"I was drowning, while all the other moms I interacted with seemed to be blissfully skipping through motherhood."

"'It must be me, I thought — I’m just not a natural mother.' She realized she was anything but alone after receiving her 'first random comment,' she said. 'That comment led me to that reader’s blog,' she added, 'and from there I discovered a whole world of moms. And these moms, unlike any I’d met before, actually understood me! They struggled and shared the same frustrations.' In addition to doing her own venting, Ms. Smokler provided those mothers a forum to anonymously confess their taboo thoughts and experiences...."

From "Jill Smokler, Who Blogged as Scary Mommy, Dies at 48/A mother of three, she turned a whim into an online powerhouse, sharing a warts-and-all look at parenting that attracted millions of readers" (NYT). (Smokler died of glioblastoma.)

Sunrise — 7:04.

There was thin snow in the air, but nothing to show for it on the ground. So much for the warnings of 2 to 6 inches. It was a little blustery, and we were the only ones out there, witnessing the nonappearance of the sun and immersed in lively conversation.

"What's another way to say 'lively conversation'? I don't like the cliché" —  I asked Grok, knowing I'd get nothing useful, just trash like "electric back-and-forth," "crackling exchange," "vibrant sparring," and "kinetic banter." Or maybe if I'd thought of one of those by myself, I'd like it. That's the trouble with help-seeking. What you get is tainted with irritating helpfulness.

"What's another way to say 'irritating helpfulness'?" — "patronizing eagerness," "meddlesome benevolence," "grating do-goodery," "insufferable solicitude," "cloying caretaking," "smothering support," "irksome officiousness," "fussy do-gooding," "tedious tutelage"....

"What's another way to say 'write about whatever you like in the comments'?" — "Say the thing you’re actually thinking," "Ramble freely—no judgment zone," “Vent, rave, or tangent away," "Comment like nobody’s watching (but we are, and we want it)," "I’m genuinely curious what’s crossing your mind—tell me," "Unleash your brain dump"....

It wasn't that cold out there, but look at the glamorous furs I wore:

I've been terrible about checking the spam filter lately.

I just released a lot of comments that had gotten caught there in the last few weeks. My apologies! I need to remember to check that place.

The order of orders: chronological order.

I found — with kind help — a way to get rid of the reply function in the comments. I hope you, like me, enjoy the return to chronological order. I never liked comments jumping the line, displaying above comments that had gone up earlier. It was especially bad because my browser still displayed the comments in chronological order and therefore had many comments that were replying to who knows what.

Anyway, I've said it before and I like to repeat it: the greatest order of all time is chronological order:

In the previous post, I wrote: "[Chronological order is] the most obvious order, used by lovers of order all over the world and through the grand course of time. There are other orders — alphabetical order, order of importance...."

This made me want to put order... in order.

If you are reading this on a mobile phone and can see that I've activated the "mobile" view...

 ... please let me know if this is helping you in any significant way.

I don't like how it looks and plan to turn it off again unless I can understand the benefit.

I believe one "benefit" is the ability to reply to a comment and have your reply appear under that comment. That's something I don't like. I prefer a straight line of chronological comments (and you can simply quote what you are replying to or write @username at the beginning of your comment).

UPDATE: Thanks for all the comments. I'm switching it back. Feel free to keep commenting. This is an option I could turn back on if I saw a good enough reason.

"While studies show that posts on social media that evoke negative emotions, like fear, revulsion or anger, elicit more engagement..."

"... some creators have found that negative comments have also become the most visible ones in recent years. Posts about the most lighthearted topics — whether it’s enjoying coffee with a spouse, pesto recipes or even power washing a home — can be overwhelmed by angry comments that seem to escalate rapidly.... Ms. Afualo has become known for videos that speak out against hateful or mean comments. The videos typically show one such comment, which Ms. Afualo then breaks down, highlighting systemic issues at play and sometimes mocking the poster, topped off with her signature high-pitched cackle. 'My typical response, depending on the severity, is to farm content out of it,' she said. One of her recent videos focused on a user’s comment asking why she had 'no ring' after having been in a relationship for years, to which she responded: 'You’re worried about me having a ring? How about you worry about your suffering — alone.'..."

From "How Creators Are Facing Hateful Comments Head-On/Ignore vitriol, or turn it into content? Creators like Kacie Rose and Drew Afualo share their tips for dealing with a harsh comments section" (NYT).

