Caleb Booker

I have a love/hate relationship wth Terra Nova. In case you’re not familiar, it’s a blog that attempts to ask the big academic questions about MMOs and gaming in general. It’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but can be worth a read if you’re in the mood. A wide variety of people post there, some total geniuses, some complete morons. While I have nothing against intellectual morons per se, it does distress me when I see something completely idiotic appears right next to something completely brilliant and they’re both hailed equally as paragons of insight by the commenters.

Usually, though, I just quickly skim it. They’re pretty much never on top of breaking news, and only occasionally do they cover genuinely new ground. I’ve paid more attention lately because Robert Bloomfield has been posting some great stuff, but it was the latest post that caught my eye today. Basically, Greg L is handing down the Word From On-High about what’s permitted in the comments.  These are the rules: 1) Be nice. 2) Be brief.

While I like these ideas as personal guidelines, my gut reaction to this was negative. I’m not a big fan of censorship. I consider it a crime against humanity to stifle another person’s ability to express themselves, whether or not I like the expression itself. In true Terra Nova fashion, however, one of the commenters managed to find the academic edge to the issue:

Indy says:

Andy, in this case it is NOT censorship. Censorship is where the government determines what can be said/published. This, OTOH, is editorial control – the owners of this space laying out the rules for using their soapbox.

Those who pay for this space get to make the rules on how it can be used.

Well… yes, but remember that “government” is a pretty pliable term these days. For every web community, the conversation eventually turns to ”governance”. As soon as you have more than one person contributing to the end result of whatever you’re building, that thing may still legally be yours, but it isn’t really. You are now merely “governing” that community, but you don’t own it any more than a country’s government owns its citizens. Sorry to break it to you, but if you delete comments on a website that you yourself contribute only a small portion of the content to, you’re censoring. You could only possibly call it “editorial control” if you were editing the main posts.

Having said that, I have no problem with deleting comments from my own blogs. If something is just mean, or a shameless cry for attention, or just irritates me enough, it’s gone and I don’t even bother telling the person. I’ve deleted maybe three comments in the last year, and those were… well to be honest I don’t even remember them. And I don’t care.

Is that hypocritical of me? Yeah, most likely. I mean, they’re my blogs, not “community” blogs, so I could use the excuse that it’s “editorial control” but… that’s a totally lame excuse, frankly. That whole business with “governance” was a total red herring, and in your gut you know it. Let’s call it what it is. It’s censoring.

I guess I do it because of limited resources. If I had all the time in the world I’d reply to every little thing. If I had all the energy in the world I’d come up with more creative ways of dealing with trolls. I don’t though, and when I run out of resources and something gets in my way, it gets smashed, deleted, patched or banned. This isn’t a justification, and it isn’t an excuse. It’s just what I’m doing to get by.

Moments like these make me really feel for the intellectuals. They are trained to find the “right answer”, and when it comes to something like censorship, it’s really hard to say that there is one. There’s just no way that the commenters are going to agree about this stuff, and upon further analysis, it will be impossible to find a way to draw a final conclusion. Sucks to be them.

Posted on June 20th, 2007 under censorship, conflict, writing. RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback.