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.)
An occasional thrashing of a crackpot can be amusing but rarely enlightening. While I admit I find it entertaining, I wouldn’t describe it as one of the better parts of my nature. So keeping comments relatively on topic shouldn’t be sacrificed in the name of either letting crackpots speak or letting them be trashed.
You seem to grasp the distinction between asking stupid questions and asserting crazy things. It is your blog so I would trust you to use your judgment. Announce a general policy and then use your judgment. Sometimes you maybe wrong but so what. The fate of civilization won’t be altered if you let one crack pot through or if you delete one serious if naïve question. But if you let crack pots over run your comments real discussion and questions will stop.
From reading the previous commentary, it appears that I am the only crackpot who knows and admits that he is one, and therefore my input might be useful.
First, it is not my intention to thrust my opinions on people who do not want to hear them. Most of my posts here are on other topics completely separate from my own hereies. (I doubt the existence of the quantum vacuum) but you don’t hear about it here. For instance, I commented extensively on the pyramid concrete theory. I would hope that I can comment usefully on this as I may have been the only person here who read the original literature on that (crackpot) idea.
Second, there is no way that I can be responsible for others linking in my ideas to this thread. I’ve seen that at least one of them got her post(s) removed for this, and, well, I’m not really very sympathetic. I think that you should keep mainstream ideas on a mainstream physics thread. There are plenty of crackpot threads available for crackpots to exchange ideas and I find these very useful.
As far as I am concerned, any crackpot ideas I have that no one is willing to listen to is simply an opportunity for me to make further progress without competition, if they are correct, and rightfully suppressed, if they are wrong.
If a crackpot idea is any good, it will very likely be understood by only a tiny fraction of the physics or mathematics community. As such, they need to be directed to the people whose work they extend (see hep-ph/0605074 ). A general thread that discusses things like rodents and tomatoes is not the place to teach it.
Collaborative rating, and filtering, a la /.
This would put you on the bleeding edge of wordpress. Googling… here’s a plugin at the bottom of this page you could try out:
http://www.e5media.com/
This way you could redirect the cries of “fascist censor!” back on themselves. It’s win-win. Well, except for whomever manages your blog code.
Oh, and as long as your fielding requests: please make the bloody column size wider.
sean,
i know you said threading was out of the question, but…will you reconsider? maybe get some advice from jacques on how to do it. it works well on his site. maybe it wouldn’t be so painful afterall and would give a major signal boost.
Ah, it just occurred to me that instead of figuring out how to modify wordpress to do slashdot style comments, you could just use slashcode:
http://www.slashcode.com/
and spruce it up with CV’s graphics. That’s probably a more drastic step than you wanted to take. And, before you knew it, you might start accepting random post submissions… and become cosmicslashvariancedot.
Hi Sean,
to add my some words: I’d appreciate if the comments were strongly moderated, since you surely have a lot of traffic here. I’d appreciate that not so much because crackpotism bothers me (I think I can figure out what is nonsensical), but because I usually don’t have the time to check of order 200 comments whether something might be interesting. If there were only the 30 comments that actually contribute something, it would be helpful. This applies to scientific posts only. As someone said before, it would be good to have a stricter policy for these. You might also consider updating the original post, and pointing towards the more interesting comments (this might also motivate people to contribute something with content). I also think it would help if you put a disclaimer somewhere that says something like: we’re not a platform for promoting your own personal theory-of-something or so. Best,
B.
Sean said: “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.”
But of course there then still exists or remains a preference for some arguments or theories over others – whether in physics, cosmology, climate or ‘politics’
Debate requires more than one point of view
Debate requires A Universe (at least one) to debate over
This site used to be the only site i ever read the comments on. now i read the articles and keep on moving. the comment sections get so waited down and it so hard to keep up with whos talking to who, who knows what and all that jazz. i am also really busy and if i do ask a question i can never rember to come back and look for the answer. if i do come back sometimes its jsut to hard to find. i guess, my choice would be moderation of the comments, or maybe just a “highlight comments section”
i dont know if any CV editor can edit and post, but if they could it would be simple for any one of them that is keeping up with the comments on a paticular post to ad a peralink to the most interesting and thoughtful (and being opinionated is a-ok) comments at the end of the already written post.
maybe to much work. but yeah, some comment sections get so out of hand or off topic, i personally as a casual reader no longer even try to keep up.
