Unsafe Commenting Guidelines
An Unfortunate Necessity
I hate rules, but I hate even more commenters using the comments sections to:
Grandstand about their preferred topics no matter how irrelevant to the post
Insult and attack the author of the main essay or other commenters.
Write long diatribes of dubious value.
Unfortunately, there has been a rise in all three, especially in response to some of the more popular and controversial essays (popular and controversial are correlated here, though they are not perfectly correlated).
Therefore, I am henceforth using the following guidelines for comments. Failure to meet these guidelines places your comment at heightened risk of being removed. Continued failure to do so places YOU at risk of being blocked from commenting here at all.
The Guidelines
Criticism and disagreement are fine. Insults, ad hominem attacks, mockery of the original post or of another commenter, are not. Do not insult your host. Pretend that you’re speaking to me, and to the other commenters, in my living room over a coffee or beer, which is, in a sense, what I aspire for the comments section to be.
You can use this as an intuitive guideline: If you act like the type of ass that would ensure you would never be asked back to someone’s home, you will probably be banned.
Stay relevant to the original post. If I post something here about, say, flaws in some published article that I characterize as infected with leftist propaganda, this does not liberate you to post a mini-blog about the real or imagined evils of Democrats or liberals. You are welcome to do that of course — on your own blog site.
Keep it short, or at least not too long. 300 words is a good limit, most should be far less. I won’t delete something at, say, 322, but if you are over 400, consider shortening before posting. Anything over 500 is at risk of being deleted. Over 500 and you should write your own essay on your own site.
Please do not tell me how to run this site or what I should be posting here. Re-read the “About” page for an understanding of why you may be able to find almost anything here.
Do not dominate comment threads, particularly in a one-on-one argument. A good guideline is that if your comments constitute over 10% of the comments on a thread, you’re posting too much.
If you are somehow inspired to write a 1000 word essay in response to what you believe are the misguided idiots posting here, contact me via Substack email. If you follow Unsafe Science regularly, you know that I love guest posts. Guest essays that are critical are fine; insulting not so much.
Do respond to the visible content of the essay or comments’ statements. Do not engage in mindreading. It is a loser’s game. You are almost definitely wrong because people are terrible at reading minds. Especially avoid misanthropic mindreading — don’t tell people they “want” terrible things or “don’t care” about what you believe to be the “right” things — you have no idea. From The Orwelexicon:
Do not engage in Cathy Newmanism, telling people what they “really” believe.
Finally, do not cry “censorship” if I delete your comment. I reserve the right to trash comments that are uncivil, grandstanding on irrelevant topics, trollish in tone, or otherwise inappropriate. You have no “right” to have every comment you make published on this site. Newspapers do not publish every letter to the editor or submitted op-ed. Academic journals do not publish every article submitted. TV stations do not air every proposed show. Call in radio shows do not allow every caller air time. I try to use as light a hand as I can consonant with keeping an atmosphere of civility and sanity. If I delete your comments, you are free to start your own site. Denounce me for “censorship” or “hypocrisy” or whatever evil you impute to me on Substack or The Medium or whatever for “censorship” on your own site. Go for it. You have been deleted, or maybe even blocked, but you have not been “censored.”
Deletion is a form of quality control and is a far cry from censorship. Readers who are obnoxious and keep making the same argument again and again, adding nothing new, will be considered trolls and may be blocked from posting comments altogether.
The tone here should be civil discourse, which permits disagreement, including sharp ones. It does not permit sneers, insults, misanthropic attributions, and irrelevant diatribes.
These guidelines were largely inpsired by (and even occasionally copied verbatim from) those used by Jerry Coyne over at whyevolutionistrue.com, which is his excellent blog site that I highly recommend.
Very well thought-out and presented comment guidelines. Good to see you care enough about your channel to demand commenters demonstrate similar consideration for others in order to continue to express themselves here.
Moderation is necessary to prevent comments from becoming a wasteland. Delete comments to your heart's content. Just not mine. ;-)
In all seriousness, I wish Substack had a moderation option such that comments must be approved before they appear in the first place. That usually prevents issues from starting in the first place and is less work for the moderator in the long term.