Over Easter I went out for shisha with my old friend and reader of this blog, D.V.
D.V. had some kind words for this blog and for myself but noted a flaw in my approach: I was spending a ridiculous amount of time responding, point for point, to every commentator. He noted that this no way to blog on controversial subjects; the time that goes into this sort of thing detracts from useful writing and indeed if I wished to address valid criticism I could do it by simply editing my posts and acknowledging whoever had made the suggestion in the first place. Why not simply go for that?
At the time I agreed that this was the right approach and promised to adopt it. However, I failed to do so for two reasons: first and foremost, because I crave the excitement of comment sparring; it has some addictive quality that I find irresistible. But also because this website is dotted with written commitments to the effect that I will approve and respond to every comment I receive; when I wrote them I actually meant them. All readers, after all, from the most constructive to the downright trolletarian, write comments in order to elicit a reaction of sorts.
Today, however, I was reminded of why he was right. I've just finished another round of comment-sparring from which little that was helpful was learnt on either side but which, in all, took enough of my time to write a whole new post from scratch. Only a small amount of this time was spent getting hold of useful research that I could then use elsewhere in the blog. That can't be right.
And this is, frankly, nothing compared to the troll torrent that followed my #debtocracy and conspiracy theory posts.
As I wrote to the anonymous commentator, I consider it an advantage of this blog that I engage with readers, be they critical or supportive, and I will continue to do this regardless of the time it takes. However, the following things will change going forward:
D.V. had some kind words for this blog and for myself but noted a flaw in my approach: I was spending a ridiculous amount of time responding, point for point, to every commentator. He noted that this no way to blog on controversial subjects; the time that goes into this sort of thing detracts from useful writing and indeed if I wished to address valid criticism I could do it by simply editing my posts and acknowledging whoever had made the suggestion in the first place. Why not simply go for that?
At the time I agreed that this was the right approach and promised to adopt it. However, I failed to do so for two reasons: first and foremost, because I crave the excitement of comment sparring; it has some addictive quality that I find irresistible. But also because this website is dotted with written commitments to the effect that I will approve and respond to every comment I receive; when I wrote them I actually meant them. All readers, after all, from the most constructive to the downright trolletarian, write comments in order to elicit a reaction of sorts.
Today, however, I was reminded of why he was right. I've just finished another round of comment-sparring from which little that was helpful was learnt on either side but which, in all, took enough of my time to write a whole new post from scratch. Only a small amount of this time was spent getting hold of useful research that I could then use elsewhere in the blog. That can't be right.
And this is, frankly, nothing compared to the troll torrent that followed my #debtocracy and conspiracy theory posts.
As I wrote to the anonymous commentator, I consider it an advantage of this blog that I engage with readers, be they critical or supportive, and I will continue to do this regardless of the time it takes. However, the following things will change going forward:
- All comments will be automatically approved without moderation. I will delete only comments that are outrageously offensive to people other than myself, or any comments falsely attributed to other people. As you'll have seen, I have never failed to approve any comments; I've only ever deleted two or three, and all of these were my own.
- I will no longer receive notifications of your comments; hence I may ignore some of them, especially if they are attached to older posts. I will strive to read all of them but can't promise this. I apologise in advance.
Ping me on Twitter (@lolgreece) if you want to remind me.
- I will not respond to comments with other comments. I will only acknowledge (by editing the main body of posts) comments that are critical of my writing and, of those, only the ones that I find constructive. I will not acknowledge anonymous posts in this way, although if you pick a spurious nickname I'll happily call you that.
- All pages on which comments are currently closed will have comments reopened in two months' time from now.
