ozarque ([info]ozarque) wrote,
@ 2007-12-08 14:10:00
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Linguistics; rudeness in e-language...
All the way back in a discussion we were involved in in May, [info]bemusedoutsider asked this question:
"To what extent, I wonder, does the deletion of a comment that's only rude -- not threatening, or obscene, just rude -- reward the individual who posted it?"

And [info]dteleki responded with this comment:

"The deletion leads the rude poster to conclude: 'Somebody did in fact read what I wrote.' 'Somebody was ANNOYED enough by what I wrote, to delete it.' If the rude poster was trying to get attention, or trying to cause annoyance, or both, then the rude poster is indeed rewarded by the deletion; how rewarded the rude poster is, depends on how much the rude poster wanted to get attention or to cause annoyance. If the rude poster wanted those results very much, the reward from the comment being deleted could be quite large; by comparison, having the rude post simply left in place, with nobody replying to it or referring to it or in any way acknowledging that it ever happened, could be extremely disappointing."

Like [info]bemusedoutsider, I wonder about this, and would be interested in knowing what you think about it. My own inclination is to agree with [info]dteleki, but one of the things you [youall] have taught me is that my perceptions are often markedly different from yours. Given the fact that I'm so much older, and so much more Rural Southern, and so much more pacifist, and so much less tech-skilled, than the vast majority of you are, those differences don't strike me as surprising. Still, sometimes I'm unaware of them unless you point them out to me.

So far as I can remember, the only comments I've ever deleted from this LJ have been of two kinds: (a) a single comment that I perceived as a grave danger to the privacy of the commenter; and (b) a handful of comments that have unquestionably been spam -- ads for ED remedies, for example, usually posted to my long-ago piece about how to get your Ozark neighbors to come get their cows out of your yard.

I suspect that my reasons for not deleting a comment that I consider "only rude -- not threatening, or obscene, just rude" are different from the reasons you might have for deletions in your own journals. I'm reasonably certain that my reasons for considering a comment rude are often very different from the reasons you would have for doing so. But I may be wrong about both of those things; heaven knows I've been wrong -- and often astonished at how wrong -- many times in the past. So ... I have two questions.

1. What -- for you -- are the characteristics that define a comment as "rude -- not threatening, or obscene, just rude"?

2. Do you agree that deleting a rude comment rewards the person who posted it?

Over to you...

(Post a new comment)


[info]conuly
2007-12-08 08:14 pm UTC (link)
If you don't delete a comment, people are only going to respond to it. I've even done it, and I know how silly it is. That's much more rewarding than if the only response is a swift deletion.

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[info]archangelbeth
2007-12-09 02:59 pm UTC (link)
Yeah, that's how I see it. Deleting may get a brief "koo, I got looked at!" but once it's deleted, it's gone and not being replied to by everyone else, or annoying everyone else who sees it.

My definition for "rude" has a lot of "I know it when I see it." I think... Hm. Coming in with a bunch of generalities for how everyone on the journal sucks, perhaps. Stuff that one looks at and says, "Dude, toxic. Downer. Go 'way." Especially if it's someone who comes in to a journal. And then it's likely to be delete-and-ban.

I can't recall if I ever had to do this. I think I've had to deal with spam once or twice -- which I reported as, well, spam. Hm. And I think banned the twit, at that.

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[info]rabidsamfan
2007-12-08 08:30 pm UTC (link)
I delete comments that I think will aggravate my usual readers, or start a flame war in my journal (because I don't want to read the back and forth myself). My criteria is extraordinarily arbitrary however. Rudeness is entirely in context. In general though I won't delete someone just for disagreeing with me, I will delete anything that looks like an ad hominem attack or like a deliberate intent to provoke.

I don't give a .... er... very small and smelly thing ... about whether or not deleting a comment "rewards" the person who posted it. I delete the darn thing because I don't want to read it again (or even all the way to the end). And if the person reposts in a similar vein, I block them. The point of the exercise is to save me aggravation. How the troll interprets my action is entirely their own kettle of fish.

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[info]brynndragon
2007-12-08 08:43 pm UTC (link)
An example is a comment regarding my appearance in a post of a pic of me and my first motorcycle. It was insulting, but neither obscene nor threatening (which is impressive for a comment on the appearance of a woman). I didn't want to have to see it every time I look at said pic, so I deleted it. Maybe that wasn't the right choice in terms of not rewarding bad behavior (presuming the anonymous commenter went to the effort to find that their comment had been deleted), but it was the right choice for my peace of mind in that I don't have to see the comment whenever I look at that post. I guess that's the decision people have to make when they encounter such comments.

