Of Duffy and Trolls
I’m not the first to notice that the D&C Storychats (forums, whatever) are completely intolerable. I spent months in there, posting daily, trying to remain civil…. to no avail. They are filled with the nastiest bunch of misanthropes I have ever encountered. They constantly bash our city, and our region. It’s a relentless drumbeat of negativity. I quit posting and reading when I began to feel myself becoming negative - when I began to stereotype conservatives not as people with different political opinions and beliefs, but as fundamentally bad, nasty, mean people. It wasn’t healthy.
It sounds like Mayor Duffy has some feelings about it too. Jim Lawrence, writing in the Editor’s Blog:
One thing that struck a nerve with me was his (Duffy’s) disappointment with the lack of civil discourse too often found in some of the comments on our website. I , too, am equally disappointed. Too often the same people use the online forum to rant and demean. Sometimes they write comments that are outright racist and sexist. It’s ugly.
Jim goes on to say:
But where are those smart, thoughtful people? We need them to register and get involved in the online conversations. Don’t let the bullies scare you off. Ignore the incivility. Post your comments and other community-minded people will respond.
In other words, you’ve got to get in it to win it.
I don’t have an answer to this. What are your thoughts on the matter? Overwhelm them with comments of goodness and light? Petition the D&C to shut it down? Ignore it?
There’s a couple problems with Lawrence’s comments:
(1) I think he means the storychats, not the comments in the blog. He needs to be more specific.
(2) The only way to clean up the comments is to moderate them. There’s no free lunch.
They do moderate the comments. Crazy, right?
During the initial brouhaha over the Greece Town Board and the Jesus praisin’, I registered as “God” and good-naturedly heckled the christofascists. Really, it was humorous, not intentionally offensive. They cancelled my account in about a half an hour.
I registered as “D&C Moderator” once, also. That understandably didn’t last long.
Anyways, my point is that it’s not a total free-for-all there are some behaviours that will result in account termination.
Yet, they allow stuff like this, from IAMGERMANAMERICAN, to stand.
(admins - anyone got an idea for a place to stash a loooong racist quote?)
OK, here’s an example that took me all of eight seconds to find, from the story “Man beaten to death today” March 26, 2008
“Wow, there have only been 5 homicides so far this year. Jeez the homies better pick up the pace or they will never break the record this year. Keep giving out welfare money to these losers and there will never be any reason to get a job and become responsible. The great Senator Chucky Boy was in town and I’m sure he’ll have an answer for the employment issues and get all the gang bangers jobs, and maybe then there will be peace in the HELLHOLE known as Rochester The Killing Capaital !!! NOT !!!”
Typical.
I wholeheartedly second Exile’s moderation comment.
The D&C can’t just throw the functionality out there and expect it to work well. I think they need to moderate it for now and try to get some community manager types in there eventually. Eventhough the new layout is not very good - IMO - I do like the attempt to get more people to participate by bumping the comment link up to the a more visible slot.
The Recommended feature is pretty useless as far as I can tell, but if it gives readers a sense of community and participation, I’m all for it.
You need to consider the function of the term works well.
True.
It’s simple for them. Because the story chats and some blogs are out of control, yet representative of free speech in a “forum” provided, they just need to allow people in the story chat areas to be registered, paying online subscription holders to the paper.
I think if people had to put their money where their mouths were, they would shut up more often than not. The paper needs subscriptions and revenues, so they should be charging for online subscriptions, just like the WSJ and RBJ and NYT does.
When registering, your identity is confirmed and a matter of record. When one gets out of line, the paper can contact them directly if necessary.
AOL has chat rooms designed as the “public restrooms” of the online world. If it were my BUSINESS, and my BUSINESS were being degredated by people with nothing better to do with their time, and having no vested interest in the reputation or page views of the site, they’d be gone.
Pay to play. It’s the only way it will work. And if people believe, they will come.
he paper needs subscriptions and revenues, so they should be charging for online subscriptions, just like the WSJ and RBJ and NYT does.
The Times stopped that about 6 months ago.
The days of newspapers is dwindling. The days of even media outlets is diminished by the immediate transmittal of data on the internet.
But you still need “local” news sources. The D&C should consider it.
The D&C simply is not a good news source. Increasingly, I find myself reading the Channel 13 or MPN website instead of the D&C.
RNews and Ch13 are my picks.
My parents have gone back to the evening news: they canceled their D&C subscription and are boycotting the online version. That’s how offended they are by the rank incivility in the forums.
RNews is good too, I agree.
AOL has chat rooms designed as the “public restrooms†of the online world.
That ought to bring out the right-wingers in droves. But how can they see which ones are tapping their toes?
Oh now, see, you’re good - you’re really good!
That’s funny.
to my mind all of you ask the wrong questions. Ask why people feel so upset, so disenfranchised so powerless that the only way they can respond is through anger. What real vehicles exist for widespread involvement of the ordinary citizen to participate in the decisions that shape their lives?
Rochester (and the suburbs) is an area run with an elitist and corporate mentality (it still has many elements of smugtown) If you are a worker here you don’t and you never have counted. The only question is why isn’t there more hostility.
I think it is mostly that anonymity allows people to be brazen. They’re sitting at their desks getting their kicks by succumbing to that inner voice they can’t use at the office.
What real vehicles exist for widespread involvement of the ordinary citizen? Town meetings, village elections, joining a local campaign, letters to the editor, calling your Congressman, rational arguments online, to name a few.
I don’t want to give any excuses for the thugs that berrate people who differ from them on those D&C Forums.
I think that everything you say is true of the country in general. And indeed the big question is why there isn’t more hostility.