You have to chose which negative comments to respond to. You'll get more of what you reward, and any response to your haters will encourage them, especially if you look as though you've been angered or saddened. They like the action, but maybe action is what you want to. Afualo's phrase "farm content out of it" is telling. Even if your on-line creation is a content farm, you care about what you are farming. You can decide to grow back-and-forth negativity — trash talking. That may be the tendency of the internet. But don't encourage the weeds to take over your farm. Or is weed farming the most lucrative enterprise?

Dancing across the blurred lines of appropriateness along the legal landscape and shifting social tapestry.

You may wonder why I moderate the comments. If only they could just flow freely, like the thoughts in your head late at night. It's not just the trolls. It's also the spam that the spam filter doesn't always catch. And nowadays, it can use AI to compose the compliment that's supposed to provide camouflage for the link it wants to post. This came in overnight:

If someone dies and I see fit to blog about it and you might be the first commenter, don't just write something showing you don't know or care much at all...

... about this person. That's really rude. I just deleted a comment but I wanted to state the general principle on the front page so everyone can see it. Stop doing this please. You don't have to comment. Plus, there's always a link to something you can read. This is a special subcategory of my general rule for the first comment — or first few comments — on a post. Here's how I word it to myself: Don't shit on the post.

"I have been lazy my entire life. I just got by in school, including college where I finished near the bottom of my class...

"... although I had superior SAT & GRE scores. I got a government job by scoring well on their exam (and had the required sheepskin). I continued to be lazy by being highly efficient. My supervisors always praised my work and considered me a top employee even though I was putting in little effort. Eventually, I retired early. When I am not wandering around museums and the streets of foreign cities, I spend my time reading and philosophysing (daydreaming). I also post comments. There's a lot more to life than work."

Writes a commenter named Paerdegat at a WaPo advice column where the question comes from a man who is absurdly disgusted with his wife because she, unlike him, is not using the extra 30 hours — gained by not commuting to work — to be "productive." The remote work for both of them is full-time — in the field of law — and both completely fulfill household chores and cooking. 

But he has "read 25 biographies, developed decent conversational skills in two foreign languages, upped my running program to the point that I am marathon-ready, and started volunteering for voter registration advocacy." 

All she does with the leftover time is read fantasy novels — "books better suited to children" — watch some TV — not crap, but History Channel documentaries — something he calls "exercise," and this thing he puts in scare quotes: "unwind."

Which character do you most identify with?

the husband

the wife

the commenter

 

pollcode.com free polls

I didn't plan for yesterday to be so momentous.

It certainly wasn't an Easter idea. Who am I to step on Easter? 

I had a post — put up before sunrise — about a column by a bishop who spoke of "recovering the strangeness of Easter," but he wasn't saying make your Easter Sunday strange — do something strange in your life. He wanted you to engage with the strangeness of the Christian belief in the resurrection of Jesus. That was no call to perform strangeness in the drama of my own little life.

I went out for my usual sunrise run. It wasn't a big showy sunrise, but there was a gentle softness on the lake that translated into luscious strips of color in the photographs. I ended up posting 8 of the photographs, lined up chronologically. I don't think I've ever presented the sunrise photographs like that.

And those 2 posts together, with nothing more, could have made a solid Easter Sunday on the blog, a change from the usual day on the blog, with more seriousness and beauty than the usual style. There's much more to the day than what shows up on the blog, and it's good to have some days when the blog side of life is minimal.

But the blog side of life turned maximal, because I put up one more post. I'd come back from my sunrise run, and running gets me thinking and putting my thoughts in new order. As soon as I got back home, I put up the post, "I'm considering changing the approach to comments on this blog." I spelled out a few options and started a conversation. The results of the poll were very clear:

"Keep it the way it is" — that is, let comments flow into new posts unmoderated and deal with problems as they come up by deleting the trolls and the spam and so forth. I like the free flow too, but unlike the rest of you, I have to continually tend to the problems, and whenever I step away from the blog to go about my life in the material world, I have background static: I wonder what's happening in the comments. Do I need to get in there and deal with a troll infestation? There was an open door to anyone in the world to make a mess of a place that I had bound myself to protect and that I had protected for 17 years.

