Stifling Anonymous Sociopaths
Mike Reith sent me a link to a nice article in the New York Times about the radical bad manners that prevail in the blogosphere. It's gotten bad enough so that Jimmy Wales and Tim O'Reilly are trying to bring about the return of blogger civility by devising a Blogger's Code that draws on community guidelines posted sometime back on BlogHer. Of course, guidelines by themselves won't work; people who say that they will misunderstand what's really going on here.
Back to that in a minute, or tomorrow if I run out of space and time. The immediate puzzle, to me at least, is why this is controversial at all. Incivility is not a free-speech issue; it's an immature-nitwits-throwing-tantrums issue. I deal with it on Contra in a number of ways, and have since I first started doing this in 1998. My one rule is simple: Be civil, or you'll be dumped into the shitcan where you belong. I do not allow unscreened anonymous comments on my LiveJournal mirror. I do not respond to angry emails, even to say something like "temper, temper!" because I know it won't do any good, and (as my mother sometimes said) it only encourages them.
I have not had to delete any signed (non-anonymous) comments on LiveJournal because (so far) I haven't gotten any really rude ones. This shouldn't surprise anybody too much. Anonymity is most of the problem. Not the whole problem, but most of it-and if we eliminated anonymous blog comments, the worst of the problem would just go away. I think that it would virtually eliminate the sorts of sociopathic comment attacks that totally freaked tech writer/blogger Kathy Sierra not long ago. (Kathy's situation is all the more remarkable because she blogs about programming languages, not George Bush. Some Guys Are Feeling Threatened, heh.)
I understand that screen names are not necessarily traceable, though if presented with proper warrants, the hosting organization can often be forced to cough up a sociopath's identity to law enforcement. I would go further and place the poster's IP address right there in the post, along with the precise time and date of the posting. A fair number of online forum systems do this, and those are the forums with the least nastiness. There's no need to pass laws, except perhaps to more crisply define what qualifies as actionable threats. If one blogging service allows users to configure anonymity options and another doesn't, the market will decide who's right.
That's a potential solution that's worth trying. The larger question is more difficult: Why is the blogosphere so filled with hate? I think I finally figured it out. I'll explain tomorrow.