Boing Boing Confirms: You Can’t Please Everyone When It Comes to Comments

Close on the heels of my commentary on Daring Fireball’s commenting brouhaha—Without Comments, A Site Is…—Boing Boing has their take on it. In addition to their solid arguments (I’d say they fall into the “it’s your blog, do what you want” camp) they make this point:

We accept comments at BoingBoing and publish them automatically, yet receive complaints just as Gruber does — some folks don’t want it to be moderated, either. Sometimes, the contention is that accepting comments turns a website into a USENET-style public venue covered only by social conventions. Unfortunately for them, our commenting policy lacks the provision, “Void where prohibited by a sense of entitlement.”

Not without reason, some believe that Boingers’ vigorous defense of free speech creates a milieux here whereby the comments should be an unfettered, energetic free-for-all. But it’s not just about entitlement … more practically, that results in a noisy, infested mess that drowns out anything of quality. We want to create a non-hostile and non-adversarial community environment, even at the cost of criticism. Antinous, Arkizzle and Avram do an unbelievably difficult job making sure the comments are spam- and arsehole-free and otherwise safe to swim. Accepting comments on a widely-read blog creates a lot of work. It’s a task no-one should begrudge anyone else for choosing not to do.
link: Daring Fireball on accepting comments – Boing Boing

Essentially: If your site gets a ton of traffic, and therefore the potential for a ton of comments, you aren’t going to be able to please everyone with how you manage comments. On top of that, it’s a ton of work to keep the comments and discussion a discussion and not an avenue for trolls carrying flame throwers.

I do my best here to let the good comments through and keep the potentially spammy ones at bay. I’m sure I’ve erred on the side of caution a few times, but I’m human (so I’m told) so that happens.