Engaging with articulate commenters

The Slugger Awards in 2008 marked a change-up for a political weblog.

I started my blog, Slugger O’Toole in early June 2002 purely as a research tool for a paper I was planning to write on the future of Unionism in Northern Ireland. At the time, I was still trying to assemble the writing team and hadn’t even approached a funding body.

Of course I didn’t need funding to start writing the blog. At the time the standard Blogger software package didn’t come with a commenting facility; and I didn’t even put titles on my post for the first month or so. They tended to be short narrative summaries of the day’s news in Northern Ireland.

But by the following February, we had the funding and were in a position to roll out interviews with some pretty senior people in Northern Irish politics. We shifted platforms to Moveable Type, primarily to give Slugger the commenting stability it lacked in Blogger.

Almost immediately the comment traffic took off.

At first it had the civility of the small village. By that stage we were on something just short of 1,000 visits a day. But as the site grew in reputation and the audience grew larger it became obvious that running a blog with pluralist values and sustaining a decent level of engaged discussion would require some conscious management.

And for me the pluralism of the blog was crucial. Not simply because of the forty year long rupture in Northern Ireland’s civil society, but because as James Surowieki notes in his Wisdom Of Crowds, a diverse crowd is a smart crowd. Homogenity leads to group think and general stupidity:

“Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement or compromise. An intelligent group does not ask its members to modify their positions in order to let the group reach a decision that everyone can be happy with”.

But the problem was primarily a political one. How do you develop and then enforce a set of rules that allows you to keep the inclusive character of the site and develop a civil discourse in a political space that’s known for the ferocity of its politics? In other words how do you keep the space broad enough and engaging enough to fit the totality of the political spectrum?

In a funny sort of way the ‘rules’ emerged slowly out of the conversations o the site. One commenter, ‘Howard’, suggested that as far as possible we should outlaw ‘ad hominem’ remarks on the site; on the basis that such arguments are not arguments at all, but logical fallacies which only ever drag a civil conversation to its doom.

Considering that a huge proportion of political argument habitually resiles to personal attacks, that implied we’d be asking for something from our commenters that our politicians and journalists could not keep to.  It was further codified when another commenter, IJP, suggested we adopt the old Soccer slogan, “play the ball and not the man“; our 2005 entry on which still comes to the top of a Google search for that term. See also the variants: Whataboutery; and Don’t listen to him…

Taking the soccer analogy on, we then introduced a red and yellow card system, with yellow intended as a warning to persistent offenders and red a last resort, an expulsion from the site for two weeks. Once we’d moved on to Expression Engine we could reinforce that by setting up a redirect to the BBC Children’s Tellytubbies site, where miscreants are greeted with an ‘Uh oh’, from one of the furry little creatures. The intention: to communicate the ban was serious, but it was neither personal nor done out of malice.

My pre-occupation at this time was to drive the aspirational quality bar as high as people could make it, whilst keeping the entry bar as low as possible. To that extent, I would look for useful ways to engage directly with contributors over the reasons why this piece or that piece had been cut.

Often by excising the abuse and leaving the political substance of the material it’s message would be hugely strengthened confronting the reader with power of argument (invariably engaging) rather the strength of feeling (unerringly similar and, mostly, dull) towards political opponents. Former offenders would often go on to provide some of our best commenter material.

So to conclude, on Slugger we have managed to keep conversations relatively civil (we do have some serious lapses from time to time) by developing and laying our a clear set of guidelines. We try to actively enforce those rules, but not remotely from behind curtains like some hidden Wizard of Oz creature.

If someone complains about an action we do our best explain, front of house so to speak, what the breach was and why it was taken.  Engagement is the key. Many bloggers who have high volumes of comment traffics see it as an add on that helps keep traffic cycling their stats upwards.

For me, has been about engaging with an intelligent commons. We’ve had some pretty big stories break from the comments zone. One that comes to mind arose in the comments on the Tuesday. Picked up by a local on the Wednesday, made the region television news by Thursday, and the front page of the Guardian on Saturday morning.

It has been a hugely rewarding aspect of my blogging; and at Slugger we are looking to develop technological ways of helping to enhance the quality levels of debate. But it is something but it has to be worked at over and over.

This article has been cross posted at the Matt Wardman Wire.