Cleveland AFL-CIO President's Blog Provides Stage for Union Bashing
I've written a few times here that labor unions need to begin engaging the public in a two-way dialog on the Internet. But opening up a blog or forum to the general public, especially anonymous posters, is not without its risks and pitfalls. Doing so is likely to open the doors to people who have no other purpose in life but to bash unions. It appears John Ryan, President of the Cleveland AFL-CIO, is learning that right now on his blog which accepts comments. Here's a few good examples of some of the anti-union, anti-worker sentiments expressed on the site.
I've run into this problem myself at a small site I build for a local union http://www.somethingaboutmaryjohnson.com. For the first couple of days, I allowed anyone to post anonymously. Within a few hours of advertising the site on a local community discussion forum, a user showed up to spew forth off-topic and irrelevant statements about how evil and greedy labor unions are. Now I fully expected some cranks, but I was wholly unprepared for the tenaciousness and ferocity of this particular user. I spent several hours responding to his vitriol no matter how nonsensical or ridiculous.
It was clear from the beginning the guy wasn't interested in engaging in real dialog. But I persisted until finally, I decided it simply didn't make any sense to spend hours trying to respond to a guy who wasn't looking for anything other than a negative reaction out of me.
In the end, we stopped immediately posting comments to the site in favor of a system that required them to be screened before getting posted. Comments also are screened before posting. And a comment policy was posted to the site.
So that's my recommendation for action to John Ryan. What's yours?
- Steve Dondley's blog
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What about Peer Rating?
I read the anti-union guy's stuff which seemed to consist of stringing right-wing slogans together sprinkled with boring insults. Absolutely there needs to be some order so that the discussion cannot be hijacked either pro or con.
Your comment policy was pretty good, and it has the virtue of simplicity. I have to say another thing that bothers me about the Internet is the practice of hiding identity. At least the host should know who people really are. Otherwise it encourages irresponsibility. Screening posts takes time though, particularly on popular sites. I've read a lot about peer moderation where the system can be designed to moderate the discussion. Here is, (my apologies) a rather long quote from the book "Emergence" by Steven Johnson on peer moderation and the problem of engineering diversity:
"You could just as easily build a system that would promote both quality and diversity, simply by tweaking the algorithm that selects moderators. Change a single variable in the mix, and a dramatically different system emerges. Instead of picking moderators based on the average rating of their posts, the new system picks moderators whose contributions have triggered the greatest range of responses. In this system, a member who was consistently rated highly by the community would be unlikely to be chosen as a moderator, while a member who inspired strong responses either way-both positive and negative-would be first in line to moderate. They system would reward controversial voices rather than popular ones. You’d still have moderators deleting useless spam and flamebait, and so the quality filters would remain in place. But the fringe voices in the community would have a stronger presence at level 5, because the feedback system would be rewarding perspectives that deviate from the mainstream, that don’t aim to please everyone all the time. The cranks would still be marginalized, assuming their polemics annoyed almost everyone who came across them. But the thoughtful minorities-the ones who attract both admirers and detractors would have a place at the table".
What I like about this idea is that it spreads the heavy lifting of maintaining a site among the community. Since I've never used such as system and I don't know what is involved in actually setting one up, I have no idea whether this is a practical solution or not.
Peer review needs peers
The peer review process works. Slashdot is a good example of that. However, it works best when there's a large community.
The second problem is that most blogs aren't sophisticated enough to handle comment moderation.
There's one guy who has done a lot of thinking about how to moderate ideas on a discussion board. His name is Britt Blaser. He apparently has some software in development he calls "orgware" specifically designed to tackle this problem. If you're interested see http://www.blaserco.com/blogs/2006/01/28.html
kiss
I am a big fan of simplicity. peer review is a pain, like steve says, it needs a base of people to even get going. This is why I am a big fan of wiki, revert crap, move it or deal with it somehow.
But in a world of thread mode weblogs, I sound insane. :-)