Behind Thurrott.com: Community Guidelines

It’s been a few weeks since the last behind-the-scenes post. Sorry about that: I have several more planned, and some partly written, but I’ve found myself a bit obsessed over my digital decluttering work, which is going much better than expected.

Anyway. Let’s get back on track here.

While I’m sure few people ever tried to put themselves in my shoes per se, most readers probably realize that I spend a lot of time reading article comments and reviewing forum posts. A big part of that is just about the conversation, as I like to interact with others and am often surprised, in a good way, by their ideas and opinions. But with over 25 years of comment-based interaction under my belt, I’ve also seen my fair share of toxicity. And this can come from all quarters, not just from trolls but sometimes from other well-meaning folk that are having a bad day, respond poorly to something I’ve written, or similar.

I don’t always handle this well, though I hope that most reading this now would have to think on the last time I behaved badly in this way. But no matter, I long ago saw the need for a set of community guidelines, and I always wanted and needed that pact to be shared, a two-way street. That is, it’s not just for readers, it’s for me and others who publish on Thurrott.com too. We should all treat each other well, and we should expect the same from others.

And go figure, but we do have a set of community guidelines. In fact, we have two, one of which I’m pretty sure no one can see since I’ve never found it on the public site either. Clearly, this is silly, and so this is an area I’m focusing on right now. I want to consolidate the two versions, make sure it’s public and obvious—an understandable and defensible list of rules that I can point to when anyone strays off-target—and reserve the right to update it over time to address issues we don’t explicitly handle.

We didn’t always have such a thing. And as comment moderation became problematic in the early days of this site, I pointed this need out to George and the team while we were still part of BWW Media. Everyone seemed to think it was a great idea, though I suspect it was also more of a Paul problem, since I was the one dealing with the comments in the first place. But whatever the reason—procrastination, most likely, but also a fear of getting it right—it took a while to get something in place.

So where is this thing? Well, the version that’s on the current site and is publicly viewable can be found on each article page between the article text and the top of the comments section.

I believe this area is technically part of OpenWeb, which is what we use for comments, but it doesn’t really matter: assuming you even see this link, when you click it, you navigate to our Community Guidelines page. Which is lackluster at best, in both perspective and content.

Yes, it’s largely boilerplate, and I’m sure it’s inspired by or even copied outright in some places by similar pages on other sites and publications. I’m glad something is there. But I would like the content to be better and look better. This page looks like it was thrown together quickly to me. Which I’m sure it was.

But let’s all look past that for a moment because this document, this set of rules, is still important, and its rules fall into two main buckets. The first is just general and obvious: don’t be a dick and don’t attack other people. And the second is a list of specifics because we all have our own sense of right and wrong, of what’s funny or horrible or too much, and what isn’t, and we all can and do fall victim to that unfortunate human situation where the reality of what we said or wrote hurts someone else even if that wasn’t the intention. The written word is a tough task master in this regard, as I know very well.

Much of what’s on that list doesn’t need to be discussed in any great detail. This isn’t Xbox Live, you can’t just jump into a conversation and start crapping on the article author or other commenters, though you should feel free to criticize products, services, and public figures at the companies in our industry. You can’t be racist or sexist, or threaten violence, of course. But you are free to have strong opinions and biases about companies, products, and services. See the theme? I feel like everyone understands all this innately and that most agree with it wholeheartedly (or are at least smart enough to keep it to themselves if not).

But there are some more debatable items in that list that I feel are just as important. And some of this may be controversial.

For example, one of the rules—and this is one I recall insisting that we add—is a requirement that comments be on-topic. This came about because of my frustration at seeing some toxic-minded commenters derailing and then commandeering what had started off as perfectly reasonable and on-topic conversations in the comments of various articles over the years. Some topics—Twitter is a good example these days—are just controversial, and they seem to almost invite trolling and aggressiveness. (Oddly, Twitter is also a good example of a low-value topic from a financial perspective in that they get an incommensurate number of comments but deliver little ad revenue because few people actually read them. The number of comments on an article is not always a good measure of success.)

