On anonymous comments

[ciphergoth]

(Unrelated note: LJ is under a denial-of-service attack last I heard. Things may be slower than usual. I hope more net vandals start turning up mysteriously dead in unpleasant ways.)

Inspired by events in faerierhona's journal.

Question: when people get abusive comments in their journal, how come they don't just delete them?

So far I haven't had abusive comments here, but I've seen it happen in other journals. I can see some reasons why those people don't want to delete those comments - I'm guessing that part of it is a "standing up to it" thing - but that I can stand up to it isn't in doubt, it's whether it will benefit me or anyone I care about to do so instead of silently deleting it.

If I think someone's just trolling my journal or trying to get a rise - anonymously or otherwise - I'll not bother to reply, I'll just delete the comments. I'm only interested in justifying myself to strangers in so far as either I genuinely hope either to bring or gain enlightenment or it will entertain me to do so.

As a matter of general policy, I leave anonymous posting on in my journal, and I have IP logging off. But this is so that people who don't yet have LJs can comment, and so my friends can tell me interesting things under cover of anonymity if they need to - I've seen and made interesting use of this possibility so I'm open to it.

Comments

[wednesday]

(complete stranger; sorry.)

I always saw leaving things as they were (with the exception of cleaning up duplicate posts, or retracting your own material) as the necessary tradeoff for an open posting environment, particularly if accountability is either minimized or eliminated. I would expect people to respect a publicised editorial policy if there were some way of making that clear alongside the accountability advisories you get in the comments field. (Something like: "Note: weds reserves the right to delete your post if you are being a wanker.") Presumably you could stick something like that in your profile, but there's no guarantee that anyone would read it. The best we've got is screening, which seems bass-ackwards to me.

If you restrict to users, at least there's the recourse of calling the wanker on possible account abuse and getting him smacked about the face by staff, and/or keeping the luser out of your space through more draconian methods.

This is part of why I kept everything after a certain point locked down: this is the best way I have of making it clear that I won't brook stupid shit. :/