Commenteer - A Concept for Better Communities

(Note: This post was originally published at odiousrepeater.wordpress.com)

It’s hard to tell if the whole #GamerHate (or whatever) thing is winding up or down or what, at the moment. I don’t really care that much, as I’m not going to spend a whole lot of time on the subject in this post. Sorry, I don’t feel like I have anything to add. Far more eloquent and intelligent people than me have already said everything meaningful there is to say. Or at the very least, they’ve said more than I could ever have thought up myself. So I’m not going to dwell on the subject, or try to force open another “angle” to what always was, and remains, one giant exercise in online bullying of the worst possible kind. There will be no minority report or desperate attempt at “nuance” here people, move along if you were hoping for one.

What this whole shitfest has done, though, is remind me of why one of my favourite Twitter accounts remains @AvoidComments. I loathe, absolutely loathe comments on the internet. For all the benefits of the “democratization” of this public online space of ours, the possibility for absolute morons to insert themselves at the same volume and level of visibility as actually intelligent people is not a good thing. Unlike in the public space, people online can impose their moronic views, ideas and grammar on the rest of us, and far too often do we find ourselves woefully underequipped to deal with them. The real-life tools of shutting people out are simply not available to us to the same extent online as elsewhere.

Mind you, I really am talking about shutting people out, not up. Freedom of speech should be all-but-absolute. I just need better filtering methods to be made available, because I would rather have no online presence at all than force myself to engage with 99% of the people who choose to post comments on the web. And I’m pretty sure that a lot of other people agree. This in turn creates a negative feedback loop, or downward spiral if you will, as intelligent people simply give up on discussing things on the internet.

Another problem is anonymity, because it has a strong influence on people’s sense of accountability. Some people say “if everyone had to log in with Facebook, they would think before they posted”. And yes, that does help things some times. But there are workarounds; people create phony such accounts all the time. Also, in some instances, it’s good for people to be able to speak their minds without having their identities compromised.

So I thought around for a bit and came up with this concept I called “Commenteer” (it’s a mix of “Comment” and “Commandeer”). The idea behind it is to create a persistent online identity that ties into a community where both individuals and websites are rated, and people and web masters in turn can set their filters according to the kinds of traffic they want in their comments fields. People can have fake ID’s as much as they want, but they will have to invest in them. If they don’t, they won’t build up their Commenteer score, and thus won’t be “let in” to certain communities and situations.

The idea is in an early draft state, and I’ve not really edited it for quite a while. But I think the core idea is somewhat solid, though there are sure to be aspects that I’ve underestimated quite a bit. Anyway, I’m sharing my slides as they are, because, well… most people are stupid. Furthermore, everyone deserves the right not to have to listen to white noise and hate speech. And let’s be honest here… there’s been way, way too much of that stuff lately.