I didn't try to skew the poll by telling you about the burden it has become for me. I just wanted to see what you thought, and it's nice to know that the majority of poll-takers were happy with the experience I had worked so hard to create. The behind-the-scenes work for me isn't something that should concern you. Quite the opposite. The backstage labor isn't part of the show. 

I was interested to see what people would say in the comments. That's the up side of comments for me. I like to read what people have to say. I'm used to the sense of seeing the readers and feeling the camaraderie. But somewhere along the way in that thread that is now up over 600 comments — many of which are from me, responding to people — I could see that there is only one answer that gives me what I'm afraid I must take for myself. And that is the end of comments. 

I've chosen the least popular option — if you don't count the "Something else," which wasn't any specific option at all. You can email me by clicking here. If you email me, you need to say if you don't want to be quoted on the blog, because I may select quotes from the email to use in updates to the blog. But the freewheeling chattiness of the comments section is gone. I'm sad to lose it. 

In that long thread yesterday, a lot of people told me that they come to my blog not for me but for the comments. They seemed to think that argued in favor of my continuing to carry the burden of moderating the comments. It cut the other way. I didn't plan for yesterday to be so momentous, but it was that argument — augmented with the threat that I would lose traffic, the all-important, precious traffic — that pushed me toward decisive action.

So now, here I am, blogging on alone, without the hefty support of a comments section under this post. I'm writing this paragraph, and that's it. It's not a kick-off to a conversation. It stands on its own. You've read it — now, you're free. There's nothing more to do. No remarks to make. You'll see — if you continue on as a reader — what difference it makes in me as a writer. That's something I want to see too.

At the Sunrise Café...

... you can talk until dawn. With moderation, of course. None of the extremism you find elsewhere. We're not moderating with extremism, so we won't moderate out extremism. It's just that whatever you write — moderate or extreme — is going to have to wait until we, in due time, release comments from the holding pen. Then why moderate?, you may ask, but I'll bet you have more interesting things to say.

And think about using the Althouse Portal to do your Amazon shopping. (The link is always at the top of the sidebar.)

The photograph was taken today at 5:26. And here's 5:30:



Driving home, I stopped at another vantage point and got this at 5:49:



The Canada geese are not nice. Look at that twisted neck! He was whipping his head around to give me a dirty look.

Framed without those birds:

"To better understand Locals, think of it as an intersection of Patreon, YouTube, and social media, or as Rubin calls it, 'digital homes for creators.'"

"To participate, content creators with some established following buy into Locals, which works with them to develop a website or app — depending upon needs and objectives — allowing each creator to operate their own personal website and community of followers and crowd-funders. Each creator determines his own rules of conduct for his community and monetary threshold for access. For instance, Rubin’s rules for his site are essentially don’t do anything illegal and don’t be a trolling jerk, and his subscription cost for community buy-in is a $3 minimum. Chronological content feeds can function as video receptacles, a creator messaging feed, and a social engagement tool for subscribers, among other things...."

I'm reading this piece in The Federalist from last December: "Dave Rubin Launches Creator Hub ‘Locals’ To Counter Big Tech: ‘Small Is The New Big’/Nearly a year after leaving Patreon, Rubin says his new tech company Locals is the solution, taking power from online behemoths and placing it into the hands of individual creators."

I've heard of this place because Scott Adams talks about it on his podcast. He's moving his work onto it, and I'd like to take a look. I'd probably subscribe, but I need to look at it first! I get this far:



I'm not going to join something I can't see at all.

I started looking at that yesterday as I was contemplating moving my own work onto this site or something like it. I'm not considering closing this blog, just ending the comments here and having a parallel blog with commenting on the same posts. I'd work on various extras (podcasting, etc.).  Anyway, I think the commenting community could flourish without the need for burdensome and annoying moderation.

But with Locals, I cannot even get to the point where I can see what I would be using. I created an account over there but it didn't get me to a place where I could get a feel for writing in that format! It's just not user-friendly enough for me to get started.

And even as I'm contemplating moving my own work into a membership format, I'm feeling my own unwillingness to join anything. I couldn't bring myself to click to "join" the Scott Adams "community," even though I really wanted to see what it looks like, and I'm willing to speak openly about it here. It's not as though I'm a secret consumer of Scott Adams material. I just resist joining. And I'm not drawn in by the idea of being in a "community."

