The irony of it is that there was some highly thoughtful, intelligent and appropriate flaming on the Gogarty thread. That’s the other point MSM sites don’t get about blogging, even relatively clueful ones like the Graun – bloggers can’t assume they’re always right, or even that they’re never ridiculous. Columnists can and do.

I think that technological fixes to the problem – Slashdot-style forms of voting and user-led moderation – rarely fix anything. In fact, I think lots of them actually make things worse. If people know that their comment can be hidden if people don’t like it, there’s even less social pressure to make it good.

It’s an interesting point to suggest that removing the linear nature of comment threads would decerease the noise – it’s entirely possible. Of course, for every person who sees a particular comment structure as just leading to shouting matches, there’s another person who thinks that they need to be more structured to encourage good back and forth debate, as opposed to a collection of lone voices hollering into the void.

In short: I’m not sure it can be fixed, any more than real-life mobs (in the losest sense) can be controlled. But you can introduce measures, much as you would with large scale public meetings, to at least structure the mob and remove unduly disruptive elements.

Some related links, all from the last time this came up, when that daft Blogger’s Code of Conduct was doing the rounds:

Cory Doctorow – How To Keep Hostile Jerks From Taking Over Your Online Community (deeply ironic, of course, because when hostile jerks took over the BB comments back in the day, they just removed the entire comment function for several years.)

Teresa Nielsen Hayden – Moderation isn’t rocket science

And from a link in that post, John Scalzi – “What the blog world needs is not a universal “Code of Conduct”; what it needs is for people to remind themselves that deleting comments from obnoxious dickheads is a good thing.”

It sort-of works – while you do certainly still get some ignorant comments if you sort by most popular, it does mean you get to read the best ones without most of the really stupid ones you’d get if reading chronologically.

The Facebook group is worrying – although on the plus side, it’s a good way to find out whether or not a new acquaintance is a complete f***wit who you should have nothing to do with…

Maybe I have misunderstood your idea, but don’t The Sun and The Telegraph already do this sort of thing (albeit in tandem with the traditional comment threads)? I have to admit that I haven’t delved too deeply into them. Having said that I did spot a terrible blog post on The Sun’s website about the F1 racism issue, which I recently mentioned on my blog. The thrust of it was that all Spaniards are racists–a stunning example of irony bypass.

Maybe I am being hasty but I doubt The Sun’s standalone blogs are of much higher quality than BBC Have Your Say and other the cesspits of demagoguery.

Which brings me on to the Digg / YouTube style scoring system. I totally agree with you on that. Allowing people to rate comments just encourages demagoguery and grandstanding even more.

I did also think you made a good point on your post about Max Gogarty. It was the comments that made it go viral. One of the few instances of an entertaining MSM comment thread, although I certainly wouldn’t like to have been at the receiving end of some of the comments given that Max Gogarty’s biggest crime (nepotism aside, although that’s the editor’s fault) is being a dickwaddish 19-year-old, which doesn’t differentiate him much from plenty of other 19-year-olds.