I figured it out.
Apr. 26th, 2011 11:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinI said before that I needed to redefine my relationship to the comment section and this morning it fell into place for me. It's my storefront. It's my workplace.
It's not a literal storefront, obviously, and it's not a metaphorical storefront in the sense that the most forward-facing pages of Amazon.com are a metaphorical storefront. But it's where I interact most directly with the public while they're consuming my work. It's the intersection of my work and the public.
Realizing this... well, it's giving me a different way to approach and view the comment section that I think might be healthier and more helpful.
The other related change to how I approach the comments is... well, I've realized that I've been trying to solve the problem of a handful of commenters (to be very specific, two... one person who so far has responded to a warning and one who really hasn't) by writing a policy to deal with them. The vast majority of people who have ever commented on the site don't need a primer on how to tick me off so badly that I lose sleep or hours of productive work trying to figure just what the heck is going on in their minds or how to deal with them.
The first rule of the comment policy* has long been the house rule - my house, my rule. I can't expect a moderator to enforce that one, but it also means I don't have to figure out how to frame a rule when a commenter "just isn't working out". Trying to frame a policy for that probably wouldn't change the behavior of the people it's aimed at, but would probably have a chilling effect on other, more conscientious commenters who would wonder if their behavior shades into what the policy is describing.
*Currently not visible on the site, because I've been struggling with revising it... but the fact that it's not there hasn't been a problem because 99% of the people commenting don't need a policy to not be complete dicks. Heck, I wrote that policy in the first place to deal with the small number of commenters who were making the comment section completely toxic.
Ugh... it'snoon 12:45. I've been up for two nearly three hours writing the preceding six paragraphs that were supposed to be about how I'm done letting one person take up hours of my time on a regular basis.
Clearly, it's a work in progress.
It's not a literal storefront, obviously, and it's not a metaphorical storefront in the sense that the most forward-facing pages of Amazon.com are a metaphorical storefront. But it's where I interact most directly with the public while they're consuming my work. It's the intersection of my work and the public.
Realizing this... well, it's giving me a different way to approach and view the comment section that I think might be healthier and more helpful.
The other related change to how I approach the comments is... well, I've realized that I've been trying to solve the problem of a handful of commenters (to be very specific, two... one person who so far has responded to a warning and one who really hasn't) by writing a policy to deal with them. The vast majority of people who have ever commented on the site don't need a primer on how to tick me off so badly that I lose sleep or hours of productive work trying to figure just what the heck is going on in their minds or how to deal with them.
The first rule of the comment policy* has long been the house rule - my house, my rule. I can't expect a moderator to enforce that one, but it also means I don't have to figure out how to frame a rule when a commenter "just isn't working out". Trying to frame a policy for that probably wouldn't change the behavior of the people it's aimed at, but would probably have a chilling effect on other, more conscientious commenters who would wonder if their behavior shades into what the policy is describing.
*Currently not visible on the site, because I've been struggling with revising it... but the fact that it's not there hasn't been a problem because 99% of the people commenting don't need a policy to not be complete dicks. Heck, I wrote that policy in the first place to deal with the small number of commenters who were making the comment section completely toxic.
Ugh... it's
Clearly, it's a work in progress.