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[info]catsittingstill
2007-12-08 08:48 pm UTC (link)
I agree with conuly; my perception is that while deleting a rude comment makes it plain you noticed it, and may be some small reward, leaving it in place makes it very likely that some other reader will respond to it--possibly several readers--and other readers will respond to the responses (even if only to say "don't answer; it just encourages them.") And the result is, in my admittedly limited experience, not just a much larger reward for the rude person, but also a seriously hijacked thread.

As to what I consider rude--um. I know it when I see it? Sometimes? For starters, anything that would seem rude in person, no matter how it was said--calling someone stupid, for instance, or a liar. On the other hand sarcasm can either increase or decrease rudeness (I think) depending on how its used--and it's awfully hard to spot in text. (At least for me, but I have a hard time spotting it in person--to the point where my husband sometimes makes little "sarcasm horns" with his fingers beside his forehead when he's making a sarcastic comment. Alas, there is no generally accepted "sarcasm horns" on the net for sarcasm-challenged people like me.)

BTW--I notice that I'm responding to a doubled post--probably one of those net hiccups that happen from time to time. If in tidying up, you decide to delete this post, and these comments, you won't hurt my feelings. I don't think LiveJournal has any easy way to transfer comments.

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Response to catsittingstill...
[info]ozarque
2007-12-08 09:20 pm UTC (link)
OT: Thanks for alerting me to the doubled post -- I didn't know that had happened.

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(Anonymous)
2007-12-09 04:59 pm UTC (link)
"As to what I consider rude--um. I know it when I see it? Sometimes? For starters, anything that would seem rude in person, no matter how it was said--calling someone stupid, for instance, or a liar."

If calling someone a liar is necessarily rude, what's the correct response to make to people who tell lies? Just pretend they're merely mistaken?

-- Doug

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[info]rosalux
2007-12-09 06:27 pm UTC (link)
Call out the lie, not the person.

"That's not true." Doesn't say anything about the person who just said it - they could be mistaken, or misled.

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Response to rosalux...
[info]ozarque
2007-12-09 06:34 pm UTC (link)
Well said. Not "You're a liar" or "That's a lie" -- especially online, where you often have no nonverbal communication and little or no context. "That's not true" is far better, as is "That's not true, in my opinion."

(Reply to this)(Parent)

[info]catsittingstill
2007-12-09 06:51 pm UTC (link)
I agree with rosalux and ozarque. Point out that the information is incorrect. Go one better by giving the correct information, along with (if possible) a reputable source of information that explains the matter in more detail.

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[info]whatthehay
2007-12-08 09:21 pm UTC (link)
I appreciate if a rude comment is deleted. I certainly don't want to read it and get my blood pressure up! Rude should not be tolerated.

Thanks.

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[info]wetdryvac
2007-12-08 09:31 pm UTC (link)
My deletion of comments is based on my perceived intent of the rudeness in question. I tend to ignore a lot of verbal attack patterns as being potentially the normal writing style/mindset of a commenter - but if I think the comment is deliberately inflammatory and fails to promote healthy discussion, I tend to reply to it myself:

"Your comment, as I read it, appears to me to be thus-and-so"

If I get a reasoned response, the comment tends to stay up - and then there's a way for future readers to see, "This is what happened." If I do not, sometimes even then I'll let the comment stand. However, if a second reply shows either unreasoned response or rudeness, I delete the comment - and often ban said user from commenting further.

I have a low enough comment flow that (usually) I'm able to monitor and interact with all of them directly.

In general, I find I have a lot higher sensitivity than most to deliberateness in comments, where rudeness is intended - and a lot lower sensitivity to most verbal attack patterns. My deletions and lack of them tend to follow accordingly, but without any hard-and-fast rules other than: dangerously identifying material gets deleted automatically, even when it's not rude.

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[info]coraa
2007-12-08 09:37 pm UTC (link)
My mental paradigm for the removal of rude/obnoxious messages (which is to say, insulting or inflammatory messages, not simply messages that disagree with me -- though of course 'insulting or inflammatory' is in the eye of the beholder) is not 'having a conversation' but 'cleaning house.' I see the removing of a nasty message from my journal as akin to removing a toxic substance from my home; it had never occurred to me to consider whether it was rewarding or punishing the poster. I just didn't want to see it, breathe it, contend with it every time I opened that post, and so I removed it.

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quick reply
[info]salzara_tirwen
2007-12-08 09:42 pm UTC (link)
1. Hard to define. Referring to someone who has a strong gender presentation by the wrong gender, deliberately, would do it.

