The purpose of Blue Mass. Group is to develop ideas that will invigorate progressive leadership in Massachusetts and the nation. Robust debate is an important means to that end. We welcome bold, constructive observations. To us, this means commentary typical of thoughtful discussion between acquaintances who may hold differing views on important issues, but who debate those issues in a respectful manner. Insults, personal attacks, rudeness, and blanket unsupported statements reduce the level of discourse, interfere with our basic objective, and are not permitted.
We expect contributors to adhere to the fair use doctrine, which means at a minimum that all direct quotes must be linked or otherwise identified and that copyrighted works should not be reprinted in their entirety if an excerpt will suffice. A useful discussion about fair use can be found here on Wikipedia.
The best way to not talk about something is to not talk about it. The primary impact of this suggestion, if followed, will be to draw more attention to the targets — precisely the wrong outcome, and precisely what several of them seek.
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p>I think that, by and large, this community makes it clear enough that we reject bigotry of all stripes. Furthermore, I don’t mind rebutting the occasional conservative talking point.
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p>While I appreciate your enthusiasm and enjoy much of your commentary, I think this comment is misguided.
For very egregious and offensive comments, don’t sufficient zero ratings cause them to be hidden?
How many zeroes does it take? Is it automatic or are they merely recommendations for the editors to follow or not at their discretion? On the other end of the spectrum, how does a post get recommended? Some diaries on the recommended list only have one person who recommended while others I have recommended don’t make it to the recommended list?
The process is automatic.
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p>So is recommendation. The list depends how many other posts are in the queue.
Is this mechanism documented? Can you explain the details as you know them?
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p>It could be an effective tool in a boycott – a free market method of marginalizing hate speech, goading, and expressions intended to distract and divert from the topic.
The parameters are documented there.
Considering that Lasthorseman is a member of good standing still — despite cheering on the murder of a federal census worker and teacher — tells you everything you need to know about the Rules of the Road.
This is tough to do without the support of our hosts and editors. Marking comments for delete regularly would only work if there were 8 frequent readers of BMG who did this aggressively. We don’t have such people. Further, there’s nothing to prevent our hosts from raising the bar from 8-to-delete to 12-to-delete.
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p>To my mind, that rules out the delete mechanism. (This, by the way, was Power Wheels’ proposal. “Excise the cancer!” Power Wheels advised.)
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p>As huh reminds us, best practice is known to be ignoring attention-seeking taunting and intentionally playing obtuse (usually called “trolling” on other sites). That might be best practice but it encounters at least two problems: (1) Attention-seeking comments invite clever comebacks. It takes unrealistic levels of community discipline to avoid that. Kirth had the interesting innovation of responding to trolling attention-seeking taunting and obtuse comments with comments consisting of nothing but punctuation. That was mostly successful but maybe not quite successful enough.
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p>(2) The other problem is that sometimes our hosts undermine the effort as well. Sometimes by praising comments; sometimes by promoting diaries. Here is a diary by a contributor who has threatened me under his previous account name and whose contributions are generally vitriolic. He isn’t even appreciated next door, but note that one of our hosts runs to his defense.
My view is that BMG has Rules of the Road that are unusual for web. I’d go so far as to say that they are weird, because they don’t function as most people expect. BMG has become rather prominent though. It has enviable traffic for a political blog. That could be because of the Rules of the Road. It could be in spite of them. There’s no way to know.
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p>I believe our hosts would say it is because of them. Conclusion: you’re stuck with them.