Phasor Burn

Tim O’Reilly means well but has really missed the mark with this one.

A Blogger’s Code of Conduct is not needed. There are plenty of existing mechanisms in place to keep trolls at bay. This problem has existed since the early days of USENET, the early BBS’s, etc etc etc. Why it’s a surprise to anyone that it’s appeared in blogs is beyond me.

Here’s a blow-by-blow response. There’s many others, since this lit up the blogospheroid quite well today.

It’s rather simple. Ignore the trolls. Only the sysop, list admin, blog owner, should make policy as to what is and is not allowed and whether they want to publicize rules (a bad idea) or just let their actions and their good users’s actions speak for themselves.

There’s technological ways of accomplishing the ignore bit, but ignoring is what is at the heart.

If you don’t feed the trolls, they go away.

As an example, Citadel BBS software had a feature that the sysop could flag a user as a ‘twit’. The user wouldn’t even know they had been flagged as such, and would still be allowed to post new messages or comments on existing ones. The twit would eventually give up and go away after a period of time with no responses by the rest of the user populace. The secret sauce was that the twitted user would see all of their postings and comments in the proper context etc but the regular user populace would never ever see those words at all. All they knew was the phone line was perhaps a bit more busy from some unknown user that was on a bit earlier.

I’ll admit that it is a bit harder to do this with blogs since any joe can put up their own blog and say things about you, trackback to your site, etc. Blog software can have, or will have shortly, filters to let you keep these trackbacks from showing up where your regular readers would see them. The problem is that the unwanted spewage is actually hosted on joe’s blog and is still readily findable via search engines and the like. Gee, like any web page since the ealry 90’s has been. Not a big hairy deal imho.

Aside from the ‘ignore the trolls’ you still have the law to fall back on. Libel, slander, etc are still enforceable and we all know how lawsuit happy the americans can be… it’ll work itself out in their clogged court system.

Anyhoo.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 9th, 2007 at 4:50 pm and is filed under General, Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.