http://www.spokesmanreview.com/blogs/conversation/

prefers to silence any and ALL dissent in its bloggs. It even recently (and illegally) has made false accusations and published libelous commentary in its blogs regarding a group of people that have responded to their blogs.

The hide behind the right of the electronic media to access Free Speach, yet they refuse to allow the same right to people willing to comment on their reporting.

Stefan, that’s true, but online communities that need written rules and regulations in order to function don’t appeal to me. If a lawyer’s advice is needed before people can speak their minds, something’s wrong. Does this mean when I go to my community supermarket, I can’t have a conversation with the cashier or other customers without taking advice from my lawyer or without reading the supermarket’s terms and conditions for cashier and customer conversations? As I said on our blog, are we as adults so incapable of controlling ourselves that we cannot be trusted to walk out our front door without being policed?

Newspapers are also scared about liability and defamation issues. MSM will always be seen as having deep pockets to go after, rather than a one man blogger, so the risk is much much greater for a MSM institution. Our lawyers wouldnt let us do comments till we had rules clearly posted. If thats what it takes , so be it – id rather have rules and engage readers, than not, and not.

But Ive used my rules time and time again. someone gets edited or deleted, they whine why? I cneasily say “go see the rules”. I dont have to explain or justify my reason – its spelled out there. The community does self police to a large extent, but there’s a reference to draw on, and they also are not afraid to call me on it if i get overwhelmed and am not moderating at my best ( and yes by moderating I do mean being a gracious and tolerant host). Which happens. Im at 300 comments a story plus others, still posting breaking news, etc, etc – judgment can falter. They call me on it, thats fine. It helps all of us to have an objective reference post.

Its about being held to some level of accountability, and establishing a clearly defined basis of trust based on that accountablility. WP is unable to point to a set of rules to help establish that trust: theres nothing to hold the public accountable for their online behavior and there is nothing to hold the Post accountable for moderating fairly.

Its the basis of Jane’s issue today, incessant as it was. I believe Jim’s answer, btw, having moderated before and been in similar circumstance, but the fact that he cant be accountable for any of it – he cant show rules that werent followed, he cant show WP definitions for “obscene” or “hateful’, or any terms, so of course theres bound to be suspicion and frustration, because it all seems so arbitrary. Youve lost trust.

Im not sure if he can/will produce the record of deleted comments either (which if made available privately or by request or behind some password protected gate) would answer the charges levelled at him – but keeping a record of all that you do and delete would also be a sign of trust and accountabilty.

As to threaded or not – I wont impose that arbitrarily, but we’ll let our readrs decide what works best for them. Right now we have the simplest of tools to comment with, and the long discussions g do get hard to scroll on, but when we do a major redesign in a few months we’ll ask the readership and see what they want. Also keep in mind every community may want something different.

Jeff, you bring up some good points in your first graf of that post. I’d love to offer all of those options to our readers, but Im not sure how to integrate it it all, or if its actually needed ( just because you can, doesnt necessarily mean you should…). Right now Im trying to decide on any benefit for general topic forums, as all we do at the moment is offer commenting on every single article. Do I need to offer a broader focus? How will that integrate with the more targeted discussions based on a specific news story? A lot to think on.

Gray, Im defintely going to check the link, see how thats done.

My vote is to do nothing to complicate following a conversation by sectioning off some of its comments into sub-directories, something that requires a lot more effort to follow than just zipping through them in a continuous straight line with the scroll bar.

Surely you’re right, Mr. Feinman!
Americablog and C&L for instance quite often have 300+ comments at one post. This makes it very difficult to find responses on comments you posted there. Plus there are some times problems with trolls and it’s hard to find the valuable insights among all the background noise. High volume blogs and especially newspapers should have a better software. Personally, I like the board of german media company heise.de (maybe you know their magazine c’t):
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/foren/go.shtml?list=1&forum_id=91257

Sorry, german language only, but you see there are several threads in the comment section of this articel about the Disney/Pixar deal. You can sort comments grouped in threads or in the order they were posted and you can expand or minimize threads. Readers may rate the comments, the overall rate is shown with a green or red bar. Also you may filter trolls or commenters you don’t like. OK, only registered users are allowed to post, but this is necessary because of the restrictions of german laws. All in all, a good board system that is working well. Would be nice if blogs with a high rate of comments would use such a software, too.

Discussion is but a form of civilization.
The first men had a very limited way of discussing, mostly with weapons and of course the right was on the side of the physically stronger.
In one way it is similar with words: the winner is not always the right one, sometimes it is the one who can better present his ideas.

“Democracy and discussion are messy, like life.”
Interactivity and discussion ARE LIFE.

Stefan, rules of what? Rules of speech … what you can and cannot say? I’m not sure that’s something we want to encourage online. I agree big communities need a moderator (if by moderation you mean a tolerant host), but I don’t think rules are useful because there are no hard and fast rules that apply to conversation, or to people voicing their opinions. I still think blogging is like a party at a house and in my view the best of them are open and free houses. Eileen makes an interesting point. I started coming here because of the variety of opinion and the tolerance for it. I don’t know what school you went to when you were a child, but where I went to school, our playground had no rules. It was where children went to escape from the confines of the classroom. Now we’re all grown up, or are supposed to be, and if some of us aren’t, it’s plain for everyone to see. Time and again, I’ve seen trolls ignored or laughed at. The community sorts it out among themselves without ever the need to resort to a policy manual.

Regarding the ombudsman position and moderated threads you wrote: “What we needed instead were police to clean up problems. Our expert showed me that the public would send us alerts to those problems, but only if we responded to their snitching quickly and reliably. It worked.” Pls emphasize this point during that disucssion! WaPo stated it hasn’t been able to clean up the thread, this doesn’t sound very convincing: Blogs like C&L manage to handle a comparable amount of comments every day, washingtonpost.com hasn’t been able to do the same? Also, WaPo’s response hasn’t been “quickly and reliably” (3 days is a long time in the fast living internet), adding insult to injury. Pls tell them they should try harder!

“Instapundit” Glenn Reynolds (who’s afraid of comments) will be there, too. I guess this will be interesting

From my prior post: “I believe Jeff’s ‘mission’ has changed in the year and a half I’ve visited here.”

When I arrived, Jeff was a purported ‘moderate’ and he supported our Iraqi war efforts. He talked the middle line. Because of that, many conservatives visited and commented here. His comment threads were voluminous. [Yet many jihadis ALSO visited here.] Jeff got MANY MSM appearances as a blog guru as a result of this for his temperate, moderate ‘mission’/stance…

And then USCentCom arrived in the comment section (in about October if you want to check the archives).

This was just about the same time that Jeff got his gig with Al Guardian.

Times have changed, eh?; the mission has changed. No more war posts. No more need for them. No more mention of Iraq the Model or even a mention of Iraq on voting day. (Of course the rest of the left wing blogs didn’t mention purple finger day, either.) No more politics. Back to ‘media’, with Stern “free speech” issues for baseline.

Got it.

“Everyone in your audience can participate, if they choose, providing you don’t have the bad manners to exclude them because they don’t fit in with what you consider your ‘mission’ … or should I say, image, to be.”

I agree with you.

And unfortunately, although I agree with much of what Jeff has to say in this post, I have also witnessed a thread where he killed 11 comments. All of them were from conservatives, and I was one of them. As I recall, noone was even profane (certainly not even in the realm of Howard Stern “free speech” profanity).

I believe Jeff’s ‘mission’ has changed in the year and a half I’ve visited here. It’s his house.

As for respect, I’ve learned that Jeff treats those who he agrees with with respect.