Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean is pondering comment policies:<\/p>\n
\nSo the question is: how can the comment sections be better? To decode this for our more innocent readers: how can we increase the signal-to-noise ratio? Increasing the signal is one obvious way, but that’s hard. The real question that I’ve been wondering about (haven’t consulted my co-bloggers on this) is: should we take more dramatic steps to decrease the noise? In particular, should we have a much heavier hand in discouraging, deleting, or even banning people who are rude, disruptive, off-topic, or just plain crackpotty? And in most specific particular: if we did so, are there folks out there who would judge the comment sections to be more useful, and might even be more likely to join in themselves?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Consensus in the comments there seems to be running in favor of some anti-crackpot moderation. I’ll take this opportunity to basically re-iterate what I said over there<\/a>, regarding my own comment policy, such as it is:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I’m something of a free-comment absolutist. My strong preference is to delete nothing but spam, and only intervene in cases where I feel that the line has really been crossed. There have been slightly more than 6200 comments posted here since the move to ScienceBlogs, and in that time, I believe I have only disemvowelled one comment.<\/p>\n
I do not attempt to filter comments on the basis of viewpoint, partly for practical reasons– I barely have time to read comments as they come in, let alone edit those I don’t agree with– but mostly out of principle. In my opinion, either you have comments open to all, or you might as well not have comments at all. In contrast to many of the statements at Cosmic Variance, I’m significantly less<\/strong> likely to read the comments at sites where I know that they moderate based on viewpoint, and I’ll post responses here rather than posting comments at any such sites.<\/p>\n
I also don’t have a major problem with people posting crackpot comments, again, unlike the Cosmic Variance gang. I suspect this goes back to a difference of opinion about the purpose of the whole blogging enterprise– the commenters there talk about the crackpots as distracting from the discussions among experts, where I view this site more as public outreach than a forum for experts to talk. I figure professional scientists have plenty of places where they can talk to each other, on the Web and off, but there aren’t as many outlets for discussions pitched to the laity. I make an effort to always keep the physics posts at the most basic level I can manage, and any expert discussion that happens in the comments is a nice bonus, not the primary purpose of the site.<\/p>\n
(The primary purpose of the site, by the way, is to amuse me. I do this because I enjoy it.)<\/p>\n
If the science posts here attract the occasional crackpot comment, so be it. Granted, I’m not drawing a tenth of the comment traffic Cosmic Variance is, so it’s possible that I might change my mind if I suddenly had an order of magnitude more kookery to deal with, but I doubt it.<\/p>\n
(I wish I had an order of magnitude more comment traffice, but c’est la vie. I don’t really have the time to respond to the comments I do get, which is probably why I don’t get more…)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean is pondering comment policies: So the question is: how can the comment sections be better? To decode this for our more innocent readers: how can we increase the signal-to-noise ratio? Increasing the signal is one obvious way, but that’s hard. The real question that I’ve been wondering about (haven’t consulted… Continue reading Comment on Comments<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-maintenance","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=907"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/907\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}