2. No. Leaving it in and arguing with the commenter is the reward.

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[info]ladyvorkosigan
2007-12-08 10:02 pm UTC (link)
My experience is that where the deleted comment is expressing something that (even loosely) can be termed a political opinion or an opinion on some other controversial topic, no matter how insultingly expressed, deleting the comment does indeed reward the commentor, who then gets to say "Look at these [insert group who disagrees me] - they're so insecure they can't even tolerate dissent! If censorship is the only way they can make their point, of course they're going to lose!" And since the original comment is no longer there, it's then easy for the commentor to spin the comment as less rude, threatening, or insulting than it really is.

Not, of course, that this necessarily outweighs the interests in favor of deletion of comments. I find most sites that are willing to delete comments that are really terrible (the kind I don't think I've ever seen here at all) to make for much more pleasant sites.

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[info]rabidsamfan
2007-12-08 10:40 pm UTC (link)
Dealing with trolls like that is really difficult, and I'm grateful I haven't had to do it. I have at least one person on my flist who does, and screens comments heavily because of it. I wonder, occasionally, if the screening makes the troll feel safer making really and truly obnoxious statements because they won't be seen...

I suppose screencapping the darn things in order to have evidence against the offender is opening another can of beans, but it might be a compromise.

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[info]toshfraggle
2007-12-14 03:17 pm UTC (link)
Yes!
Or they say you lack integrity, or aren't smart enough to deal with their superior intellect--it just proves to them that they are smarter and stronger than you and doesn't ultimately take care of the problem because they'll certainly be back again.

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[info]ingulf
2007-12-08 10:21 pm UTC (link)
My immediate instinct is to observe that there is a (potential) technical solution, namely to render the rude comment invisible to all but the commenter. Of course, that wouldn't work on anonymous posts.Of course, livejournal doesn't provide a way this at the moment.

Er, to answer the actual questions:

1) Um. Well, unintentional rudeness may not be either threatenning or obscene, but I think any intentional rudeness is a kind of threat.

2) Sometimes. However, if the commenter is of the kind who considers that to be a reward, then I think this is outweighed by the benefit of deleting the comment to the other readers.

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[info]victoriacatlady
2007-12-15 08:06 am UTC (link)
My immediate instinct is to observe that there is a (potential) technical solution, namely to render the rude comment invisible to all but the commenter. Of course, that wouldn't work on anonymous posts.Of course, livejournal doesn't provide a way this at the moment.

On the other version of this thread, [info]bemusedoutsider pointed out something that I hadn't known: "(LJ has an option for 'screening' comments, ie making them invisible to readers, such that they are still visible to the blog owner and can be restored later if she changes her mind.)" This is precisely the technical solution you were proposing, I think.

I had not known anything about it before, so I went to my own journal to look at comments. Sure enough, each comment has four options:

An X: delete.
An ice-cube: freeze (meaning, I think, no responses will be allowed to the frozen comment).
An icon I can't figure out: screen.
A thumbtack: track this.

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[info]victoriacatlady
2007-12-15 08:08 am UTC (link)
Rereading this, I'm not sure "screen" was exactly what you were proposing. You wanted something that would make the rude comment invisible to everyone but the author of that comment, right?

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[info]anansi133
2007-12-08 11:25 pm UTC (link)
1) I don't use that particular word, 'rude' when evaluating internet commentary. In personal converastion, rudeness is deeply embedded in context, be it a rowdy soccer game, a dinner party, or a funeral. That degree of context is hugely absent on most of the internet, so there's fewer benchmarks against which to measure that stuff.

When I see a comment that's obviously more snarky than the original poster was looking for, it hits me as an attempt by a person with fewer language skills to drag the conversation down to a level with which they are more comfortable.

The example that comes to mind, was back in high school when I tried to throw a birthday party for a friend in the main lunchroom. A gang of jock bullies were always trying to remind us who was really in charge, and I wasn't very surprised when they did their best (succesfully) to disrupt our celebration. It offended their imagination to witness a party to which they were not invited.

I think something like that is at work every time a troll tries to redirect the flow of conversation in web-space chat.

2) Yes. I think any kind of response at all is a reward. I think most such rewards come from other rude people who see a chance to advance their own rude agenda. (I have rude agendas too, and I'm not always adult enough to squelch them before hitting 'save'.)

A technical fix that comes to mind, that's sure to have its own drawbacks, is the option to 'freeze' a comment in invisible amber, so it cannot be commented upon. Or, in a repuation economy, any coments to such a flagged post are themselves evaluated to whether or not they bring the level of conversation back up to 'civilized'.

I suspect you could draw all kinds of interesting social network diagrams based on this idea....

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[info]deifire
2007-12-09 01:31 pm UTC (link)
1. I think [info]salzara_tirwen's example is a good one, as is childish name-calling, bringing up something in a public post after being asked to discuss it only in a locked post or only in real life, posting someone's identifying details...

