Moderation, Kathy Sierra, and the Blogger's Code of Conduct

Teresa Nielsen Hayden has weighed in on the subject of the Blogger's Code of Conduct:

Bloggers can ban anonymous comments or not, as they please. The problem isn’t commenter anonymity; it’s abusive behavior by anonymous or semi-anonymous commenters. Furthermore, the kind of jerks who post comments that need to be deleted will infallibly cry “censorship!” when it happens, no matter what O’Reilly and Wales say.

Anyone who’s read ML for more than a couple of months has watched this happen. Commenters who are smacked down for behaving like jerks are incapable of understanding (or refuse to admit) that it happened because they were rude, not because the rest of us can’t cope with their dazzlingly original opinions. It’s a standard piece of online behavior. How can O’Reilly and Wales not know that?

What's interesting about this behavior is that "rudeness" is locally defined. Someone can be a welcome and valuable participant in the comment threads of one blog, say Majikthise, and at the same time drastically transgress the norms of another, like Pandagon, and never understand the norms they have transgressed. The real mistake they make is that of assuming that common courtesy is in fact common and not an arbitrary social construction that is constructed differently in different social venues.

Everyone taking part in this discussion (and yes, this means you) should drop what they are doing and read Clay Shirky's essay "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy."

Shirky quotes one Geoff Cohen as saying, The likelihood that any unmoderated group will eventually get into a flame-war about whether or not to have a moderator approaches one as time increases. This is what the argument over the Blogger's Code of Conduct is really about. There is a widespread perception that Tim O'Reilly, Jimmy Wales, and their supporters are trying to impose moderation on the blogosphere. Much of the derision O'Reilly et al. are receiving comes from the expectation that O'Reilly calling upon the blogosphere to comply with the BCC will be every bit as effective as King Canute calling upon the waves on the sea to calm.

Nobody in their right mind who runs a blog that allows commenting at all can afford to take a absolutist position on free speech, not without their blog comments becoming overrun with comment spam. And while some comments are obviously legitimate and some are obviously spam, there isn't a bright line that separates the two. To deal with comment spam, a blogger has to harden her heart to the possibility of deleting messages that might not be spam but legitimate attempts at self expression. And which side of the line belong messages that are clearly bloggers trolling for some link-love? Comment spam has cost us our censorship cherry. Comment spam is the proof that no online discussion forum that is open in an infinite world can exist without moderation.

The substance of the BCC is reprehensible. Nevertheless, any community, online or otherwise, needs to have mechanisms in place to reinforce social norms.

Of course, one aspect of the Kathy Sierra affair is that it was an example of those norms at work: the norm of sexism in the world of tech. This is what keeps getting swept under the rug. Teresa Nielsen Hayden, to her credit, makes sure that it is part of the discussion.