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You say that when people refer to weblog comments as ‘ideological battlegrounds’ it’s time to disable comments. I’d take that a step further and say it’s time to disable your weblog. The comments section of a weblog is little more than a reflection of the weblog itself. With the exception of trolls and the rare civil dissenter, weblog comments tend to mimic the views and tone of the owner. If you write scathing indictments of those you disagree with you can hardly expect more from those commenting. The echo chamber concept is very accurate and you reap what you sow.

It is folly and ego to believe that weblogs influence anyone besides a small and vocal minority. Most of us have enough sense not to base our opinions on quasi-anonymous voices shouting into the wilderness of the web without a shred of accountability. Matt Y. has it right, it’s a self perpetuating thing and the harsher your words the more your traffic rises allowing you to view yourself as a shaper of minds and maker of memes. Without strife, these folks wouldn’t have anything to write about so there is no incentive to seek common ground and form consensus.

I think you’ve made a key point, Al: “weblog comments tend to mimic the views and tone of the owner.” We’re not going to name names here, as that just hurts feelings and escalates ugliness. But there are indeed people (on both sides of the aisle) who strike an aggressive and at times harsh stance in their writing, and then express amazement at the cesspool their comments have become. There are others who do so, and then declare the cesspool is not of their making, and they sure won’t be diving in to clean it up. They are somehow just victims of hundreds of drive-by ad hominems, and, well, that’s just the way it is.

I guess I just feel that if you reach that many people, with that comes some vague and nebulous responsibility. If you don’t like that—the fact traffic implies added responsibility—then sign up for a new Blogspot account and go back to anonymity, where you can vent and spew with no impact. Sure, even with thousands of visitors a day, it is still your site to do with as you please. But, why wouldn’t it “please” you in this ugly election year to do your part to advance civil debate, when it is clearly of vital importance? Is it too hard? Or is the alternative just too much fun too give up? Are you afraid that if you make an effort to offer only “sober, on-point, factual, and tightly argued” articles … your traffic will go down?

So what if it does? Aren’t your clear thoughts more important than some transitory numbers on a Sitemeter page?

And I agree with you that some just output outrageous shit to grab lots of traffic, and therefore think they are “shaping minds” or influencing the debate. But they’re still doing it with output “shit.” What can you “shape” with that? If that’s all it takes to get attention, and getting attention is all that matters, then Andrew Dice Clay could be President.

“Without strife, these folks wouldn’t have anything to write about”

That’s a sad place to be, and it will be for many come the second week in November. I honestly expect some blogs that now garner thousands of visitors per day to drop from the face of the earth by end of 1st Q, 2005.

Maybe we should start an office pool.

“Maybe we should start an office pool.”

Okay.

What if we take a sample of weblogs that represent extremes. These have to be webloggers (not mainstream journalists who post on the web) who make their views clear and have comments enabled. No centrists, it’s the extremes we want. You, Oliver Willis, Puppy Blender and Tacitus don’t count.

Here are two:

On the right: LGF .

For the left: Kos.

Get another three or four for each side and let the good times roll :)

The trash talk is exactly why I, and apparently alot of others, no longer watch shows like Crossfire.

“No centrists, it’s the extremes we want. You, Oliver Willis, Puppy Blender and Tacitus don’t count”

Oliver, a centrist? Don’t make me laugh (that’s a real inside joke that probably only I get. Over at Buzzmachine, Oliver once said “Jeff, a liberal? Don’t make me laugh”).

I feel a bit like I’m watching someone who has lit a firecracker, and is holding it just a little too long. In my living room. Please, no bleeding on the carpet.

I don’t really feel qualified to comment (no pun intended). I could name some sites where I [1] no longer view the comments at all because they are a cesspool, or [2], no longer visit at all, because the site owner’s tone is too extreme for my liking.

But since I no longer see those things, how can I comment on them?

In addition, it’s a bit like the blog-delinkings people publicly make. I just don’t play that way. So I’m not willing to say, “I stopped going to Joe Righty’s site, and Mary Lefty’s, too, because of their extreme tone.” But I have. And I’m sure talking about it in any detail will merely bring Dreck’s Law into effect, in this very thread. Plus, they’ll link this in anger, and the hordes will descend, destroying my attempts to lower the traffic at this site.

If others want to add their take, that’s fine. Just be sure to leave an e-mail address.

Dan(ny?): “The trash talk is exactly why I, and apparently alot of others, no longer watch shows like Crossfire.”

I know Tucker Carlson irritates a lot of people, but I just want to stuff a big smelly sock in Paul Begala’s mouth lately. He epitomoizes this “shout-em-down” approach. When Christopher Hitchens was on recently, he called them on it, and momentarily appeared ready to walk. Until someone does that, these guys will keep it up.

It strikes me that blogs have rapidly evolved in the same direction as the major media we so rightly excoriate, and for similar reasons. If it bleeds, it leads. Politics is always a win-lose game; elections are horse races; there are no issues, only personalities. Few people have the time or interest to absorb background and context so rich in moral and practical compromises unless its an issue of very particular concern to them.

