Experience Vs. Idealism. 15 Rounds.

This blog has had a constant, self-imposed tension to it, at least to me.

Idealistic, Small-L Liberal Mitch is a free speech absolutist for reasons not the least of which being when people who find not only disagreeable but hateful are speaking in the open, then they’re doing less skulking through back alleys and plotting and scheming.

UX Pro Mitch sees the data, and knows there are four kinds of online forums:

1. Small forums that take care of themselves, because the participants fundamentally agree on everything they talk about. . And I do mean everything. A forum on bird-watching can turn into an online barroom brawl over punctuation, or Trump, or the Green Bay Packers.
2. Large forums that police their traffic pretty relentlessly. Aggressive moderation keeps things under control.
3. Forums where the “owners” don’t really care, and degenerate into a nonstop flame pit. See: The Strib comment section.
4. Forums that don’t exist anymore, because the owners got frustrated with the un-usable maelstrom they’d turned into, and shut them down. See the MinnPost comment section.

I’ve been running this blog for almost 22 years, and installed the comment section over 20 years ago – and for that entire time, I’ve striven to keep things in the #1 category above; to keep a light hand on moderation, sticking to the ideal that the best defense against bad (or annoying, or dumb, or trolling) speech speech is more good speech.

Part of that is principle. Part of that is, honestly, I don’t have the time to be a heavier hand. I don’t make enough money off this blog to hire moderators, like Powerline or Hot Air. I do 90% of the writing between 5:30-7AM – and then I go to work. All day long and, given that the team I lead stretches from the Bay Area to Bangalore, sometimes into the wee hours of the late night. I don’t want to exert a heavy hand on the comments, because I can’t.

In all that time, I can list the number of people I’ve banned on two hands, and list most if not all of them by name. And as a very general rule I’ve only banned people for three reasons:

• Picking personal fights with me that involve some variant of stalking or other hyperpersonal attacks. That’s why Bill Gleason, Dog Gone and a few others wound up pining for the electronic fjords.
• Genuine worries that letting them air their inner monologues here was harming their mental health (and, possibly, my actual health). “Doug” was one of those.
• Thinking they could take the blog over from the comments. Mitch, please.

There’s been tension between order and chaos – but the de facto “gentlemen’s agreement” to speak freely and meet bad (or dumb) speech with more better smarter speech worked for a long time. There are some blazingly smart people here, and I have learned a hell of a lot from many of you. And there’ve been some unintended but salutary consequences; for example, the impetus to turn a couple of sarcastic posts about Twin Cities Ron Paulbots into a Dickensian serial, and then a book, came from several of you in the comments.

The “gentlemen’s agreement” worked for probably 19 of the past 20 years.

Because for most of that time, while I don’t have a lot of time to read what goes on in the comment section, when I did it was almost always fun.

But it’s not fun anymore. Worse than that, it’s not especially interesting.

My hands-off approach has stopped working. The comment section has gone from a #1 to a #3.

#2 isn’t really an option. Not only do I not want to be like Sally Jo Sorenson, manically (and, it seems to me, dreadfully insecurely) screening e v e r y single comment to keep things on track – I literally can not do that. There aren’t enough hours in the day to produce and police the blog, and everything else that needs doing.

But for all that, #4 is off the table. It matters too much to me for that. Between the show prep it provides, the zen-like self-discipline of getting up early and going this every weekday, the interactions that I do like and value, and maybe (who knows?) some “sunk costs fallacy”, this place is important to me.

But there are going to be changes.

In fact, they’ve happened.

Brass Tacks: I’ve shut down the comment section. It’ll stay shut down – not permanently, but for a bit. Maybe a day, maybe a year, most likely somewhere in between.

When it comes back, things will be different. Not radically so – but different.

More later.