"That's an incredibly annoying song. Why are you playing that?"

I ask, and Meade says: "This is 'A Song To Play Every Time You See A Sexist, Racist, Or Homophobic Comment Online.'"

Me: "I would rather be called a 'fucking cunt' than have to listen to that song."

If you want to hear the chirpy irritatingness that I heard, you'll have to go — warning: it's Upworthy — here.

"Removing comments... affects the reading experience itself: it may take away the motivation to engage with a topic more deeply..."

"... and to share it with a wider group of readers. In a phenomenon known as shared reality, our experience of something is affected by whether or not we will share it socially. Take away comments entirely, and you take away some of that shared reality, which is why we often want to share or comment in the first place. We want to believe that others will read and react to our ideas."

From "The Psychology of Online Comments," by Maria Konnikova.

"The comments by 'titus' on this post are offensive but important."

Says a commenter on a Facebook post that links to that post of mine about the gendered complexities of makeup.

I'm just guessing that longtime readers of the comments section on my blog would be amused to see someone noticing Titus for the first time and pronouncing him offensive but important.

I was going to invite readers to attempt to say something offensive but important, but immediately realized that was not a good idea. You need offensive + important + ??? + !!! to = Titus. And until you figure out the ??? and the !!!, the offensive + important formula is incomplete.

"One of the reasons the Daily Beast is struggling to attract readers has to be Troll City: the comments which mar the view of the last couple of paragraphs of every article."

"Your writing is pretty good, Beast, but the quality and intelligence of your comments is at the bottom. The nastiness spewing from these red-captioned paragraphs negatively colors your whole enterprise."

Says a comment to a Daily Beast article titled "Hillary for President...of the Universe," subtitled "Sure, Hillary Clinton could run for the White House. But where the world desperately needs a personality like hers is at the helm of a strong global governing body, says Sally Kohn."

"Comments can be bad for science. That's why, here at PopularScience.com, we're shutting them off."

"As the news arm of a 141-year-old science and technology magazine, we are as committed to fostering lively, intellectual debate as we are to spreading the word of science far and wide."

Even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader's perception of a story. A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to "debate" on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.

Kinja, Gawker's answer to the problem of ugly, out-of-control comments sections.

"Kinja flips on its head the idea of comments and conversation below a story on Gawker Media’s Web sites...."

When people sign up for Kinja, they are given their own Web address on the Gawker platform — similar to a Tumblr Web site — which becomes a collection of that person’s comments on stories. Kinja will also enable readers to write headlines and summaries — comments that have graduated from college, if you will — for stories on Gawker and even from other sites. Readers will then be able to use Kinja as a central hub for discussion on these stories, almost like their own chat room protected from the commenting maelstrom.

Great. I hope the design works. Seems similar to what Metafilter has been for many years. It's good to allow people to take possession of their collected comments that are otherwise scattered about. You can take some pride in your body of comments, at least within Gawker blogs (as, on Metafilter, you have a page that collects your comments on all the various Metafilter posts you've commented on). It makes being a commenter more like being a blogger, and it lets a popular commenter drive traffic to blog posts. But it's all very intra-Gawker, just like Metafilter is intra-Metafilter. I'd like to see an overarching comments system like this. And I'd love to see Blogger provide something like this for Blogger blogs like mine.

Along with the updates to the comments service on Monday, Mr. Denton is set to unveil “a manifesto” of sorts that will outline Gawker’s plan to further blur the line between reporters and readers and explain readers’ rights. Among them, there is “the right to experience legible conversations” on the site.

I've had a big struggle, peaking over the summer, with the problem of "illegible conversation," as problem commenters maliciously disrupt what might otherwise be a readable comments section. Now, I don't know that the Kinja solution will work. It might empower some of the most disruptive commenters, as they go off topic to entertain and win admirers for some agenda or style of comedy or edgy satire who'll relocate to their Kinja page. But Denton just wants you within the Gawker media empire, and not off on Twitter or Facebook, because he wants the page views in his operation, where he gets the ad revenue. The situation for a blogger is different.

I blog to publish my own writing, and I include comments as a way for me to interact with readers and to amplify and get different angles on things I want to talk about. I'm not about devoting my work to maintaining a social media website for people who don't care about what I'm writing. That's the enterprise of people like Denton who are designing a mechanism for making a lot of money. As an individual expressing myself — with the long-time motto "To live freely in writing" — I am more like the commenters upon whom Gawker is leveraging its Kinja scheme.

Perseverating about shoes before 7 a.m.

Woken by a phone call from the demonic "Blocked," I make coffee at 6 a.m. and sit down to approve the comments that collected in my "awaiting moderation" folder overnight. Somehow that sets me off to writing 5 comments in the thread about shoes. The coffee kicked in spiked by the false sunrise and the poetry it inspired and I got myself retracked onto the front page, where, looking back now, I feel like the blog has a theme today. It's something like: We're always only seeing things from our own point of view. (Dylan lyric: "We always did feel the same/We just saw it from a different point of view.")

