I run a philosophy/theology blog, and my commenter threads are usually a lot more decorous than on a lot of similar blogs, so I haven’t revised my free-for-all comment policy at all (didn’t want to fix what isn’t broken, had an ugh reaction to putting limits on speech—feels like public weakness).
But then I remembered I didn’t have to assume that a more restrictive comment policy would be bad or piss people off, I could experiment. So, this week, I did a pilot post with different rules from normal. I was highlighting a commenter’s question about arguments about natural law and restricted top-level comments to people who liked that frame of thinking and wanted to explain. All critiques had to be direct replies to the proffered explanations. I set up two exception threads: one for feedback on the experiment, and one for complaining about other commenters.
So far it’s going really well (conversation more focused, fewer ad hominems, fewer jumps onto tangentially related politically charged issues. So I’ll try it again in the future and give some of my other weird ideas a test run. Just a reminder not to assume I know how an experiment will turn out if it’s not costly to just run the test.
I run a philosophy/theology blog, and my commenter threads are usually a lot more decorous than on a lot of similar blogs, so I haven’t revised my free-for-all comment policy at all (didn’t want to fix what isn’t broken, had an ugh reaction to putting limits on speech—feels like public weakness).
But then I remembered I didn’t have to assume that a more restrictive comment policy would be bad or piss people off, I could experiment. So, this week, I did a pilot post with different rules from normal. I was highlighting a commenter’s question about arguments about natural law and restricted top-level comments to people who liked that frame of thinking and wanted to explain. All critiques had to be direct replies to the proffered explanations. I set up two exception threads: one for feedback on the experiment, and one for complaining about other commenters.
So far it’s going really well (conversation more focused, fewer ad hominems, fewer jumps onto tangentially related politically charged issues. So I’ll try it again in the future and give some of my other weird ideas a test run. Just a reminder not to assume I know how an experiment will turn out if it’s not costly to just run the test.