I think comment moderation is clearly desirable on this blog (to keep busy smart thoughtful people reading the comments) and I have absolutely no reason to believe that the moderators of this blog have done a bad job in any way, but it would be better if there were a way for a sufficiently-motivated participant to review the decisions of the moderators. The fact that most blogs hosting serious public discourse do not provide a way is an example of how bad mainstream blogging software is.
The details of Youtube’s way for a participant to review moderation decisions has already been described. Paul Graham’s software for Hacker News (which will be released soon as open source) provides a elegant way: if a participant toggles a field (“showdead”) on his profile page from No to Yes, then from then on, unpublished comments will appear in the participant’s web browser at the position in the flow of comments at which they would have appeared if the comments had not been unpublished.
Now will the original poster please tell me whether in the future I should wait for an Open Thread to make a comment like this one? I do not believe that in this medium (namely, linear, non-threaded comment sections) keeping threads of conversation separate is worth the effort, but a lot of people disagree with me, and I will defer to the preference of the original poster and the editors of the blog.
I think comment moderation is clearly desirable on this blog (to keep busy smart thoughtful people reading the comments) and I have absolutely no reason to believe that the moderators of this blog have done a bad job in any way, but it would be better if there were a way for a sufficiently-motivated participant to review the decisions of the moderators. The fact that most blogs hosting serious public discourse do not provide a way is an example of how bad mainstream blogging software is.
The details of Youtube’s way for a participant to review moderation decisions has already been described. Paul Graham’s software for Hacker News (which will be released soon as open source) provides a elegant way: if a participant toggles a field (“showdead”) on his profile page from No to Yes, then from then on, unpublished comments will appear in the participant’s web browser at the position in the flow of comments at which they would have appeared if the comments had not been unpublished.
Now will the original poster please tell me whether in the future I should wait for an Open Thread to make a comment like this one? I do not believe that in this medium (namely, linear, non-threaded comment sections) keeping threads of conversation separate is worth the effort, but a lot of people disagree with me, and I will defer to the preference of the original poster and the editors of the blog.