He has a Horde? One difference is that he was more ruthless in culling that horde. And that made it difficult to sustain — this resonated with me.
He doesn’t sound optimistic about the future of the comment section. Instead, he sounds tired: of deleting and banning trolls, of trying to police and curb an online community’s worst—and, it often seems, most natural—instincts, all in the name of a goal he doesn’t feel he’s ever achieved. “To be honest, I can’t say how long this will go on for,” he told me, addressing the possibility that he might someday close comments entirely, like his colleague James Fallows. “It never quite became what I wanted it to be. I never really figured out how to get people from different perspectives in a place without defaulting to these usual conversations.”
Sometimes comments work, sometimes they end up being self-destructive. It’s a hard thing to balance.
It’s also the case that those damned trolls have a strategy that is sometimes effective — no matter what you do, there are assholes who make it their obsessive, petty hobby to tear it down.
And if you remove the comment section they will crow elsewhere about how it was their wonderful reasonable, rational argumentation that you couldn’t handle and how you are now scared of exposing your arguments to criticism.
Humans gonna human.
I have no intention of shutting down the comments section.
Coates has only had 2 or 3 posts with open comments in the last 6 months, and it’s been more than 6 months since he actually commented on any posts himself. I get the sense that he’s done with that format, or at least on extended hiatus. (He’s quit Twitter before too, but is back to using it again.) He doesn’t have his co-moderators anymore and his posting volume has been way down recently (though that may be because he was writing a #1 NYT Bestselling book.)
One reason I went into education was because I liked to build things up rather than tear things down. I don’t quite understand the mindset of making others hurt or unhappy. What does the person doing the action gain from that? A feeling of superiority? Lack of empathy rides again.
redwood @5:
I suspect you’re looking at it from the wrong perspective. This is from earlier in 2015, but it’s still an illuminating peek into the mind of a former troll who spent time trying to hurt Lindy West and make her unhappy:
As a black man speaking out, in strong terms, about white supremacy in the US, I imagine TNC is the target for some particularly nasty trolls, too.
Tony! @ 6
Thanks for that passage–I hadn’t seen it before. It’s good insight into how trolls think. In real life I’ve noticed that unhappy people want to tear down happy people. One difference is that in the physical world we can put physical distance between ourselves and people we don’t want to be around. That distance doesn’t really exist in the cyber world.
I did notice that the above troll’s empathy kicked in–“it finally hit me: there’s a living, breathing human being who’s reading this shit”–so it really is a matter of consideration of others’ feelings and situations that’s important in how we interact with said others.
redwood @8:
Yup. Now if only there was a way to successfully teach others how to be more empathetic.
With all due respect, I think a bigger difference between this joint and T-NC’s is the simple volume of comments. He attracted hundreds, maybe thousands (they were already called The Horde when I first saw them), when he was blogging regularly. Threads would get so long that it was hard to jump in without feeling you’d missed some vital aspect of the discussion. He must have spent hours moderating, and I don’t blame him for backing off, he has better things to do with his time. For a while there, though, he did seem to be working out his thoughts and feelings and the feedback likely helped.
Krugman, by contrast, lets comments run and gets lots, but (he wrote lately) almost never moderates them himself, and very likely does not read them. I don’t have any sense of a community around his blog, but it’s always interesting to read what often turn out to be the first drafts of his columns.
@ Tony! and Redwood
I really do think that’s the root of most internet trolling. You get to pour all your anger and frustration out; it’s cathartic, and no one get’s hurt because it’s just words on a screen!
Except of course it is a real person, but it’s easy to forget that when you can’t see them, just some text and an avatar. There’s a reason these trolls don’t act like that to people’s faces; because with a person right in front of you your empathy kicks in.
@redwood 5
One of King Ashoka’s successors supposedly asked a wise man how he could be as famous as his great ancestor. The answer was said to be: There are two ways to make your name. One is to be very good. The other is to be very evil.
Since it was hard to be good, but very easy to be evil, he chose the latter. As have the trolls. End of lesson. ;)
Really liked Ta-Nehisi Coates’ writing, I learned a lot, esp-
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/tanehisi-coates-between-the-world-and-me/397619/
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/?src=longreads
There’s a pretty good overview of exploitation and of denial of that exploitation there.