Another debatable rule that I feel strongly about—and this one is not in the publicly viewable version of the guidelines, yet—is about spreading misinformation. This falls into a category I think of as “being a bad actor,” something akin to a spammer creating an account only so that they can post links to nonsense and/or malicious online URLs (something we do a good job of preventing).

And that requires a bit of explanation.

We all have opinions, and we all get facts wrong sometimes. If being an online presence for 25-ish years has taught me anything, it’s that you won’t have to wait long to be corrected, so that kind of thing usually handles itself. But spreading misinformation is something else entirely. It’s purposeful, and it’s done with malicious disregard for the truth. We don’t see this very often on Thurrott.com, but because this has become an explicit tactic in politics, it’s seeping into the mainstream and is now more common than ever. And I’m taking a stand on that here.

That statement will set off alarm bells in certain circles. And it should, as there is a debate to be had over what’s misinformation and what isn’t. I’m of the opinion that misinformation is like pornography, in that you know it when you see it, assuming you have the facts at your disposal. But my misinformation could be you just asking questions or whatever the turn of phrase is this week. I don’t like falling back on the “it’s my ball and I’ll take it home if I want to” defense, I’m not a child, but in the end, this is my website, and I guess the buck does stop here. We will address these issues as they come up, I guess. And you can judge.

Which brings me to the other side of the coin: these rules aren’t just important to me or for me: anyone who visits this site and expresses themselves via an article comment or a forum post should be treated with basic human dignity and respect. Disagree, yes. Debate, of course. But don’t make it personal.

Is there a double standard here? As I noted up top, these rules are for everyone, and that includes me and Laurent and anyone else who posts content on the site. But yes, we should acknowledge that there is no one policing the police here, so to speak. I do own the site, and while I try to be as even-handed as possible, it’s reasonable to think that I’m going to favor my own opinions and communication style. I set the tone, in some ways.

So what does this mean in the day-to-day?

Well, I have a recent example that I hope explains how I approach this. In the comments for a recent editorial I had written criticizing Microsoft (hard to believe, I know), a reader strongly disagreed with an assertion I made, that Edge hijacking web links from Widgets and Search in Windows 11 is, among other things, “a key point of contention for the majority of people who use this platform.” Their response to this was, I thought, a bit aggressive.

“Do you have any evidence for this?” he wrote, adding that in his opinion few Windows users care, know what’s happening, or have even clicked in these UIs.

Since he was expressing an opinion, I chose to ignore that, though I of course left it there for everyone else to see. I’m not here to censor opinions, though I know some people may disagree strongly with that. (Most who cart out the word “censorship” are not behaving nicely and are likely not here anymore.) Anyway, another reader came to my defense, which is both appreciated and preferable, but it gave the original commenter a chance to follow up, and they clearly haven’t backed down from their original stance. That’s fine.

But then another person chimed in.

“This user [the original commenter] could argue with a street sign,” they wrote. Sigh.

This comment triggered a couple of actions on my part. First, I looked them up to determine if they were a long-time reader or someone new, as I didn’t recognize the account name, and anyone who creates an account just to dump on someone else is basically a spammer in my book. But they were not new, and so I moved on to my second action, which was happening regardless: I manually rejected the comment, removing it from the site.

I don’t do that lightly. But this one was clear-cut: it was literally just a personal attack on a commenter, with no other content, and it had to go. And so it did. I didn’t blocklist the user, of course, but I will remember if I see something questionable from that person in the future. I have emailed chronic abusers in the past, hoping that a personal outreach will make them realize the error of their ways. This works sometimes, but not others.

But I hope it’s obvious that in removing that comment, I was also protecting a person who had disagreed with me. And this is a crucial point, as the rules are universal.

I will be working soon to shore up our community guidelines, but I am of course interested in your feedback, since you may see some behaviors in your own experiences that we aren’t addressing and should. So let me know, and don’t be afraid to criticize and disagree. Just be nice about it, and try not to make it personal, though I understand these things often seem personal.

But I am listening, and I’m always trying to learn and do better.