As you might’ve noticed, TXAB (short for “The Christ Almighty Blog,” y’know) doesn’t have a comment section. Used to, but I got a lot of trolls and grew tired of moderating it. If you’ve ever bothered to read the comments on YouTube videos, and I don’t recommend it, you’ll notice a lot of them are stupid and awful, particularly under videos which express unpopular opinions. My opinions are just as unpopular, apparently. So away they go.
This is far from the first site to do this. In the early days of the World Wide Web, lots of news sites and blogs permitted comments. The hope was people would moderate themselves, be civil, and not need someone to police them. The reality was people did no such thing, especially since the internet permits you to be anonymous. (Well, anonymous to everyone but hackers, who are scary good at finding out who you are with very little effort.) And even with websites which require you to use your true name, like Facebook, people are just vile. So websites started moderating the comments… until it became more trouble than it’s worth.
On my blogs I moderated the comments myself. It took way more time than I wanted, and I was deleting and banning most of the comments and commenters. No, not because I disagreed with them; it was for godless and fruitless behavior. That was my only real rule for moderation: Behave yourself! When they couldn’t do that, down came the banhammer.
A decade ago, right about the time I started TXAB, I switched to Disqus for my comments. They claimed they’d moderate people for me. Largely they did! So I have no trouble recommending Disqus to other bloggers. But Disqus really just moderates for harassing or profane behavior, and my standards are a bit higher.
And of course those I banned, complained. Their usual argument was that this (the United States, anyway; TXAB’s readers are from everywhere) is a free country, and how dare I censor them; don’t I realize they have the First Amendment right to express themselves freely? I’m a journalist;
Anywho, no more comments means no more bans. No more rude statements for me to delete; no more hurt feelings because I dared to delete what other people had toiled over; no more trolls. No more positive comments either, but I wasn’t receiving all that many of them anyway.
Well, I do receive ’em through email. Sometimes. And like I said, there’s still email.