“Commercial” bloggers trying to generate income from ads or donations have an incentive to do everything they can to drive up their traffic stats. Preachy bloggers use carnival barker techniques to draw crowds into their online revival meetings, and they might even pass the offering plate, too.

You can see the same useless partisan spin in the letters or emails to the editors of news media, too. I’d like to see editorial page editors cull their own “comment sections” a bit better, too. Maybe they could just add a standard disclaimer, “and we also heard more of their usual partisan rants from commentators A, B, C, and X, Y, Z.” News media seem every bit as obsessive as bloggers for anything resembling feedback, no matter how bad it is.

I think there is even a more basic reason for the declining quality of rhetoric in the blogosphere, and it is this. There is an increasing quantity of rhetoric of declining quality all about us. By the mechanisms of social norm adjustment presented in the PDF file of this paper entitled “LEARNING TO BE THOUGHTLESS:
SOCIAL NORMS AND INDIVIDUAL COMPUTATION” bloggers and their readers are especially prone to driving one another to incivility.
It’s a pretty interesting paper, and names formal sub-mechanisims such as radius adjustment, that describe exactly the behavior of many bloggers and their readers.

Like it or not, incivility has become the driving mechanism of the blogosphere. Lacking the central organizing heirarchy and social capital of Usenet, or the more formal mechanisms of editorial standards adherence required by professional media, this medium is bound to be vanity publishing on the cheap, and little more.

You can be incensed by attempts to incense all you want, and you can lead a third column of reasonable men to picnics at good vantage points on the near hills overlooking the senseless rhetorical carnage you leave, but the wars will continue, because they cost nearly nothing, and because they’ve come to pass as social interaction. Trash talk is the norm of the blogosphere now.

Traffic generating style doesn’t require grammar, spelling, capitalization, facts, sophistry, originality, or anything else which might even momentarily slow the flood of thoughtless invective. It doesn’t do any good to deja somebody who doesn’t know what deja was. They just think you’re anal.

Not in a good way. If we want to elevate our discourse, or at least enjoy it, we must turn from those who bore, and those who bore in, to those who bear reading, and response. In my book, you do, which is why I read here regularly, and post occasionally, and am grateful for the forum you provide.

I think this medium is yet young, and it is built on bad protocols, with tools of limited imagination and power. Discourse has not evolved in n-dimensional hyperlinked webs, but as threads connecting minds through time. I think this wannabe World Wide Web can support new forms of discourse, but so far, blogging is just borrowing a lot of older tools and ideas, adapting them for the Web protocols and customs, and strewing them through the DNS namespace as haphazardly organized island kingdoms, most of which are not geared to handle the high volume of noise that comes with popularity

The TrackBack thing was a dopey implementation of a not bad recognition of a basic problem, which could have been a good idea, but wound up being a Step in No Direction. But it’s the kind of social networking infrastructure experiment of which this medium is greatly in need. Perhaps, if you are tired enough of bombast, you’ll start something of a community for designing the alternative.

I, for one, am waiting.

Or, rather than some transitory disease, the decreased level of discourse could simply be an economic phenomenon.

Diminishing marginal utility.

When there were just three networks, there were no crossfire type shows. That only happened after we got to the point where there was more news-channel than news.

The blogosphere has just taken us one step further. Now, rather than hacks who couldn’t get jobs with responsible news media, we have hacks that couldn’t get jobs with even the heretofore most irresponsible portions of the news-media.

To make matters worse, the very nature of a blog makes the blogger feel like he’s slacking if he doesn’t post relatively often. This is true even if he doesn’t have anything to say. (I have been struggling with this myself recently, and will probably continue to . . . until Falcons training camp begins.) So the more that gets said, the less likely it becomes that any given post is useful.

So there you go: Diminishing marginal utility. Now, like you, I must get back to my day job. (which has nothing to do with economics.)

Hi, this is my first time here. I found this blog on a list of Georgia Bloggers. So far, I’m impressed. I am an amateur photographer and blog reader.

Much of the above commentary on the state of poli-blogging rings true to me.

I think it’s helpful to point out that cruelty within the context of political advocacy was around long before the Internet.

I see the web as a reflection of the people using it. It may just be that especially during an election year, the noise of the rabble drowns out reasonable dialog in many forums.

My suggestion is that we can choose to participate in forums that suit the level of civility which we desire, and avoid those that don’t.

I am not going to deny those who feel that an online food fight constitutes political dialog, I just move on. I have a list of blogs which I visit daily. The list is by no means permanent. When the noise level gets too high, I delete the shortcut.

I had the experience of witnessing an Anti-Globalization protest in Minneapolis a couple of years ago.

I was willing to give the protesters the opportunity to sell me on their point of view.

My perception of the event itself was that of a group of spoiled children throwing a tantrum.

No one even attempted to articulate a coherent position.

Apparently they were unaware of the fact that a demonstration is only a way to get people’s attention, not an end in itself.