I really appreciate the high quality level of the comments this blog is attracting. But quality is often a gaussian distribution, and the more the number of readers is growing, the more often I get the occasional comment which is not so high quality. Just over the last few days we had the "pig fucker", the "THINK MORE NEWB", and somebody whose comment had absolutely nothing to do with the subject of the post or the blog. And I'm left wondering what to do.
I have the power to delete comments, and I'm already wielding that power to delete all comment spam advertising. But one of the reasons why I created this blog was that I felt that on some game message boards the deleting or censoring of comments was done in an unfair fashion. There are game message boards where criticizing the game in question gets your post deleted, and there are guild message boards where criticizing the officers gets your post deleted. I don't want to delete anybodies post here just because I don't agree with his opinion, or because he is critical of me.
On the other hand I don't want this blog's comment section to sink to the depth of the typical game forum in quality. I don't like people shouting at each other in ALL CAPS or using insults instead of arguments to defend their position. To quote Engels: "one person’s freedom ends there, where the freedom of another person begins". You have the right to defend your opinion, but you don't have the right to shout down somebody else's opinion. So I'm leaning towards deleting comments that don't contribute to the discussion, but are just insulting the other participants in that discussion.
What do you think? How would you like the comment section of this blog to be moderated?
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