Writing Hurts

I made a joke on Twitter earlier about how a lot of Internet commenters might fail a Turing test.

Ha ha, but there’s a a sad truth in the joke. I’ve written about comments before, but one thing I’ve been trying to figure out is what expectations we should have for our commenters. I’m not talking rules here: most sites already have plenty of rules about what we will and won’t allow. Rather, I’m talking about the kind of behavior we WANT our commenters to engage in, rather than the behavior we DON’T WANT them to engage in.

Clay Shirky talks about this at length in his essay: A Group is its Own Worst Enemy.

And we do need to empower members of the community to create their own standards; this isn’t just our community. But it is useful to set a baseline. How about:

• Be civil. Don’t say things to someone or about someone that you wouldn’t say in their presence.
• Be honest. That means more than just not lying, it also covers half-truths and evasions.
• Be yourself. If you post as an anonymous coward then we won’t take you nearly as seriously as if you’re clearly a real person.
• Add value to the comment threads you take part in. Look at blogs like Gizmodo and Jalopnik. They have well-informed, generally useful comments. There’s some level of idiocy, and that’s OK. Sometimes it’s even entertaining. But it’s not nearly as bad as it would be on, say, Digg. One of the reason the commenters behave is the judicious use of the ban hammer and that might not be the model we want to use, but it does work.
• When you’re being provocative, do it for reason. Rather than writing things for shock value, try to enlighten and inform your fellow commentariat.
• Tread lightly. Some threads feel like a barroom, while others feel like a church. Be mindful of those tones, and don’t disrupt them needlessly.
• Lastly, another don’t: Don’t be a troll. Nuff said.

So what would you add to these expectations? Am I being overzealous on some of these?

We all know I’m a twitter addict (as are many of you), so it shouldn’t be surprising that I follow the twitter status blog fairly religiously.

Today, Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter, wrote on the blog today that IM support, which has been gone for months now, won’t be back any time soon. That’s going to disappoint plenty of people, but it’s not such a bad thing. First of all, it’s been gone for months already, second of all, what good is IM support if the system itself is shaky? Twitter went through some really rough growth spurts earlier this year, with many people threatening to leave for good because of spotty connection and the seemingly omnipresent fail whale. They’ve gotten better. Not perfect, but much much better. It would really be a shame to lose that for IM support.

But more importantly, Williams’ entry makes Twitter more transparent. Web 2.0 and social media are supposed to be about transparency and connecting with users, after all, and saying you’re going to do something you have no intention of actually doing is a great way to alienate your user base.

It’s dangerous to not give your users what they want, but it’s much more dangerous to lie to them.