Anonymous commenting means both that there are plenty of problematic ideas and ways of expressing ideas (problematic or not) to comment on AND that ill-thought-out criticism can easily get lost in better criticism. It also means that people share their ideas with relatively little fear of censure or abjuration.
A recent poll*, the following comments, and a particular comment bring up the best of the criticisms of the status quo.
- Flaming/flame-baiting/trolling needs to be radically excised.
- There’s no contradiction between anarchist principles and the censor-ship/repression of actions designed to impede them.
- [better site] works like this…
- Some would call (this site) incoherence and confusion. (later comment)
On the one hand I can entirely agree with the author of this post. I find it very frustrating that the broader project of the site is continuously forgotten, ignored, or belittled because of the comments made to the stories. I also entirely agree with the commenter that there isn’t a contradiction between principles and removal of hostile comments. I believe that attentive readers would notice that the increase of moderators plus a stronger hand towards moderating comments has resulted in a noticeable uptick in the quality of the discussions in the last month. But at the end of the day the project of this site is to provide a non-sectarian news and discussion service. This means that the comment section, the registered and non-registered users, and the content of the site will, by definition, be incoherent.
This is one of the reasons that “outlier” (or anarchist-only-by-self-identification) anarchist stories have been posted in the past and will be posted in the future. This is not a news site expressing the position of an editorial collective or a particular anarchist position but a feed of what is happening in the anarchist space, primarily in North America. It is intended to inform an intelligent, critical, engaged anarchist audience. It is also intended to entertain them. The assumption continues to be that this audience respects that other people have positions that they may disagree with but are entirely acceptable anarchist positions.
Other anarchist, or anarchist friendly, sites take a very different approach to these problems. I think one of the reasons that Anarchist News garners so much hostility in certain circles is because of the natural tendency of people to want their political preferences to be represented and to feel hostility towards the dissonant nature of a story about the CNT next to a story about the Tea Party and another announcing a communist journal. Couple this variety with the attitude of many of the site’s commenters towards everything (be that hostility or bland positivity) posted, and the effect can be jarring. Even I continue to be surprised at interesting stories that receive little to no attention from commenters while silly stories receive hundreds of comments. But I enjoy this feeling and appreciate Anarchist News even when I don’t relate to the commenters, in a way that I don’t with other sites. That said I regularly visit many other anarchist sites.
There is a general attitude among the moderators of Anarchist News that prisoner stories will (continue to) be heavily moderated; hostile and anti-anarchist comments will generally be removed unless they are respectful; most triggering terms will be replaced, by default, with more awesome ones or removed; burning pseudonyms or calling people out by their (non public) legal name will be re-moved. This is a far longer list than we started out with six years ago but as this community has matured it is increasingly evident that it is a necessary change. Anarchists are targets. We have enemies in the form of Statists and their friends, Capitalists and their friends, Anarchists who believe that theirs is the single correct way to approach problem-solving or that all of our aims are the same. We have a very simple shared desire, to live in a world without the State and Capital. All of the rest is yet to be determined and will be the kind of confusion and incoherence that I can’t wait to experience.
* poll at http://anarchistnews.org/?q=node/11977
