It never ceases to amaze me how the knee-jerk reaction to deal with problems is to create regulations: Governments, Municipalities, Homeowners’ Associations..etc – they all think the best way to reach harmony is by regulating everything. No, thank you. Free Markets are a superior mechanism to sort most issues out. Be it real, tangible markets, or the market if ideas.
Tim O’Reilly’s draft Code of Conduct stems from the ugly attacks against Kathy Sierra, and is an attempt to bring civility to the blogosphere, which in itself is a nice, albeit naive idea. I actually (almost) agree with the first point:
1. We take responsibility for our own words and for the comments we allow on our blog.
We are committed to the “Civility Enforced” standard: we will not post unacceptable content, and we’ll delete comments that contain it.
We define unacceptable content as anything included or linked to that:
– is being used to abuse, harass, stalk, or threaten others
– is libelous, knowingly false, ad-hominem, or misrepresents another person,
– infringes upon a copyright or trademark
– violates an obligation of confidentiality
– violates the privacy of others
Personally, I can’t accept some of the subsequent points. I will not commit to:
- always connecting privately before responding publicly,
- taking up arms when someone is attacked,
- banning anonymous comments.
Not that I like anonymous comments, but my current blog platform has a somewhat awkward registration process, and without it, providing information is optional. Besides, if commenters want to hide, they will, just registering with bogus credentials. Which is the weak point of this entire Code of Conduct concept: only the bloggers who already act 
accordingly will embrace it.
This will NOT stop trolling, hate speech, personal attacks, libelous posts. There will be some who proudly display the opposite “anything goes” badge, but the real trolls and slimebags won’t. Their style has never been “shields up”.
But my biggest issue with the Code of Conduct is the underlying philosophy. We don’t need regulations, most of us (?) prefer/enforce civility, although we have our own definition to what it actually means (my blog is my castle…) – let the Market Forces sort out the rest. Readers, commenters have a choice, and protection is as easy as “unsubscribe“. Blogs that don’t follow basic civility rules will become magnets for trolls, and it’s probably fine with them. In the meantime, my own comment policy is:
- I prefer named comments, but won’t disallow anonymous ones
- I allow debate, disagreements, criticism
- I delete hate speech, extreme attacks – most of the time. The exception may be to leave it when I make it a precedent.
The road to police-state (and blogosphere) is paved with good intentions. The danger is that we rarely notice when we first step on it.
Update: This is becoming the hot issue on TechMeme. Mike Arrington, Robert Scoble, Mathew Ingram, Jeff Jarvis, Kent Newsome won’t wear the (Sheriff’s) badge, amongst others.
See other related posts: Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim, Connecting the Dots, Guardian Unlimited, Smalltalk Tidbits …, 901am, WebProNews , Digital Common Sense, robhyndman.com, rexblog.com, Worker Bees Blog, IP Democracy, The Blog Herald, duncanriley.com, Mark Evans and Blogspotting … the list grows as I type. Check TechMeme.
Update: The tribe has spoken: bloggers (almost) unanimously have vote the Code out.
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