![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Deprecating Disemvowelment
Mar. 8th, 2009 09:23 pmA while back (my file system tells me 2002) I wrote a little MovableType plugin to automate the process of disemvoweling comments. I did this because I thought this thread was pretty funny. Which it was, actually.
Also nasty. I'm not actually adverse to nasty; as anyone who knows me could tell you, I'm a pretty snarky person. I think I always will be. This does not prevent me from reading Ebert on snark and going "Huh, that's worth thinking about."
One of the things I think is that I can't recommend deliberate obfuscation as a generic means of moderating comments. It's a really powerful tool that has the effect of subjecting the commenter to mockery. It sharply delineates the commenter as an outsider. "Bar bar bar" and all that, what? The message is that people who screw up are to be mocked, and your words -- which are what you've got when you're interacting online -- can be made a subject of contempt at any moment. No matter how well you write them.
This is climate of fear stuff. It works, but you lose empathy for the outsider and you put your casual readers on a bit of an edge, because I tell you what: being mocked is worse than being excluded silently. The proof of this assertion is any Boing Boing comments thread that's been heavily moderated. People react very, very poorly to being disemvoweled. As, really, they're meant to -- the idea isn't to make them stop posting, the idea is to turn the posts into objects d'amusement.
One could, if one wanted, contemplate the relationship between moderation by mockery and "Fans are slans!" Irony located here. It is really damned hard to get away from one's environment. And yeah, the second spur that got me thinking about this was the discussion of privilege and race that's been burning on LJ and elsewhere for the last couple of months. I've been sort of uncomfortable with the technique for a while, but the whole mess made me want to do something concrete about it.
Anyway. I don't think anyone uses my plugin any more, and I don't care if people who do use it keep using it, but I don't want to provide it any longer, so I'm not.
Also nasty. I'm not actually adverse to nasty; as anyone who knows me could tell you, I'm a pretty snarky person. I think I always will be. This does not prevent me from reading Ebert on snark and going "Huh, that's worth thinking about."
One of the things I think is that I can't recommend deliberate obfuscation as a generic means of moderating comments. It's a really powerful tool that has the effect of subjecting the commenter to mockery. It sharply delineates the commenter as an outsider. "Bar bar bar" and all that, what? The message is that people who screw up are to be mocked, and your words -- which are what you've got when you're interacting online -- can be made a subject of contempt at any moment. No matter how well you write them.
This is climate of fear stuff. It works, but you lose empathy for the outsider and you put your casual readers on a bit of an edge, because I tell you what: being mocked is worse than being excluded silently. The proof of this assertion is any Boing Boing comments thread that's been heavily moderated. People react very, very poorly to being disemvoweled. As, really, they're meant to -- the idea isn't to make them stop posting, the idea is to turn the posts into objects d'amusement.
One could, if one wanted, contemplate the relationship between moderation by mockery and "Fans are slans!" Irony located here. It is really damned hard to get away from one's environment. And yeah, the second spur that got me thinking about this was the discussion of privilege and race that's been burning on LJ and elsewhere for the last couple of months. I've been sort of uncomfortable with the technique for a while, but the whole mess made me want to do something concrete about it.
Anyway. I don't think anyone uses my plugin any more, and I don't care if people who do use it keep using it, but I don't want to provide it any longer, so I'm not.
