The responsibility of running a community
Should the manager of an online community be responsible to its commenters, or to its anonymous readers?
Say I put a blog post out, and someone comments (on my blog? hah!) politely and articulately with a question that I think is utterly trivial and silly. (Let’s assume for the sake of this discussion that my judgement accords with that of most readers, which it normally won’t reliably do.) Now, if I want to engage with the commenter, I have to respond to the comment, and enter into a conversation whose starting point is an inane question. This exchange could have value for the commenter, if they’re open-minded. Otherwise, they’re a troll. Let’s assume they’re openminded.
So, a polite, articulate, openminded, and ignorant or slightly stupid person asks a silly and trivial question. I can give that commenter value by answering it. But how much does reading that inane exchange cost my other readers? Is the total cost more than the value I give to that one commenter? Should I delete the comment, and save my other readers the trouble? What if the question is obvious and trivial, but not quite inane or silly?
June 26th, 2006 at 20:54
I guess it depends on the site. On Unfogged, for example, “on topic” is pretty expansive. I ended up in an email conversation once about whether a comment was appropriate or a troll that involved the sentence “It was on topic but maybe he doesn’t mean the primer on how to have sex with a dog in the right spirit.”
June 26th, 2006 at 20:58
Well, not so much “on topic” as “contributing to the purpose of the community”. At Unfogged, that means either sharing an interesting anecdote or being witty or engaging strongly and insightfully with some other commenter/poster (or some combination thereof).
June 29th, 2006 at 12:19
I tend to be pretty lenient when it comes to off-topic or inane conversations in places I run. For two reasons:
Firstly if something is off topic, it may simply be that there’s no appropriate/good forum where it actually is on topic. If the conversation has value its value should not be diminished by a lack of 100% appropriate forum.
For instance I tend to allow any discussion of blue sky packaging/distribution topics on autopackage-dev, even if not really related to autopackage itself, simply because there’s a bunch of knowledgable and interested people there and there aren’t [m]any other places to discuss such things.
Secondly, it’s really not that “expensive” to scan read a conversation to see if you’re interested in it or not. We do it all the time. Especially in email you can just blackhole the thread, so nobody loses much from a wandering discussion. Trying to suppress them would be optimising the wrong thing.
June 29th, 2006 at 12:24
Many readers don’t have the skills or temperment to minimize time wasted on such uninteresting threads, and those readers will develop an aversion to the community as a whole. If there are too many such threads, even the readers with the skills won’t be inclined to stick around. So allowing too much of this can harm the community.
Also, off-topic is not necessarily uninteresting, or unhelpful to the community.