Question 

Anybody see a parallel between the K.S. matter and the Don Imus uproar?

Curing incivility 

I agree with some of the ideas coming out of the discussion about a bloggers code of conduct. Whenever I hear hand-wringing about blog comments I always think, "Come on, you guys, the message board world figured this out a long time ago." Couple old posts of mine about it here and here.

Of course it's OK to delete individual comments that contain talk you wouldn't allow in your home, and the way you do that in an even-handed way is by putting the rules of your road in a TOS. I've been moderating online discussion off and on for close to 20 years. It makes total sense to me that you can't expect people not to cross lines that you haven't drawn, and published and enforced.

I guess the point where I part company is when the talk turns to shared rules, or even a number of different sets or levels of shared rules, because that looks an awful lot like TV, movie and video game ratings, and casts an aura of legislated morality and prissiness over the scheme. Even calling it a "code of conduct" sounds preachy. Like calling the Better Business Bureau the "Agency for the Imposition of Moral Business Practices."

Shoot, even the rules I wrote a long time ago for a Jane Austen discussion site weren't prissy or preaching. They just state specific behavior expectations. You don't like them, move along, find a place that suits you better, one with different rules or no rules. Simple as that. Or start your own. The Pemberley site did end up spawning some 20 or more spinoffs (and spinoffs of spinoffs), and was itself spun off a scholarly mailing list in 1996. It's a good and natural thing.

Plus, more important, the rules were for our one site, with no idea of dictating what goes on anywhere else on the net. All you can control, and all you should want to control, is your own space.

(BTW, lest you think that a Jane Austen site is a poor example or a subject area naturally easy to manage [yeah, right, no such thing], the same principle has worked on other diverse communities I've founded or helped manage. These include a graduate student writing support site, and message boards for AT&T Worldnet and Columbia Tri-Star Interactive. Moderating teenagers posting on a Dawson's Creek site was a real challenge, but it does work if you show you mean to enforce the expectations. Not unlike parenting in that way.)

These days, for my own spaces, I like the idea of having just one rule, "you can't get personal" -- and that covers pretty much all I care about.

When traffic gets to a certain point, moderation becomes a big job -- even with automatic tools like user flags and ratings. Another concern is the danger of moderator power gone wild. Moderation style can turn draconian and cliqueish in a heartbeat. I've used the living room analogy, but I prefer the barkeeper as metaphor. You have to balance a bunch of factors: you want to create and maintain a cool place to hang out, maybe make some money, and see that everybody has a good time, but you have to insist on certain behavior limits.

I'm open to hearing what the code of conduct badges are supposed to accomplish, and want to hear more because I confess I don't quite get it. Is it supposed to be something like a Good Housekeeping seal of approval, and you should be ashamed if you don't have one? That's what it feels like to me at this point, and I tend to reject shame as a motivator in any arena.

An opportunity 

It might be impossible to clean up YouTube's or Digg's childish snarky comment culture because it's a social force already set in motion. If the site operators wanted to do something about it, they'd have to blow up their comment sections and have a cooling-off period with no comments at all before putting in some kind of moderated system. I'm looking forward to seeing how Salon's new comment moderation tools work out in their already-established culture of bad manners.

There is an opportunity for competitors to come into the spaces occupied by these sites having juvenile comment areas by providing well-lit comment communities as a point of differentiation. In fact, that might do more to solve the problem than anything else. Eventually, if it turns out there is a market for politeness (and I think there is), these unmonitored places could come to be viewed as unprofessional, badly managed businesses, not worth as much to investors, advertisers and users.

Shoot, that sounds very Republican for me, doesn't it? Let market forces take care of the problem? Not always a horrible idea.