Other than that it gets hard to define. There are some journal owners who view unasked-for debate/disagreement with the original post as rude, while others see it as part of the natural flow of an online conversation. LJ-space is a weird mixture of public and private, and it's sometimes hard to tell what the "house rules" of someone's individual journal might be. (That said, violating the stated guidelines of an individual LJ or community could probably be considered rude.)

2. Yes, to the extent that any kind of response at all can be a reward. Most of the time, I prefer to let those sort of comments hang, the exceptions being:
a) Those that include identifying details in a public post, and
b) Rude anonymous comments, which I don't unscreen to begin with.

Really, it's a judgement call and a matter of personal preference. One deliberately inflamatory comment can derail discussion on an entire post, and even freezing the thread doesn't stop others from adding a new comment to respond to the first one.

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(Anonymous)
2007-12-09 04:56 pm UTC (link)
I'm not an LJ person.

Based on my experience in another forum some time ago, deleting a comment is less rewarding than letting it stay, because (as people have pointed out here) if you let it stay, people will reply rather than ignoring it (no matter how much they're warned not to feed the trolls) and things wll go downhill from there.

On that other forum, it occurred to me that when deleting, the moderator would have been well advised to write something like "Two comments were deleted because they violated our policy in the following way." What actually happened was that comments were deleted w/o explanation, and this led to heated discussions: "Hey, there was a comment there! Where'd it go?" "Why the heck was _that_ deleted? It wasn't inappropriate." "Hey, can someone tell me what the deleted comments said?" etc. etc.

-- Doug

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[info]dale_in_queens
2007-12-10 03:09 am UTC (link)
Hmmmm....

Rude, to me, would be something like an unkind comment about one of my friends. While I've received plenty of rude emails (or emails that I perceived as rude), I don't think I've ever received a rude comment in my LJ. Of course, it could be that only 3 or 4 people read it! I have received spam.

Should I receive a rude post, if it was anonymous, I would delete it. If not anonymous, I would reply to the poster privately, and then delete it.

I'm reading this *after* reading the post about LJ being a living room, porch, common room at university...

For me, LJ is most like being in the lunchroom at work. Rudeness I might ignore at home, I would nicely comment on at work, because you'll see the person again (where at home, you could just not invite at person back).

This LJ is rather different and has reminded me of the "annex" at my library school, rather like a common room for all the graduate assistants (and anyone else who wanted to drop by) in the program.

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[info]dteleki
2007-12-10 03:37 am UTC (link)
The original blog post in May was THIS one: http://ozarque.livejournal.com/400388.html
The question was asked, not by [info]bemusedoutsider, but by [info]ozarque, commenting on a comment by [info]bemusedoutsider:
http://ozarque.livejournal.com/400388.html?thread=7659268#t7659268
My reply to THAT included an example of a case when the deletion of a combative post did indeed reward the combative poster considerably.

There seems to be a consensus by everybody here that yes, deleting a rude post may reward the rude poster, but THAT particular effect is less important than keeping the peace; in particular, deleting a rude post prevents it from getting responded to, thus preventing the responses from escalating into a flame-war. Deleting the rude post also prevents the rude post from poisoning the general emotional atmosphere.

That being said, Anonymous/Doug's suggestion that the moderator(s) should post a comment saying that comments were deleted and why, is a very good suggestion. If it isn't followed, then when some excessive number of rude comments just happen to appear in a wave and then get all deleted at once, the regular readers may start to suspect that the moderator(s) is deleting posts just to sweep opposing arguments under the rug.

In my opinion, the essence of "rudeness" with regard to other people's posts is the ad hominen attack; and in general, the deliberate ignoring of the actual substance of the other person's writing. For example, with the rejoinder "you're just saying that because you're a [whatever-it-is]", instead of addressing the actual argument.

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[info]rosalux
2007-12-10 02:10 pm UTC (link)
*My* LJ is a lot like my front porch, thank you for the analogy - anybody *could* walk right in but in reality only people I know or invite do. A longtime friend or neighbor (I have internet acquaintances I've known 15 years) gets a reasoned response where a random stranger might just get the boot, except that's never happened to me on LJ. It does happen on my real front porch from time to time.

For someone with many readers it's a different issue, and one that has a lot to do with the nature of the crowd - I was drawn in by being pointed to the post on the etiquette of favors, personally, so it's not surprising that this crowd is so self-regulating.

For a larger crowd, or a less polite one, I think the reasoning a lot of people have used - that leaving up an inflammatory comment causes replies and rewards the troll with *more* attention - is more relevant. Personally, in a big online forum I really appreciate the jackbooted moderation that prevents flareups before they can spread.

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