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Because when Tribe was asked - nicely - to provide us with the option of screening comments on our blogs, not only did it decline to grant this reasonable request, it declined to even respond to it. We're just not going to have that feature. Period. At least, we won't under the current management.



Tribe has a well developed troll problem, so the absence of comment moderation becomes a problem waiting to explode. Let's say that somebody drops by and posts something abusive on one's blog, and one deletes it. A troll will think nothing of dropping by to repost the remark, or having one of his friends or socks do so should he be banned by an administrator, leaving you and him in a test of wills. A test of wills will tend to be won by whomever has the most time to waste, which is to say, whoever has the least in the way of a life. In this, a reasonable contributor can't - and shouldn't - hope to compete with the troll.



Nor is trollage the only problem that arises under such a system. Think back to the days before the Web, back before hotlinking became an option, when almost all fora were unmoderated. A recurring issue was the "signal to noise ratio"; groups would steadily degrade because those who posted what was, at any given time, the best content, would find themselves having to wade through large quantities of the worst grade material to find the few posts to which they had a reason to wish to see. What such groups offered was a deal whose goodness varied inversely with the quality of what a user had to offered, the chaff driving the wheat out before it, as the writers of quality content, even if they weren't being abused, simply tired of having their time wasted by reading that much drivel.



The introduction of the World Wide Web solved the SNR problem, not by changing the ratio, but by making it irrelevant, in most cases. In an unmoderated, all text forum, one doesn't get to choose whose writing one's readership will be seeing following one's own, but to a large extent, one can do precisely that with a webpage, because while getting followed up on isn't a choice, giving a link is - and a page not being linked to is a page visitors aren't finding themselves on, without a conscious, informed effort on their part. The worthless pages were simply routed around. If one found a few good sites, one would often find that they brought one into a network of other good pages.



What the "comment moderation is censorship" crowd would do, finding some support on sites such as this one, is return us to the bad old days before the Web was invented, by making one's presence (and maybe even the planting of links to more of one's material) an entitlement, reviving the old signal to noise issue in large part. Intelligent comments on a blog are a treasure, but as the history of the Net has shown, they're a treasure that's going to be lost in a tidal wave of virtual garbage, if just anybody who wants to post, can. With very good reason, then, I refuse to participate on those terms, and have sought more agreeable ones elsewhere.









Elsewhere, in this case, is not always so very far away. While Tribe's system won't let me set up a blog and shut off commenting, it will allow me to set up a tribe and decline applications to join. It will also allow me to run the tribe's rss feed on blog, simulating the presence of an all text blog, one to which nobody can post comments. I'm not completely happy with this substitution, but it's the best that Tribe has decided to leave available to us. You can see, now, why I can't approve any applications to join this tribe - anybody on this group could, in effect, post to my personal blogspace on my Tribe profile.



I'm already running the feed for a real blog - the Caffeination blog on Tabulas - on my profile, so one might ask what purpose this tribe will serve. Perhaps it will be a sort of grab bag, in which I further discuss topics that arise on the tribes to which I belong, the sort of discussion that doesn't fit in very well on the self-consciously premodern setting that I'm creating on Tabulas, one almost entirely focused on life offline. Like the blog on Tabulas, though, this tribe of one will be focused on a discussion on matters more scholarly, and the imagery will continue the purely monochrome color scheme I makea point of using throughout the Caffeination site. Ah, if only I could get Tribe to create a black and white version of their logo, and run grayscale advertising ...



Perhaps later. Much later.





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posted in Caffeination / Joseph Dunphy's Tribe - 0 replies