We Are Restoring Comments | naked capitalism

Dear patient readers,

Please read this post in full before commenting.

We are reopening comments on this and some recent posts. While we do very much appreciate your thoughtfulness and insights and therefore would very much prefer to keep comments on, the bottom line is we see no alternative to becoming more bloody-minded about enforcing our site Policies.

While we did miss the input and even camaraderie, the comments section has recently become negative value-added overall. Some regular readers confirmed our sense that comment quality had nosedived after the Trump inauguration. We’ve had earlier periods of toxicity so severe that one drove off our then most seasoned moderator, Jules. This recent period seemed worse. And as we regularly point out, you do not see the comments that we don’t allow to appear.

When we turned comments off, we did not indicate that we would restore them. We need you all to take to heart the notion that if the members of this community cannot individually, and enough of the time, collectively, engage in civil, reasoned, as-factual-as-possible-given-the-tainted-information-environment discussions, we will have to shut comments down permanently. Barring unforeseen events, we will have another four years of Trump, with the broad-spectrum derangement that implies. The site writers cannot endure the time sink and emotional drain of meme amplification, bickering, bad faith arguments, and personal attacks and still turn out high quality posts at our needed rate. Even vastly better resourced sites than ours have cut back on comments. The Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal open them up only on about half their articles.

One of the most disturbing patterns in the Trump era is celebration of cruelty and the destruction of institutions, an almost apocalyptic fervor about burning things down. We have antidotes and bird songs and plantidotes and stories about helpers because the world is already brutal. Civilization is, or ought to be, an exercise in reducing the pain level. I am the sort that feels a small pang every time I see a shuttered storefront (and in NYC, a regular trigger was landlords jacking up rents; they doubled them in my area in the early 2010s). I think of the loss of livelihoods. And I know well from my time in consulting how hard it is to make very large institutions function passably well, and how it is even harder to start and build new enterprises into big successful entities (success measured in other ways that looting and ramping asset prices).

So when readers cheer the prospect of mass firings, and justify their glee with the idea that workers at the CDC or USAID were up to no good, that criticism is misplaced. Over the weekend, Alexander Mercouris described the giddy atmosphere at the 2022 Munich Security Conference, where the participants were spoiling for their fight with Russia and were savoring the taste of victory. I see similar giddiness now.

As KLG has pointed out, many CDC staffers are doing real science. And as for USAID, as Clive pointed out long ago, it’s almost impossible to work in a stable middle class job that does not make one a participant in some sort of unethical or exploitative activity. Think of what has become of the health insurance industry, or most of finance, or the many vendors jacking up prices over what is justified by cost increases (new data suggests that eggs go on that list). And as with the financial crisis, does anyone seriously expect the perps, the policy-makers, or the leaders who designed and implemented the shifts in programs and priorities that took institutions away from their original missions to becoming tools to support the power structure, to be the ones who suffer? It’s the beneficiaries of the value-added services and the non-officer-level employees who will suffer.

Along with such schadenfreude are big upticks in tribalism and black-and-white positions, both of which work against the central mission of the site: critical thinking. Another more prevalent and draining pattern approaches gladitorial combat: commenters who persist with arguments after it has become clear their aim is to win and not to get at a better approximation of the truth, or, even better than that, improve our collective knowledge. Some of the big tells of this behavior include shifting ground, lack of evidence (especially links), failing to providing substantiation when challenged, broken record, and whataboutism. Engaging with these commenters becomes an exercise in “don’t feed the trolls.” That’s not a good use of site time.

It has been troubling to see some of our particularly sound and well regarded commenters start to go rancid, as in start to regularly make comments that are much less informative, and also more emotionally charged or otherwise overly-dogged than their old high standard. The most common trigger is when a new topic becomes so important that we report on it regularly, and our take, or the emerging consensus of the readership, is contrary to strongly held beliefs of the commenter in question. As past examples, we’ve lost very valuable contributors over Brexit and the Ukraine conflict. The warning signs include failing to discriminate between solid and tendentious information sources, not recognizing the limits of their knowledge, making unduly emotional comments or rebuttals, and yet expecting the same level of deference as in their established area of expertise.

While feedback and informed input are essential to this site, comments policy has always been an exception to our egalitarian orientation. Lambert and I have moderated over 2.2 million comments at Naked Capitalism. Both Lambert and our moderators have substantial comments moderation experience independent of Naked Capitalism. In other words, it is pretty much impossible for any of you to have the moderation experience to second-guess us. Despite the increased contentiousness of discussion on the Internet, this site until recently has gotten kudos from readers and experts in journalism as a standout in terms of the consistently high quality of debates here. We would prefer for this high standard to continue. We hope you do too.

