But what would YOU do?
October 19th, 2008 by Bad Jew
Recently our site has been having a problem with trolling comments. In a way, it’s a good thing: trolls mean that someone is actually reading our stuff! Always a nice to hear.
The admins have been discussing how best to deal with this. I (badjew) am in favor of us just deleting the worst of the comments that show up here. There are only so many electrons to go around, and I’d hate to waste them on useless trolls. Lianne and NotHayama are concerned that our readers might think that it’s censorship to delete posts that generally disagree with us. I counter that I couldn’t care less what our readers think, but that’s a bit off topic.
But, maybe it’s the readers who should decide. Should we use a strong hand in deleting trolling comments, or should we keep them up so that everyone can revel in their stupidity? To help you decide, I’ve invited respected public citizen Summer Glau to analyze a recent comment on our Death Note review.
This is what someone wrote. What really gets me is that this person is considered a “human being” and thus entitled to the same rights and dignities that you and I enjoy.
jezz, if you hate sexism so much don’t watch japanime! Simple. I’m a female but I don’t see any problem with their portrayal of female characters. If anything, their depiction of the male characters is far more “outrageous”. They appear mostly as emotionless, power hungry and immature (L confesses this to Light’s father). Additionally, once you add too many female characters it becomes a romance and the composers of death note obviously didn’t want this. Listen to the few smart people above in this blog who said: this anime is characteristic for its appreciation of issues such as justice etc not for telling us about the importance of males and females in society and their roles. If you want to get all crazy about some slight unintentional sexism in this anime then don’t watch it and while your at it don’t turn on the TV because the ratio of man to women ads may insult you and don’t go outside or you may throw up when you see the revealing clothes that demean half the teenager girls out there. I could go on about for ages about this but unlike you obsessive-feminists I have a life and a boy friend- something that as feminists you will never experience. I suggest you go get laid. Or write you own damn anime and stop attacking something you don’t even understand. Anyways I bet you eat meat you hypocritical bastards.
The first clue that we’re either dealing with a troll or someone lacking a sane connection to this world (besides the lack of capitalization for the first word, which actually isn’t a word at all) is the use of the term ‘japanime.’ This is a new one for me! Japanimation sure, but japanime? You were so close to getting it right, but so far away.
Next up we come to the statement that the author is a female, and isn’t offended by the sexism in Death Note. The point of this statement in the author’s mind is to establish her (maybe him, it’s so hard to tell on the internet) authority as a woman in order to comment on feminism. This is a common misconception, feminism has very little to do with a particular gender (well, actually the author uses the biological term, not the gendered term) and everything to do with the interactions amongst and between genders. So, we can ignore that.
In the next two sentence, the author makes what comes closest to a cogent point. The character development of the men in Death Note is pretty bad. No argument there. The only problem is that the author is trying to use this as a counter-point to the poor development of women in the manga. Maybe the argument should instead be “why can’t Death Note have good characters of both genders”? Wouldn’t that be a nice thing!
The next sentence is possibly the worst statement in here, until the post devolved into personal attacks. The idea that too many girls automatically makes any story a romance is laughable on so many levels. Off the top of my head, Neon Genesis Evangelion had man to woman ratio of about 1:3, and I don’t think anyone would call that a girlish romance. The inverse of this argument is that anime and manga with all boys will be the most action packed stories of all. Sounds like someone has never heard of a little thing called Yaoi. I’ll skip on the author referring to Death Note’s Manga-ka as “composers,” what ever that means.
Moving on to the next statement, that since Death Note is talking about other issues, we shouldn’t be concerned with the gender roles. The author is missing the point that Lianne, NotHayama and many other commentators were making: it’s not that every manga has to be able gender roles, but that it would be really nice if manga actually treated women as human beings instead of cardboard cutouts.
Next is what I would say is the low point of the author’s argument, but that’s like trying to find the lowest point in Death Valley. The author is basically saying since there is sexism is all other forms of media, Lianne, Maggie and Badjew just should give up, turn off their TVs, shut off the computers and avoid all media altogether to make sure they never have to experience it ever again. Beyond the general stupidity of this comment, it ignores the fact that this webpage has identified many manga and anime that actually treat characters well regardless of gender. I’d also suggest checking out the award-winning sci-fi series Firefly, starting yours truly.
And finally in the conclusion of the post we run into a string of personal insults. Interesting, once again we see the author’s attempt to establish her authority by saying that she has a boy-friend and is thus more attuned the material world than the writers of this site, who, in the mind of the author, work this webpage from cells in a isolated monastery deep in Siberia.
So, to sum up, this post – while once veering close to what might loosely be described as cogency – is a series of misapplied ideas about feminism and literary criticism. It is difficult to say for certain if it was written ironically or if the author sincerely belivies in what she wrote.
~ Summer Glau
P.S Be sure to catch the second season of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, airing now on FOX!
Hey, thanks Summer. I really appreciate your comments on this. And really folks, check her out, if not on the Terminator than on Firefly and Serenity.
So, readers, if you made it this far, what do you think? It’s my opinion that posts that stray as far from logic, sense and common decency as this one did should be deleted from both the webpage and our memory. Lianne and NotHayama, on the other hand, think that this might be seen as censorship by our readers. I don’t dispute this point, I just don’t care what our readers think. But, what do you think? What’s the solution to our small, but growing troll problem?
