The Indian Blogosphere has gotten into one of its periodic fits of wondering about what to do about nasty comments. I have stayed out of previous discussions on the subject, but I fear that I cannot resist any more.
As you can see, I do enable comments. I have been fortunate in that most of the comments – in fact, the overwhelming majority of them, have been civil and intelligent ones. I’ve hardly had to do any policing, and the little I do has to do with deleting spam that spam karma catches for me. It’s not as if I steer clear of controversial topics. So I suppose that the quality of my comments section entitles me to some bragging rights which I shall herewith proceed to expend.
It so happens that I am firmly in the pro-comments camp. I believe that virtually everyone should get comments on their blog. The only exception I’ll accept is if you have such a large readership and you get so many comments that a) you yourself won’t be able to read all of them, b) no reader can possibly read through them and c) you get so many nasty comments that spending 10 minutes a day with the delete button will not clear them.
I do not believe in having an explicitly stated comments policy on the blog, unless I have some specific requests to make of a reasonable reader which he won’t otherwise understand intuitively. What I mean is, “Keep your comments civil and respectful” is pointless as a comments policy. Think of it. If his mom didn’t teach him manners, will your policy teach him? A bad mannered person is simply going to ignore your policy’s admonition. A good mannered person will not need to be told. A policy is useful only if you wish to make unusual requests to your reasonable reader. For example, “Keep your comments on topic” is a policy that people will not intuitively get (because it is accepted practice to put in extraneous comments.) “Do not use SMS-speak” or “Use only Shakespearean English” are other examples of valid comments policies.
So how does one deal with nasty comments if not by putting in comments policies? I have my thoughts on this, but please understand that my qualifications on this score are suspect. I don’t have to deal with nasty comments because I rarely get any, except when I make jokes about ethnicities (1, 2) So take my thoughts for what they are worth.
I think that on this issue, our instincts betray us. In evolutionary terms, we learnt to hit each other long before we learnt to talk. When we humans did learn to talk, the talking was usually a prelude to hitting each other. The ability to talk to convince others probably came quite late. When you are involved in a physical fight, non-violence is ineffective. If you do not respond to someone hitting you, it might prove that you are morally superior to the assailant, but you will also get killed. So there isn’t much you can do with the moral superiority you gain. So your first instinct is (rightly) to hit back and inflict pain on your assailant. You get angry and clench your fists. When you are in a verbal duel, you are instinctively preparing for the physical duel that is to follow. If you take an insult lying down, it seems like you do not have the stomach for the fight. If you do it in front of others, they will take the hint and join the other side to pile on you. In a real-life confrontation, letting an insult go unpunished has real consequences. This is why it feels good to insult someone. Your body is charging you up for the scrape that is to follow.
But you are running a weblog. The purpose of the blog is to inform and engage other fair-minded people in a discussion, not to give your ego a temporary boost by “defeating” someone in a verbal argument. The moral superiority argument, which is so vacuous when it comes to physical violence, actually works here, because the only harm people can inflict on you is by making you angry. If you can overcome your instinct and refuse to get angry, you are at an overwhelming advantage.
So if you are an evolved soul like me who has conquered his anger, you can follow this advice:
Stick doggedly to the topic. Even if the comment’s tone is combative and contains a paragraph of abuse and a sentence with a debatable point, respond to the debatable point and ignore the abuse..
Do not offer your abuser free psychiatric diagnosis.
Do not tell him how nasty a person he is.
Do not question his motives.
Make no reference whatsoever to the tone and tenor of your commenter.
Whatever you do, do not get into an escalating war of abuse with him.
Before you rise to argue with me on this (“appeasement” is probably the word you will use) think of this. The target of all these manoeuvres is not the person who’s abusing you. It is the other readers of your blog. If a question is worth discussing, it is worth discussing regardless of who asked it and regardless of what tone the person used while asking it. If the devil has quoted the scriptures, you are still answerable to the scriptures.
This will also have the secondary result of “training” your users. Let’s face it. Other people are humans too. They carry the same genes that egg them on to a combative stance as you do. There will be a few who do want to have a rational discussion with you and want to “win” that argument with you. By feeding their former instinct but not the latter, you will be training them to make more nuanced arguments – and it is well-known that nuanced arguments cannot be made in an insulting manner. You will also be setting an example for others. By not escalating the issue, you will leave a neutral third party in no doubt whatsoever who was responsible for the whole thing.
Lastly and most importantly, you will be left with a small list of really exceptional characters whom you need to handle separately.
Then you will find that the last group is the easiest to handle, as long as you continue to follow the cardinal rule. Do not get angry and do not show anger. The easiest thing to do is to silently delete comments with content-free insults. (Do not get into a slanging match before that. ) There are other tactics that I’ve followed. Usually, it involves being an unpredictable nutcase and confusing the attacker.
To repeat my caveats:
This strategy will not work in the real world. In fact, I’ve been quite contemptuous of such ideas when they refer to Indo-Pak relations, for example.
I do not have experience with dealing with a flood of nasty comments. I’d like to think that I will simply delete whole bunches of them without ever acknowledging them or grumbling about them. But I haven’t had to do that yet. I want to use deleting comments as a last resort, because if I start deleting comments, there is the temptation to delete comments that irritate me by espousing a different viewpoint or asking a difficult question. But I don’t want to make any promise on that because making promises will mean being predictable and that is a bad thing.
That was a good piece of advice. Few of them I am aware unknowlingly!
On the same note, what is your take on anon comments ?
Well, as my advice is to focus on the content of the comment and not on the person, naturally I would have no problem with anonymity. I only ask that if you wish to argue with me, choose a consistent handle for yourself, so that I can follow your argument from one comment to another.
The only exception where I will care about your real name is if you argue from authority, i.e. if you claim to be a Nobel prize winning economist and assert something about the collapse of the yuan on that basis, then I will insist on knowing your real name so that I can assess your credibility.
That said, if you establish a reputation, either by giving a verifiable real name or by blogging or doing other good things in the virtual world under a n anonymous, but consistent handle, then I am more likely to take you seriously. I am also more likely to give you the benefit of doubt if you say apparently stupid or insulting things. In that sense, it is just as it is in the real world. But if I say that I am “against anonymity” in the sense just described, there is no way to enforce that, is there?