Or that particular swear?

Or the kind of language that seems to have chased some away?

Hi everyone!
Thanks Lambert!!

(ok, that was kind of stupid)

But before WKJM2 over at TL, it was a pretty good site for keeping out trolls and keeping the shouting matches down to raucous.

I think the adherence to pretty neutral rules in terms of content, and the enforcement of them in a relatively even-handed way is what made it that way. Also, interestingly, although this was a site function, the fact that comments cut off at 200 helped keep people from days-long obsessions with trivia.

I'm going to reach into the law and grab the 1st Amendment's time, place and manner restrictions. The govt can curtail free speech if it disrupts a reasonable and content-free enforcement of the 3. So, for instance, a town can prohibit driving around with gigantic speakers on your car blaring political speech (the most protected kind), if the prohibition is for a residential area in the middle of the night.

For PB2.0, time is anytime and place is the internet, so manner and content-neutral become the really important ones. I think they are fairly entwined, though.

Manner means how discourse is delivered:

* if your opinion or argument rests on contended facts, or new facts, must include linky goodness or willingness to supply such on request.

* no personal insults, not to public figures and not to commenters.

* no ad hominems -- outside of the straight up ad hominems, probably the most useless and annoying sort of response to an argument is to accuse someone of membership in some sort of group (you're a Republican, a PUMA, even an Obot, or the nots -- you're not a progressive, not a feminist, not a petlover etc.).

There are probably some others I'm not thinking of.

I think that covers both questions of tone and content, really -- gardening, fiction books, camel-riding, cooking, whatever are all fine if we're talking content neutrality, and as long as no one starts calling names over any of them.

This has been a particularly painful primary year. Anyone who denies that gets negative "gets it" points. A lot of us start from there.

Y'know what's startled me? That people regard "from there" as a starting point, and Obama doesn't get it

F&ck yes!

(irony alert)

this comment.

I have no time, but bypass at your limits.

As far as behavior we need to change?

I always argue for civil. Do you really think we don't have more knitting posts because of swearing? Or is it tone--or?

Gardening; knitting; etc., etc. and political comments--where more swearing would be?--separate?

is just polite and thinking about not hurting the other person--you may want to prove them wrong but not insult them...and I'm talking about the on-line people you're talking to, not a general politician-public figure thing.

Maybe we should have a Dept. of Venting...

will people say what would make the post more/read more?

For me, my time is often work-limited but...
more gardening and knitting and making/fixing things would be great. Is the problem that we maybe don't have daily content on those, more than the general tone on some other posts/comments?

There's also this whole emotionally driven stuff that is a relief to express here--and the very important "actually able to think and analyze while others go crazy" part...seems as if that attracts people, yes?

To get more of the 18 million:
more on sexism;
open choices in life;
more local stuff;
continuing coverage of what's happening v. what the press says;
more analysis of how to be a true liberal

Because once the dynamic of group behavior crosses the line into groupthink, there's no going back.

Someone -- I think it was FrenchDoc? posted a long and fascinating essay a few weeks back about group behavior (I will try to dig up the link).

At the time I thought that really, even groupthink isn't a bad thing, if the groupthink is trending the right way. By right way I don't mean 'agrees with me', but a high value put on the goals of PB2.0.

I'm still working this out, but in the U.S. we all participate in groupthink -- democracy is good, voting is good, choices are good, open debate is good. Even those who are trying their darnedest to subvert those values, pay homage to them in every other sentence. We all agree on the framework, at least in the abstract.

If the guidelines for acceptable behavior are both clear and consistent, then folks within the community who aren't admins/owners feel empowered to speak out on their own and create a guideline reinforcing dynamic.

What we need is groupthink aimed at the manner of discourse, not the content of opinions or arguments.

From what I've heard of the purges on Kos, and what I witnessed on TL, the trouble started when the owners were willing to take sides and allow posters and commenters to do the same.

Buttons and dropdowns make it much too easy to slag off someone you simply don't agree with. But there has to be some mechanism to flag violators, because there will always, always be at least a few, and the critical mass for toxicity is suprisingly low. I thought the 'Siteviolator' model Jeralyn had going helped, because a board member at least had to type a few characters, and give a reason.

As another example, over at The Confluence, and contrary to some popular belief, when folks come around peddling COLB crap, or start repeating Obama's middle name like that should mean something, very often the commenter's give a slapdown with explanation. Or, when Republicans show thinking they've found true pals and start extolling the virtues of McCain, someone sets them straight pretty quickly. Occasionally the community policing doesn't happen and RD steps in.

So I guess all that rambling was to say, there needs to be a mechanism for identifying violators, or potential violaters, and it should be clear, but it can't be too easy.

But at some point, someone has to have the zapping power, because some folks just aren't bothered by violating community norms. That's always going to be the last bulwark in practice. For that (and keep in mind I don't know how Corrente works in this respect), it seems like we can borrow from a courts model as well, with modifications.

There's reasons why trials are before one judge, but appeals before groups of 3 (usually) and the final court of appeal is before 9 (federal) or at least 5-7 (some states). We (ok, not we, the founders) wanted the law of the land to not be held in the hands of any one person, so they set up a system where you had to get most of a group to agree.