Apparently nobody actually reads these comments, even the ones by me. So, let me point out again that there is no realistic possibility of threaded comments, extra forums, large scarlet C’s stuck to posts by crackpots, or any such gizmo-oriented strategy that makes work for us. The only question is, would the conversations be more useful if we deleted/banned more people who were all noise and no signal?
There doesn’t seem to be much of a groundswell of support for a crackdown, although perhaps we should try to run a tighter ship in the science-oriented threads. (Rudeness, rather than crackpottery, is the primary danger in the other threads, and I think that’s easier to deal with.) Again, not to discourage non-experts who actually want to learn something and ask questions, but to create a more useful set of comments for everybody. Maybe.
I read the comments section on 2 blogs regularly, CV and Michael Berube’s blog. I think you should ask him his policy on commenters, because his S/N ratio is extremely high. I don’t mind crackpots too much, but sometimes a comment can stop an interesting thread in its tracks. I’ve seen it happen on CV – a great discussion will hit a wall with one rambly disconnected comment. I don’t like that and I do think that it discourages interested and interesting people from commenting. I’ve noticed that many of the ranty derailing people post comments on other blogs as well, perhaps they enjoy ruining a good thing even if not consciously. I’d say delete their comments. They have other avenues to express themselves, and I think a bit of therapy would help more than unlimited access to great blogs where they are ignored or tolerated.
It’s possible it just takes a while of ignoring the crackpots before they weed themselves out, and maybe that is what Michael B. has done (although I think his great commenters do a bit of policing as well).
I enjoy reading this blog, and I enjoy reading the comments – except for those by Plato, who should be given a job moderating a special section “For Crackpots Only”.
I’d like to see CV deleting more comments from crackpots!!! Do the exclamation points count for groundswell?
Pingback: How outdated is physics? at
Plato is not so much a crackpot as a source of mostly incoherent rambling, as in comment 60: While this thread instigated a incubation to write another post on name, as I said, it was only part of it.
“instigated a incubation”? At least the two 4-syllable words were spelled correctly.
That said, predictably worthless comments from a few familiar names are easy to ignore. Random garbage from unpredictable sources is considerably more distracting and frustrating. CV seems largely free of the latter.
Jennifer West wrote:
Only if each exclamation point denotes the factorial of the one before.
if you’ll permit me to question your question… perhaps you shouldn’t be asking current commenters what they want (in a referendum). you might rather want to ask yourself what kind of audience you wish to attract to the comments section, and hence what culture you should create to facilitate the experience for that audience.
what is your primary target market – professional physicists (with laypeople watching) or laypeople (with professional physicists replying)? if the former, you need to banish crackpots whenever possible, because professionals are very impatient with their time. if the latter, you probably need to be lenient with the ignorant, so that nobody feels like they will be punished for trying to participate (or at least not let it be widely known that you’re dismissing certain types of ignorance). standard business marketing would suggest that you’ll have difficulty attracting both types of people to the comments in the long run.
i’m focusing solely here on the comments section, not the question of who will read or subscribe to your posts. (sorry to hit you all upside the head with marketing speak – i’m an economist/mathemetician/computer geek with a lifelong interest in physics.)
“My character” is sure taking a beating today. 🙂 I acknowledge I am a non expert and have a lot to learn. Being lead by the physics is important and I acknowledge that too.
I am sorry John on commenting on the “Megalithic carved stone balls from Scotland,” even though I understood they were being held at the Ashmolean Museum in the UK. And for not including you with Hooft, Coxeter and Heisenberg. Or talking about the sites in Arizona that you walked through.
