THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF COMMENTING

"The Lord Jehovah has given unto you these fifteen...*Crash*... Oy!... Ten! Ten Commandments! For all to obey!"
-Moses (History of the World, Part One)

Commenting is, as long time readers of WATN know, an area of interest to me. Each comment is an addition to the great discussion and debate going on around the world on the Internet, a way of billions of minds to reach out to each other and share, discuss, argue, and consider - and along the way hopefully learn and understand.

When you write a few lines on a message board or chat program or leave a comment on a blog, you've added to this discussion. The addition can be good or it can be pointless, or even bad - which is up to you. There are plenty of people who exist only to leave bad comments and cause trouble, and such people aren't interested in what I have to say here, nor will they be until they grow up a bit.

For the rest, for people who want to add to the discussion, offer something beneficial, interesting, entertaining, or educational, I offer these Ten Commandments of Commenting.

1. Thou shalt not Spam, Troll, or otherwise abuse the privilege you enjoy
2. Thou shalt obey the rules of the site
3. Thou shalt not whine or complain when moderators act
4. Thou shalt not feed a troll
5. Thou shalt treat each person as if they were sitting next to thee
6. Thou shalt not assault thy neighbor
7. Thou shalt read before replying
8. Thou shalt proofread and pause before publishing
9. Thou shalt keep it clear and as brief as possible
10. Thou shalt have a life
    

Here endeth the commandments. But what do they mean?

Let me explain a bit more carefully. Being online is using the generosity, time, and hospitality of someone other than yourself - even if you created the site, others made the internet, others run your Internet provider, others carry the signal across lines others made, and so on. You are a guest. The first three commandments are about this concept; being a guest and treating the setting and host with respect.

I) Thou shalt not Spam or Troll: Although I've explained what each of these is in Profiles in Commenting, they represent any misuse of online discussion and the commandment is broader than just these two categories. This means no Greifing, Advertisement, Autoranting, Cutting and Pasting gigantic sections of text or entire articles (especially copyrighted ones), nothing that particularly annoys or causes trouble for others. No matter how funny you think it is or how mad you are, saying the same thing 47 times in a row to fill the screen is an online sin, it is a violation of the first commandment. Treat the site and the others on it with respect. Don't post or do anything that you would not appreciate someone doing on your site or to you. The positive way of stating this would be: do unto others as you would have them do to you.

II) Thou shalt obey the rules of the site: As you are a guest at the site you visit, you should treat the site and the others there with respect. Even if you think the rules are stupid or pointless, even if the rules are absurd or arbitrary, they are the rules for that tiny slice of the Internet. This applies to both the moderators/owner of the site/long time members/friends of the webmaster and to visitors. Simply having the highest ranking for a message board commenter doesn't make you no longer subject to the rules. Everyone should obey them, or there's no point having rules.

If you don't like the rules, leave, even make your own site with different rules. The Internet is not a free-speech zone, it is a series of places you visit with their own rules. Even a free speech zone has rules: you cannot slander someone just because you have freedom of speech. Learn the rules, follow them, and if they are foolish or wrong, talk to the owner or moderators and suggest politely and reasonably some changes - they might point out something you hadn't considered, reasons the rules are there.

III) Thou shalt not whine or complain when moderators act: If the site you are at has moderators, they may take action against someone at some point. That's their job and their prerogative. The moderators are there in the first place to police the commenting and actions of visitors. Sometimes they may be unfair, unevenly execute their authority, or unreasonable. If that happens, contact the owner or the moderators, and give them your position on why you disagree with their position - politely and reasonably. Perhaps there's something you don't know that they did and acted on. Perhaps they are just jerks. But here's the thing: you don't have to stay.

If a site has poor or arbitrary moderation, if they are just pointlessly cruel, domineering, or show favoritism, leave. Most people will, in fact, leave such a site. It will pay its own price for such treatment. If someone deletes your wonderful, insightful post, suck it up, don't whine about it over and over (and have the whines deleted, most likely). Either take it like an adult, or leave. Again: you're a guest here, and no one is required to listen to or read your thoughts. Even if American-style free speech applied in this setting, there's no freedom of having your ideas forced upon everyone, everywhere.

IV) Thou shalt not feed a troll: This is one of the most important commandments, and it ties into respect for the site. Every single website that allows users to contribute will eventually, and sadly, attract the worst of the internet. Usually this will be adspam, but often trolls. Do not feed the trolls. Ignore them, no matter how provocative, annoying, or persistent they are. If you see a post deliberately and obviously intended only to gain a negative reaction, the answer is to scroll past and simply ignore it. Never, ever answer a troll. Never, ever respond directly to a troll. Never, ever gratify their need for attention and lust for reaction by your posts. Ever.

If you absolutely must respond somehow, a commenter at Ace of Spades Headquarters came up with a clever device: post how you visited an advertisement at the site. This not only denies the troll what they want to see, but demonstrates that all they accomplished was rewarding advertisers of the site and the owner. For example:

Hmm, Grandma's Cookies
*click*

What did the troll get? A hit on the ad for Grandma's Cookies, thus benefiting the site they clearly despise and want to fill with their trash. Everyone wins... except the troll.

V) Thou shalt treat each person as if they were sitting next to thee: One of the saddest parts of Internet discussions is that they consist of a host of people who have little to no contact with anyone else that they are talking to. Not only does this cut off critical human contact and interaction, it all too easily leads to improper, even hateful behavior from people who in any other setting would be quite pleasant and friendly.

