For over a week now Tim O’Reilly has been writing and talking about the desirability of a Blogger’s Code of Conduct - a proposal that arose out of an attack on Kathy Sierra. More precisely, it arose out of a series of posts on a number of blogs that Kathy Sierra perceived as serious (that is, life threatening) attacks on her. The people allegedly involved have all denied that they were doing anything more than being satirical or humorous in admittedly tasteless ways. The truth seems increasingly murky, and nobody, including Sierra, comes out of it well.

On March 31 Tim O’Reilly called for a code of conduct. On April 8, he and Jimmy Wales (that’s Mister Wikipedia to you) released a draft Code of Conduct. Finally, today, he posted about about the lessons learned so far.

I felt from the outset that this was a worse-than-bad idea, and I wrote a piece to that effect that will live here permanently attached to the Comics Code of Authority stamp of approval.

This morning I wrote the following as a comment on the lessons allegedly learned so far.

A comment

ProfessorDino asked:

So, if so many of you are against Tim’s proposal, at least initially, then what solution(s) would you propose?

My response to this is: solution(s) to what, exactly?

The basis of the problem, as I understand it so far, is that some people are not being “civil” when they post to their blogs and, even more so, when they comment on other people’s blogs.

This raises the question: at what level is this solvable? At what level can we say that the problem exists, and a solution can therefore be found?

Tim O’Reilly responded to a comment by saying:

Here’s how the “code of conduct” would have helped the Kathy Sierra thing:

Social mores are the prevailing values of a group. One of the “values” of the internet is that unfettered speech is better than any restriction.

I propose that, as a starting point, this confuses rather than elucidates. It misunderstands the problem and hence makes the search for a realistic solution harder.

Tim seems to see “the internet” (or “the blogosphere”) as a single group or a community. This is a category error. The map is not the territory. The analogy is not the reality. The internet is not “a place”, and even less is it a single town, or a community in a single town.

There is no “group” that can be asked to be civil, even if those who see themselves as members of a “blogosphere” wish to act as though there is.

I had never heard of Kathy Sierra or any of the allegedly leading players in this saga until last week. I had never seen their sites, and they have almost certainly never seen mine, or any of the many sites that I visit daily.

We do not inhabit the same “place”. We simply use the same tools, and because of the global reach of these tools, we may - once in a while - find ourselves within view of each other. We may then interact well or badly; we may then communicate or miscommunicate, understand each other or misunderstand each other.

This should not be surprising. The internet is a set of linked communication tools that different people, and different groups of people, use for their own (similar, different, separate, overlapping and often contradictory) purposes. Contradiction and friction are built into the tools and will be unless they are centrally controlled, and their use licensed and monitored.

The problem then, imho, is: what do we do with people playing different games using different rules, when they come into contact, and start having problems with each other.

Personally, I am all in favour of civility. I am all in favour of rational discussion. I am all in favour of Jan and Dean’s status in the pantheon of popular music being revised sharply upwards. Other people may agree with some or all of these.

I believe that civility, and the recognition of Jan and Dean’s true worth, are aspects of life that individuals must decide, and act upon, themselves.

For this reason I think that a Code is silly and potentially dangerous. I think realistic solutions include mechanisms to disemvowel comments when it seems like a good idea; to have them user-moderated into near invisibility; or to have run through a Slashdot-like threshold system.

In other words I don’t think you can (or should) stop people from being “inappropriate”, but I think you *can* filter so that different groups can catch different fish from the same pool.

Subsequently…

A poster named Bliss, who claimed to be a lawyer, wrote:

One would imagine that civility would also include not demanding that a stranger adhere to some arbitrary speech code in advance - to flip your point, that wouldn’t fly in person, why should it fly on a blog? I can’t imagine that you actually meet someone new, and immediately give them a Code of Civility for them to review and adhere to before they start talking to you . . .

Two days later…

By Friday the conversation had begun to change direction slightly. Tim O’Reilly had answered my comments with a lengthy answer in which he explicitly ackowledged my reference to General Semantics. I replied:

Tim O’Reilly said:

I believe that I’m thinking about a real problem, and proposing solutions for how to deal with it, and I’ve moved quite a lot in the direction that you also ended up, namely that we need better moderation mechanisms in common blogging software. Right now, all we have as a tool is the binary delete/allow.

I’m planning to take practical steps to provide additional moderation plugins that could then be used by any blog owner who wants to use them.

I agree with this, Tim. I do believe that there is a real problem, but I think that it is not the kind of problem that can be dealt with by “community means” because, as I tried to explain, I do not think that the internet or the “blogosphere” is a place of any kind, let alone a community.

It is (in my view) a powerful set of tools which lets users communicate and (if they so wish) use the tools to build up self-acknowledged voluntary communities. Some users do not want to join these communities. They are not thereby “bad community members” because they are not electing to be members in the first place.

I applaud your move into thinking about tools for widening the choices site owners, authors and commenters have for controlling and improving their own experiences. As I said before I think that improved filtering mechanisms are a viable approach to an answer to the problem. They propose a solution to the problem at the level where it actually occurs: the individual user’s experience.

If you are going to put some of your resources behind developing tools to help bloggers, site woners and commentators take control of their own web experience, then that is VERY COOL!

IMHO

I believe this. If Tim O’Reilly is really going to take steps to write improved filtering plug-ins and make them available, then we will all be a lot better off, and something useful will have emerged from this. If he does this instead of pursuing the idea of a code of conduct, which I still insist is pitched at entirely the wrong level, then I will be very happy.