Netiquette

There's been a few conversations on these boards about the way we interact with each other. As some posters have pointed out, the problem of rudeness is common throughout the web and is handled differently by different website coordinators or administrators, taking into consideration the purpose and intended audience of the site. Two recent NY Times tech column articles addressed this problem. The first one was the column writer expressing dismay over this growing trend of nastiness on the web. The second, which I've copied below contains some of the reactions his first column generated. Many of the comments are insightful and directly related to some of the conversations on this topic here, so I thought it would be helpful to post it.

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The New York Times Circuits www.nytimes.com/circuits

The Netiquette Diaries

Last week, I wrote in this weekly e-column that the nastiness online seems to be intensifying. If Digg, Slashdot and my own blog are any indication, there.s less and less meaningful discussion, and more and more jerkiness and backstabbing.

Over 450 of you posted or e-mailed your reactions.450 of the most intelligent, articulate comments ever typed. Some of you commented on the abusive e-mail message I quoted at the beginning of the column. Josh, a 15-year-old, had written it to express his disagreement with a review I.d written.

* .I am a firm believer in karma. Maybe when Josh starts looking for a job, his potential employer will be smart enough to take a look at his MySpace page! Wouldn.t that be justice?.

* .Only 15? I had better grammar skills than that when I was 11..

* .Well, at least there are 15-year-olds out there that read the NY Times..

There was also this thought-provoking notion:

* .Come on, folks--.Josh. is an obvious ruse. .Oppinion,. .sceduled,. .wrightings. and .biast. are wildly improbable as accidental misspellings, and the rest of the message is completely inconsistent in syntax, grammar and overall language quality. If my suspicions are correct, then .Josh..s message is more notable not as evidence of growing incivility, but of a much more sinister product of internet communications: fraud..

Still, a huge majority agreed that the tenor of online discussion is disgracefully low.

* .You could not have hit the nail on the head more squarely. These behaviors are spilling over into driving, schools, businesses, and relationships. Parents have abrogated their roles, and teachers/schools have no authority to impose accountability..

* .Why is everyone so angry?!! It appears there is so much suppressed anger these days. Nearly everyone is so much richer in material things, but so much poorer in a philosophical sense, i.e. living a meaningful life. You.re opening deep crevices here. More power to your elbow..

I loved this reader.s term for the New Abusiveness:

* .It.s called .courage.com.. Usage: .You sure have a lot of courage.com. I bet you can.t come here and say it to my face..
Many of you pointed out that rudeness isn.t solely an online phenomenon; it.s a sign of the times.

* .The uncivil and ignorant have always be with us.but now they have Internet access. Mix in anonymity.what do you expect?.

Quite a few, however, argued convincingly that the problem is not, as I wrote, intensifying.

* .I.ve been reading Slashdot since 1996 and UseNet since 1982, and I can.t agree that there has been a decline in civility. The same low standards we see today have been more or less constant. We can and should bemoan those standards, but if there is a downward trend, I sure don.t see it..

* .Take a look at Google.s Usenet Archives from, oh, say, September 1994. Pick any group with decent traffic. Watch the anonymous and the ignorant piping up with similar trash to what you illustrated above. The difference is that back then, there were established community members willing to crack down on netiquette infractions, educating the ignorant and driving away the willfully malevolent..

Blogger Michael Moncur (figby.com) responded to my own posting, noting that the percentage of nastiness climbs with the popularity of the blog:

* .What Pogue has probably noticed is that, as his writing presence grew from a tiny thing read only by techies to a mass-audience phenomenon, he.s getting more and more e-mails and comments from jerks. It.s easy to look at this and think that people everywhere are losing their manners...I.ve had the same thoughts more than once. But now that my wife and I run several different sites, we.ve learned that the smaller ones have less jerks, and different sites attract different sorts of audiences..

And Gina Trapani, an editor at Lifehacker.com, also suggests that it all depends on where you.re reading:

* .Netiquette in public forums has a lot to do with the content around which the community is centered. Lifehacker's posts set out to help folks, so in kind, our readers want to help us and each other back. Digg is a popularity contest of one-upmanship. Gawker is all about making fun of things, so its readers mock each other and it. Karma's a boomerang..

A few of you offered solutions.requiring online commenters to use their real names was a frequent suggestion. One reader considered solutions for my own blog in particular:

* .There is no easy way to stop it. You could charge membership fees to post (like Times Select), but then your blog would be empty and boring. You could hire quality moderators to facilitate civil discussion, but that would be expensive. I suppose you could also stop writing about consumer items that have little consequence one way or the other (is it really that important that a digital camera or MP3 player is slightly better than another?) and start to using your blog to build solidarity and solve more serious social problems, but then you.d lose both your job and your large audience.

.No, I think you are stuck with it..

In the end, I.m glad we went through this little exercise in mutual depression. These two readers could not have summed up my feelings about your responses any better:

* .I only had time to read 93 of the 186 (so far) comments. Just about all of the 93 people were folks I.d be happy to sit next to on a plane for an hour..

* .I just thought it was ironic that a post regarding a lack of civility in message boards was followed by a couple hundred of the nicest comments I.ve ever read..