Saturday I tried to find some information online about how to adjust the frames of my new glasses. They hurt like hell. So, hoping I wouldn’t have to wait until I could get back to the optician, I headed for Google for advice. The search results were not helpful. The first page or two of results were all from places like eHow, howtodothings, answers dot com, answerbag—and the articles at these sources each returned pretty much the same worthless, minimal information. Why?
It’s not the sort of question I’m asking, necessarily. It’s that these websites rely on the efforts of freelance “experts” whose main goal is to make a buck by writing as many articles as fast as possible and then to game search engines, especially Google, to generate as many hits as possible by driving their articles to the top of search results. In the advice columns they write (“How to make cash by writing for eHow!”), the emphasis is on capitalizing on attention, not at all on the topic itself.
This behavior reminds me of Garrett Hardin’s famous essay “The Tragedy of the Commons” (1968). If you’ve missed it, briefly, Hardin argues that the damage of destructive overuse or exploitation of a shared resource does not outweigh the benefit to the abuser. In the short term, the abuse of the shared resource is profitable, but the end result is the destruction of the commons. It’s an old essay, and many considered it somewhat tired, and it’s frequently dismissed because it relies on a “rational actor.”
Yesterday morning I read on Ron Silliman’s blog that he’s closing comments. That’s really too bad. The conversation there was sometimes valuable. But it was often—despite Silliman’s moderation—little more than carping back and forth as the conversation was monopolized by the same characters harping on the few issues that they always managed to shoehorn into comments, relevant or not. And I read in Silliman’s blog entry that his moderation involved reading a great deal of hate-full speech: homophobic, antisemitic, sexist. I’m betting he left out a few forms of disgusting speech. I’m not surprised he decided his effort would be best spent elsewhere.
And I’m sure that there’ll be a lot of people accusing him of censorship, including many accusations by the people who were abusing the commons Silliman offered. These folks will be angry that they no longer have Silliman’s blog for a venue because they benefitted so greatly from its large readership. But they can no longer capitalize on Silliman’s attention, nor mine. But the resource is already exhausted.
Anyway, a public thanks to Ron Silliman for the work he’s done and will continue to do at ronsilliman.blogspot.com.
Follow-up
Silliman has posted quite a long list of responses to his decision (at the bottom of the list of links). The one I found most interesting is “The Silenced Generation,” which took place on Jessica Smith’s blog just prior to his decision to close comments. And here’s one example of the “he’s censoring” response: “Ron Silliman and the Diminishment of Free Speech.” I forgot to anticipate another typical response: “Toughen up.” Nice masculinist rhetoric; strength and freedom means doing it my way?
Many have been complaining that Silliman hasn’t archived comments. As pointed out on in the comments at Jessica Smith’s blog and reposted on Silliman’s, you can always just use the Google Cache or The Wayback Machine.