So what did I say — about shoes?? — before sanity kicked in at 7? Highlights from the comments:

... there are things you feel you need to do in NYC that you look almost foolish doing around here. I see some young women around campus mincing about on heels when no one else is. There isn't one man around who is dressed to go with that. It's as if she's on her way to a party that exists only in her mind....

Take a good look at yourself in the mirror when you've got your shorts on. Ask yourself if I were a woman, would I fuck me? (The question, put that way, assumes you are not a gay man. If you are a gay man, you don't need advice from me on how you look to other men.)....

I'm vulnerable to the criticism that I've promoted women's shoes that are like little girl shoes and that's inconsistent with saying shorts infantilize men. I'm treading -- in Mary Janes -- on dangerous ground!

Those shoe comments reveal that...
	Althouse should be permitted to wake up naturally.
	The comments section is a good place to hide the crazy.
	Early morning Althouse belongs on the front page and should happen more often.
	Althouse needs to resist defending her posts from whatever the hell gets dropped in the comments.
	There really are some serious issues about sex and shoes that demand exploration.
pollcode.com free polls

A Madison, WI proposal to authorize community street painting projects to "bring people together."

We're not talking about water soluble paint, but permanent paint jobs, the equivalent of murals, but on the horizontal surface that cars drive on. The alderwoman who proposes the new ordinance — Marsha Rummel — got the idea from Portland, Oregon, "where community members paint an intersection to give it a sense of place and create a public square."

There would be a permit process, including a petition "indicating approval from at least 60 percent residents, businesses and non-residential properties within a 200-foot radius of the proposed location"  and "assurances for the city that hold the design's applicant responsible for maintenance of the painting and requires them to have insurance." (I'm quoting the Cap Times article, not the ordinance, so I don't know whom to blame for the irritating ambiguity.)

"You can't just say you want to come in and do this. It needs to be maintained over time. Paint fades. It needs to be repainted from time to time, just as we go and repaint traffic lines," said Arthur Ross, the city's pedestrian-bicycle coordinator.

Which is why it's obviously a terrible idea.

"What it really is is a community building activity. It gets people out of their houses and working on something together," Ross said.

And what about when it breaks them apart because it's ugly, it makes the neighborhood look trashy, and it's not properly maintained.  I loathe these government dreams of bringing people together. Leave us alone! I know it's Madison, but people have their own private ways of getting together.

Here's Wisconsin State Journal columnist Chris Rickert mocking the proposal by stressing the provision that forbids "text, numerals, symbols, overt messages or any images designed to convey a message of any kind." Obviously, this provision is needed to avoid making street painting a public forum incurring First Amendment protection from viewpoint discrimination. Rickert jokes that in his neighborhood pretty much everyone hates Governor Scott Walker: "In my ’hood, liberal politics are a building block of community, a distaste for Walker one of the glues that hold residents together," so the things his neighbors would get enthused about painting on the street will be rejected. What if Madison risked permitting messages and accepted the legal proscription on viewpoint discrimination?

Residents could get their Wisconsin-shaped fists and [Obama] “Hope” images, for example, but would have to accept the risk — albeit a small one — of getting portraits of the governor and Ronald Reagan, too.

No doubt the latter would play havoc with traffic in my neighborhood, where drivers would surely wonder just where they made a wrong turn and how they got so horribly lost.

Long-time Madison politico Stu Levitan — in a thread on the Isthmus forum titled "Why does Rickert even bother?" — acts like no one can tell what Rickert actually thinks and accuses Rickert of not even knowing what he thinks. Here's what I think: If you want to make fun of lefties and actually hurt their feelings, you have to use your sledgehammer!

***

Meade frequently comments over at the Isthmus, and I can't tell you how many times the cocooned lefties there simply cannot understand his gentle verbal comedy. For example, here's a blog post written by former Madison mayor Dave Cieslewicz, who's writing about bicycling without coming to a full stop at stop signs:

To be clear I wasn't promoting the flauting of the law. I was being honest about what most bikers do at a quiet intersection. Let those drivers who have never exceeded the speed limit cast the first stone.

Meade comments:

I see Dave has now become Jesus on a Bicycle.

Then, noticing the misuse of "flauting" for "flouting," adds:

Jesus on a Bicycle, tooting his legal flute. (Although he doesn't promote it.)

Dave, instead of laughing, gripes:

See, now this is why I usually don't read the comments.

This is the first time Dave responded to Meade in the comments. Indeed, just a few days ago, Dave was blogging about how he doesn't usually read comments on his blog (which he said was "not a blog") and how he has a special problem with Meade. (I blogged about that here, noting that Dave accused Meade of repeatedly calling him "a liberal idiot," which is not a fair description of Meade's comments.) Meade responds:

I'm trying to help you, Dave. With word usage, spelling, etc. (Do I need to use a sledgehammer? Compare flaut with flout.)

