Death of Discussion

Usenet and all of its suc­ces­sors are dying. No mat­ter what they call it in the movies, it is really anti-social net­work­ing. Social net­works are sup­posed to make it pos­si­ble to con­nect peo­ple who share inter­ests and activ­i­ties across polit­i­cal, eco­nomic, and geo­graphic bor­ders. OK, this hap­pens. But way too often, the medium turns into some­thing that more resem­bles the cliques of junior high school. You are free to be part of the dis­cus­sion so long as you are accepted by the pop­u­lar leader of the group. Do or say any­thing that is per­ceived as a slight by the clique’s leader and you will be shunned by all the mem­bers of the group. They will stand in a cir­cle and talk to each other, and you had bet­ter not try to butt in.

I have already expressed my opin­ion about com­ment­ing and link­ing on blogs. I believe that not allow­ing com­ments sti­fles dis­cus­sion and as a gen­eral rule am against the prac­tice. I guess there may be extremely rare cases where an indi­vid­ual blog­ger is so rec­og­nized or noto­ri­ous that allow­ing com­ments would attract way too many unde­sir­able com­ments and the prac­tice is jus­ti­fied. But these cases would be few and far between. I would be very under­stand­ing of such cases if the blog­ger were to be accept­ing of dis­cus­sion through other media. For exam­ple, if a blog­ger felt that they were jus­ti­fied in not allow­ing com­ments directly on their blog, they could main­tain a Twit­ter account where com­men­tary could be allowed.

This would work, not as well as allow­ing com­ments on the blog itself, but at least com­ments would be tied to an account that can be tied to the blog author. There would be no real need for mod­er­a­tion of com­men­tary. The dia­log could be car­ried on in pub­lic. It would cer­tainly not be as archival as a blog post and asso­ci­ated com­men­tary, but it is bet­ter than no com­men­tary at all. And if the 140 char­ac­ter lim­i­ta­tion of Twit­ter became too lim­it­ing, indi­vid­u­als who wished could use their own blogs and links to these blogs to expand the dis­cus­sion. As I said, it would work as a poor compromise.

But it also allows for a blog author to have tremen­dous power to sti­fle dis­cus­sion, espe­cially one who has a large fol­low­ing. Twit­ter allows any account to block any follower:

Block­ing users on Twitter

We pro­vide all Twit­ter users with the abil­ity to block other users. Block­ing pre­vents a user from fol­low­ing you, send­ing you an @reply or @mention, or putting your account on any of their lists.

What this allows a blog author who has a large fol­low­ing to do is to

1. turn off com­ments on their blog,
2. block any Twit­ter fol­lower who dis­agrees with their point

which results in insur­ing that they remove the dis­agree­ing fol­lower from any dis­cus­sion. In other words, it cen­sors the dis­agree­ing follower.

Since in most cases the fol­low­ers of the blog and Twit­ter account of the pop­u­lar poster will not be fol­low­ers of either the commenter’s blog or Twit­ter account they will never see the dis­agree­ing com­ment. These fol­low­ers will only be exposed to one side of the dis­cus­sion. Sim­ply by not allow­ing com­ments and by block­ing dis­agree­ing accounts on other social media, pop­u­lar blog­gers gain a uni­lat­eral pul­pit from which they alone can speak.

To make mat­ters worse, when the pop­u­lar account holder chooses to block some­one, it is a pri­vate action. There is no pub­lic declaration,

“I hearby declare @personIdonotwanttohearfrom BLOCKED”

It is as if the pop­u­lar blog­ger has got­ten with the admin­is­tra­tor of the Web and said, “Well, as of this moment, they’re on DOUBLE SECRET PROBATION!” You are on the list but you have to use sur­rep­ti­tious mean to find out (well it is not all that hard).

I know that I will not change this. Noth­ing about this is vio­lates any rules of use. If either side crosses into abuse, then cer­tainly, block that per­son, but that is not what I am talk­ing about.

What I do think we should do is point out when account hold­ers are block­ing us sim­ply because we expressed a dif­fer­enc­ing opin­ion. Per­haps we need a pub­lic declaration,

“I hearby declare I was BLOCKED by @personwithtoothinaskin”

Per­haps if enough of us did it we would see a pat­tern start to emerge. Per­haps we would rec­og­nize when pop­u­lar blog­gers were sti­fling open dis­cus­sion and should not be so pop­u­lar. Or not

Is Still Here