If we are to have a comments section that adds to our shared understanding and sharpens the work of site writers, the least restrictive solution Lambert and I have been able to come up with is much stricter enforcement of our Site Policies (posted below). Stricter enforcement means we will do something we have heretofore been loath to do: rip out violating comments that somehow get through. Note that this will require us to remove benign responses, since otherwise comments nesting on that post will break. So we apologize in advance for collateral damage.

Be warned: When we ask a commenter to read the Site Policies before commenting again, only to have them respond with a speed or in a manner that makes clear they did not do so, that’s a site violation, and a fast track to being moderated or blacklisted.

The purpose of this site is to promote critical thinking. If you read our Policies, you will see that the basis for moderation decisions is conduct. Too often, those who are unable to defend their views fall back on bad faith argumentation, which leads them to rationalize having been moderated or banned as being due to their opinions, as opposed to bad behavior.

We are going to be in zero tolerance mode until readers understand that this site is not the place for mere personal opinion. There are plenty of places for memes, sheepdog-style talking point-driven commentary, singing in chorus, dogpiling, and other forms of thread-jacking: Kos and Reddit come to mind, along with social media generally. We’d rather have 50 thoughtful comments (such as links to articles or topics that weren’t included in Links) than 250 that consist largely of noise. Please keep in mind that we can also be held liable for comments. We have found that this is not merely theoretical.

If you aren’t happy with this outcome, as Barry Ritholtz would often say, GYOFB.

Our Site Policies state that commenting constitutes acceptance of our Policies. They also state that all moderation decisions are final. They point out that we do not have the bandwidth to deal with reader question about the status of their comments. E-mails on this subject will not be read or answered.

Again, please read the section of our Policies on comments in full, which we are reproducing below.

Comments Policy

The comments section has become an important feature for both Naked Capitalism readers and site authors, due to the general high caliber of the discussion. That in turn results from having commentors who are engaged, thoughtful, adhere to high standards regarding the quality of information and analysis, and who steer clear of abuse or intellectually invalid argumentation strategies.

The comments section is a conversation hosted in Naked Capitalism’s space. That means that commenting is a privilege, not a right.

You are invited into our space because your comments are often at least as informative as our posts, and they can be funny too. You keep us on our toes and graciously correct our all-too-frequent typos and broken links. However, in order to keep the conversation civil and informative, we have found that we have to establish and enforce guidelines.

We welcome comments and will accept any reasonable or constructive comment that contributes to debate and stimulates conversation, including strong criticisms. We prefer to keep the comments section as open as possible, but Naked Capitalism is not a chat board or a forum. The site’s administrators spend a considerable amount of time in the review and maintenance of the comments section, not just in moderating comments that hit our moderation tripwires (see Moderation below) but also by engaging in comments on a frequent basis, often to keep discussions from going off the rails.

Readers who run afoul of our standards are subject to the loss of comment privileges. The overarching requirement is that you comment in good faith to advance your understanding and that of other readers.

Our Goal is to Promote Critical Thinking

When in doubt, consider this quote as a guideline:

You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.

-Harlan Ellison

Typical violations:

1) Engaging in broken record: Repeating the same point, especially when it’s been refuted. That includes taking an argument that was rebutted on one post and repeating the same argument on another post.

2) Not reading the post: Evidently reacting only to the headline of a post, or not reading through to the end.

3) Bad faith: Deploying any of a long list of rhetorical tricks that are all about winning, as opposed to conversing. As former debaters, Yves and Lambert know these tricks well. Don’t use them.

5) Rude and offensive language: Naked Capitalism is read by a wide audience, and if your comment includes offensive or inappropriate language, it may be deleted. For example, please avoid “bad language” that’s more than mildly vigorous – no body parts, please! – and avoid racist ranting.

6) Ignoring Site Policies after having been instructed to read them. When we ask a commenter to read the Site Policies before commenting again, only to have them respond with a speed or in a manner that makes clear they did not do so, that’s a site violation, and a fast track to being moderated or blacklisted.

6) Ignoring Site Policies after having been instructed to read them. When we ask a commenter to read the Site Policies before commenting again, only to have them respond with a speed or in a manner that makes clear they did not do so, that’s a site violation, and a fast track to being moderated or blacklisted.

Other violations include but are not limited to: ad hominem attacks, hogging bandwidth, assignments/demands (asking/telling post authors or site admins to Do Something other than fix typos or broken HTML), sock-puppeting yourself, link-whoring/using comments to promote your work, thread-jacking, concern-trolling, jailbreaking, acting as a self-appointed moderator and/or complaining about moderation policy, agnotology or other forms of making stuff up, tag teaming, and a high invective-to-content ratio. In borderline cases, such as recidivist smarminess, we may fall back on the platypus rule.