I think the invitation into the home analogy Warren Ellis uses works pretty well here so I'll extend it slightly and stay away from the piss aspects. What you do with a comment system is try to host a salon on a topic, which may or may not go well. But then you leave, maybe for a few hours, maybe for a few days. When you return you are surprised to still find a whole bunch of people milling about your foyer having completely insane conversations. All the reasonable folks have left a while ago, but these folks are making themselves at home.
Perhaps when the participant selection process is, well, non-existant (e.g. on twitter you select with whom to engage on a case-by-case basis, you can safely ignore the rest) such a comfortable environment is not optimal.
When you return you are surprised to still find a whole bunch of people milling about your foyer having completely insane conversations. All the reasonable folks have left a while ago, but these folks are making themselves at home.
Interesting. I wonder if a comments section could be more resistant to going to hell, if the author always closed comments as soon as they were done with it?
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I think the invitation into the home analogy Warren Ellis uses works pretty well here so I'll extend it slightly and stay away from the piss aspects. What you do with a comment system is try to host a salon on a topic, which may or may not go well. But then you leave, maybe for a few hours, maybe for a few days. When you return you are surprised to still find a whole bunch of people milling about your foyer having completely insane conversations. All the reasonable folks have left a while ago, but these folks are making themselves at home.
Perhaps when the participant selection process is, well, non-existant (e.g. on twitter you select with whom to engage on a case-by-case basis, you can safely ignore the rest) such a comfortable environment is not optimal.
When you return you are surprised to still find a whole bunch of people milling about your foyer having completely insane conversations. All the reasonable folks have left a while ago, but these folks are making themselves at home.
Interesting. I wonder if a comments section could be more resistant to going to hell, if the author always closed comments as soon as they were done with it?