As most of you know, we pride ourselves here on being a top-down blog. We’re not one of those touchy-feely people-powered sites that are all “What would you like me to post about?” and “Whatever can we do to serve you?” Our attitude is, we know what’s best for you, and we’re taking time from our busy schedules to provide it, and you’ll like it or learn to. At Cosmic Variance, that’s just how we roll.
There is, however, an obvious exception to the rule: the comment sections. (Or should that be “are, however, obvious exceptions”? Grammar is not how we roll.) That’s where the people, our beloved readers, can let their voices be heard. A Habermasian zone of free communication, where all are welcome to participate in reasoned and passionate dialogue concerning the nature of the universe and our place within it. Okay, I’ll stop there.
So the question is: how can the comment sections be better? To decode this for our more innocent readers: how can we increase the signal-to-noise ratio? Increasing the signal is one obvious way, but that’s hard. The real question that I’ve been wondering about (haven’t consulted my co-bloggers on this) is: should we take more dramatic steps to decrease the noise? In particular, should we have a much heavier hand in discouraging, deleting, or even banning people who are rude, disruptive, off-topic, or just plain crackpotty? And in most specific particular: if we did so, are there folks out there who would judge the comment sections to be more useful, and might even be more likely to join in themselves?
Personally, I rarely read the comment sections on other blogs, even my absolute favorites. But I enjoy our comment threads here, and we certainly have some insightful and articulate commenters. Sadly, there are also the crackpots. To be absolutely clear, I am not referring to folks who are not experts in science or whatever else we happen to be talking about, but would sincerely like to join in the conversation, add an outsider’s perspective or ask a question or two. We like those comments, in fact those are our absolute favorites! Indeed, those are the ones that I most worry are being squeezed out by the noise. Likewise, we’re very happy to see comments that represent strong but principled disagreement with what we are saying. (We’ve been accused, unsurprisingly, of taking delight in stifing dissent, but the briefest glance at any of our controversial threads makes that a difficult position to support.)
The crackpots to whom I refer are those who know little or nothing about the subject but are convinced that they do, and are likewise convinced that the world needs to know about their theories, yet have absolutely no interest in listening to what others have to say. You know of whom I speak: the guy who has read the first chapter of The Elegant Universe and come away convinced that he knows more about how spacetime really works than these groupthinking string theorists, or the gal who constructed a model from ordinary household appliances that predicts the masses of all the particles in the Standard Model. (Neither of these examples refers to actual people, at least not to my knowledge; but I wouldn’t be surprised.)
So, do people prefer to let a thousand flowers bloom, even if some are indistinguishable from weeds, or should we play a more active role in deleting the nonsense? We’ve always been willing to delete/ban people who are repeatedly obnoxious, but it’s never fun to do so. We recognize that the free-speech zone that everyone is in favor of is not each individual blog, but rather the blogosphere as a whole. If anyone wants to push their own crazy theories about the birth of the universe, they should feel free to start a free blog and explain away to their heart’s content; we’re very happy to accept trackbacks to nearly any blog.
But individual blog comment sections aren’t public squares; they are more analogous to private living rooms. The preeminent statement of this philosophy was offered by Eugene Volokh, when he explains that comment threads are like cocktail parties to which the blog owners have invited you. It’s not supposed to be a free-for-all fracas in which rudeness and craziness must stoically be tolerated; it’s supposed to be an interesting mix of viewpoints from a wide variety of backgrounds, but one that comes together in mutual respect to create a stimulating dialogue.
And yet… and yet we almost always err on the side of letting people ramble on, at least until they become so impolite and/or disruptive that we have little choice. So what do you think? Would this blog be a better place if the Heavy Hand of the State slapped down some of the noisier contributors, or is the chaos part of the charm? (Responses from people who don’t usually comment are especially welcome.)
This is the only blog I usually read comments on. It would be nice to keep/get the S/N high enough for that to continue, so I tend to favor policing. It would be nice if an informal “what we don’t accept” policy was put forward, so people couldn’t claim to be surprised. (I wouldn’t expect it to be detailed, and would expect it to give latitude to the blog owners. You’ve provided a start of one in this post.)
Maybe it would be helpful to have a little reminder somewhere close to where people type in the comments, where you state what kinds of comments you hope for (without being discouraging). Or a separate document, like many newsgroups have FAQs. It’s for example not always clear to which extent the bloggers want people to stay on topic or not. Conversations naturally evolve and one thing reminds someone about something else which reminds someone of yet another thing and so on, which in my opinion can be quite interesting and is very different from, say, someone suddenly jumping into a lecture of his or her favourite pet theory. Unfortunately, I think the problem is partly that the kinds of people who have these crack-potty theories tend to also not be so good at gauging the social signals that should tell them that others do not have much interest in what they are saying.