Well, many blogs maintain a good level of discourse by having a comments policy — that is, that they can delete off-topic, trolly, or flamey comments at their discretion. To keep comment numbering consistent, some comments mods replace the comments instead — say, with a YouTube video of a cute puppy. tnh of BoingBoing and ML espouses disemvowelling, which makes the trolling unreadable unless you’re really determined to be offended.
I like Chris Clarke’s Stick Rule — “you must be smarter than this stick [picture of stick] to comment”. You could replace comments failing this standard with amusing anime music videos.
I think they’re kind of funny and you should leave them up. Covering them with something else, as Tiönista mentioned, is just fine, but my personal reader input is just don’t delete them.
I don’t know, if that’s the worse of the troll comments, leave it be. People know stupid people are stupid– deleting them will probably lead to an overwhelming about of stupidity in retaliation for a paragraph of stupidity deleted.
I agree with LadyUranus for the most part. I really love your site, but don’t often read people’s comments. It wouldn’t bother me much if you started deleting or replacing them, though I do agree that would probably spark more stupid in retaliation. Whatever you all decide I’ll still be an avid visitor to this site and will happily laugh in the virtual face of anyone who posts a comment so rife with stupidity as that.
Even if some of the statements, such as too many women make a romance, are wrong, that isn’t really grounds for deletion. That’s just some misconception that a person has (which could start a civil conversation if they were inclined). However, as soon as it dives into random personal attacks, I wouldn’t be offended if it was deleted. The person almost had a point, but it was lost in the trollish execution. I wouldn’t view that as censorship.
If I made a comment on your vampire knight review about how I love sexy vampire nibbling (which I did for a few volumes) and that got deleted, that would be censorship.
So deleting trollish comments that you’d rather not look at or think are seriously detracting from the post seems fine.
Been coming to this site for years but never commented until now.
My vote is to leave them up. They don’t really hurt anybody and ‘girl’ is so stupid she’s funny. If it gets to the point where the trolls flood the comment sections my opinion might change, but for now it’s funny. Next time she posts, respond with a video of someone eating chicken.
I’ve deleted a few posts in the past, but usually things like, say, a one-liner about how something is “teh awesooooooomes” that barely makes sense in the English language, and then one or two that were such vicious attacks and seemed to have nothing to do with the original posts that they may have been some kind of robot hate spam. But yeah, I agree that we should keep flames that have some kind of point and are at least on topic, because I think most of our readers can recognize stupidity in its purest form and can derive enjoyment from the spectacle that results.
But I promise not to respond to a troll while angry again. Bad Jew took away that right when my first response to “girl” involved my desire for her to choke while doing…something inappropriate for her precious boyfriend. I edited that later, of course, when it wasn’t 7 am and I hadn’t just arrived at work with a splitting headache.
Question, though–a lot of the angriest flames seem to center on the fact that anime fans “can’t get laid,” which seems to be a throwback to the cliche of a geek setting up models in his mom’s basement all day. Does anyone honestly believe geeks are completely anti-social anymore? Of the GIANT nerds and geeks I know, not only do they party more frequently and harder than most people I know, those who choose to have sex seem to get a lot of it. Those who don’t have sex don’t out of personal choice, because if the Jonas Brothers taught the public anything, it’s that ABSTINENCE CAN MAKE YOU LOTS OF MONEY.
Sex = cool is so…stupid and outdated that I’m surprised even trolls seem to clutch to it (oh wait, I guess Hollywood does, too). In the words of Penny Arcade, when it comes to sex, “Any jackass can do that.” I have much more respect for someone who can write coherent sentences.
…Although I think I’m analyzing these flames too carefully again.
Long time reader first time commenter!
I don’t really see anything wrong with deleting comments like the one under discussion. Expressing an opposing opinion is all well and good but this person was obviously just trying to be as offensive as possible. I come to Sleep Is For the Weak to read snarky reviews and long gushy posts about how awesome Skip Beat is. If I want to watch people making dicks of themselves I can just hang around on Youtube (or like 30 million other sites).
Or use some of Tlönista’s great suggestions, may I suggest the puppy one?
I’m always in favor of deleting trolls since it is usually a bored person spouting garbage anonymously, and why should you preserve garbage. And why would you delete posts where people try to raise a point in all seriousness, in the end a fruitful debate is more interesting than ignoring or deleting comments, but when someone’s all “you need to get laid lol” there’s just no point in trying.
Maybe it’s time for you guys to get a forum. That way, people can be idiotic all they want there, and it doesn’t clog up your articles.
This is tricky, but I think you should keep the flames, because they are hilarious to read, as long as you don’t take them too seriously.
Erasing them straight off only gives them more power and attention than they deserve – I feel that ignoring the messages annoy trolls far more than responding to them. Of course it’s so easy to get sucked into a ridiculous conversation with a troll who will probably only be peeing-themselves-happy that someone finally responded to their stupid posts.
Maybe do a ratio thing – if troll messages start to outnumber useful messages, then it is time to start erasing them.