Editorial deletions

I am one of the people in this ruckus. Perhaps an explanation is in order, which you may take as an apology if you want.

Off-topic remarks are annoying. The original post was a mildly sexist joke which was still on-topic. It prompted a completely off-topic politically correct rant, and that provoked my completely off-topic rant about being adults and not on slashdot.

Where does one draw the line? The joke was at least related to the topic, and easily ignored. The complaint was 100% off-topic and reeked of political correctness run amuck. We readers have to carry part of the load for lwn's tone. I thought about it for a bit before responding, finally deciding that just as one can't help but make noise in shushing someone noisy in a library, one can't help but make an off-topic post to tell someone new to stop making off-topic posts. The next one to complain and suggest our grumpy editor start deleting posts made the same decision.

I have no idea how I would respond on a different day. I hope our editor is never forced to delete posts simply for being politically incorrect.

I think there's a huge disconnect between the quality of LWN's content and the quality of the comments. There seem to be some highly opinionated curmudgeonly people here who really have the capability of destroying conversations, and it's a real disappointment to me.

I subscribe to LWN because its articles are valuable to me as a professional programmer, and I think the editors should try to bring the quality level of the comments up to the standards one finds in professional venues.

If it were up to me, I would:

1) Require that everyone who wishes to comment supply their real name. Have the real name attached to every post and police the use of aliases.

2) Provide a publicly viewable comment history for every member, indexable by real name and user name.

3) Allow people to edit or delete posted comments for a period of time. Give people a chance to fix their own enraged-posting mistakes.

4) Draft explicit guidelines for posting, requiring people be on-topic and avoid personal insults.

5) Delete all posts that violate the guidelines.

Of course it's you're site. But I think you overstate the 'slippery slope' or 'anti-censorship' argument. LWN is hardly the only place on the internet that blowhards can make themselves heard.

I do not want you to delete comments to "shape the conversation". I want you to delete comments that are inappropriate for a public forum because they are offensive to reasonable readers, and thus are not part of a civilized conversation. I am also good with you deleting comments that are wildly off-topic, and thus do not contribute to the conversation at all. Setting a fairly high bar in both of these areas is OK, but I think blatant and gratuitous sexism, or a rant about the health care system attached to an article on an OS release, must clear that bar. I do not believe that there is a "slippery slope" here; if that is what you are concerned about, write a couple of paragraphs of explicit and detailed editorial policy on comments (such as many print periodicals have) and set it in stone.

Honestly, if I had posted either of the examples under discussion, I would both expect and hope that they would be deleted. You would be doing me a favor by helping to protect my reputation, and yourself a favor by helping to protect the reputation of LWN.

IMHO (having been involved with open source since before the beginning, and in my capacity as a college CS professor who deals with open source newbies on a regular basis) the "Wild West" nature of open source conversations is not helping us. I think it is a big part of what drives away women, people of under-represented ethnicities, older adults, and frankly a lot of really deep thinkers with a lot to contribute to our work. I would like to think of LWN as, among other things, a haven for those people. The comments should be an accompaniment to the measured and thoughtful LWN articles; failing that, they should at least not be an embarrassment and a source of discomfort and dismay.

I've read that Boing Boing skated this slippery slope by introducing editorial *defacement* but not editorial *deletion*. What they actually did, at least at first, was that an editor would push the "remove vowels" button on the offensive post, which would make it look silly and would clearly show everyone that the social consensus regarded the post as unacceptable, but would not actually remove it.

Apparently, that was a big success for that crowd. People hated getting devowelized and started modifying their behavior to avoid it.

I would suggest "remove the vowels" for lwn.net, but what about some sort of "fold it out of sight by default"? I guess the important part is a consensus among the community that this thing should be ignored and not responded to, and ideally not seen at all unless you are morbidly curious. If this consensus is visible to the original poster as well then this might motivate them to change.

Just brainstorming. I think you'd probably better do *something* before too long, because status quo probably won't continue to work, and it might be easier to manage before it gets bad than after.

Heck, maybe you should just try what worked for Boing Boing. Editors get a button that removes the vowels. :-)