Chris Clarke on Comments

http://faultline.org/index.php/site/comments/if_there_is_hope_it_dies_with_th...

“There is an odd conceit in the blogging world that deletion of bad-faith comments is a violation of the rights of the hater. ”

I keep coming back to my grieving friend-of-a-friend nine hundred miles away, and to my empathy with her, impossible without this tool the Internet. The Internet does not inevitably intertwine the hearts of those who use it, by any means. But it has the capacity to do so. For that capacity to be expressed most fully a necessary condition, I believe, is a context of community. And as is true in the off-line world, the healthiest communities are those in which members of that community act in good faith. There is an odd conceit in the blogging world that deletion of bad-faith comments is a violation of the rights of the hater. Even when the point of the comment is expressly to disrupt, to inflame and derail, the canonical response is not to simply delete the comment, but rather to warn commenters against “feeding the troll.” Thus the blogger’s responsibility for maintaining the community of the site, his or her responsibility to refrain from publishing hate speech and slander (which is in fact what allowing such comments to remain live on one’s blog amounts to) is externalized.