Is civility an endangered species in the blogosphere?

There’s been a lot of chatter as of late about the civility of bloggers and the people who comment on them. A few weeks ago, Matthew Yglesias argued that bloggers had an incentive to behave badly:

The trouble is that when you write something really good, in the sense of being sober, on-point, factual, and tightly argued, your targets would do well to simply ignore you. And so they do. Maybe a person or two will recommend the story to their friends, but basically it vanished into the HTML ether. Something sloppy, offensive, over-the-top, or in some minor way inaccurate, by contrast, will provoke a flood of responses. If you’re lucky, those responses will, themselves, be someone sloppy, and folks start defending you. Then you find yourself in the midst of a minor contretemps, and everyone gets more readers.

Brad DeLong concurs. Laura at Apartment 11D is similarly disgusted with bad big blogger behavior:

[A] nasty side effect of blogging is that hit counts can go to your head. Occasionally, hit counts can inflate egos creating not only the so-called pundits, but a hundred little bullies. Blogs are not soap boxes for speaking your mind, because bloggers don’t have to respond to hecklers in the audience. Blog readers don’t have the opportunity to hear responses to posts and weigh differing points of view. The heckler has been effectively silenced.

More recently, concerns have been raised about the comments on popular blogs as well. Billmon recently shut down comments at Whiskey Bar; The Command Post has done the same. Commenting on this — as well as his own difficulties with impolite posters — Kevin Drum observes:

I get questions about the vitriolic tone of the comment section here with some regularity, and my answer is usually the same: there’s just not much that I can do about it. True, I can ban people, but that works only if they have a fixed IP address, which these days most people don’t. What’s more, if the ban fails, the recipient is often pissed off enough to try even harder to make a pain in the ass out of himself. It’s also true that the problem is exponential. A year ago I got 10-20 comments on each post and had no trolls. As a result, the conversation was relatively civil. Today I get 100+ comments per post and the site has at least half a dozen trolls whose only love in life (as near as I can tell) is to start flame wars. The result is a melee…. I don’t have any plans to either get rid of comments or to moderate them, at least for now. But as more and more blogs cross the 10-20,000 reader mark, which is where comment sections seem to break down, I wonder if comments will increasingly become a thing of the past in the upper reaches of the blogosphere.

Kevin is not the only one to observe this degenerative phenomenon. James Joyner points out the following:

Certainly, there’s value in interaction with readers. Unfortunately, there seems to be a strange variation on the Gas Law with regard to blog comments: As blog readership expands, the quality of comments declines geometrically. When OTB had 500 readers a day, the vast majority of the comments—whether from people who agreed or disagreed with me—were quite good. With readership in the 5000-10,000 range, most comments are crap. Reading—let alone policing—the comments gets to be more trouble than it’s worth.

A few weeks ago, Glenn Reynolds made a similar point:

[A]s Eugene Volokh noted in a discussion of this topic a while back (read it, as I agree entirely and he said it better than I could, as usual), the worst part isn’t the flaming by people who don’t agree with you, it’s the nasty comments by people who generally agree with you…. Some blogs, like Daniel Drezner’s or Roger Simon’s seem to avoid that problem most of the time, but I think it’s a scaling issue — up to a certain level of traffic it feels like a conversation, past that it degenerates into USENET. At any rate, I’d rather blog than deal with comments. The other problem, which I’ve seen both at blogs I agree with and blogs I don’t, is that bloggers can be captured by their commenters. It’s immediate feedback, and it’s interesting (it’s about you!) and I can imagine it could become addictive. My impression is that often, instead of serving as a corrective to errors, comment sections tend to lure bloggers farther in the direction they already lean. Anyway, I worry about that.

