simon Wilson had a posting about a year or two ago about his concepts towards implementing a spam-free blog comment system. He had developed his own blog software, and as such felt a need to try and re-work the comment idea while implementing a his anti-spam measures.
One of the points that came up was that TrackBack is really a wonderful concept for leaving messages from readers. The problem with the implementation of TrackBack is of course, that it requires you to have a pre-existing blog for others to leave a comment. A few of the proposed solutions were a bit outlandish and broken security wise, but the post (and it's follow ups) is worth reading if you can find it.
Of course, none of this corrects for inane comments from end readers, and the concept of moderating has already been proven to be not as useful (see: Slash-game) as original thought. I think the better solution would be to subject would-be commentators to an IQ test and place a ranking upon that. Of course then you'd have to develop a rotating question list and points value similar to the SAT.
Dan
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