Daniel Hannan comments on comments. I know what he means…
Now there’s a new variant of the phenomenon: judging a blog by its comment thread. Again, the absurdity should be obvious. Bloggers are not responsible for what happens after they have posted. Those who comment most aggressively are more often than not hostile to the writer. The word “troll” didn’t originally mean, as is often thought these days, someone who is rude and unpleasant; it meant someone who used an assumed identity to discredit someone else.
Although of course sometimes the relevant commenters aren’t trolls at all, being far too stupid. They are simply ignorant – and in the case of many over at CiF, deluded, pompous self-righteous aresholes. Want an example? Oh, yeah, just look at any article discussing smoking and health – the usual haters come out to spew their vile misanthropy for the world to see.
Here. though, I’ve not usually had that problem. We had the Dickie Doubleday issue a couple of years back, but he was relatively easily dismissed. And when the tinfoil hatters tried to hijack the discussion on Peter Power, I simply drew it to a close, thereby ending the lunacy. Hannan has a problem that I don’t – threads with a thousand or more comments. I’m lucky if mine enter double figures, which makes them manageable and I have rarely had to intervene because someone has stepped out of line. I’m not sure I would take such a laissez faire line as our good friend Captain Ranty if a thread descended into the paranoid “it’s all the fault of teh eeevil joos” kind of idiocy. Again, I’d probably leave the comments that started it and terminate the discussion, nipping it in the bud early – deleting only in extreme cases.
Point is; I’ve got it lucky – this place has always been pretty even tempered and easy to manage, so deleting and terminating threads has only occurred rarely.
But – this is so familiar to anyone who has tried to argue a reasonable case with a dickwad:
Without intending to, Bob was using the same line that trolls habitually do: “Unless you explicitly say X, we can all assume Y”. Every blogger, every Tweeter, will recognise the tactic.
Indeed I do. I might initially try to correct their mistake – allowing for that being the case. However, once it becomes obvious they are a cretin, I stop engaging as I did some years back with erstwhile Labour blogger Neil Harding. It isn’t worth the effort, so best to just walk away.
I have to confess that the quality of a blog’s comments section is often a decider for me as to whether or not it will become regular reading. I feel almost “cheated” if I read a decent blog piece only to find that it’s followed by a lot of two-line comments comprising little more than expletives and insults or in-jokes and cliquey-ness (a la “Oh, I see Jim’s off on his right/left-wing looniness again.” Who the hell is Jim??). For me, the difference between reading stuff on the internet and reading it in the MSM is the difference between taking part in an interesting conversation and listening passively to a speech. So the absence of decent commenters renders blogs – even well-written, interesting ones – to the one-dimensional level of bog-standard newspapers.
You’re right, of course – no blogger can or should be held responsible for the fact that he/she might be unlucky enough to number a few overly vocal morons amongst his readers, and I guess in a free country even the dull and ignorant should have the right to vent their spleen somewhere – but I certainly wouldn’t waste my time regularly reading blogs where the quality of comments was little better than the average knuckle-dragging teenager’s views on the world. When there are great blogs like these with equally great commenters putting in their two penn’orth, who needs to read the ones that only give half the value for money?
That’ll be half of nothing, then…
XX So the absence of decent commenters renders blogs – even well-written, interesting ones – to the one-dimensional level of bog-standard newspapers. XX
This is what makes the few German blogg sites that are around, so boring.
Two line comments, no “thread” following, you write, maybe the fourth post in a thread at 08:00, never any notifications (Götter sei dank!), come back at 10:00 and there are a thousand pages of this sort of crap.
Anything worth while reading in the cooments is lost under an avalanche of shite. Even when you DO stumble upon a gem, answer it, and you just get lost in the rabble again.
That is why I haunt the British blogg sites……… sorry 🙁
You amaze me, FT! I’m staggered that there aren’t loads of really deep, meaningful and well thought-out blogs (and comments) in Germany. The Germans have always struck me as being incredibly similar to the British in many ways (which is probably one of the reasons why we’ve always squabbled such a lot), and so I assumed that there’d be about a similar number of good blogs and bad blogs and also a similar number of good commenters and useless ones. To discover (a) that there aren’t many German blogs in the first place, and (b) that the standard of commenters is so low, is deeply depressing. Perhaps you should start one (with a translated version for us lot to read as well, of course!) – with an invitation to leave comments only to those commenters who can string at least one coherent sentence together …
XX Bob was using the same line that trolls habitually do: “Unless you explicitly say X, we can all assume Y”. XX
Aye, well.
Solicitors and Barristers make MILLIONS from such “nit picking”, are they all “Trolls” as well?
SERIOUS answers. We ALL know the clichéd (sp? who cares) “Solicitor” jokes.
Personally, I miss the insights of Dirty European Socialist; his passing is deeply mourned…