Thoughts on O’Reilly’s proposed Code of Conduct

Tim O’Reilly set off a firestorm today in the tech blogosphere with his proposed Code of Conduct for blogging. Some are sensible, some a bit off, but what strikes me is that they basically are dealing with attacks coming from within the blogosphere, which seems more than a bit inward. Because if, say, your blog is political, the attacks sometimes come from outside the the world of blogging where you may well have real enemies.

My main blog, Politics is the Zeros is antiwar political and supported immigrants rights. During the huge immigration rights marches last year, Polizeros got dozens and dozens of vile, racist comments, all of which were deleted before they appeared.

The Polizeros comment policy appears whenever someone makes a comment.

Comments subject to deletion at whim of capricious webmaster. Disagreements are ok. Flames, trolls, and right-wing attacks are not.

Nuke the nasty comments before they appear. That’s the best way to keep an active comments area where people feel comfortable.

Some of O’Reilly’s Code isn’t doable in politics.

We connect privately before we respond publicly.

When we encounter conflicts and misrepresentation in the blogosphere, we make every effort to talk privately and directly to the person(s) involved–or find an intermediary who can do so–before we publish any posts or comments about the issue.

This assumes the conflict is some internal blog thing where you can email someone first to try and clear it up before responding. That’s not possible in politics. An attack on the antiwar movement be a right wing senator needs to be responded to fast, saying you need to contact them privately first is silly.

4. When we believe someone is unfairly attacking another, we take action.

When someone who is publishing comments or blog postings that are offensive, we’ll tell them so (privately, if possible–see above) and ask them to publicly make amends.

Again, this assumes it’s all just some collegial misunderstanding that can be cleared up with an email or two.

5. We do not allow anonymous comments.

All comments are anonymous, unless you know the person. You can post “non-anonymously” on blogs via registered email address, but such addresses are trivial to get. So how are comments via an email address any better than anon ones?

So, I disagree with some of the code, think other parts are fine, and wonder why this met with such a firestorm of protest.