Have you considered some form of moderation system?
Also, I think threading would help to eliminate some of the noise that comes from viewing multiple conversations in a flat format.
Rude flaming is one thing, crackpottery (cracked pottery?) another, it seems to me. Most of the time, it’s not hard to see how cracked the pots are, even if you’re a lay reader, like me. It’s my choice to ignore them or be amused by them. But I wouldn’t spend any time on them as a moderator, and I think it’s best to ignore them when they do comment. Rudeness in civilized exchanges doesn’t have a place anywhere though, and I’m all for booting off the inappropriate. They’ll never learn any manners anywhere otherwise. I also think a clearly stated policy is a good idea. The thing with policing is that once it starts, the line gets more and more blurry and then it’s eating your life, just moderating the comments.
I agree that you need to distinguish between crackpottery and rudeness here. Crackpottery certainly CAN be rude… but I do like being able to point to fresh examples of physics crazy in recent CV threads. It makes for a wonderful coffee-break discussion, at least on a once-every-other-month dosage regimen. Though I understand that more prevalent craziness does get to be tiresome. Maybe you could have a single-thread crackpottery policy? Each armchair physicist gets to air their special Theory of Laundry Lint in full once and only once… after that, they have to leave room for “mainstream” discussions and other crackpots. Or risk manual deletion, or even IP address banning.
(But that allows for the possibility that at least a few of the crazies might be genuine geniuses with giant chips on their shoulders and home-made parabolic radio antennae in their mothers’ backyards.)
But rude, tricky. What happens if you’re talking about women in science, and some well-known theoretical physicist stops by to assert that all female scientists inevitably obtain their jobs by quota, not merit? Not that I have anyone in particular in mind…
While I agree with the goal of reducing the noise, I think you are setting yourself up for a lot of work if you begin moderating the comments section. Every instance becomes a judgement call. For example (and I will use real examples here) do you allow Peter Woit to post here? How about Lubos Motl? What if Lubos confines his comments to scientific areas where he presumably has some expertise? Are you going to censure someone for articulating the view that abortion is a sin? What if they are extremely polite about it?
I think you might want to rethink this issue by dividing posts into two catagories:
1) Physics and Cosmology, where the four of you possess some clear expertise and justification in focusing the discussion.
2) Everything else..Politics, Culture etc. where you fall into the classification of intelligent lay people.
I can see adding some “structure” to the first catagory. Limiting crackpot speculation etc.. but for the second I think you need to realize that you have stepped off the podium and are mingling among the masses.
Rude is not tricky; rudeness gets deleted, simple as that. Consistent rudeness gets banned.
But if people are more amused than turned off by the crackpottery, that’s interesting to know. Once-per-thread etc. rules are unworkable, as per the “eating your life” concern to which Lee refers. No way we’re going to spend too much time doing this; I just want to have a consistent policy and enforce it without hesitation or effort.
Usually a lurker, but I feel your pain, especially when you note:
“The crackpots to whom I refer are those who know little or nothing about the subject but are convinced that they do…”
You’re familiar, I’m sure with the 1999 APA paper regarding competence and the effects of the lack thereof (“Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments”).
To refresh your memory see, http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf
My own inclination: be fair, be ruthless, take no prisoners.
Best wishes.
Elliot, please don’t use real examples, as that’s not the point. And those are all easy questions. Not being a fan of string theory (or inflation, or dark energy, or whatever) doesn’t make someone a crackpot, so there’s no issue there. And being excessively rude is not permitted, no matter how much of an expert you may be.
And there isn’t any expert/masses dichotomy. I can be wrong about cosmology, just as I can be right about cooking or politics. It’s the argument that matters, not who is making it.
I second the earlier comment about suggesting worthwhile discussion topics in the comments. In an ideal world, we could have a Cosmic Variance that sprouts into its own Slashdot derivative, with a forum system that allows readers to begin their own sub-threads. But that would be a lot of work as you mentioned.
Maybe you could provide an attached forum. When you see the comments are going in one particular way (say, very esoteric science that I, a reasonably well-educated student can’t understand a word of it), you can create a thread in said forum and provide a link to that thread. Then individuals who stand to gain/contribute to that off-topic have a place to do it that doesn’t alienate your other readers. That, I think would be the most bang for your buck, as you could create those forum topics ad hoc whenever necessary (and it’s pretty easy to do, too!) and accommodate weirdos and prophets alike.