The bravery of being out of range, I call it. It is the confidence that you are anonymous and unreachable that leads to people becoming more and more cruel, spiteful, and hurtful in their debate, reducing to a Lord of the Flies-style community. Instead of thoughtful, rational debate like the forum, you get grade school playground insults and fighting. Just because someone is 5000 miles away in a different country doesn't mean you can treat them like trash. Think of them as sitting in a chair not far from you, talking to them face to face. Would you really say that if they were right there? There's some good that comes from not being intimidated by people, from the freedom of not worrying about personal attack (see below), but don't take that freedom into being the attacker.

VI) Thou shalt not assault thy neighbor: This one is serious. Not only is it rude to violate this rule, it's an actual criminal violation in most places. Do not attack someone so viciously they feel threatened. Do not threaten them personally, nor encourage others to. Do not promise death or maiming to someone, or assault in any form. Do not hack their system, do not send them a virus, do not harm them physically or threaten it in any conceivable manner. DO NOT.

Do not assist others in any sort of attack, such as posting IP addresses or directions to their house or phone numbers. This is simply unacceptable in any possible manner, no matter how obnoxious, annoying, frustrating, or deserving you perceive them to be. It's one thing to alert the cops to someone online who needs legal attention. It's another to say you're going to drive to where they live and beat them with a baseball bat. This crosses over to the line of felony.

VII) Read Before Replying: It is all too easy to fire off a response to something someone has said before you've read their entire point in context. Maybe a line they post sounds outrageous to you, but makes more sense when they explain it. Maybe you misread them and the context makes it more clear. It is too easy to read what someone says, stop halfway through presuming you know all about them and what they are saying, and fire off your indignant response.

Read the blog article, read the source material - chances are what you're going to comment on someone has said, someone has already covered it or answered your question. Sometimes you'll even misunderstand the point being made by the original author and end up with a foolish and embarrassing response. This humiliation is easy to avoid: just read what you're responding to.

VIII) Thou shalt proofread and pause before publishing: This follows closely upon Commandment VII. This is more of a tool to avoid embarrassment and frustration than anything, but it can help you obey the previous commandments. All too often a comment is the result of the heat of passion or excitement: you just have to fire off your perfect response, brilliant thought, or witticism so everyone can bask in your greatness. But when that greatness is spelled wrong, has poor formatting, misquotes people, responds to the wrong name, or simply is in a tone you regret... there's often no way to take it back once it is on the Internet. And for all practical purposes, when you say something on the net, it's usually forever.

Stop, sit back, read what you typed, if there's a [Preview] button, give that a shot to see how the formatting turns out. Maybe you forgot to close an italics tag and now everything after your brilliant comment is in italics, annoying the moderators and readers. Maybe you didn't link what you were trying to properly. It's easy to make mistakes - this simple step helps avoid them. The time it takes to re-read and preview your comment can give you time to calm down and gain some perspective, perhaps you wrote that a bit more stridently than you needed to.

IX) Thou shalt keep it clear and as brief as possible: If you post gigantic missives or have a post filled with terrible grammar, spelling, and formatting, you will find that people tend to mock you rather than read what you have to say. Just a simple expedient of cutting up your response into smaller paragraphs can make a world of difference in terms of reading ease. Even the best computer screen in the world is hard on human eyes after a while, and eyestrain is made worse by gigantic unending blocks of text. Imagine this whole essay with no paragraph breaks. Not so fun to read, right?

If you don't speak the language well, you can be forgiven for misspelling and having troubled grammar - be proud you're able to be understood at all. But if you understand and speak the language in question well there is no excuse for poor spelling and grammar. No matter how used to typing on a postage-stamp sized keyboard on your telephone, a computer has a keyboard and room to post large messages and comments that negates the need for imbecilic abbreviations like KTHXBYE and IDK. You just typed up a 500-word essay on the price of tea in china: you can spell out someone's name or the words "in my opinion" or "in other words."

X) Thou shalt have a life: sometimes it can be too easy to get wrapped up in the process of reading and responding to the discussion, spending hours in the effort to think through and argue and have fun with debates and reading what people have to say. It can be easy to get so caught up and intensely identify with the debate that you lose all sense of perspective.

Step away from the keyboard. Pet a cat, take a walk, kiss your baby daughter, wash the dishes, do something else for a while. The fact that "Iknowstuff" on the messageboard can't seem to figure out what you're saying or that "LibertarianMom" is such a frustrating idiot politically is really not that meaningful. It really isn't. So they are wrong? Or right? What changes, really, in your life? Take what you can from the exercise - learn, think, and understand - and walk away from it. You don't have to win the debate, in fact 999 times out of 1000 nobody wins because people refuse to give an inch.

That's okay. Maybe they'll change their minds later. Maybe they won't. Maybe you will change your mind. Internet time is a funny thing: it can seem like you've been talking about something forever when it's only been hours, or a few days. It didn't take you a few hours to come to your conclusions or understand things the way you do - why should it take that short a time for someone else? If you find yourself getting sick at the stomach or losing sleep or depressed, losing your appetite, etc over Internet discussions, if you find yourself "falling in love"... its time to take a few hours at least and do something else.

And remember: this is just talk. It's just discussion and debate, it is not really that immensely important, no matter how passionately you may feel about the talk at the time. Almost every single time things get too intense and start causing physical or emotional problems in you, the reason is because you're too self-focused and too inwardly directed. So what if you win the argument, what has been gained? So what if you don't win, what has been lost?

Pull back, get some perspective from things that really matter. If you can't find that, go visit a nursing home, find someone who needs help in your neighborhood. Volunteer at the Boys and Girls club nearby. Tudor a student. Help your little brother with his homework. Focus outside yourself a while and it can make a world of difference.

CONCLUSION
Hopefully these commandments can help with your online experience, can benefit your efforts and debate on various Internet sites, and can be of some assistance in some way. Most of them are common sense, obvious steps, many of them are repeated and called for at least at some point online at most sites. I personally fail in almost all of them, but at least this gives us all something to strive for.

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