I’m no fan of comment sections. They’re all-too-often the worst of the worst of the worst of the Internet of Garbage. This is mostly because nobody wants to pay anyone to keep them from becoming a dumpster fire. Comments are easy social glue to keep people on your site, and for cash-strapped digital publishers, the ad views and metrics from a burning dumpster fire at the bottom of each page are still preferable to paying someone to spray a hose on it.
You’d think I’d be all for this development. One less section of toxic ooze at the end of otherwise great writing, one less place for people to be horrible to other people without consequence. I should be running naked through the streets in celebration. (You can thank me for that image later.) But, I’m not. I’m sitting at my desk, grumpily writing about why it’s bad.
See, there’s a huge problem to just ditching comments on a high-profile, highly-trafficked website, and that problem can be summarized in one, simple word: Twitter. Twitter is not a comment section. Twitter is worse than a comment section. Comment sections on websites generally have the advantage of being self-contained. Twitter is a public network, with a public harassment problem that its new leadership have decided to ignore in favor of shuffling chairs around. So, now if you want to make a statement about an article, you’re putting yourself at risk of becoming another victim of rampaging hordes with pitchforks, virtual and real. How is this an improvement?
Oh, right. It’s an improvement because it gives the publication an avenue for “feedback” while freeing them of two burdens. First is the burden of displaying advertising next to the poorly-spelled, vitriolic vomit of your typical comment section dweller, second of churning through underpaid community moderators—or outsourcing the task to overseas moderation companies. The publisher comes out smelling of roses, and with somewhat diminished overhead costs, while the sort of people who are going to be obnoxious assholes whenever they have a megaphone get free reign to be obnoxious assholes with the biggest megaphone in the world.
There are people who are trying to fix comments. You have ideas like the brilliant Jess Zimmerman’s proposal to “make comments cost money”. She’s “not proposing just charging to comment…” but also that “we should pay people when their comments reach a certain threshold of value.” It makes sense. If comments are as valuable to the online reading experience as some people would have you believe, why not provide some financial incentive for people to write good ones?
A more practical (read: “cheaper”) solution is something along the line of Digg’s new Digg Dialogue, or the croud-sourced model of Civil Comments, which is in beta. Their idea is:
Instead of blindly publishing whatever people submit, we first ask them to rate the quality and civility on 3 randomly-selected comments, as well as their own. It’s a bit more work for the commenter, but the end result is a community built on trust and respect, not harassment and abuse.
Elsewhere, MakerBase is being designed from the ground up to mitigate the possibility of abuse. It’s not a comment section, but if the same principles can be applied to one, along with some of the other ideas being floated around, a day might come where comment sections are actually worth reading. But first, publishers will have to care, and make investments in these ideas. As long as money is tight, and Twitter is ubiquitous, it’s not likely to happen. So, we all suffer for it.
This isn’t about stars versus hearts, or favorites versus likes. Changing a single icon without changing the basic functionality of a feature is basically shuffling deck chairs around on the SS Atlantus. The ship has already run aground. Twitter’s job is to free their ship and get it out to sea, before the action of the waves slowly turns it into a rotting hunk off the coast, fit for little more than a tourist attraction. That’s the problem Twitter under Jack Dorsey is facing down, and it is, so far, failing spectacularly.
Less than a day after the heart issue, Twitter’s only African-American engineer, who was downsized after Dorsey’s return, blasted the company’s abysmal diversity. Elsewhere, Brianna Wu revealed that since Dorsey’s return, Twitter’s response to harassment has fallen through the floor:
Hey, @jack. Since your return, Twitter's suspension of accounts harassing us has plummeted from 90% to about 15%.
Not that Twitter’s ever been great about dealing with harassment, but it’s shocking and saddening to see what little progress they’ve made disappear under the new, old leadership of Jack Dorsey. Perhaps their community management team was also a victim of the layoffs.
It’s a long running joke in Tech Twitter about every announcement to Twitter’s board of directors or major hire that nobody at Twitter actually uses Twitter. Every action since Jack’s return to the company has driven that narrative home. There’s a disconnect between what Twitter actually needs to improve its experience for new users, and what it thinks it needs to do, probably due to the influence of Wall Street analysts who demand to see big numbers.
