Fluxed

Comment is not free, exactly

A brief quote to set the frame:

`The question is,’ said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

`The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master — that’s all.’

In the wake of dealing with a troll in the Waveflux comment garden - my very first persistent troll, a landmark of sorts - I ran into a serendipitous topic being discussed on the interwebs: who owns comments left on blogs? The question of commenters’ rights and related notions of authority is under considerable discussion just now, with some thoughtful viewpoints being offered. The post at Intense Debate opened with three provisional options for framing comment policy at that site:

Blog Publisher Ownership - Comments made on a blog belong to the blog owner, giving them the ability to edit the comments as they see fit (deleting and editing comments).

Commenter Ownership - Comments cannot be edited by blog publishers. Comments can still be deleted by blog publishers - blog owners must be able to remove spam and inflammatory comments.

Shared Ownership - This is where it gets complicated and we try to reach a compromise. We’re proposing that blog publishers should have the ability to edit and delete comments as long as the original comment is accessible both on the edited comment and in the commenter’s comment history.

Leaning toward the third option - that of shared ownership - Intense Debate maintains that while it hosts comments, it does not own them, and that the debate is the beginning of hashing out just what that means. At Scripting News, the estimable Dave Winer shares that notion, calling it “a mutual thing,” stressing the we-ness, the collaboration, inherent in commenting.

In the brave new world of social media, this is bound to be the chosen stance of many blog owners. It won’t be mine.

Traditional media comes in for a lot criticism from this quarter, but I still take a lot of cues from the old days of what’s thought of now as one-way publishing. Control - especially over a personal voice, which Waveflux is - is rather important to me, and the idea of allowing that authority to be abridged leaves me cold. That, and the fact that I’m a rather asocial guy, causes me to look askance at this whole “shared” business.

Different strokes for different sites and purposes, of course. I agree with Jeff Chandler at Weblog Tools Collection when he decries the need for a “one size for all” approach:

I don’t believe a commenting bill of rights needs to be created in which all blogs should follow. However, I do think that each blogger should create and make publicly accessible a commenting policy. This policy should clearly explain what you as the blog author will do with comments posted on your site, who retains ownership of those comments and explain circumstances which would require you to edit an end user’s comment.

Even before reading Chandler’s remark, I had taken steps along the lines he suggests. The comment policy in effect here at Waveflux is posted under the Submit button of the comment form. It’s mercifully brief and rather readable as such statements go, but I provided a plainer-English version on the About page:

I may quote your comment in whole or part and attribute your words to you at any point in the future.
I may edit or delete your comment if it seems necessary.
It is your responsibility to make and keep a copy of your comment if you want it to live forever and unedited.

Along with a gentle reminder:

Commenters should strive for courtesy or risk mockery.

Which has been the case 99.95% of the time with comments left here. The policy is in place for the unregenerate remainder, those behavioral outliers (trolls) who may chance by. They have been warned.

As for the great debate over comment ownership, we may well see a tiered approach adopted as a wide standard, something similar to Creative Commons licensing. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if Creative Commons itself didn’t offer up such a framework.

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