Oddly Together

The Case for Curating Comments

Five days ago, I quietly turned on commenting two months after turning it off. Comments are temporarily back at Oddly Together. Perhaps this second stage of experimentation will lead to my making comments a permanent fixture or instead giving John Gruber the apology I promised should the commenting feature be permanently removed. I’m still wondering if John’s approach might be right.

Before my mid-June post “Be a Man, John Gruber,” his blog had no commenting system, while Oddly Together offered Disqus. I insisted that “his no-comments approach is out of place in an era when so many Websites or services provide discussion tools and encourage readers/viewers to use them.” There was much more to the reasoning. Read the post to get it all.

John didn’t change his no-commenting ways, as expressed in his responding post “I’ll Tell You What’s Fair.” So, I flipped things around, trying it John’s way by turning off commenting. What started out as a two-week experiment has gone on for two months. Two reasons: 1) I waited for Disqus to release tools for migrating comments between blogs. 2) I observed a seemingly troubling increase in obnoxious commenting. What? Are too many people unemployed, with nothing else to do but vent their anger and frustration through comments? It’s a sad state affairs on the social Web—that so many commenting deviants pollute rather than add to the conversation.

Since mid June, I have sought to work out the real value of commenting. I even tried to set up an online debate between John and Robert Scoble. John and Robert are both high-profile bloggers, who happen to be on opposite sides of the commenting question. Robert is a big fan of comments, while John is not (at his own blog, Daring Fireball). One of the bloggers was enthusiastic to engage the discussion, but not the other. Because I consider my communications between John and Robert to be private, I won’t say which cooled the idea.

Just days after I turned off commenting, Boston Globe published “Inside the mind of the anonymous online poster.” Three days later, Brenna Erlich asked at Mashable: “Are You a Comment Troll?” One commenter aptly responded:

A troll has always been someone who just wants to cause a stir and gain responses. A troll is not about illiciting a response to spur discussion. It’s just a response to get a response and get people fired up.

You are correct that a troll can will post a rant or typo-ridden garbage, but it’s always inaccurate on purpose. It has to be, or you’re not going to get people fired up enough to respond to your troll.

I’ve long opposed anonymous commenting, because of trolling. But trolls register to comment just as easily using the most obvious of fake names (as they do at Betanews, where I have no control over commenting). I’ve decided to filter them out by proxy. For now, all comments will require my approval before appearing on an Oddly Together post. I may change the policy in the future. I won’t approve all comments, either. This blog will be a curated conversation. Comments that add to the conversation and extend the storytelling will most likely be approved. I will discard the others. Trolls be gone.

I’m trying to find middle ground between the commenting approaches advocated by John and Robert. John asserts Daring Fireball is a curated conversation, representing his voice for an audience of similar thinkers. Robert believes the conversation benefits from interaction between the author and commenters and commenters among themselves. He is Mr. Social Media. I want to have it both ways—curation and reader interaction. That may not be an achievable goal, but I want to try.

Disqus’ comment migration tools didn’t work for me. They’re more suited to moving comments between domains. I wanted to move comments to different URLs off the same domain. Given this situation and the new curation approach, I reset the clock to zero, by deleting all comments from this blog on August 21. The comments are archived and could return in the future. For now, Oddly Together starts with a clean slate of comments, as of five days ago.

There are many good places for comments, such as the reviews people leave on Amazon product pages, comments on Facebook Walls or responses people give to pics on photo-sharing sites like Flickr. Oddly Together has a managing editor—Me! I edit my own posts for clarity, readability and style. I curate the posts until they’re ready for public display. Now I will curate comments, too. From a storytelling perspective, comment curation is just editing. If you don’t like the approach, if I curate your comment into the trashbin, please email and make a case for your comment. But I suspect that the majority of worthy comments will be quickly approved. 

That said, I would prefer not to curate comments because free speech is an important part of my worldview. Curation is necessary. Oddly Together is like my home, where other people have an open invitation to come by and chat. Trolls come to dump their garbage on my lawn or—gasp—living room. They also beat up my guests. No more.

Do you have a commenting story that you’d like told? Please email Joe Wilcox: oddlytogether at gmail dot com.

My Pitch for a Truly Gruesome Vampire Story

This week I got PR email about new “True Blood” comics, and I received Rolling Stone issue 1112 with cast members from the HBO series on the cover. Suddenly, an idea came to me for a different, modern vampire drama. Here is the plotline of the story I’d tell:

Stefan has a problem. After years of being undead, he is, ah, dying. The vampire has contracted a virulent form of HIV and now has AIDS. Stefan sucked the blood of the wrong victim, not that he ever worried about disease before. Born in Rotterdam during the fourteenth century, Stefan, as a vampire, had survived every imaginable plague. Why not? Diseases attack the living, not the undead.

But this HIV-variant is different, lying dormant until fresh blood is ingested. In a vampire, the virus improves immunity, specifically attacking hemoglobin vital to the creature’s survival. The rich pink color Stefan’s skin would take on after feeding is gone. The tone is an aura of grey that rarely fades.

Stefan feeds more frequently, out of need and anger. He can’t seem to suck enough blood to maintain vitality. Meanwhile, he realizes that feeding infects victims with HIV. The strain as spread from the vampire is even more virulent among humans. They contract AIDS quickly but linger in a ghastly state for months — living and yet undead. Europe panics, as a frightening new HIV epidemic spreads across the Continent.

In France, graduate student Mirielle Charbonneau makes a startling discovery. She finds that the newest AIDS epidemic stems from a single HIV strain, and DNA sequencing suggests something simply impossible: A carrier whose genes point to Northern European origins at least five centuries past. Conflicting motivations between Mirielle, her professor and the university regents lead the research to be dismissed.

But Mirielle carries on. She leaves the university after accidentally meeting Cusper Rhodes in a bar. Mirielle drinks a bit too much and says too much about her problems. For Cusper, the meeting is miraculous. Weeks earlier, mysterious bite marks appeared on his girlfriend’s neck; she grew deathly pale for a few weeks and recovered. Cusper and Mirielle suspect there is some connection between the recent epidemic, and they return to London.

Meanwhile, Stefan reaches an unbelievable realization. His vitality and palor brightened for a few days after a busy night feeding in South Kensington. Some human’s blood countered the effects of his disease. The vampire returns to the London district to search for this victim, desperately hoping the HIV-immunity given to him has protected the human.

The hunt is on, as Cusper and Mirielle seek a vampire who is looking for Cusper’s girlfriend. But no one guesses another startling tie that binds them together.

That’s the gist of my vampire story plot. Working title, subject to numerous changes: “My Blood.” If you’re a publisher looking for a fresh vampire yarn and willing to pay a hefty advance so I can drop everything else and only write the novel, please contact me. Or I would gladly write the fuller story for a screenplay—or even the screenplay. I’ve laid out just the framework here. The real story will be even better.

[Photo Credit: Phoney Nickle / Tiffany]

Do you have a vampire story that you’d like told? Please email Joe Wilcox: oddlytogether at gmail dot com.