Catholic Authenticity
Patheos is trying out a new commenting system, and I’ve agreed to be among the guinea pigs.
The new system is called “World Table,” and the basic idea is that it’s designed to create more productive conversation by rewarding positive, respectful, helpful and amusing contributions – and by penalizing obnoxious com-box behaviours like trolling and sealioning.
It uses a more sophisticated user-feedback system than Disqus, and the feedback makes a difference in terms of people’s ability to participate in the conversation. If someone’s contributions consistently receive negative feedback from others in the commenting community, then, over time, that person will build up a bad reputation on the system. The site administrator (that would be me) gets to decide on a minimum ranking that person has to have in order to be welcome to participate in the com-box.
The way it works is that readers will be invited to evaluate comments using four criteria: respectful, helpful, honest and likeable. These criteria were selected because they don’t have anything to do with whether you like, or agree with, the content of a person’s answer – they’re concerned with whether the comment contributes positively or negatively to the tone of the com-box. The hope is that this will foster productive dialogue between people who hold different views, and that it will discourage rude, dismissive, irrelevant and unproductive comments.
The benefit here is threefold. First, it means that if a person gets blocked, they got blocked because of their own choices and the choices of the community. It wasn’t my decision. This means that I don’t have to worry that disruptive com-boxers are going to be hurt, or worse, spiteful if I block them – because it’s out of my hands. It also means that if someone does get blocked, they’ll know that it wasn’t just because I happened to find them personally irritating.
Second, it should ideally function as a means for greater self-reflection and self-correction. It’s not like anyone is going to just suddenly find themselves cut off from the com-box – if a commenter is getting bad ratings, they’ll be able to see why, and they’ll have the opportunity to improve. Also, the rating system will always be right there when you’re composing a comment, so it will serve as a reminder to be respectful, helpful, honest and friendly. I don’t know how other people will feel about that, but I know that I do sometimes get frustrated in com-box discussions and I end up giving responses that are snappish, uncharitable or unkind – and then later regretting that I did so. Having a built-in reminder that I need to be accountable, even in the heat of a disagreement, will be a definite concrete help in making sure that my own behaviour contributes to building the kind of discussion that I want to see.
Finally, the hope is that this will help to create a safer and more welcoming commenting community. I know a lot of people avoid com-boxes because they’ve had too many experiences with toxic com-box behaviours and they just don’t want to expend the emotional energy required to deal with trolls and assholes. Unfortunately, this means that people with honest questions or intelligent contributions often end up censoring themselves, and the discussion becomes dominated by folks who want a forum to air their own opinions but who are not interested in respectful discussion. One of the goals of this commenting system is to create an environment where more people will feel that they can safely add to the conversation.
The new system should be in place sometime over the next couple of days. I invite readers to share their feedback on it with me so that I can pass that information along to the people responsible for developing it. Also, if you have more detailed questions about how it works you can check out the World Table website, and hopefully your questions will be answered there.
Happy commenting!
picture credit: pixabay
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