a friendly reminder about the quality of comments

I had originally left this as a comment in the Ted K forum post, but have added it here after checking into the website today and seeing a rash of just terrible comments and forum posts.

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As was feared, there have been a handful of one-liners and just terrible comments that are less than a sentence long and take like 30 seconds to submit (not just on this post). One goal of this forum is to have genuine meaningful conversations about texts on the library projects. My recommendation is that if you don't care about having thoughtful conversations that you find another website to share your commentary with.

Perhaps it is what the Internet has become, but we are anarchists here trying to experiment with registered users and anonymous comments to discuss, critique, and learn from each other - not spend time calling each other names and just leaving troll comments for your own personal lulz. I imagine this comment might just disappear into the void to those who it is actually addressed to, but for other participants I wanted to share that the idea is light moderation, but I do hope commentators put a little more thought into their words instead of just saying something terrible.

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I'm going to add some other thoughts here as well. It seems we have some very targeted trolling by known trolls who have frequented the comments of other anarchist websites and forums over the years, at least this is an educated guess. It's not surprising as this website was linked around the Internet and life is just wildly intense everywhere one goes nowadays. I really don't want to try to launch a project and immediately have people, who may have interesting things to say, write it off because of the level of poor trolling that is happening on the discussion board. I think these forums can hold a really special place in anarchist discourse (online) and to reach something like that, it obviously needs unique and intriguing participation from anarchist thinkers.

Anonymous comments and not logging users of the website are really important for me and others in this project. This website is an attempt at revisiting the Internet of old, where there were many websites one could visit, participate, and comment on anonymously. Over time, this has obviously changed to the point where it is extremely rare to find any place on the Internet hosting anonymous comments (especially without logs). One possible solution to the rash of poor comments by Anonymous would be to only allow registered users, but that also has some really negative consequences. For one, you have to register and it would really cut participation down from the many anarchists who remain anonymous in the world. After all, anonymous is the most prolific of anarchist writers.

A part of me sometimes wonders about who is leaving such comments and just trolling away all day at the keyboard on an anarchist website. Are you legitimately only able to have a conversation by saying something terrible and name calling and think it's actually productive and funny? Are you really that angry and obnoxious about it IRL? Or, as without a doubt sometimes happens - are you being paid to try and disrupt anarchist ideas by causing people to waste time and cause chaos while spamming your comments? I would say, over the anarchist Internet of things that both of the above statements are true for the kind of unwelcome guests visiting.

I wish there was an easy answer to trying to create a meaningful place for anarchists to discuss texts from the library project, but for now it seems to remain a works in progress. A part of me hopes that a message like this might cause some terrible commentators to reconsider their practice, but I also wanted to share this to say that I’m going to keep on pushing very light moderation, but will take out some of the really bad trash. Overall, I feel that even though the forums have gotten off to a rough start, I’m still really excited about this project and looking forward to reading and engaging thoughtfully with anarchist ideas.