Infuriatingly it usually involved having just spent 5 minutes reading something and then spending 10 minutes to hours writing a reasoned and thoughtful response. (Because every troll knows that’s what the internet was designed to encourage, right?)
After pressing the reply button (even scarier than hitting the “Publish” button because you don’t have the ability to edit it after-the-fact and someone else now “owns” your content), you see the dreaded notice that your comment is “AWAITING MODERATION…”
Will they approve it? Will they delete it? Is it gone forever? Did they really get it, or did it disappear into the ether? Oh #%@$!, I wish I’d made a back up copy because that took a bit of work, and I might like to refer to it again later. Are they going to censor my thoughts? Silence my voice?
I Get It: The Need for Moderation
I completely get the need for moderation on the web, particularly as almost no one is as kind, considerate, courteous, or civil as my friend P.M. Forni. (And who could be — he literally wrote the book(s) on the subject!)
On a daily basis, I’m spammed by sites desperate to sell or promote FIFA coins, Ray Bans, Christian Louboutin shoes, or even worse types of hateful blather, so I too gently moderate. I try to save my own readers from having to see such drivel, and don’t want to provide a platform or audience for them to shout from or at, respectively.
I won’t be silenced anymore
No longer can I be silenced by random moderators that I often don’t know.
Why, you ask?
I now post everything I write online onto a site I own first.
Because now, thanks to philosophies from the Indieweb movement and technologies like webmention, which growing numbers of websites are beginning to support, I now post everything I write online onto a site I own first. There it can be read in perpetuity by anyone who chooses to come read it, or from where I can syndicate it out to the myriad of social media sites for others to read en masse. (And maybe my voice has more reach than the site I’m posting to?)
Functionality like webmention (a more modern version of pingback or trackback) then allows my content to be sent to the website I was replying to in an elegant way for (eventual?) display. Or I can copy and paste it directly if they don’t support modern protocols.
Sure, they can choose to moderate me or choose not to feature my viewpoint on their own site if they wish, but at least I still own the work I put into those thoughts. I don’t have to worry about where they went or how I might be able to find them in the future. They will always be mine, and that is empowering.
Join me
Would you like to own your own data? Own your own domain? Free yourself from the restrictions of the social media silos like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter? Visit Indieweb.org to see how you can do these things. Chat with like-minded individuals who can also help you out. Attend an upcoming IndieWebCamp or a local Homebrew Website Club in your area, or start one of your own!
This is nearly the opposite of an effective pitch for widespread IndieWeb adoption. I know that’s not really what you were writing to do, but… yeah.
Mike, it’s an edge case for many to be sure (I don’t expect my mother to encounter it often), but just another of hundreds of other reasons to be part of the Indieweb. The “big reasons” sell themselves but aren’t the entire raison d’etre, and I like to document some of the others when I encounter them.
I and others in academia (most of my audience) run up against it fairly frequently in relation to scientific journal articles. It’s particularly egregious when big publishers like Elsevier, who insist they’re adding value for their steep subscription rates, under-manage their sites and don’t always approve comments that further scientific communication or require additional work on their part to editorially change/modify what they’ve published in print.
The particular case that spawned this particular “rant”, still hasn’t “approved” the comment/question I made, yet they approved a dozen or more “me too” congratulatory comments around mine that did nothing to further the conversation in the community in which it was posted.
Further proof that you can’t please all of the people all of the time…
Exactly as I wrote a while ago: https://tinokremer.nl/blog/2015-07-09-why-i-write-on-my-own-site-first/
[Editor’s note: The original copy of this link disappeared/moved, so it has been redirected to a copy on the Internet Archive]
“I think that ServiceWorkers are important because they make websites behave more like books” https://robinrendle.com/essays/futures-of-typography/%23fn:17 #Indieweb
This Article was mentioned on boffosocko.com