On moderation

Why moderation at all? One can just ignore to read (or view) what they do not like, self-censorship and political correctness has become really annoying. If one does not like an invited guest they can avoid going to their meeting, if one has strong allergy to caricatures, well it is easy do not look. I for one appreciate the direction here in LWN that assumes everyone here is an adult and can deal with some random trolls without tantrum, it is a waste of their valuable time and energy. Last filter (after the one you can apply on users) is the eyes.

The commitment of the editorial team to freedom with all its benefits and the occasional wart is what keeps me coming back. And the comments are valuable. Among other things, it often adds a great deal when a prominent member of a project reviewed in an article takes the opportunity to add their response. Or when an uninvolved but interested expert takes the time to provide further value.

For my part, I am often disturbed enough by some comment or thread that I start to draft a reply. More often than not, the catharsis of just drafting a reply is sufficient, there is no need to feed the trolls by actually posting.

On a related note, I am saddened (but understanding) that the editorial team appear to have been browbeaten into not posting on what is happening in the systemd project as there seems to be a lot of great technical interest going on there. Regardless of whether one feels that systemd is right for one's (or even anyone's) computers, this should not be a reason for commenters to shutdown any article or discussion of what systemd does or how it does it.

Thank you for your reasonable approach to comments.

It would be sad to lose valuable comments and it would be sad if the bad comments would affect the experience of the audience at lwn.net.

It's a thin line between Scylla and Charybdis. But if anybody can steer us along this line, it's Jonathan and the editorial team of lwn.net.

How about a system for "flagging" comments. A link to flag a comment as inappropriate. A confirmation popup that has a little blurb about when comments should be flagged, to discourage people from doing it unnecessarily. If a comment gets more than a certain number of flags (from distinct users), it could be automatically hidden (but with a button to expand it to visible again so people can see what it was.) You can keep track of who is flagging who, and if you find a user who keeps on flagging inappropriately, you can disable their ability to flag comments (or just tell the system to silently ignore their flags in deciding which comments to autohide). Maybe you could also limit the ability to flag comments to subscribers (or even higher level subscribers) to minimise the abuse potential; alternatively, you could make the autohide algorithm weight flags based on subscription level.

Did you ever consider limiting the number of comments per commenter per article?

In the few cases where I commented, I rarely felt a need to write more than two or three comments. Just posting an opinion and maybe replying to someone was always enough.

I have to say, the editors deserve a prize for being so broad-shouldered. Putting up with the din, only now dying down, in threads like http://lwn.net/Articles/631319/ is quite something.

Looking at that thread, I'm inspired to pontificate that that the contentiousness of the multiplicity of some contributors' protestations is only matched by the indefatigability of their self-justifications.

Ah, well...

LWN seems to avoid certain topics due to the type of comments that follow. It's really difficult to be a moderator. Where to draw the line is not easy. You might change the line. Replying that certain comments are not ok is already part of moderation. That said, in various cases people do you way overboard. Not doing anything because a possible eventual slippery slope is too easy.

On LWN from time to time it seems way too acceptable to behave badly. As a result, people behave badly. In the article Jonathan states that a simple reply to behave more nicely is enough. I've done that various times, it sometimes works but it is not always enough. Then it is the responsibility of LWN to intervene.

I don't believe everyone here behaves like an adult or the "We as a community are better than that". Most do, but not all. Further, on this site it is way too easy for one person to steer the direction of the comments in one way. Just make a big rant as the first or second comment.

Then the strange notion of freedom. When as LWN you really think someone did the equivalent of "painted obscene graffiti onto our houses", then in normal life you want the person caught by police, fined and pay to remove it. But you don't say that it is someones freedom and leave the graffiti on your house. The minimal thing you do is clean it up!

I do appreciate that LWN will step in more often in future. However, the article in full makes me go: "ehh???".

There are options which doe not require LWN to read every comment. And IMO I'd prefer if the decision is solely taken by LWN and by default that LWN doesn't really participate. This to avoid group think.

I take it that going back to "Letters to the Editor" is not an option?

One compromise in moderation, that has worked at various places is to remove the vowels[1] from offensive comments. That way, the comment is still readable, and not censored, but makes it easy to skip over.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disemvoweling

I'd like a way of thanking people for making positive contributions to a discussion without having to write a reply myself which wouldn't add anything to the discussion itself.

You could have a "thank you" button which increments a counter that only the author of the comment can see. It could be a nice gentle way of encouraging polite behaviour while avoiding the gamesmanship that is present when the "scores" are public.

As far as undesirable comments go I think people are already responding to unpleasantness by clicking "Reply" and that mostly works.

