Revising TYWKIWDBI once again

These are turbulent, rapidly evolving, and extremely interesting times, and it's time for TYWKIWDBI to evolve as well.

This blog has gone through various iterations (always at the same address), with early tweaks in the layout, the headers and footers, the sidebar contents, topics for the posts, and even the translation of the acronym (twice).  The sites I harvest have changed (many have died), and the material I select has varied, as have some of my views.

Today I decided to recheck how much I've personally changed by once again taking the Political Compass test.  I've done this before, and blogged about it, in 2007, in 2009, and most recently in February of 2018 (charts at that post show me to be slightly to moderately - but not dramatically - left of center and more libertarian than authoritarian).   Here are my results from today:

So I'm now more deeply embedded in the lower left quadrant.  I don't think that represents a change in my attitude toward the issues, but rather a more vigorous set of replies, clicking agree/disagree strongly rather than just agree/disagree.

I encourage all readers to take the survey here.  Feel free to post your x/y coordinates in the Comments section if you wish.

This drift in my personal political compass will inevitably inform the choices I make about what to blog and what insights to offer about the source material.  It will also (immediately) affect the comments written on the posts.

As TYWKIWDBI enters its fourteenth year, it now sports an accumulation of over 16,000 posts, and equally as important over 57,000 comments.

This is actually not a public blog.  It is certainly not a commercial one, eschewing even a hint of advertising or click-related revenue, and not even displaying a tip jar.  I started this blog in December of 2007 as a personal venture, as a way to share interesting stuff with my family and friends.  After a while outsiders started finding their way to it.  I distinctly remember in January of 2008 writing a post in greeting to a visitor from Argentina, and noting at the time that "so far this blog has been viewed in 31 of the United States plus Canada, the U.K., Greece, Pakistan, Argentina, Mexico, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Finland, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Brazil, Panama, and Sweden."

As time went by, some visitors became regular "followers" (currently 1621), and some have become regular contributors via the Comments sections of various posts.  It has pleased me to no end to see the insight and expertise displayed by many readers here.  About ten years ago when Andrew Sullivan was a prominent blogger, he offered this advice:

"Take your readers as part of your community. This is a dialogue, not a monologue. With any luck the dialogue then becomes a conversation. No single person knows very much, and what he knows he soon forgets. So the collective consciousness, or collective mind, of the world out there is what... is really what we’re trying to do..."

I have been told by some readers of the blog that TYWKIWDBI is one of the few places they visit where they routinely read most of the comments on the posts.  But comments vary enormously in quality (exemplified here).  Back in 2009 I wrote a megapost about what I considered to be the main categories of comments, summarized here as...

A) Comments that enhance, clarify, or correct
B) Handclaps from appreciative readers
C1) The “loyal opposition” begs to differ
C2) The “vehement opposition”
C3) “The Fringe” wishes you were dead
D) Profanity
E) Mindless spacefiller and comments by Captain Obvious
F) Please feed me with a spoon, Mommy
G) Spam
H) The Troll emerges from under the bridge

It seems to be taking me forever to get to the point here...

There has been a longstanding trend towards less civility on the internet, and TYWKIWDBI comment threads are not immune.  I have wasted uncounted hours moderating and intervening in shit fits and cat fights between polarized, vehement, and uncompromising readers - to the point that for controversial topics I have recently started closing comments to save myself time.  That has been necessary on posts regarding religion (where the snarky anti-religious comments are worse than the skeptical nonreligious and pious pro-religious ones) and politics.

For posts regarding Donald Trump, the polarity seems absolute.  There appears to be no middle ground regarding his tweets or actions.   The other factor influencing potential Trump-related posts is that many people (myself included) don't want to see TYWKIWDBI filled with such material when it's already widespread everywhere on the internet.  To that end I started sequestering most of my Trump material into "Trump clumps" (sample here), but I stopped doing that a year ago.  My bookmark folder where I store Trump-related material currently has 249 links in it.

My dilemma now is that I don't want to write posts and leave the "comments closed," because I really do appreciate and enjoy the best comments (categories A and C1 above).  If the comments are closed, the post just becomes me screaming into the void with no echo returning.

And I don't want to skip the controversial topics altogether, because this blog ultimately will serve for me as an ongoing diary of my senior years, and I want to be able to look back at the way we were.  There is so much going on right now, and I want to provide a forum where these issues are read and discussed.

So here's the new editorial policy of TYWKIWDBI.  Controversial topics will continue - and accelerate.  All posts will have open comment threads.  But all comments have to be reviewed by me before becoming readable by the public. And I'm going to curate ruthlessly - continuing to delete any comment that insults another reader and also any comment that I consider inflammatory or that I find offensive.  I make no pretense of being "fair and balanced," and snarky comments from readers in the blue quadrant of the top image in this post are probably doomed.

We'll see how it goes.

Update one year later: open comment threads on predictably controversial subjects are too much of a hassle to curate.  I am not pre-emptively closing comments on some posts just to save myself time and psychic energy.