The Volokh Conspiracy?

That's a rarity in any forum online--even the calmest people have their buttons...

My only thought, being the skeptic that I am, is that the site is moderated to give the appearance of being "civil," but that the public is not made aware of the moderation. Of course, I could be wrong--just the first thing that comes to mind.

It's basically an academic site. Prof Volokh also runs several LISTSERV mailing lists, and 'moral suasion' works there, too.

A rare instance on the web of not fouling one's own nest.

Any thoughts on why it is so?

Click to expand...

Several:

1. There are no statist moderators for posters to goad for their own amusement.
2. Trolls and really lame posters are simply ignored by other posters.
3. There's no fear that comment posters, no matter how stupid, will be interpreted as representing the site itself.
4. There's a belief that debate is a useful tool.
5. Most commenters seem to be over 30.
6. There are articles of substance, to which people respond.

Several:

1. There are no statist moderators for posters to goad for their own amusement.
2. Trolls and really lame posters are simply ignored by other posters.
3. There's no fear that comment posters, no matter how stupid, will be interpreted as representing the site itself.
4. There's a belief that debate is a useful tool.
5. Most commenters seem to be over 30.
6. There are articles of substance, to which people respond.

Click to expand...

Holy cow. Uh...can I revise my comments to agree with these?

Umm, maybe "Volokh" is a much more way cool way to transliterate the name than is "Volk"?

(Runs away, jinking and dodging...)


Please don't hurt me.

Note that there are really whack posters, trolls, hardcore authoritarians, idiots, etc. on Eugene Volokh's discussions. Some of them directly and personally attack those who write the primary articles.

No one gets all bent out of shape about it; no one worries about the impact that some idiot's post might have on libertarianism. Life goes on, and so does the discussion.

Personally, I enjoy this site because most libertarian fora are dead in the water. This place is alive, and I like it.

But I have to say that there's some inherent tension when a bunch of Boston T Party readers encounter cops, and talk about liberty. There's no way around that.

Oleg, didn't you ask Kit how she could morally become a cop in our society, given the nature of some of our laws?

I would have the same question. Of course, I figure Montana isn't California. I do not believe that one could believe in liberty and become a sworn officer in California.

Now all the social conservatives out there can feel free to disagree with me, but that should be good for a discussion, not a scolding for "cop bashing."

Blogs are fundamentally different than fora, in a couple of important ways.

*The blogowner sets the topic and tone, the commentary is secondary in priority, often being isolated from the main site by a link.

*Topics have a time limit on them, once they get pushed "below the fold", comment interest dips pretty quickly. Usually, anything of substance gets said in the first couple of days. It's pretty rare to get a comment on a stale topic, because everyone knows that replies are unlikely.

*Moderation is not obvious, and can be quite invisible.

*The content of the blog is the blogs "product", so to speak, people judge the blog mainly on what the blogowner has to say, rather than what the commenters have to say.

Here's an example: http://www.redorbit.com/news/display/?id=747011

It's a science article discussing recent evidence supporting the "one giant meteorite" hypothesis of dinosaur extinction, compared to the "swarm of many" hypothesis. The commentary is entirely OT, degenerating into a typical evolution v. creationism by way of sauran extinction via Biblical Flood train wreck. The unruly commentary really doesn't impact my assessment of the site itself.

This is distinct from a forum, where the product IS the commentary.


* I also believe that the points concerning the overal maturity and gravitas of most of the denizens of Volokh are valid. Esoteric points of law simply doesn't attract a general crowd.

I always thought a lot of the hostility from this forum was caused by people who lost a debate or had their world view challenged and then made it their personal mission to attack the other side through veiled insults every chance they got.

As an example someone would pop into every thread where people where debating someone being arrested, cop thread, or privacy thread with a comment like "patriots, take your ex-lax!" Those comments would then piss other people off and they would get hostile. Comments like that also tended to polarize the forum. Banning those types of posts would probably help.

I have often had informative comments to make but decided to stay out of a thread after someone attacked my side personally. For instance I had evidence of the Katrina gun grub that had not been mentioned anywhere in the Hurrican section. It came from people living and staying in N.O. But I decided to stay away from the stickied thread after the original poster (a moderator who should have known better) said some rude things that where directed at his fellow forum members.

The "Muslim Wars" and the huge double standards applied to different religions chased some of our better posters away as well. I have seen moderators go after people for saying Catholics reproduce at a higher rate than average, but then later on I saw a thread started by a moderator about how Muslims would out breed us all. The constant cries for deportation, genecide, and internment camps did not really help much either. It was pretty sad hearing people make comments about how even Stormfront dot com was not as bigoted and extreme as many of the comments being made here.

Having people, including moderators call whistle blowers "tin foil hatters" for saying things that where completely reasonable, supported by evidence, and that later turned out to be true, is not helping at all. Examples are the many things that happened in N.O., the rules about having to show ID on request, various shootings, heck even pointing out laws on the books or quoting government officials has caused me to be labeled as crazy. (I then turned around and proved myself right, along with the help from other posters, but still.)

The frequent accusations that anyone who disagres with the poster is not pulling their weight should also be stopped. I can not believe how often I see that "debate tactic" used. One of my big motivations for putting the free state project in my signature line was so people would stop accusing me of not writing my represenatives. I was tired of people accusing me of doing absolutely nothing when I was doing 60+ hours a month at the time.

The lack of enough moderators being able to watch the forum has caused people to say things for hundreds of posts in a thread or threads before anyone stopped them. This has caused threads to be locked and people to be banned because some posters thought it was ok to act a certian way because they saw everyone else doing it for so long. For the first several years that I posted here I spent a lot of time and effort trying to understand the intracasies of the rules, and to figure out why some people had gotten banned. I sometimes still can not tell why some posters have been banned, and in a few cases I can not tell why some posters have not gotten banned. Stating the rules in a more clear way would probably help. So would putting any new rules that get stickied for a few weeks or months and then are dropped in the "forum rules" section.

While I certainly enjoy his page I don't find the discussions in blogs to be all that engaging and much slower paced. I imagine it makes people's responses a little more carefully crafted and less prone to emotional outburst. The site seems to be mostly intellectual and probably draws a slightly different crowd that a site that has as many hobbyists as this one. Both seem to stay quite civil on the whole though. THR is very impressive for a firearms forum.