2:59

“you guys are just a bunch of fuckin dorks who have nothing better to do that sit around butting heads about a band. its a fucking band. you should be lucky you don’t have real concerns like people who live in fear of their lives everyday in the middle east and shit.” - Anonymous commenter, Punknews.Org

The Internet’s made huge strides to connect disparate music scenes and bring together otherwise unconnected fans and bands. However the very nature of the online community catches many off guard. The ability to voice an opinion about a band or trend with a complete lack of consequence has opened up a whole new level of discourse that doesn’t exist in normal social settings (well, without resulting violence). It’s easy to envision even if you’ve never commented on a message board: Is it easier to talk up to a band member after a show and let them know you true opinion, or is it easier to do so with a few keystrokes and a cloak of secrecy? The major appeal must be the lack of social stigma. In true anonymous message boards (ones that don’t require you to post under a registered account), nothing a person says persists. Nobody’s going to call you out for hypocrisy or inexperience, since there’s no way to know connect any two comments to one person. To call this empowering is obvious, in fact what it really does is make jerks of us all.

Anonymity strips one of humility, it frees one’s tongue from the bonds of “what people will think.” The result is usually an increase in petty arguments, less civil discourse and an atmosphere of negativity among the community. The solutions to these problems aren’t as obvious as they seem either. Removing anonymity also removes it’s legitimate uses. Many times people with public profiles, band members or label employees who would have great insight into a music discussion, have a stake in keeping their identity hidden. Another solution is to designate responsible users as moderators of public conversations, but this opens up a whole other can of worms. It’s something we’ve experimented with and, particularly with the punk rock community, is never simple. Any influence of an authority over the rabble is seen as censorship, and particularly in punk rock censorship is (quite rightly) highly vilified and quickly rallied against. Noble intentions don’t get very far when your scene claims distrust of authority as one of it’s founding principles. Still, some regulation is tolerated but only in the most obvious cases. If someone posts the word “GAY!” fifty thousand times it obviously disrupts the readability of the site itself, so removing things like that are within the limits of what people agree to (I’d argue that some UN backed agency should license use of the copy and paste functions to only the most responsible and sound of mind, but that’s another article entirely). It’s dangerously easy to turn the community against you, especially in a scene were credibility is so key, so it’s no surprise that most message boards launched by the big indie labels die a quick death.

The compromise to this problem came from the computer science community, as the heated arguments of punk rock fans pale in comparison to vicious debates among computer geeks. At some point a few innovative folk (as they tend to be) took a break from writing long tirades about the best Unix text editor (I’m a Vi man myself) to implement a tiered comment system. This allows the moderator to, instead of removing inappropriate comments, reduce their “score.” If readers really want to read everything uncensored, they can just lower the score that they’re willing to view and they can access the whole mess unabated. We’ve tried this in music comment boards and it’s so far been left alone by the ever-critical punk rock public opinion.

The biggest challenge as a reader is that anonymity creates illusions about the popularity of bands or the divisiveness of issues. The simplest rule is that you should never use the amount or type of comments under a topic as an indication of anything meaningful. Remember that fifty anonymous postings from fifty different people and fifty anonymous postings from one person look exactly the same. If you’re running a website you can usually see the individual internet connection that comments come from, and it’s not uncommon for one source to purposely create what looks like a big discussion. I’ve seen large political arguments in which one person champions every socially conservative issue imaginable. The debate, all done anonymously, looks like a big split between the left and right, when was really the left versus one guy with lots of time on his hands. That scenario plays out daily. For the same reason an abundance of negative comments about a band can’t be trusted as indicating anything more than “at least one person doesn’t like them.”

All of these factors lead to an illusion that the number of people commenting on a website, and the general opinions of that group, somehow represent the readership of the site. This is entirely untrue for a number of reasons. There’s a certain personality type that feels the need to argue over the internet and it’s this subset of the population that is represented in message boards. Most people “lurk” and often don’t read the comments under the main article at all. The syndication of articles among website and blogs nowadays compounds this. Furthermore the numbers themselves don’t lie, the number of people commenting is often drastically less than the overall site readership. But you probably already know this: ask yourself how many of the websites you read do you actively post messages on?

That’s what I thought.

From the zine Pause For Effect (PFE), available at the Union Label Group / Planet Smashers booth at the Canadian Warped Tour dates.