I enjoy the comments sections very much. I rarely read or even try to read the whole comments thread (unless it’s just a few posts), but instead will try to find the one or two main discussion threads and follow them–it seems to me that usually there’s just one or two such threads. Since those posters usually mention each other (and often post number) by name, I find it is pretty easy to find and ignore the people that are just being disruptive or are digressing.
So I don’t personally find the current system to be that painful.
It’s possible the effect of the disruptive stuff is worse than it seems. As Sean mentioned in the post, it is possible that some valuable voices are discouraged by the noise from posting. If there’s some way to know that this is the case, then yeah, anything that encourages more of the on-topic, non-crakpot contributions would be great.
(I rarely post myself, though that has nothing to do with anybody being disruptive.)
I’m a recent CV convert, rarely post, but this is absolutely my favorite “serious” blog. To be honest with you, as a non-scientist (or “near-scientist” – I was within reach of a Physics major before I switched to literature), I really enjoy the challenge of trying to sort out the signal from the noise myself. It’s almost like a proving ground for the real world (e.g., reading the vast bulk of mainstream science journalism as they cover people who claim to have invented free energy by “harnessing the power of magnets” and such).
Anyway, most of the time, I can tell who the cranks are on my own – the times when I can’t, it quickly becomes obvious by way the rest of you respond or don’t respond. And frankly, I think that’s a much better kind of censorship. As well as censure, of a kind – if you were a crank, which would be more legitimizing- being banned, or being ignored?
Rude is not tricky; rude gets deleted, simple as that.
It’s tricky in the sense of, who determines whether or not someone is being rude? “Common sense” usually — but what if someone follows the example I gave? They could argue that they are not being rude, merely stating the truth as they (and many others) perceive it. And if it’s a women in science discussion, I actually think it’s unwise to shut them down with anything other than verbal retorts and (ideally) better evidence to the contrary.
re: crackpottery, I don’t mean once per thread — I mean once, period. I suppose it’s only fair to let someone blather on at length long enough to determine that, yes, they are in fact a crackpot. But, golly, I don’t know what’s an effective way of telling them to knock it off after that… amusing as they are (and sometimes it’s a worthwhile exercise just trying to untangle their arguments), they don’t in my experience take kindly to being told they’ve had their say, please shut up.
I do like threaded discussions. Though you lose some of the value of having everyone talk to everyone.
Sean just wrote
I hope you really mean this. I know I have point of view that runs counter to the beliefs of most physicists and cosmologist. I appreciate your willingness, so far, to let me express my take of what I think is wrong with the gravity theories of Newton and Einstein. It has taken me years to come to this stance and if you continue to let me express this different point of view of mine, I feel a useful contribution can be made on both our parts.
I must disagree: rude is tricky. Sometimes rudeness is a byproduct of passion, and I absolutely do not want to squash that.
I’m struggling with where that line between the bad post and the passionate post should be drawn right now…if you get it figured out, let me know.
I’ll echo several of the previous commenters: I’m another person who rarely reads blog comments, and yet regularly checks in with CV’s comments on posts, because it’s invariably an interesting discussion. The fact that recent comments to posts are listed in the sidebar makes for great ease of navigation, too.
Personally, I think CV does a great job in this respect, although I can’t speak for those who mght be discouraged from commenting by an “unacceptable” signal to noise ratio. I don’t find the ratio unacceptable, and like Matt, even as a layperson, I can generally sift out the crackpottery on my own.
In general, I’d err on the side of less heavy-handed moderation. You don’t want to stifle the natural conversational “flow,” plus, it’s a hell of a lot of work. Which brings me to my ground-breaking new insights into the space-time continuum (I read ALL of “The Elegant Universe”… almost)….
My two cents: I find that I can only merge into a conversation when I discover it early enough. After a few days the comment thread tends to be taken over by small subset of commenters, with their specific and repetetive concerns. I am then reluctant to comment, assuming it will just not be noticed by anyone I’d like to converse with. In the few times I did, that assumption proved valid.
In other words I think that while rudeness is usually not much of a problem here, maybe more pruning would be useful for me personally. On the other hand it does sound like work…
On the topic of off-topic topics….
Has anyone ever contemplated the philosophical connection between the idea of a “universe on a brane” and Plato’s Cave?