ADDED: I see that I wrote "I think the commenting community could flourish" and then "And I'm not drawn in by the idea of being in a 'community.'" Is that inconsistent? Not really, I don't comment on other blogs, and I don't look for in-person opportunities to comment on various issues. This blog exists and has persisted as a daily activity for 16 years because I'm not the community type.

What does it mean that I put up a picture of a beautiful sunrise and the first comment contains the words "full panic mode"?

1. It means that Trump Derangement Syndrome has burst out into a raging pandemic that includes the coronavirus and anything else that comes along. (In the car ride home from my sunrise run, the CNN announcer at the top of the hour said, breathlessly, that yesterday the stock market took its biggest one-day plunge ever, "12 thousand points," before correcting it to "12 hundred points." We're supposed to feel as though it's 12 thousand, when it's only 12 hundred. Add a zero to every number to feel the feeling of today.)

2. It means that any photograph on the Althouse blog signifies an open thread, and that's actually true and something I've said many times. I'm not needy or bizarre enough to expect every sunrise pic to get comments like "beautiful," "one of your best," and other Facebookish clutter. If I did, I wouldn't have written "expect every sunrise pic to get comments like...." I'd have written "expect every sunrise photograph to garner comments like...." And you know I'm not that kind of blogger. So I understand that the comments would tend to be about whatever's in the news that I'm not blogging about in the same proportion as the news, and obviously, right now, that's coronavirus, coronavirus, coronavirus.

3. The commenter was going meta on the news coverage — "Wow. Drudge is in full panic mode today." The commenter is not looking at the sunrise and saying "Panic!" The commenter is, perhaps, looking at the sunrise and perceiving the harmony and grandeur of nature and the modest impression human footsteps make upon it, and he is observing and mocking the press in panic mode.

4. "... and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.... And then shall many be offended, and shall betray one another, and shall hate one another. And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many. And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold. But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.... [T]he lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west.... [T]he sun [shall] be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken..." (Matthew 24).

What's your reaction to the new approach to comment moderation we've been using on this blog over the last few weeks?

What's your reaction to the new approach to moderation over the last few weeks?

It's really troublesome to me.

It's a bit frustrating but I get that there are reasons for it.

It doesn't change anything for me/I didn't even notice.

It's improved the experience.

 

pollcode.com free polls

UPDATE: The results:

"Which post had that comment?" I ask after checking for the comment in last night's café...

... which begins with a photograph of flowers.

The line has become a running joke around here at Meadhouse: "The world is falling apart, and YOU'RE GARDENING?!?"

Where was that if not in the post that shows Meade's garden?

But it wasn't a comment, Meade tells me. In just one day, I'd lost track of the source and imagined we were talking about one of my trolls. And that demonstrates the perfection of this cartoon (in The New Yorker) by the great Roz Chast:



IN THE COMMENTS: Ignorance is Bliss said:

I made an on-topic comment about the garden, noting that any real gardener could tell how bad a gardener Trump is.
Then the zinnia started obsessively attacking me.
I sent you a private email requesting that you rip out all the zinnia, but of course you did not.
Your new weeding policy is a joke...

"We’ve relabeled 'comments' as 'conversations' to help create an environment where everyone is welcome and encouraged to share their thoughts."

From "Goodbye 'moderators,' hello 'audience voice reporters': Here’s how The Wall Street Journal is refocusing the comments to incentivize better behavior."

We decided we could do more to foster elevated discourse and to welcome broader parts of our audience to join in conversations around our articles....

We know there will inevitably be a small group of people who may not like the changes, but there is a far larger group that would like to contribute to audience conversations, if the postings became more thoughtful....

Heavy commenters are often not reading much of the articles they comment on. They go to the headline, sometimes scan a small part of the story, and skip right on down to the comment box....

[W]e have concluded that overly focusing on the small subset of users who comment frequently and want no one intervening at all in their comments is costing us the opportunity of engaging with our much larger, growing, and diversifying audience.

Indeed, when we looked at the demographics of our heavy commenters, we found they don’t represent the Journal as a whole. That led us to focus on the people who are not commenting as much. Women and younger people have been less represented among our commenters than they are among our subscribers, so we took a look at what was keeping them away. What we heard was they want to feel safe from bullying and share their comments in a forum in which they won’t be attacked....

Thanks to Leslie Graves, in last night's café, for pointing to that article. I'm giving this post my "blog commenting" tag because it relates to my experience here on the blog. Consider that a prompt for the conversation here. To me, the WSJ's observations seem pretty obvious. The trick is what to do about it. Comments are great and comments are horrible. To me, it's an endless struggle.