For too many people, Twitter is synonymous with online harassment. Who would wade in and start tweeting away when the wrong post could lead to being on the wrong end of pitchforks? Twitter Moments, changing favorites to likes, giving stock to employees, incomprehensible TV ads, these are solving the wrong problems. Jack, stop moving the deck chairs, and start patching the leaks and push the ship out to sea.
A while back, my Twitter feed was blowing up about an episode of the podcast Top Four, wherein Marco and Tiffany Arment discuss their picks for the worst four Weezer singles. I didn’t listen, largely because I didn’t have an hour to devote to the discussion, and I already know Weezer’s worst four singles. Frankly, Weezer has two good albums: the self-titled blue album, and Pinkerton, and I will hear no defenses of their subsequent material. Well, the song “Keep Fishin’” gets a pass, mostly because of the music video. Muppets make almost anything better
Going back to Pinkerton, like all good Weezer fans, it’s an album I appreciate a lot. I, too, was once a shy, love-lorn dork who found a seemingly kindred spirit in Rivers’s emotional lyrics. Then, I came across an amazing piece in The Awl about Pinkerton that woke me up to the album’s serious issues. Between the casual racism of “Across the Sea” with its broken English lyrics and exotification of an underage Japanese woman, the rape-apology-not-apology of “Butterfly” and the queer erasure of “Pink Triangle,” there’s a lot of gross to unpack. As a queer person, I know my feelings on the latter song alone have changed a lot from before I understood my sexuality. But, despite these issues that I cannot un-hear. I still like Pinkerton. It’s a great record, and one of the albums that I have deigned to be in my iPhone’s “Permanent Rotation” playlist.
I bring up Pinkerton, because it’s a good example of an ongoing debate in, for lack of a better term, “geek” circles, about the media we love, and whether loving a piece of media requires us to look beyond the issues it has. The word “problematic” is thrown around a lot—and is a source of backlash in itself. From a distance, the argument looks a lot like people saying that beloved geek works are sacrosanct and above criticism, at least when those criticisms are focused on “social” issues like gender, sexuality, race, class, etc. On the other side, you have the people shouting that loving these problematic things is the same as endorsing their problematic aspects—though the existence of this side is largely mythical, it’s more a side effect of the volume of the other side.
What I find odd about this debate is that there is a long geek tradition of tearing down works based on certain flaws. For example, there’s a long-running YouTube series called “CinemaSins” that takes a film, often ones that have popularity among geeks, and tallies up all the various goofs, inconsistencies, plot holes, and other issues that happen in even the best movies. There’s a strain of geek who wants reviews to focus on what they term as “objective criticism.” Objective in this case refers to a focus on gameplay, production, special effects, and not “subjective” topics like the social concerns I mentioned above. What is it that makes one subject of critique more valid than another? You’ll get people complaining that engines wouldn’t make noise in space, but turn around to say that a gratuitous shot of a female character in her underwear that adds nothing to the story is no problem at all.
There’s an idea that criticism of a work is something that determines whether it is good or bad, or more accurately, whether the reader should spend money on it. We conflate the “review” which is, by nature, a subjective set of opinions on a work with the intent of making the case of its merits as something to spend money on with “criticism,” an academic discipline that attempts to identify aspects of a work and what it’s trying to say. In other words, a video game review is: “Action-packed, great controls, graphics aren’t great: 3.5 stars,” while a video game critique is: “The series continually denies agency to female characters…” One can use both to come to a purchasing decision, of course, and the lines between a review and a critique are often blurry outside of academia. It’s still important to make the distinction.
The distinction matters because too much of geek identity is tied up in the media we choose to consume. Some people are video game geeks, some music geeks, some comedy, or sci-fi, or anime, or a combination of a bunch of these. It becomes our identity: we tie ourselves to the things we love and they become part of us. When a criticism we see as off-base is levied at a piece of media we love, it’s easy to take it as an attack on us. The social critique reads to the media-affiliated geek as “This is bad, and you are a bad person for liking it,” but that is almost never the intent. Social criticism is just another way of thinking about the work. Many critics (in the academic sense) approach their subjects out of a sincere love of the thing they’re critiquing.
