We need a better class of right wing troll
Unsurprisingly this week, we’ve had an influx of contenders to be a RWNJ, running anti-leftist and pro-reactionary lines. Also unsurprisingly, the mod workload increased substantially. I just spent an hour sorting through various aspects of moderation, most of it related to the current political controversy.
Regardless of your political persuasion, if you are new to TS and want to comment (or even if you’ve been commenting a while), a few things to understand,
- Read the site Policy (top of every page). Like most places in the internet, The Standard has a specific purpose, and standards and boundaries to meet and maintain that. Our purpose here is to write posts aligned with the labour movement, and to enable robust debate. Robust debate has boundaries, you can read about them in the Policy.
- We are under no obligation to let people comment here, commenting is a privilege.
- Don’t make claims of fact, or reckons, that are defamatory. Such comments put the site owners at legal risk. We ban people for doing that. If you are unsure if your comment is defamatory, err on the side of caution.
- That’s the first rule of commenting. The second is don’t waste moderator time. Read why here.
- We expect comments to bring a certain level of political analysis and debate to the table. Reading posts and other people’s comments will give you an idea of what the culture is here. We are not FB/Twitter, so unsubstantiated reckons will get moderator attention fast. As will flaming and trolling.
- The moderators tightened up on commenting last year because of the election, handing out long bans for repeat offenders to clear the decks so the rest of us could get on with enjoying serious and meaningful debate. My inclination is to continue doing this, because while it might lessen the number of commenters/comments, the nature of the debate improves. It also lessens mod workload. The other mods can comment if they want, but I think it’s fair to say we’re sick of the amount of time moderation is taking. Read this.
- To understand moderation, read this as well. One day I’ll compile it all into some tl;dr bullet points, but in the meantime, the posts tagged moderation are all here.
- The sysop, authors and moderators all work hard here, for free. Respecting that goes a long way.
In case anyone is stupid enough to take the title of this post literally and try and be a clever troll, the title was a bit of internet fun. It’s also a test to see if you read the post.
What we really need here is a better class of right wing commenter. We have some, which provides important political insight and stops us being an echo chamber. If you are new and RW, read the right wing commenters to get a sense of how they manage to comment on The Standard.