Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
From the mail:
. . . I also wanted to thank you for hosting a blog where you disable comments half the time, and I mean that sincerely. I'm very tired of comment-culture, and it's nice to go to an interesting blog where the blogger seems focused on producing thoughtful and interesting things to read, rather than providing raw meat for comment-warriors to spar over.
Looking forward to more, as ever.
by
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I absolutely understand and agree with this, but it’s a shame because sometimes I’d definitely like to ask you a question about one of your posts or what not. It isn’t, of course, important to email about. But if you open up the comment box, you tend to get the sort of irresponsible people that will ruin the respectability of a blog.
What a dilemma.
My own compromise solution (I started off detesting the idea of hosting comments on my blogs) is to maintain a draconian comments policy and to post only those comments that meet those standards (comments should be civil, succinct, relevant, and named — i.e., not anonymous).
It’s funny, the ComBox was not supposed to be open on this post, but now that it’s open I’ll leave it open.
Jonah, thanks for the comment. I’m approaching my seventh ‘blogiversary,’ and I have never hit upon a really good solution. The best sol’n so far is to allow comments only on the more technical posts. Politics and religion tend to inflame passions and bring the sorts of comments that I don’t want. On the other hand, I suspect I am cutting myself off from some good constructive criticisms.
Hi Kevin,
Well, Typepad has a feature whereby comments can be held for approval: they don’t appear immediately. But that throws a wet blanket on comments in a medium as fast as this one is. Keith Burgess-Jackson uses this feature, but he gets very few comments.
As for anonymity, I don’t like it one bit, but I tolerate it because there are many who are rightly afraid for their careers if they post under their actual names. One of the best commenters I had on the old Powerblogs site posted anaonymously as ‘spur.’ He was untenured and probably afraid of the leftist apparatchik, Brian Leiter, the notorious ‘Ladder Man.’
I hated not being able to question/comment on things at first, but I’ve gotten used to it. Never the less I am petitioning the government to make a law that mandates open comments on all blogs because it is a restriction of my free speech. You will receive a letter from my lawyer shortly as well. Good day
That’s a good one! Ha Ha.
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