As long as we allow our identities to be defined by the media we love, we’re going to keep running up against legitimate critiques of that media and puncture our balloons. It’s important that we understand that we are allowed to like what we like, and to dislike what we dislike. It’s also important that we realize that, as we grow older and learn more about ourselves and others, our opinions may change. The rest of the world doesn’t have to agree with our specific media opinions, either. It doesn’t mean they’re wrong; it doesn’t mean you’re right, and vice-versa. And we really need to learn that nobody is going to take the media we love away from us. The days of Jack Thompson, the Comics Code Authority, and The Hayes Code are all behind us.
More importantly, we need to come to terms with what it means to love someone else’s creations. When we love a work of art—a video game, an album, a movie—we need to acknowledge its flaws, not to single them out, but because we know it can be better. The attitude of loving a thing “warts and all” doesn’t mean ignoring the warts. It means acknowledging them, and understanding someone else may not see it your way. And that is okay. The people who make social critiques, who talk about the problematic nature of a lot of the things we geeks love, they’re not doing it to hurt us. They’re doing it out of love. It comes from the same place as your love. The sooner we understand this, the better.
I’ve been struck by a thought lately when I look at my setup—it’s too much. I want to rip it up, sell my Mac, my iPhone, my iPad, my Watch. I’d use the proceeds to buy a used ThinkPad or some other inexpensive laptop, install Linux, get a cheap Android phone, and live with the barest of the bare minimum I need to still do what I need to do with technology in my life. I’d use free software, simple, lightweight tools that do one thing well, and get maximum efficiency out of inexpensive, commodity hardware.
Then, I realize that, though I’m sure Linux has improved a lot in the intervening decade since I switched to the Mac, and that Android has come a long way, the sheer time cost of starting over is not going to be worth it. Then I start to worry about the Sunk Cost fallacy, and whether I’m not rage-simplifying because I’ve sunk too much money into my Apple setup. And believe me, I’ve sunk a lot of money into hardware and software for the Apple ecosystem over the years.
Next, I realize that my idealized world of simple computing on simple hardware isn’t as simple as I think. I rely so much on synchronization services, not just for the usual suspects: contacts, calendars, email—but for passwords, notes, photos, tasks, even backups of my digital life. While there’s options for all of these that are cross-platform, I run into the problem of trust. I’m not a fan of Dropbox, at least since Condoleeza Rice joined their board. I worry what Google is doing with my data, so I’m trying to cut ties with both of them, where I can.
iCloud is the best option for the majority of what I need to keep with me in terms of trust and reliability. Of course, to keep using iCloud, I have to stay within the Apple ecosystem. Sure, I could use the iCloud web client, but that’s not a solution. I could roll my own synchronization setup, I suppose, but that is also not a solution. I don’t want or need the hassle of managing a server and storage, even with BitTorrent Sync. I’ve had conversations with Nick Wynja about his struggles with this, and honestly, I’d rather just satisfice on something that meets my standards for trust and reliability. iCloud it is, and so we come full circle.
It’s not that there’s anything wrong with my Mac, my iPhone, and my Watch—though my iPad 3 is long in the tooth and doesn’t get any of the cool iOS 9 features that would make iPad ownership more useful. I’m overwhelmed by what I’m using because I allowed it to get this way. Rather than rip everything up and start again, maybe I should just sit down and selectively whittle away at all the accumulated cruft I’m using, or rather, not using. This is the sort of thing Patrick Rhone was on about back in the days of Minimal Mac. It might behoove me to go back and give the book another read.
Being a woman in tech is fraught with all kinds of complications, and speaking up against inequalities in technology and harassment leaves victims open to more harassment. It is a fight I want to fight. But why should it be something women and marginalized groups have to fight on their own? Why do diverse and safe spaces have to come at such a high cost?
An important look inside the SXSW debacle from one of the people involved. Caroline makes a great point: how can you provide a platform marginalized groups fight inequality and refuse to defend them against the abuse it opens them up to?