Since the now infamous “Kathy Sierra Debacle,” blogger Tim O’Reilly has been pushing for a Blogger’s Code of Conduct. He put an early draft of one up on his blog.
Before I even read it, I scrolled down to see what the commenters had to say. Not surprisingly, there’s not a lot of support there. In fact, as of now I don’t see any support in the comments.
The code is apparently based on the Blogher Community Guidelines, but there’s a big difference between what Blogher asks of it community and what O’Reilly is trying to do. Blogher is referring to blog posts that they choose to publish on their own site, under a rather traditional publishing model. What O’Reilly is speaking of is a code for personal bloggers.
I’ve been blogging for over 3.5 years, but I haven’t had to deal with rude commenters on my blogs. I fly pretty low in the blogosphere, of course. Most of my readers have been friends who may disagree with me on occasion, but they’d never be rude about it. I don’t get too controversial in my blogs, anyway.
But I’ve been a moderator and administrator for a forum that used to get very heated, so I do have experience dealing with folks who like to be rude or go against the popular sentiment for whatever reason. We were learning as we went, and found ourselves changing forum rules in response to specific actions by specific people, even though the forum started as place for free discussion. For years, though, we didn’t ban the troublemakers, despite repeated call to do so by some of our other members. I was one of the last holdouts when we did finally ban them, although in the end I agreed with the reasoning, they’d broken forum rules that were put in place for the privacy and security of our members. But my fear was that by banning these voices of the opposition the forum would lose some of it’s vitality, and I do think that’s what happened. Most of our members have very similar viewpoints now. It’s still a fun forum, and we have great new members who never would have participated earlier, but it’s become a different place, and I do miss the back and forth we used to have.
I guess my big issue with this is that it’s one person’s opinion on what is acceptable. Sure, he’s asking others to contibute via a wiki but even then, I don’t think it speaks for most. Are there really that many bloggers who feel like they need iron-clad rules? Some of us like a little snark with our daily blogging, anyway. Sure, there are lines that are crossed, but I really think for the vast majority of bloggers rude commenters aren’t an issue, and those for whom it is already have the power to control their blogs without some outside rules being the driving force. I can’t imagine seeing a comment I find disturbing then consulting the code of conduct before taking action.
I either delete or I don’t, my blog, my decision. Simple.
3 Comments
Of course a “code of conduct” is a way for the more powerful bloggers to start “taming the Internet frontier,” as it were - to their own advantage.
It will always be the instinct of those in powerful positions to seek to keep frozen the natural evolution of conversation, under the guise of “law and order,” of course.
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Thank you for your post, and for noting the same difference we at BlogHer see between setting transparent guidelines for community participation within our own community vs. trying to come up with a code for the entire blogosphere to theoretically follow or not.
That distinction was not drawn very clearly in the article, so I’m grateful you mention it. you can see more of our thoughts on that distinction at my blog: http://workerbeesblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/theoretically-going-to-be-in-mondays-ny.html , and from Lisa on a BlogHer post (in the comments): http://blogher.org/node/17887#comment-17365
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Donna- I don’t know if I see some kind of plot or evil intent on the part of “powerful bloggers”, but I do agree that the free exchange of ideas absolutely must be protected. Those who are against net neutrality, for example, are a much larger risk than A-list bloggers I think.
Elisa- I do think that it’s an important distinction. Sites like Blogher, that publish a great deal of content from a variety of viewpoints, need a code of conduct, but you’re not asking that your contributers adhere to the same code on their personal blogs. I’m not sure even Tim O’Reilly sees the difference, though!
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