LC & IB FIAR, whose post you shouldn’t miss either, points us in the general direction of a bunch of goody two shoes who have decided to blindly stumble where too many well-intentioned idiots have gone a million times before: To boldly go and try to nannify the Internet.

Is it too late to bring civility to the Web?

By all means, Ms Post, be as civil as you like. That was easy, wasn’t it?

The conversational free-for-all on the Internet known as the blogosphere can be a prickly and unpleasant place. Now, a few high-profile figures in high-tech are proposing a blogger code of conduct to clean up the quality of online discourse.

Oh great. Guess what, you simpering snotwits? That’s been tried before, way back before blogs became a phenomenon and people had to resort to a thing called “newsgroups” for their online debating entertainment. For years (and quite possibly still), self-appointed net-nannies would patrol the USENet hunting for meanies to scold and chastise to no effect at all. Other than the hilarity involved in watching them get more and more exasperated as everybody with an ounce of individualism told them to go pound sand or, at the very least, flush it out of their va-jay-jays.

Last week, Tim O’Reilly, a conference promoter and book publisher who is credited with coining the term Web 2.0, began working with Jimmy Wales, creator of the communal online encyclopedia Wikipedia, to create a set of guidelines to shape online discussion and debate.

Please get it done as quickly as possible. We’ll make a point of violating every single one of your guidelines systematically and repeatedly, just to let you know how much we don’t care for yourselves imposing your personal values on something that isn’t yours, never will be yours, and quite frankly doesn’t give two shits if you live or die.

Chief among the recommendations is that bloggers consider banning anonymous comments left by visitors to their pages and be able to delete threatening or libelous comments without facing cries of censorship.

Are you saying that we can’t ban idiot commenters as we bloody well please now? That’s news to us. Please explain this to us in the comments so that we may promptly demonstrate our banning powers to you. Or are you suggesting that we’re all cringing in the corner, deadly afraid to ban an utter loon because he might call it “censorship?” But you’ll change all of that, right? Not only will your new guidelines grant us the mythical power to ban, they will also ensure that the trolls we ban will be unable to whine about “censorship” for all time? Amazing.

Oh, and what exactly IS your definition of an “anonymous commenter” anyway and, more importantly, how do you propose verifying that the identity somebody posts under actually belongs to him?

A recent outbreak of antagonism among several prominent bloggers “gives us an opportunity to change the level of expectations that people have about what’s acceptable online,” said Mr. O’Reilly, who posted the preliminary recommendations last week on his company blog (radar.oreilly.com). Mr. Wales then put the proposed guidelines on his company’s site (blogging.wikia.com), and is now soliciting comments in the hope of creating consensus around what constitutes civil behavior online.

We don’t need nor want your retarded “consensus-based guidelines”, we already have guidelines that work very well for us, thankyouverymuchly, but if all of you Net-Nanny control freaks get off fantasizing about all the rules you’re going to pretend to impose on everybody, by all means whack your pudenda to bits in orgasmic frenzy.

Mr. O’Reilly and Mr. Wales talk about creating several sets of guidelines for conduct and seals of approval represented by logos. For example, anonymous writing might be acceptable in one set; in another, it would be discouraged. Under a third set of guidelines, bloggers would pledge to get a second source for any gossip or breaking news they write about.

And then we can all plaster our blogs with a consensus-approved logo designed by a bunch of anally retentive nerds, thus signaling to the world that we never have been, nor have any intentions of ever getting laid. Thanks, but no thanks.

Bloggers could then pick a set of principles and post the corresponding badge on their page, to indicate to readers what kind of behavior and dialogue they will engage in and tolerate. The whole system would be voluntary, relying on the community to police itself.

Pardon us, but we were under the impression that we already were policing ourselves. The problem seems to be that the policing doesn’t meet with your superior approval. Ain’t that a bitch?

“If it’s a carefully constructed set of principles, it could carry a lot of weight even if not everyone agrees,” Mr. Wales said.

Among other anally retentive control freaks, yes. And then you can all sit around and admire each other’s badges and logos and decoder rings while the rest of us laugh our arses off. We’re beginning to like this idea, but that’s only because we love freak shows. It’s great material for endless mockery.

The code of conduct already has some early supporters, including David Weinberger, a well-known blogger (hyperorg.com/blogger) and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. “The aim of the code is not to homogenize the Web, but to make clearer the informal rules that are already in place anyway,” he said.