Eerily enough, now Roger is having difficulties with commenters. With such an impressive consensus, it is very tempting to just shrug one’s shoulders and accept that there is a rhetorical version of Gresham’s Law in the blogosphere. It is undoubtedly true that in the short run, provocative, vitriolic, and/or sloppy writing — by either bloggers or commenters — can attract attention, whereas closely reasoned analysis sometimes falls by the wayside. The fact that so many top-notch bloggers have made similar observation about the correlation between hit counts and trolls is indeed disturbing. However, I remain stubbornly optimistic on this front for five reasons:* 1) In the long run, reputation matters. Sure, being a bombthrower can attract attention — but it’s hard to do successfully over a prolonged period of time. Inevitably this kind of ranting leads to major as well as minor missteps. Once a commentator commits a major rhetorical gaffe or colossal misstatement of fact, it becomes impossible to take them seriously. Which is why it’s so easy to discount the statements of Ann Coulter, Noam Chomsky, Pat Robertson, or Michael Moore. 2) Technology can help as well as hinder. I’ve raved about MT-Blacklist before for blocking spam, but an unanticipated bonus has been the ease with which I can delete any comment. Blacklist rebuilds my site much more quickly than MT — so it’s been far easier to prune away comments now than before. 3) Commenters usually follow the blogger’s lead. Whenever I use profanity in my posts, the language in the comments inevitably becomes coarser. This works in reverse, however — the more civil my posts, the better the tone of the comments. In this respect, the presence of comments has affected me in one way — I’m much more polite on the blog now than I used to be. 4) Compared to academia, this is a tea party. Another blogger once asked me whether I felt “surprised at the angry tone of the comments your readers leave… It can be odd to be shouted down on your own website.” Look, I’m an academic, and this stuff is nothing. I’ve attended seminars where the paper presenter ran out of the room because s/he was crying. I’ve presented papers that have been likened to poor undergratuate theses. I’ve had papers rejected by top journals because they were “narrow and without much theoretical interest.” I’ve heard cruelties uttered that will be burned in people’s psyches until the day they die. In other words, I’m used to a pretty high standard of criticism. Compared to that, a line like “Hey, Drezner, let’s outsource your job, you f***ing a@#hole!” — or letters like these — just come off as histrionic nonsense. 5) Don’t forget the benefits. Laura at Apartment 11D and Henry Farrell both point out the social value-added of blogs. Henry gets at something with this comment:

The most attractive ideal for the blogosphere that I’ve come across is in sociologist Richard Sennett’s brilliant, frustrating shaggy-dog of a book, The Fall of Public Man. Sennett is writing about the eighteenth century coffee-house as a place where people could escape from their private lives, reinventing themselves, and engaging in good conversation with others, regardless of their background or their everyday selves…. Like Sennett’s patronizers of coffee shops, bloggers don’t usually know each other before they start blogging, so that it’s quite easy for them to reinvent themselves if they like, and indeed to invent a pseudonym, or pseudonyms to disguise their real identity completely. This has its downside – some bloggers take it as license for offensive behaviour – but in general, if you don’t like a blog, you can simply stop reading it, or linking to it. The blogosphere seems less to me like a close-knit community (there isn’t much in the way of shared values, and only a bare minimum of shared norms), and more like a city neighborhood. An active, vibrant neighborhood when things are working; one with dog-turds littering the pavement when they’re not.

Eszter Hargittai has more on this. As for comments, sure, the trolls can be annoying. However, they usually don’t crowd out the good. For example, check out the comments to this post about rethinking the National Guard and Reserves. This is an issue on which I know only the broad contours — and thanks to the informed comments (click here, here, here, and here for just a few examples) I know a lot more about the subject than I used to. For me, that benefit outweighs the occasional irritations that come from blogging. *Two caveats. First, I don’t have the traffic that Kevin, Glenn, Andrew, James or Michelle have. The scale factor is undeniable. Second, from now until November, extreme partisanship is going to be contributing factor to the level of discourse across the blogosphere. UPDATE: CalGal poses a fair question in the comments:

If you can delete any comment you want, then how can you honestly declare that the comments are reflective of your reputation? An edited comments section is “letters to the editor” with you, the editor, deciding what feedback is worthy of your publication. When you’re at the point of blessing your software for making it easy to purge comments, it’s time to get rid of comments entirely.

Actually, I’m blessing the software because without it, deleting a comment takes 10 minutes of rebuilding; without it, it takes 10 seconds. In a world with spam, that’s not a minor convenience, it’s a major one. This does not mean that I delete a lot of comments, however — you can read my criteria here. At this point, I’d say I delete maybe one comment a week that’s not either spam or an accidental double post. I don’t think that translates into a “letter to the editor” section.