Ip addresses are a good thing in the context of moderation, especially if one can change their name as readily as they can create a new email address. I don’t do that. Or use software to hide the IP. Any blogger understands that the IP addresses can be found.
I would of course have to be respectful of the thoughts about one’s living room.
No I do not like to be called crazy, but knew it would be a hard one if I put myself out front.
instigated= because of the post a certain motivation
incubation =seriously thinking about what Sean was posting?
Sorry Chris W. Four’s a good number. 🙂
Of course you know what comes next.
I like Plato.
Sean, you said in comment 84:
“Apparently nobody actually reads these comments, even the ones by me.
So, let me point out again that there is no realistic possibility of
threaded comments,
extra forums,
large scarlet C’s stuck to posts by crackpots, or
any such gizmo-oriented strategy that makes work for us.
The only question is, would the conversations be more useful if we deleted/banned more people who were all noise and no signal?
… Again, not to discourage non-experts who actually want to learn something and ask questions, but to create a more useful set of comments for everybody. …”.
Of course, it is your blog and I think that you should do whatever you want to do,
but anyway here is a comment:
If your objectives are
to get more expert comments in order to educate relative newbies,
and
to get more expert-to-expert comment discussions,
then
maybe you should poll the experts in the relevant fields and ask them what it would take for them to participate in comment discussion.
If THEY, the experts (and you know who they are because you are active in the relevant fields of research) say that they are unhappy with certain types of comments, then (if you can identify those types of comment with reasonable effort) you can move toward your objectives by deleting those types of comment (and that includes barring individuals who for whatever reason alienate the experts whose commentary you want).
For example,
Joe Polchinski was a recent guest blogger here,
and
of the 76 comments on his blog entry the last time I checked it,
only number 43 was from Joe Polchinski himself,
and
it only referred to numbers 20, 22, 24, 26, 29, 35, and 36.
Apparently he felt that only 7 / 42 = 1/6 of the 42 comments preceding his number 43 were worth his time to discuss,
and
that none of the 33 comments after his number 43 were worth his time to discuss.
Maybe he could tell you privately (maybe he already has?) to what extent your deletion of some (or all) of the 5/6 of the first 42 comments and the last 33 comments would have encouraged him to do more discussion in the comments to his guest blog entry.
Any such advice from him (or from other similar experts) would probably be more helpful to you than advice from others (including but not limited to me).
Tony Smith
http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/
I remember the old sci.phys.* usenet groups, and how it was eventually overwhelmed by noise…
Anyway, I am very daunted by the sheer amount of comments for each post, and I do wish there is a more heavy handed approach to deletion. Fair enough, the usual suspects are easily filtered out, but like Jennifer West said, a good conversation can easily be swamped out by the noise, even by the usual suspects. 100+ comments is a lot to scroll through and it’s easy to miss an insightful reply. To stretch the analogy, the cocktail party is noisy and we have to shout to be heard…
Most of the time, I ended up doing (guiltily) what I do when I read the arxiv : I fall back to reading only comments by the “known experts”. (Ok, I saunter over to the big shots and eavesdrop :D)
I think a stricter moderation will do two things : (a) It will reduce the noise (b) it will increase the confidence levels of lay readers who read the comments for insights. And I count myself, in general, as a lay reader because most of the stuff posted on this blog is over my head.
As a new visitor to this wonderful site with interesting topics and stimulating comments, I would love to see the highest quality discussion. As a layperson some topics may be way over my head, but hope your sensible handling will keep enticing the experts to contribute freely.
Please do away with obvious noises, particularly in science topics. The fact that you feel the noise ratio is up is a good indication it is time to act. I am certain the majority of the readers have trust in your judgement. Hope it will not be an additional burden for you.
Let me also thank you for the interesting and informative links. They are great additional learning sources for me.
Please feel free to prune or fine tune the comments section to reflect the quality you would like to see.
Ditto Ms. Ouellette on registration-only commenting.
