Meta McMeta

[prog]

Great scott, that was the most horrible thing I've seen in davis_square in a long time. It's like coming home to discover a steaming turd in the middle of your kitchen floor. (And you don't have any pets.)

This is a compliment to the mods that the turds stand out so much, rather than being part of the background noise like-certain-communities-I-could-name, but I still feel like it shouldn't have gotten as far as it did. Wrote a mod about it.

(Started to mention TNH-style moderation tactics in my email, for I am a fan of them, but then had second thoughts. I'm not convinced that they apply in the case of every active internet community. It's an interesting question.)

Comments

[prog.livejournal.com]

I am a relatively recent reader of ML, migrating from completely free fora like Usenet, Slashdot, and Daily Kos, so the idea of dedicated and direct moderation is still pretty novel to me. In fact the first time I even heard of the idea of actively squelching trolls was from TNH's own mouth at a panel at Boskone 2006, and it sounded quite new and outrageous to me at the time.

Disemvowleling: before going to bed last night I skimmed through the comments on the BB post I linked to. Apparently a lot of BB readers didn't know the source of dsmvwlng until someone linked them to that post. They correctly guessed it was an in-community phenomenon, but incorrectly guessed that it's a traditional way for BB commenters to signal that something they're about to write is highly opinionated.