Smack’em down. Whoever ’em are. Use whatever rules you like, or none. Whatever strikes your fancy. Management of comments is as much a part of the editorial content of a site as the articles, and can be as informative (of the attitudes of the proprietors). For my taste loads of “me too’s” or “Microsoft sucks” (Not to pick on /.) make a pretty thin broth. Perhaps a less linear form where repetitions of the same idea became progressively smaller fonts? Perhaps just a concordance graph? Ideally, someone would boil the content into a summary of what was said and put that up top after a few days. But than that would be another article and require more comments.
Since the idea of a cocktail party sounds better than a soup kitchen, if populated with interesting people, keep what you like and smack the rest.
Perhaps, simply asking those that comment to indicate a level of area expertise, then adding some kind of icon before their user name would help. That way, those who are only looking to read the comments of individuals with degrees in physics or cosmology could more easily sort what is “signal,” from what is “noise.” This would allow the comments of others (no matter how crackpot), to be sorted through without being removed from the general comment area.
Obviously, there are well educated lay individuals that also contribute greatly to this blog, and to disregard their thoughts would not be the purpose of the icons.
Given enough variety, each commenter could adequately describe their position in the discussion (i.e. Ph.D. in Physics, to Physics Enthusiast, to Questioner).
This might also help others to respond to their comments in an appropriate manner. If an individual with a Ph.D. realizes that someone who has no physics background is asking a question, they would likely respond in terms that the person could understand better.
Just a thought 🙂
Elliott,
I’ve certainly never felt that my comments were unwelcome here, and have commented when I’ve thought I had something to contribute. I can’t remember if there ever was a comment of mine that was deleted, if so it most likely it was part of some exchange with Lubos involving far too much rudeness.
Sean,
I’ve struggled with the problem you’re describing here, and have ended up adopting a more heavy-handed approach than what you are doing. In my case the choice is a bit easier, since the goal of communicating with the general public about science is not as important a one to me as it is to you. But I think you should take Moshe’s comment seriously. I fear that far too many knowledgeable people like him are discouraged from contributing comments here (and also at my blog…) because the noise level is too high. If most comments are nonsensical or ill-informed, a sensible, well-informed person is not likely to take the time to try and participate.
The analogy with a cocktail party is a good one. If the conversation becomes dominated by loud people who don’t have anything of interest to say, people with good sense move on to another group. I’ve found the most common problems are exactly the same as in a social gathering: boorish people who want to turn every conversation to themselves and their pet concerns, and clueless people who have no idea what a conversation is about, but feel it necessary to join in anyway.
To PZM’s point above: People with strong viewpoints in the midst of a discussion are often rude by the standards of water cooler chit chat. A blunt “No”, even a “No, your wrong”. even a “what the *&^* *^%#!%^ would think that” followed by a “because” pertinent to the topic can be distinguished from the pure ad hominem. A polite ad hominem is even more offensive and reprehensible in my view, but for reasons that are purely ad hominem, so they must be treated in the same way. It may be that this opens up all sorts of fallacies as fair targets. Fallacies are part of the game however, which generally ends when some one is reduced to insult.
Another sort of rude/passionate distinction may be the subjective report. “That article turned my life around” and “That really upset me”. Allowing life stories is an editorial decision, but distinguishing between that part of a post and the argument part seems possible.
I am like Charon: “This is the only blog I usually read comments on.” The comments on this blog are great! If it were up to me I would allow a light amount of crackpottery just because sometimes it can be hilarious and sometimes I learn allot seeing people point out their errors.
However, I believe any crackpot argument that doesn’t go away after a couple posts should be put to an end so that readers don’t feel the comments are leading nowhere productive. I think crackpots should be allowed to make a post, but when they try to take over the comments section with their ideas they should be stopped.
I do not think flaming or being rude should be tolerated.
Thanks again to everyone who comments. I read the comments on this blog because I really learn a lot. 🙂
Sean wrote
Writing as a long-time moderator and now an Administrator of Internet Infidels Discussion Board, I can say with confidence that there ain’t no such animal. PZ (formerly a mod at Infidels) says it well:
It really does require time and effort, Sean. There’s no magic bullet or shortcut. Volokh’s cocktail party metaphor is a good one — I tell new mods at Infidels that they are in effect hosts for their forums. But there are also bouncers in the house: the Administrators.
Moshe does have a valid point about especially long comment threads. Once the number of comments moves past 35 or so, I generally stop reading the thread because it’s just too overwhelming, and in general, by that stage, most of the salient points of the discussion have been made. Not sure what the solution is, however… I’m still not a fan of heavy-handed moderation.