With the assumption that the majority of people aren't malicious, one thing that might be interesting is finding out roughly how many people have added you to their black-list. That would give a little indication that you're not meeting the social standards that lwn.net expects and might make commenters re-evaluate their tone.

This might be better than having a way to hide individual comments as any feedback that way could be interpreted as a "disagree" or "controversial opinion" indication rather than "you're being unpleasant to the extent that people don't even want to read your comments anymore".

I've proposed before, and still think it's a good idea, the ability to collapse any thread from a default open state would greatly enhance navigation of the comments. Sometimes, having to scroll down through a subscriber thread which is of no interest is a pain. Default collapsing of guest threads is a great feature, I can take a quick look and collapse it again if I see no value in reading further.

I recognise two names of note in that last old thread link:

- "mjg59", known for the "fart fart fart" meme, infamous for his self-labelled affiliation with online harassment groups, and anyone paying close attention may remember some of his recent commentary here (in particular, telling one user to F off over mild criticism).
- "chromatic", who single-handedly managed to create a chilling effect around the topic of Perl 6 on Reddit through years of targeted FUD and trolling (of the same sort grsecurity is known for around these parts). The consensus in the Perl community is language-related discussion on that site is now to be avoided, solely because of him, at a loss to everyone else.

And so I find it quite surreal to see the same identities attached to level-headed, agreeable statements speaking out against *exactly* the sort of thing they've become, eight years later. How did things go so wrong?

Hm, I think the current mechanism where you can blank out comments written by certain serial offenders is sufficient. I only had to use it twice in the recent years, and it worked well for me. After all, the signal-to-noise-ratio is still high here on the LWN comment sections.

And no, guest comments should be allowed: As other have stated, valuable input has come from guest commenters, which would be a real loss.

Being able to collapse sub-threads would be a nice thing to have: To have to scroll down and down to see where a possibly interesting sub topic has been opened, doesn't play well with my laziness ;-)

LWN team, I love and respect your work. Have for years.

It's really this simple:

LWN is your house. If you don't want abuse happening in your house, under your roof, under your watch, you need to tell the abusers to be quiet or to go away.

There's no technical solution to this social problem. Just leadership.

Looking at the "request for moderation" in the first link of this article, and the "request for closing a thread" in the second, there's a common theme that has gone unmentioned so far: that of calling for moderation, and further instructing the moderator(s) on how to go about the task. In my opinion this is an undesirable attempt to permit administrative control of discussion such that the result matches certain activist organizations' PR goals.

Not to make too fine a point of this, these requests call for a policy where censorship is performed by a moderator, and that a particular ilk of advocate would have their hand firmly up said moderator's skirts. Then it would be (say) Mr. Corbet protecting the protectable and punishing the irreverent, and not his handlers. All in good faith of course, not that we plebs could tell -- evidence of mis-moderation having been erased by the act.

At the same time it's significant that despite previous attempts to move LWN into the "fluffy hugbox" sphere (as seen in the article's third link) by an implied threat of becoming a cess-pit of rumoured Internet horrors otherwise, it's neither been coerced to be the former nor degenerated into the latter. It follows that the current argument, "... and it'll drive away the minorities; and your site will be doomed!" is likely to appear wholly bunk in seven years' time like the "you'll drive away half the user-base (demographic)!" is today, judging from the foundational similarity between the two.

As such, it surprises and disgusts me that such requests aren't being dismissed summarily, as the intransparency point alone would give sufficient reason to.

[As for anyone itching to point out that their view of censorship is different from mine, usually one that permits great numbers of non-governmental people to engage in righteous de-facto censorship: that viewpoint is wrong in theory because of the outsourcing argument, and wrong in practice because the effect is exactly the same regardless of whether it's Big Brother blacking out your letters, or Little Sister giving your wife a headache for your being such a horrible non-team-player.]

Perhaps a reddit-style up/down vote (for subscribers only), a filter threshold (view all or view only above a certain threshold), and the ability to reveal any below-threshold post would be sufficient to let the community handle its own moderation.

I just registered and subscribed because I wholeheartedly agree with this article. Perhaps this is noise and if so I apologize but I'd like to take the opportunity to thank LWN.
It seems to me that the comment section is working very well, as far as Internet Comments go, and I don't currently see the need for radical change.
Some of the solutions brought forward so far are interesting, but I am not yet convinced that 'bad commenters' can be so easily turned into 'quality posters' or kept away without imposing significant limitations on others.

I would think that encouraging quality would be a better approach than heavy handed moderation to maintaining a healthy and interesting discussion space.