The Internet has lots of places where smart people can go to engage in conversation with other smart people. The D&C forums aren’t structured to attract that kind of conversation. Lack of moderation is one reason — smart people don’t want to get called names by idiots.
Another reason is the complete lack of interaction between forums and the rest of the D&C content. Intelligent people want to have their contributions to the conversation acknowledged. Reporters don’t say that a commenter caused them to look into something further, nor do they correct stories based on comments. Commenting at the D&C is as effective as shouting down a well. No wonder the forums attract mostly bitchers and moaners, because they’re used to bitching and moaning to no avail.
I think it’s even worse than that. There’s a general air of stupidity that pervades the entire D&C website. They seem to have deliberately chosen their community bloggers — as well as their new community board members — to be the dumbest, least informed readers they could find.
Conrad wrote that newspapers were “written by fools to be read by imbeciles.” Gannett has cut out the middle man by letting imbeciles write the thing too.
I think it’s worse even than THAT.
Gannett as a whole (it’s not just the D&C, not by a long shot) has decided to stake its future on the notion that print is essentially dead, and that a “totally interactive” web presence is the way of the future.
It’s gotten to the point where the daily print paper is nearly an afterthought over there. Did anyone notice that they chopped out the Monday op-ed page starting about a month ago? Did anyone catch Jim Lawrence’s explanation? It amounted to “we’re understaffed and we need more time to go out and get pointless man-on-the-street video.”
The unspoken coda was “…instead of doing what the proprietors of a decent editorial page should be doing.” (And no, Jim Lawrence, that doesn’t include a fourth year of your windmill-tilt at the nasty evil rap-music industry.)
To the extent I’ve waded into the filth pits of Story Chat, it seems to me that it follows the tone set by the choice of letters the D&C has run in print for the last few years. There’s only so long you can allow the negative feedback loop of anti-ferry, anti-city schools, anti-everything letters to see print, after all, without having that attitude carry into the online community.
The D&C editorial page can still be a very powerful weapon in the right hands. Shame it’s being wielded so poorly. And thanks, Mayor Duffy, for calling them out on it.
Exile, I think the reason they end up with morons for bloggers is because the restrictions that they enforce for bloggers mean that, generally, only morons would want the job. The bloggers are supposed to be like sports color commentators, only talking about peripheral issues in the community.
ipsos, yes to all, and the understaffing is no excuse. Their staff has been cut, but they still have a huge staff by any reasonable standard. This is especially true for opinion, which has a big group of full-time employees.
Hey - I used to be one of the community bloggers - Gates. I always tried to keep up with the news, wrote about issues, and am by most accounts reasonably intelligent (principals have that reputation).
There are intelligent, informed community bloggers still.
Be careful about making blanket statements. They can make you look ill-informed and not very intelligent!
Sorry about that — you’re one of the exceptions to the rule. I mean to throw a “usually” in there — they “usually” end up with morons for bloggers. It’s like 90/10 or 80/20.
The two school teachers who blog do a good job. There are a couple of others. But some of the community bloggers are awful. It could be 10X better than it is.
Rottenchester wrote -”Exile, I think the reason they end up with morons for bloggers is because the restrictions that they enforce for bloggers mean that, generally, only morons would want the job. The bloggers are supposed to be like sports color commentators, only talking about peripheral issues in the community.”
Having been one of the bloggers, I can tell you that’s not true. I never had any of my content edited, I did not have restrictions placed other than that I needed to make sure my primary focus was on the community I was blogging about, I could not promote a business, and I had to be careful about offensive comments. But I was free to comment on other issues as well as long as I covered the community. In just under two years of writing - and more than 500 posts - I never had a problem from “Mother” (as I used to call the D & C) restricting me in any way.
It is demeaning for you to stereotype a group of people as “morons.” Stereotyping is one form of bigotry.
You’re one of the good ones, Lee. Petrena, too, though she’s a stealth winger. The exceptions that makes the rule?
I’d expect a town blogger to - at minimum - attend Town Board meetings and School Board meetings, keep on top of what’s going on, and try to present issues from a different slant than simply neutral reportage.
All of which you did. Little, if any, of which the other D&C bloggers do. I mean posts asking people to refrain from wide left turns? Agony.
I would disagree with part of that itchy. I think the D&C should have actual reporters attending these board meetings.
That said, we know that isn’t going to happen, so the town bloggers should definitely be covering those events.
I agree that there should be an actual reporter attending - but it’s not either/or.
A blogger is freed of some of the neutrality of a reporter and can fill in the blanks, include opinion, and report from a different angle. So they should be there, too.
Lee, other than you, I think most of the bloggers there are poor. I like your blog, which performs the way a community blog should. Why can’t they find other bloggers who view the position in the way that you do, as a venue for responsible reporting?
That’s my gripe. The few good community bloggers they have just cast the others into starker relief.
I’m sorry, as I said above, because I should have qualified my comment. Most of the blogs are full of trite, low-quality, uninteresting content, not all of them.
On editing/oversight: I spoke with another ex-blogger who was reprimanded for writing about things that were the “turf” of the reporter on his town’s beat. So I think you may have had a slightly different experience from other bloggers.
Thanks for the compliments.
Of course, I no longer do the Gates blog.
One of the problems was that it did not pay for my time or expenses. Not even a comp subscription to the paper.
I do agree that the paid reporters should be at the Town Board meetings and other meetings. The MPN reporters often at - I regulalry used to see Chris Fien at meetings (before she went back to City).
The reporters are often assigned to several towns - a lot of ground to cover. But they could have rotated meetings or looked ahead to see which meeting had a major issue to cover.
Oh well, back to more productive writing.
Lee:
The Gates blog just isn’t the same without you.