What with all the brou-ha-ha over needing new guidelines for posting standards, the response, and the meta diary over needing new trolling standards, I figure the door was open to bring up a subject that has been bothering me for some time.
We need new standards for DKos commenters.
I mean, think about what we've seen recently which indicates the low state to which the level of commenting has fallen here:
- Spelling has become atrocious. How many times, in recent memory, have we seen misspellings such as "apothecary" when "apotheosis" was intended? Or, "prostitute" instead of "provocative"? Where will this all end--when someone spells "antidisestablishmentarianism" as "antacid"? What will happen to clear discourse then?
- Paragraph breaks--have paragraph breaks gone the way of the dodo? Walls of words, with no break to be seen for miles. Do these people even stop to take a breath when speaking?
- And, while I'm at it, what about run-on sentences which never seem to end, which continue on unabated, which can't seem to ever get to the point, taking side-trips whenever the next shiny object comes into view, completely losing the point that the commenter was attempting to make, while forever being seen as a fool or an idiot? Ummm...where was I?
- How many comments have we seen which, in their pathetic manner, used far too many words to say, simply, "I agree"? What a waste of bandwidth of bits. Perhaps we need to add a "me too" button to the site. Which, when pressed, sends an AJAX command to the user's browser shutting it down, with extreme prejudice.
- And what is it with the lack of good grace in not using "EOM" or "NT" in the subject line when the body of the comment is empty (actually empty or empty of meaningful content)? Do these people have no understanding of the time it takes to open such comments, only to be utterly disappointed?
- Poorly done HTML, causing presentation errors which make it hard to read the information presented? What ever happened to the "blink" tag to draw attention to important text?
- And using *** in the middle of bad words. Where did that ever go to? Do these people not understand how sensitive we all are?
There are more complaints I could lodge, I'm sure--but that is left as an exercise to the reader/
People, people, people! Where will this all end? We must unite to save this site!
We must have rules for who is allowed to comment, and what they are allowed to say--and, more important, we must have someone to proofread all submissions before they are posted.
The entire progressive movement is at stake!