Thanks for adapting to the new comments policy!

It's working out great from my perspective.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, here's where I hammered it out last night. I gave 4 reasons for the change, and I am already seeing 4 corresponding aspects of improvement. Thanks for adapting, and I hope you enjoy the benefits and accept the slight lag time.

There's new text above the comment composition window that explains — in case you don't already know — that all comments go through moderation now.

New evidence, answering a 14-year-old question.

On February 20, 2005, I asked whether it's "party hardy" or "party hearty." The NYT had written "party hardy," and that was the first time I'd noticed the near homophones and the potential for either word to make sense — with a slight difference of meaning:

If you're trying to wish the person well in holding up to all that drinking, it's "hardy." If you want them to have a lot of rollicking fun, it's "hearty." If you're trying to say both, stick to the spoken word. If you're the NYT, and you mean to insult the catty, exclusionary state school girls, "hardy" actually is the better choice.

 I love when people comment on old posts, especially really old posts, and I was pleased to see that "Unknown" stopped by last night to contribute this:

"What I was surprised to find was the extent to which [the 'manosphere' is] using ancient Greek and Roman figures and texts to prop up an ideal of white masculinity."

Said Donna Zuckerberg, interviewed in "Donna Zuckerberg: ‘Social media has elevated misogyny to new levels of violence’/When the academic, sister of Mark Zuckerberg, began exploring online antifeminism, she discovered far-right men’s groups were using classical antiquity to support their views" (The Guardian). She's an "academic" in the sense that she has a PhD (in classics). Her job is editing an on-line scholarly journal.

[I]n the case of stoicism’s sudden revival, Zuckerberg found that an active corner of Reddit was applying Hellenistic philosophy to explain the pain and hardship white western men were suffering in the 21st century. Except these men didn’t consider themselves angry – they considered themselves oppressed....

In her book [Not All Dead White Men] Zuckerberg explains that political and social movements have “long appropriated the history, literature and myth of the ancient world to their advantage....

Zuckerberg digs deep through the most popular and excruciating message boards, blogs and threads – so that, I joke, we don’t have to.... Her research, on which she set herself a limit of an hour a day, led her to essays advocating rape, posts offering advice on how to dehumanise, trick and control women, and reflections on the case against female education. “Sure, it was upsetting,” she admits. “I made a rule that if something really got to me, I’d stop right there for the day.”...

Okay, guys, be excruciating. I'll stop right here for the nonce.

ADDED: The nonce is over. I just had to come back to say I'm reading "The Zuckerbergs of Dobbs Ferry" (New York Magazine)(linked in the Guardian article) and I've learned that Donna & Mark's mother was a psychiatrist and their father was a dentist, and:

For many years, Ed commuted daily between Brooklyn, where he kept an office, and Westchester, where his family was steadily growing: Randi arrived in 1982 and Mark in 1984. In 1987, the year his daughter Donna was born, contractors completed work on the renovation of the ground floor of the house, and Zuckerberg moved his practice full time to Dobbs Ferry....

Karen, now a licensed psychiatrist, was enlisted as his office manager—“my most overqualified employee,” Ed says. A few years later, Karen briefly attempted to return to psychiatry but returned home after a year. “She saw those people in the chair,” Ed recalls, “and she didn’t want her kids to turn out to be one of them.”

Your mother is a psychiatrist, and after you were born, she switched to being the office manager for your father the dentist, and the whole operation is home-based. She tries to get back to her profession, but can't, because of the superior importance of you, your siblings, and your father's career as a dentist. Drill down into that. What does it mean? Who knows! The psychiatrist gave up.

Moderation.

You may have noticed that I've had a problem with comment moderation. I hadn't been able to get to the page where the comments on posts older than 2 days wait for approval. Sometimes I could get through, but it was (and remains) totally unreliable. Yesterday, I figured out a work around. So, if you've been avoiding contributing to old threads — anything older than 2 days — please know that it's okay now. Your comments won't go up immediately, as they do with posts from the last 2 days, but I'll see the pending comment within a day (probably much sooner) and release it from limbo. I'll definitely read it too, which isn't true of the newer comments, which outpace my ability to read (though I do read a lot of them).

And let me just more generally thank you for commenting. It means a lot to me!