(This is from a reply to a diary at docudharma called F*** The Meta
IMO, the mechanics of blogs could be improved. Quite easily, I should think.
Basically, you should give diarists the ability to ban people from further commenting in any particular diary of theirs, if they don't think the commentator is being serious. (But only after the offending commentator makes at least one post.) Since some diarists will do so dishonestly, or because they're fanatics or overly irrational,
- people who are banned should have the ability to respond, with either the verbiage or the link to verbiage clearly shown in the diary
- the banned person should have the opportunity to troll-rate the diarist who banned them
The enhanced blogs should also display links to diarists' lifetime banning records, plus their lifetime troll ratings. (Dimensions for the latter might be in terms of number of troll ratings divided by number of diaries, divided by number of unique commentators; the troll rates should be weighted according to the "trollishness" of the person giving the troll rating. So, if a person gets banned by a large number of distinct diarists, and in a large number of diaries per diarist, the weight of their troll-rating of diarists is decreased, accordingly.)
Another mechanical approach to addressing both commentator trolling and excessive diarist irrationality , which could also be tried, is to allow the diarist to throw an optional switch (let's assume that it's on, by default), which allows the diarist to confine commentators to a single reply per day, or per X hours. (With visual cues that show you when the diary is writable, to yourself, which are updated with each page refresh.)
The idea, here, is to channel commentators in the direction of writing longer, essay-like responses to the diary (or, alternatively, to another commentator). On the negative side, it will put a damper on the sort of normal back and forth of a conversation, plus some people may have something significant to say to a number of commentators, who aren't gong to be bothered checking back in after X hours, just for the privilege of doing so.
In the case of dailykos, there are so many comments which aren't trollish, but are not really substantive, either, that one can waste a great deal of time wading through them. For such a high-volume site, at least trying some of the fixes I propose seems like a very good idea. In fact, I think I'll write a post, there, to suggest this.
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ETA: Another idea to try is to give the diarist the option to assign their per-diary banning privileges to a moderator. In this case, I believe the moderator should be named, and they should be liable to be troll-rated, as if they themselves were the diarist who had banned a commentator. Since the diarist assigned such privileges, they will still absorb troll ratings from banned commentators. This will encourage them to pick moderators who reflect their own judgments.
Unfortunately, the "community rating" schemes are highly susceptible to being gamed by trolls, themselves, COINTELPRO-like efforts, irrational cliques within a blog community (who imagine that their uniformity of irrational 'reasoning' implies rationality), etc. That doesn't seem to be a problem in some places, such as OpenLeft, but even there it might have helped things. E.g., jeffroby was banned, for no particularly good reason that I can discern. ("bad faith" was the stated reason, IIRC). If the owner of the site was in a bad mood that day, he could have expressed his displeasure in a less 'fatal' way, had these features I'm suggesting been available.