The Layoff Beard

Extended Thought ▪ I’m Not Gonna Write You A Swan Song

By Matt Sussman | Thursday, August 6th, 2009

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And to think I was done here. Oh, it was lookin’ pretty much wrapped up in a neat little bow with the previous day’s events, but sure enough SwanGate™, unlike its key players, simply will not die.

The swans who were initially thought shot by rednecks, or maybe eaten by coyotes, were in fact … hit by a car. Residents said the swans appeared to be shot, which means someone out there invented a firearm that shoots Volvos. I’d be scared if I were you.

The comments were moderated with a heavy hand, with a simple one of mine taken out:

And I thought it was swan flu.

Later a cryptic moderation message was planted afterward, saying that “we have removed three comments from this post that were either off-topic or did not further the conversation.” They then linked back to their community guidelines, which I have already read before enough times that I could probably recite it like I can the Preamble. (And without help from Schoolhouse Rock!)

In all my years of Internet tomfoolery, I don’t think I have ever had to do this before, but I’m actually going to diagram, outline, and explain my comment.

And I thought it was… — This sounds harmless enough. It is referring to a thought belonging me, one Matt Sussman, so perhaps they objected to that, but for doling out the benefit of the doubt, we’ll say it ain’t.

…swan flu — A play on words. I know! Hi, my name’s Matt. Nice to meet you.

The reference is to, of course, swine flu, an overblown disease that many people thought they had contracted when the media first started saturating their inches, minutes, and pixels with it. Swine flu was an unimportant story in the grand scheme of the news cycle. Wait a minute. Overblown news story? That sounds familiar.

So there’s the removed comment and its (hopefully) obvious meaning. In all fairness, it was one of my more favorite comments this year. The question then is, did it violate their commenting guidelines?

The best comments and posts are those that add more information to the story, express a different viewpoint or help create intelligent debate.

It didn’t add any information, but it did express a viewpoint that I was the first to mention on their website. Of course, you wouldn’t know, because that viewpoint was removed.

We welcome constructive debate on our site, but we won’t tolerate jerks.

We’ve already been over this. I am a jerk. But a useful, functional jerk.

Don’t be that guy – avoid comments or posts that are off topic, offensive, contain personal attacks or that don’t further the conversation.

Off topic? Nope. Patently on.

Offensive? Perhaps to some with extremely thin skin. It’s a very subjective word. People could take offense to viewpoints they simply don’t agree with.

Contains personal attacks? Nope, except to myself, for saying that I would truly believe it was “swan flu” that killed them. Perhaps they were protecting me … from me.

Didn’t further the conversation? This is another puzzling criterion. It assumes every comment furthers the conversation in some fashion. Perhaps some comments are made by people who just want to say their part and be done with it. It doesn’t further the discussion, but it doesn’t curb it either. Although, in the end, since my comment was discussing the overblown coverage, it was a method to discuss the unreasonable amount of coverage on this story.

My first thought to all this was, are my comments too subtle for them? Are they just gonna up and remove the comment because they don’t understand it, then point to the discussion guidelines? I realize they’re not even a month into putting this policy into practice, but if too much book theory goes into comment moderation, the discussion’s potential will be crippled and thought will be discouraged. Just like a real newspaper!

(Okay, maybe we’re done NOW. Probably not. Wait for the story about the swan love triangle.)