Reader sestamibi wrote:
Roissy, I’ve been a follower of your blog for two years now. I agree with almost all of your positions (double-entendre alert) and apparently so do many other new followers.
While your popularity is admirable, posts that garner 600-1000 comments are a bit difficult to navigate, especially when many of those comments are juvenile pissing contests of the “are not/am too” variety. This discourages a lot of serious commenters who would like to stay on message.
You need a better system to manage comments. I would also cut off the number at 300.
I sympathize with sestamibi’s complaint. A lot of insightful, witty, stylishly hateful, and funny comments are getting lost amid a deluge of retarded games of “last licks”, trollish prattle, and horrid online flirting between ten guys and an entity that may or may not be a girl. For anyone who has spent the effort to leave a solid comment only to see it disappear under piles of bullshit from the likes of contrarian (tokyofistshimself) and many others, the cool-commenter-signal-to-tard-noise ratio can be depressing.
I have no plans to moderate comments. It’s too much work to sift through hundreds of comments culling the weak and feeble. I’m a free speech anarchist who believes that if we’re not careful to uphold the right to say what’s on our minds – hateful or harmonious — the kind of stuff I write here could one day land me and those like me in jail under an Orwellian ”hate crimes” statute. If you think I’m joking imagine the reaction of, for example, Feministing readers to my being handcuffed and hauled into court for “proselytizing hate”. Champagne corks would pop.
Therefore, this mad blog beyond thunderdome will remain a free fire zone. I will occasionally delete or creatively edit random comments by aggressively tardish commenters just to fuck with them, like a virtual version of Chinese water torture. My editorial caprice may even persuade these misfits to rein in their worst impulses.
So for now the only comment policy I have is this: Police yourselves.
