Aperture

As a research project, I’ve been studying news values on Daily Kos. Kossacks have a culture of sourcing. They provide links to all the facts in their posts and replies, or risk being called out by other community members. DK isn’t a news outlet, but in that respect, the community operates a lot like journalism and plain old good conversation. Linking to sources is a way of establishing (or demanding) credibility in online conversations, and so it has the potential to raise the level of discussion, and to increase the credibility of the commenters who, I would argue, bring a lot of the unique value to online news.

And then there’s Wordpress. I love Wordpress. I do. It’s an awesome CMS and a flagship of the open source community. My question here concerns its spam-blocking settings. Even without enabling Akismet, Wordpress is set, by default, to hold comments for moderation that contain more than 2 links. That would seem to penalize well-sourced replies to blog posts. It doesn’t permanently delete them, true. But it also holds up impromptu conversation of the sort that takes place on Kos, unless of course the blog owner is hovering over the “moderate comments” button.

While a blog (or WP-based news outlet) is small, and receiving only a couple comments a day, then that’s not a big deal. But if it has a large readership, this could inhibit discussion, or dumb it down considerably by discouraging well-sourced replies. And what happens when a blog is making the shift from small to large readership?

Well, I suppose I should give credit to bloggers for being smart people. They can change the Wordpress defaults if they’re a problem. And if their blogs are becoming wildly popular, then they may just be hovering over the “moderate comments” button anyhow. But I do wonder whether there’s an insidious side to spam blocking, which prevents occasional value-added discussions from happening where they otherwise might.

What say you? Have you ever been left out of a blog discussion because your brilliant post sat in the comment queue, while other people tossed around pithy remarks? Have you ever watched someone duplicate your idea in a thread, simply because your reply is sitting unread in the holding bin, with links to credible sources, while the come-lately blogger tossed off the same idea as a hypothetical?

Or do these things never happen?