David who? Sorry, but who are you again, Mr. “Well-Known Blogger?” Somehow, we’re getting the impression that “making informal rules that are already in place anyway clearer” has less to do with actually achieving something than it has with you trying to finally merit the “well-known blogger” moniker for which you lust so badly.

But as with every other electrically charged topic on the Web, finding common ground will be a serious challenge. Some online writers wonder how anyone could persuade even a fraction of the millions of bloggers to embrace one set of standards. Others say that the code smacks of restrictions on free speech.

Limiting free speech is a restriction on same? Somebody give that man a Kewpie Doll.

Mr. Wales and Mr. O’Reilly were inspired to act after a firestorm erupted late last month in the insular community of dedicated technology bloggers. In an online shouting match that was widely reported, Kathy Sierra, a high-tech book author from Boulder County, Colo., and a friend of Mr. O’Reilly, reported getting death threats that stemmed in part from a dispute over whether it was acceptable to delete the impolitic comments left by visitors to someone’s personal Web site.

And your badges, logos and guidelines are going to stop morons from throwing death threats around? Wow. We can’t wait to see that happening.

As many female bloggers can attest, women are often targets. Heather Armstrong, a blogger in Salt Lake City who writes publicly about her family (dooce.com), stopped accepting unmoderated comments on her blog two years ago after she found that conversations among visitors consistently devolved into vitriol.

Good for her. But how on Earth did she manage to do that without the help of Web 2.0 and their Magic Multi-Colored Logos of Civility (+5 against death threats)?

Since last October, she has also had to deal with an anonymous blogger who maintains a separate site that parodies her writing and has included photos of Ms. Armstrong’s daughter, copied from her site.

Ms. Armstrong tries not to give the site public attention, but concedes that, “At first, it was really difficult to deal with.”

Have you heard about this modern invention called “law enforcement?” If your anonymous stalker is truly threatening, we not only suggest, we would highly encourage you to get them involved because, quite frankly, no amount of badges and logos on your website is going to scare off a determined psycho. A couple of loads of buckshot, on the other hand…

The preliminary recommendations posted by Mr. Wales and Mr. O’Reilly are based in part on a code developed by BlogHer, a network for women designed to give them blogging tools and to guide readers to their pages.

“Any community that does not make it clear what they are doing, why they are doing it, and who is welcome to join the conversation is at risk of finding it difficult to help guide the conversation later,” said Lisa Stone, who created the guidelines and the BlogHer network in 2006 with Elisa Camahort and Jory Des Jardins.

A subtext of both sets of rules is that bloggers are responsible for everything that appears on their own pages, including comments left by visitors.

Sorry, pals, but the courts say otherwise. Don’t get us wrong, if we’re alerted to a particularly nasty and vile comment, we don’t have a problem getting rid of it, not at all, but we’ll be damned if we’ll be responsible for every byte of blather posted in our comments by a drive-by troll and, again, the courts have agreed with that stance on more than one occasion. Unless you’re volunteering for the job of meticulously going through ever word ever posted to our comments, that is. For free.

They say that bloggers should also have the right to delete such comments if they find them profane or abusive.

You’re saying that we don’t have the “right” to delete any damn thing that we please on our own farkin’ sites ALREADY? Damn, that’s news to us.

That may sound obvious, but many Internet veterans believe that blogs are part of a larger public sphere, and that deleting a visitor’s comment amounts to an assault on their right to free speech.

And those “many Internet veterans” are herewith cordially invited to go pound sand, piss up a rope, cry us a river and talk to the hand, because we don’t give a somersaulting shit what they “believe”, particularly not when they’re exercising their free speech “rights” on OUR property.

It is too early to gauge support for the proposal, but some online commentators are resisting.

Go whine on your own blogs then, fuckheads.

Mr. O’Reilly said the guidelines were not about censorship. “That is one of the mistakes a lot of people make — believing that uncensored speech is the most free, when in fact, managed civil dialogue is actually the freer speech,” he said. “Free speech is enhanced by civility.”

“Managed dialogue is the freer speech?”

Oh yes. And war is peace, ignorance is wisdom and weakness is strength. And we’ve always been at war with Oceania.

Now go have fun with your circle-jerk and let us know when you’re done, because we have a feeling that the opportunities for mockery will be positively endless.

AnalWarT.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 10th, 2007 at 10:10 PM and is filed under Idiotarians. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.