What constitutes a diary worth recommended or a comment worth giving an outstanding rating has burned up oodles of bandwidth around this place. But something I don't think has been discussed much is what should inspire people to unrecommend a diary.
What's prompted my ruminations on this subject is the diary by Soj currently on the recommended list. It presents a pretty compelling theory that the outrage over the editorial cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammed. The problem, however, is these sentences and everything that follows them:
So what triggered this? Well it takes a blog to explain it. What CNN and the other traditional media failed to tell you is that the thousand gallons of fuel added to the fire of outrage came from none other than our old pals Saudi Arabia.
One of my biggest concerns with blogs--really, with life in general--is the passive acceptance with which too many people consume news, fact and opinion. I don't do it in every diary or blog post I read, but typically if I'm engaged with something, I follow the links. The sources one uses, the care with which they use their sources, and the modesty they exercise in basing assertions on the facts and arguments at hand tell me a lot about the person's writerly ethos. In short, it helps me determine if I should trust and respect them, and if I do develop a trust with them, over time I will search out their writings and they can come to shape my own thinking about the world around us.
So, I followed the link to the blog that would supposedly explain the Saudi role behind fanning the flame of outrage over the cartoons. And what do I find? SATIRE! The blog doesn't explain anything, it presents satirical memos written as if they came from a Saudi official, when clearly they did not and are intended to present some provacative--and , I fully concede, possibly even correct--theories about what may be behind the spreading outrage over the cartoons. But in terms of evidence, it provides none.
I don't like being manipulated. And I detest misuse of fact, authority and trust. It's manipulation of facts and trust that got us in to the war in Iraq. And I don't like seeing it on Daily Kos. Usually I think it's sloppiness, but sometimes it's harder to discern motive. But whatever the case, one of the primary reasons for unrecommending a diary one initially thought was worthy of extra attention is finding out a source is compromised. Just because on the surface a source may seem OK, it doesn't mean the source is in fact legitimate. For instances, I've attracted the wrath of some Kosmopolitans for asserting, with examples, that Anti-war.com is NOT a legitimate source. Whatreallyhappened.com is a joke, and is arguably no more reliable than Lyndon LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review. And obviously finding out that a source doesn't come close to supporting the assertions a writers claims it does is, in my mind, a reason to unrecommend a diary that you initially thought lauditory.
But what else? What other reasons can you think of to unrecommend a diary, or to resist calls to unrecommend a diary? We're still figuring out this only community stuff with recommended features like those available with Scoop. Surely game theorists will try to analyze some of this behavior over time. But in terms of what we think should be community standards, what do you suggest?