I love comments. Love how they add a depth of interaction with a readership that you could not have in traditional media. I think it’s awesome. However, net nannies of the world have a strong case for the need of an Internet tidy-up if you look at your average cross-section of comments on various China blogs and forums.
A trip to the China Daily is all around a good joke. If not for the “news“, then for the comments that come out of their forums. Stupid, vicious and vile are just a few adjectives I can attach to them.
As I run a couple blogs, I’m no stranger to them myself, but even I was left mouth open and wondering what the “author” of the diatribe was thinking when I saw the following at Just Another Laowai.
Asians are the gods most favored race. It is evident in their uniformity. It is evident in their cultures.
The gods place high barriers to entry for (some) Asians into the United States. This is yet another good example of reverse positioning, for the gods are really trying to protect those whom they grant favor upon.
There are no barriers to entry for Latinos.
When white people capitalize or exploit Asians they incurr and one day will be punished. This included Chinese buffet restaurants, so prevalient in disfavored cities and the Southern United States, for the gods hate these people and want them to incurr.
Wait… there’s more.
Hey Ryan,
Your link at the bottom is a little broken. I just saw that diatribe linked through a comment from your last post at The Humanaught – very strange stuff indeed. But it doesn’t even make sense – so we can afford to throw it into the ‘crazy’ bin.
As to comments on your websites – do you just delete the most offensive comments without a second thought? Some people are just too… something bad.
I know I edit out content that would get me kicked out of the search engines or render the website unaccessible from China – just things that have to be done in a way.
Hey Jeremy, cheers for letting me know about that link… my bad.
in regards to comments and how I moderate – I generally don’t. Unless it tastes of canned ham, or is stopping me from getting on this site, I am pretty open to letting everyone have their say.
My opinion is that if it’s really just ridiculously bad, they’ll get set straight by other commenters.
What do you mean about getting kicked out of search engines? I’ve posts on every topic known to Buddha and not had much problem being indexed.
Hi Ryan,
Every time I put an inappropriate word into a post (such as sexy or sperm), my traffic from Google drops about 90% almost immediately. I’ve had this happen twice already, the first time lasted for several months, the second time several days (I edited out the offensive content and perhaps Google was quick to re-search my site). It didn’t get me kicked out of the Index, but it got me kicked way way way back on all search results. For example, I’m usually #5 or #6 for a search for China Expat. After both of these incidences, I got kicked back to maybe page six or seven (in the 60’s and 70’s).
Don’t know why it happens seemingly only to me, but it’s enough for me to self-edit out offensive content because even though Google traffic is still quite low it’s quite discouraging.
This comment has been spammed all over the sinoblogospheraurus, just Google search the first sentence. Wait! I’ll do it for you! If you click repeat search with blah blah blah you end up with over 500 instances of this comment. Would be interested to learn the IP address of this individual…