Besides, the crackpots will just register.
(N.B. to Prince, #47: If someone gets a paper published in Annalen der Physik, that usually counts as prima facie evidence of the paper’s non-crackpottery.)
A key question in an informal poll like this is whether the opinions of the people who are responding are representative of the opinions of the readership in general. (For example, I almost didn’t comment, although since I finally did I guess I can’t use myself as an example…) It seems to me that the people who don’t read the comment sections are less likely to respond to the informal poll, so you may not be hearing from the less satisfied customers. Additionally, many people find it a lot easier to voice a positive comment about how things are fine the way they are than to express dissatisfaction with some aspect of a popular blog that they generally enjoy. Counting votes for “more moderation” vs. “no change” may give a filtered picture of what the current readership generally wants.
I thought that “agoodspellr” brought up an excellent point about setting a policy designed to attract the readership you want. It is questionable, however, whether the typical lay reader enjoys noise more than those who are more intimately involved in physics or cosmology. I doubt any reasonable expert would begrudge a lay reader from asking a sincere question about an elementary point or presenting a well-thought argument, nor do I get the impression that Sean or others are viewing those kinds of comments as “noise.” Many lay readers when it comes to science are probably quite knowledgeable about some non-science issues that get raised in this blog, and they generally seem tolerant of expert scientists expressing opinions without great expertise. 😉
As noted by “kapakapa” (after I had written this! I was scooped!), it seems apparent that one or more blog owners feel that the signal to noise ratio has dropped to unsatisfactory levels often enough to be a concern; otherwise Sean wouldn’t have raised the issue. That in itself seems like a strong indication that there really is a noise problem. I expect that the blog owners are in a good position to set a reasonable moderation policy unilaterally. I vote for going with what seems to produce a healthy environment that encourages desirable kinds of comments, with an eye to what will best engage your target audience(s).
P.S. to “Plato”: I have found myself rapidly scrolling past most of your comments because you seem to delight in making them cryptic, or else you compose your comments so rapidly that you don’t pay attention to how comprehensible they may seem to others. I really don’t think that you add any additional depth or provoke more thought in your comments by being cryptic, or quoting others to bring up a point of your immediate interest that has little to do with the topic at hand, or ending at least half of your sentences with an annoying question mark. I think this style more than the actual content is what may cause some people to associate your comments with crackpot-ism. It takes extra time and effort to express thoughts in a clear manner, but I think a lot more people will be receptive to your observations and questions if you make the effort to phrase them clearly and save them for posts where they are on-topic. As a refreshing contrast, I thought your comment #92 was clear overall, and mostly free of superfluous question marks…
The policy of “comments” ?
To those deemed a little cracked, it may come as no suprise to see this thread, it’s a reccurance of keeping one’s house in order, we all have to do this in a while!
Even so Gone but not for ever : http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2006/05/29/gone/
the site original’s policy makes good reading :
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/about/
The whole site of cosmic variance, trys to maintain a creditable balance, but I for one only try to learn, I may learn slow, but I know my limitations, and do try to restrain my inabilities, but at the same time I do shoot off in obscur directions. This is not fair for the site owners, so rather than see no cosmic variance at all, I will strive a little harder to retrict my often qwurky comments.
Having someone put up the most interesting threads online, is the most important factor…
I have to agree with many of the posters before me, CV is rather unique in that I manage to read most of the comments, most of the time. As for the noise, I don’t think the crackpots are a real problem. Instead, after a certain number of posts, noise is generated mainly by people who simply express agreement with previous posts, or worse, repeat previous arguments. As a result, the perceived S/N often decreases when the number of posts goes up.
Threading is a technical solution to this problem, but I understand that will not be implemented. So, please do remove posts from obvious crackpots (to someone who can identify them, the well-meaning replies can count as noise, too), but I would also encourage people to only post when they have something new to add to the discussion. Perhaps in this particular thread, and to gauge opinions, numbers count. However, that is not the case on most other topics.