Why I don’t read Boing Boing much anymore

I’ve seen some complaints that the quality of the content on Boing Boing has gone down recently. I don’t agree. They have more contributors than they used to, so the range of topics and voices is more diverse; and there are more ads than in the early days. But they’ve also managed to keep their RSS feed ad-free mostly ad-free, and they’ve partitioned some of the less-mainstream material into separate sections with excellent independent curation. So my complaint is not about the content, which I still think is among the best on the internet. (Disclosure: I worked with one of the editors ten years ago, but I don’t think this fact has affected my opinion.)

It’s about the comments. Specifically, the practice of disemvoweling. When a commenter crosses a boundary of civility, a moderator will often push a button that removes the vowels from the offending portion of the comment. This is censorship.

Boing Boing’s chief moderator, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, and undoubtedly the rest of the Boing Boing staff will disagree with me. It’s not censorship because it’s their site, they will claim, and they have the freedom to choose what to publish and what not to. The moderation policy states this, in fact, and superficially the statement is correct. But there’s a subtlety: what they don’t have a right to do is attribute whatever text they want to whomever they want. Silently altering the content of a post, albeit in an algorithmic way, breaks a social contract, and it’s censorship just as the phone company bleeping your calls would be censorship, even though they own the phone lines.

When I read a comment that’s been disemvoweled, I can usually guess at the original content, though I have no way of knowing whether the author wrote it that way (to make a metatextual point) or not. But what’s more frustrating is the decontextualization of the discussion. Here are some of the bits of context that are destroyed or omitted when a post gets disemvoweled:

• The original, presumably offensive, text (though it can still be guessed at)
• Who (which moderator) altered it
• Why it was altered
• When it was altered
• Which replies, if any, were made before the alteration and which after

All of these omissions hurt the flow of the discussion for both readers and participants.

For example: one time, another user directed a slightly rude comment at me. I wasn’t offended, but I posted what I thought was a funny response, and a few people replied appreciatively. A little while later, a moderator disemvoweled the rude comment, which ruined my joke and made me and the people who liked my joke look, out of context, like assholes. Since there’s no way to edit or delete one’s own comments, there was nothing any of us could do.

Why don’t I just ignore the comment section? Well, mostly I do, and it’s been forever since I posted anything. But even just skimming the articles via Google Reader makes me want to click through and read the discussions now and again, which inevitably leads to anger at the approach to moderation.

Mrs. Nielsen Hayden is a literary editor by trade, which means she spends much of her time altering other people’s words. I’m sure she’s very good at it, but it just isn’t an appropriate tool for this trade. It’s destructive to the community, and I’ve had enough.