If, on any one site that gets at least a medium amount of traffic, there was a group of people with Zap power, perhaps it could be set up so any one Zapper could ban egregious violations, while bannings based on interpretation of the guidelines would need a group decision. This would hopefully be a barrier to personality-based bannings and too-hasty bannings. If a real question came up, maybe the question of whether a type of post (not the poster personally) could be thrown open to the community.

Am I getting too nuts and bolts? I'm not sure how this would work out in practical reality bc I don't have my own blog and have never had to act as an admin. I know enough to know it's a sucky, thankless responsibility, for the most part.

Link to Group Behavior post

That's the hard question. A new kind of journalism! But being able to post, post, post! is key. Otherwise, no hits, no comments, no activity, no revenue, death spiral. It really is a big issue!

[ ] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

Or in this case, the posters and commenters.

They appear to be doing a good job holding people to a standard. Afterall, it's in their interest to have that standard, otherwise, they wouldn't have joined in the first place.

Because it's randomizing.

Posting and commenting can be a passionate thing. Policing (which is what we're talking about, and unfortunately have to talk about) should be dispassionate, or as dispassionate as possible given our limitations as plain ol' humans with opinions. Having more than one person working together, and randomizing the appeals folks helps with the dispassion of policing.

doing content than in policing posts--although I would do it as a community duty.

But to have more regular posts, I think we have to pay people. I understand it's a problem for everyone, but how can people commit to posting even several posts of quality every day if they also have to do outside jobs, have families, etc.?

I suppose we could assign days?

What if we did assign some days and gave people shifts for a week? Just as an experiment? With some basic rules?

I love talking to everyone about these things but we've done a bunch of it. Can we start doing things?

I'm willing to volunteer for some things.

If we don't do this shift thing, can we try something else like: x people making at least one garden post a day?

because there will always be violators, and in the one-bad-apple vein, it only takes a small number to turn a group dynamic bad.

I've been thinking about RL, where I have many energetic discussions with friends who are Obama supporters and Republicans. While arguments get heated, they seldom devolve into the kind of vitriol and nastiness, or even truthiness that we've seen on the web.

I'm guessing its because between me and my friends, there are already rules, they're just unspoken. We know what's out of bounds and what kinds of thing you simply don't say to others face to face. We already know the norms of the group and have agreed implicitly to follow them.

Online there needs to be more explicitness because the barriers to nastiness are lower (no/few repercussions) and the potential group of commenters and posters is highly varied -- we need to build a community, and the opportunity for building community norms is a bit narrower than RL.

Some of the things I'd like to see as part of the PB2.0 ethos (mushy, sorry), but don't know whether they rise to the level of guidelines for the community are things along these lines:

1. Respond to the argument, not the person making it.

2. Respond to the argument being made, not the argument someone else made but you're too annoyed by it still to read and respond to what someone actually said.

(This includes not railing against the views of the group you believe a commenter belongs to).

3. If someone makes a point, or puts out an opinion that really ticks you off, try to determine whether they have a valid point in there somewhere, even if the argument was badly or stupidly made.

4. Assume good faith until it's clear otherwise.

5. If you really, really need to rev up a full on rant -- a truthy, angry, mean, snide rant (as we all do occasionally), then take it to a site where rants are welcome.

As someone who was largely late to PB1.0 failure, most of my observations are a bit second hand, or involve incidents that look mild compared to the more famous ones. But my impression is that the problem was much less the fact that people had different bets on in the horse race, than the manner in which disagreement manifested itself.

mostly?

I mean: garden posts would be diy;
knitting posts would be by experts or total newbies going 'help!';
political posts would be on clear analytical thinking...

and agree...
but I think there are sometimes--often?--deep underlying issues when people are scared, worried or afraid. The "progressive" liberal ideals that many have devoted time, energy, lives to have seemingly blown up on-line and in RL and I think many are afraid that they have helped causes that are now aligned against them.

Although it seems like we're talking about a couple different things (volunteer policing duties, posting, posting in a particular subject matter?) so I'd love to know what I'd be volunteering for.

I'm a bit skeptical of monetary-rewards/market systems, just because of the lowest-common-denominator effect (or race-to-the-bottom effect). But ignore that comment if that's already been decided on.

I saw someone sniveling the other day about the use of profanity on this blog. Please.

Please, please, please keep doing what you're doing. You're doing it right and fine. Don't let anyone convince you to change.

It seems as if you are describing a group of blogs where everyone will be reading every blog. I'm not going to read every blog. And if it were reasonably possible for me to read every blog on a regular basis, I'd say that PB2.0 shouldn't even bother existing.

I keep going back to the Netflix type model. I want to control what I read and I want to be able to remember what I've read before that I liked and didn't like (and my rating system is invisible to everyone else, just like their ratings are invisible to me). If I like it I'll go back again, if not, I probably won't unless prompted. If I feel like reading about knitting on Tuesdays and Sunday mornings before knitting groups, I can. If I don't care about knitting why would I want to have required knitting posts? Personally, I'll spend more time on science and political blogs than other stuff. And generally only specific types of science and politics at that.

What seems to be hinted at is a Kos model, only instead of diaries you have different "blogs". But a similarly "controlled" environment where you are imposing aspects of blogging that you like. That is completely wrong in my view. I think rules should be at a minimum and more diversity (in topics, perspectives, etc.) should always be pursued. I like as little top level control from external forces as possible.