But your sense of humor could also use some tweaking, Dave. Why the thin-skinned Mom, Laurence is being mean to me! My advice: roll with it! Ride right through those stop signs if need be. Laugh at yourself more. Who knows? - it might even help you get your old job back.

By the way, you still owe me a correction, Dave: I've never called you "liberal", "idiot", or even "liberal idiot". Check - as President Obama might say - the transcripts. Although I will admit - some of what you say on your blog is amply dumb.

Hey, thanks for the reply!

Again, Dave responded:

I don't want my old job back, Laurence. I'm happy misspelling stuff and using poor grammar as a non-blogger.

And as for the liberal idiot stuff, while you may never have used the exact words, that's the gist of much of it. I'm not offended. I've never denied that I'm either liberal or an idiot. I am who I am.

And so it goes, in Madison, Wisconsin, where one can have a hell of a time looking for witty conversation. You may wonder why Meade puts his writing over there instead of hanging out in the comments here where people adore him. But that's Meade. You may similarly wonder why we live here in Madison, Wisconsin!

People have their own private ways of getting together.

"I rarely read the comments at the bottom of my blogs and I almost never respond. I'm ambivalent at best about sparking a dialogue."

"The reason I don't do social writing is that occasionally I actually do read the comments. There's this one guy (hi Laurence!) who writes a comment almost every time I happen to look at them and it's almost always something along the lines of what a liberal idiot I am."

Interestingly, Laurence — that is to say, our Meade — never calls Citizen Dave (the erstwhile Mayor Dave of Madison, Wisconsin) an "idiot." That's Dave's paraphrase.

To paraphrase is to reveal the inner workings of one's own mind. If someone holds up a mirror and you say "I look like an idiot," is the mirror-holder calling you an idiot?

I've rarely read anything associated with my writing — or for that matter with online news stories or columns — that I would consider worth my time or anyone else's.

In short, if that's blogging, then I'm not doing it and never will. Blogging does not work in any useful way as a form of social intercourse. The small number of people who comment seem very angry and very bitter. Why would you want to spend your time with them?

"We're all trolls."

Writes Meade (at the Isthmus forum): "This very thread, started by someone who hides behind his troll name, fisticuffs, is an example of spiteful trollery. The question is: do you want to be an affable interesting troll - like Meade - or do you want to be a grumpy old ill-humored boring troll? Like Galoot or fisticuffs."

"Awful online comments hurt understanding of news, reports local news site filled with awful online comments."

Interview with the UW scientist whose report on the effect of nasty online comments got mocked in The A.V. Report.

I turned my conversation with [Dominique] Brossard to the digital Capital Times....

Her reaction to our plan to scrutinize comments for relevance and taste? “I’m so happy to hear you say this because I’ve been speaking with different people who (think) we should stop allowing comments. I say, look, it’s a great opportunity for us to engage, where well-meaning citizens may have something important to say and can add to the discussion.”

The trick is to figure out who is "well-meaning." Sharp criticism and biting satire should count as "well-meaning." The term we use monitoring comments on this blog — to the extent that we get into the comments, which is always an incomplete process — is "good faith." We get to apply our subjective judgment about that, but it keeps us from drawing the line over notions of "civility." A mainstream newspaper will have trouble being intuitive about the good faith of the very best creative and comical comments, and their monitoring is likely to slide into insipid enforcement of a civil tone, which makes the comments almost pointless. I say almost, because there is some point to the look and the feeling that comments are accepted.

Brossard's "well-meaning" might be the same thing as our "good faith." My commenting instructions  seen above the window where you compose your comments — say:

We value all comments made in good faith. I love different points of view and even edgy modes of expression. What we delete are bad faith comments, comments that we believe have the ulterior motive of destroying the conversation and driving people away from this forum.

Here's the post where I announced the "good faith" standard.

There might be a commenter who impresses us with a clever form of expression, even as he hurls insults. My orientation toward free speech has made me very tolerant of people like that, even when they attack me and the commenters here. I've gone very far defending edgy and harsh expression. That's part of why my new policy is about the good faith/bad faith distinction. That distinction depends on the writer's purpose, and purpose can be hard to discern, especially in clever writers.

The Washington Post has a system of badges for commenters.

You can nominate yourself or someone else for high-quality comments in the following categories, and if WaPo agrees, your comments will appear with one of these icons next to your name:

A badge for comments on politics and national affairs.
A badge for comments on Washington area news and trends.
A badge for comments on Washington area sports events and news.
A badge for comments on international affairs.
A badge for those trained by the National Weather Service as Skywarn Spotters.

If I could do a system of badges for the blog commenting here at Althouse, I might like having 5 different badges, but I'd have different categories! Help me fantasize about what the badges could be. And feel free to provide graphic design for the badges.