comment is dull

Lord, it’s dull. With one or two exceptions. And where are all the bloggers, exactly? Most of the people piling in who aren’t actual Guardian hacks offering their leftover musings and intellectual plate scrapings seem to be second order Guardian types – the kind of people who make representations to the Guardian about this, that or the other. Professors with strong opinions. It’s like reading the Nationwide Conference Guardian, full of clumsy enthusiasts hoping for a big break, or at least an editorial nod and seventy five quid, which is apparently what you get if your stuff becomes an editor’s pick. Why not just stick the letters pages online?

Comment is not only dull, facts are almost nonexistent. Compare Daniel’s piece on France with the other stuff they’ve had on that subject. An oasis of analyses in a wilderness of dummy chucking and privileged spite.

Nearly everyone seems to be masticating the same few Guardian subjects into a pulp as well. There’s nothing particularly outré about these or about the opinions expressed. It’s just that people who seem to be obsessed with the same topics tend to gather about themselves the garments of nutterdom, however prosaic those topics are. They might as well be talking about the illuminati, or their brainwaves being controlled by the European Commission, or whatever.

UPDATE: having said all that, I've just started commenting there. But I won't do it much. Promise.

Comments

[Simstim]

As a rough estimate, 95% of the pieces there seem to be about one of three subjects:

Israel/Palestine
Blair/Brown
US politics

[Alex]

And that's different to the rest of the blogosphere?

More seriously, it's like the activation energy of a chemical reaction; if you don't care enough to start your own blog, you're not likely to be a gem, are you?

[Simstim]

Actually, those three subjects pretty much sum up the Guardian's obsessions these days...

[dearieme]

If you reckon that one of the better bits is that wearisome discussion about Oxbridge, I don't think I'll bother with the rest.

[jamie]

Well, they could surely do with a few wind ups over there.

[dsquared]

One "easter egg" bonus of that site is that the titles you see on the blog are assigned by the editorial staff. But the URL is created by the Movable Type software and reflects the original title set by the author. Some of them are quite insulting ...

[jamie]

Daniel, why not stick the anti-semitism thing up there?

[dsquared]

that's an idea ... I wrote another bit that was also a blatant pisstake of David Hirsh, but it got shoved into a backwater (although, I see, not such a backwater that he didn't write a pissy reply

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/daniel_davies/2006/04/what_does_demonisation_mean.html

I'd love to do it, but after seeing what happened to John B when a couple of American nutters decided to have a go, my "low profile" instincts are kicking in.

On the general problem of CID, I don't think it's as bad as that, but it does have a bit of a case of a more general problem with edited weblogs; I've seen it at slashdot.org or kuro5hin.org.

The problem is that everyone (including me) wants to get on the prime real estate on the front page (particularly as this is what they pay for).

The way you get this is to be a karma whore (slashdot.org moderation points used to be called "karma" cf http://www.answers.com/topic/slashdot-subculture), which is to say, submitting something which is either a) basically the same thing as the conventional wisdom, but slightly better written or b) reasonably literate mindless contrarianism. The editors won't necessarily think that this is the greatest thing since sliced bread, but what you will have done is crafted something that they know will look OK on the front page.

Since they are massively overworked because of the vast tide of posts, they will go for the risk-management approach and always post stuff that is "definitely OK" rather than "possibly great". That makes people think this is what they want, so there is positive feedback in the system. That means that there is now a surfeit of "dull but worthy" posts crafted in this way, so the non-front-page bit gets filled up with them too.

[Chris Williams]

It seems to me that the way to deal with that problem is to specialise on well-written articles on a narrower range of subjects, using actual (gasp) information rather than mere opinion. Stumbling Chris and the Ranter are both very good at this - you're not so bad yourself when you put your mind to it.

And what's Hirsh doing having a go at you? I was under the impression that it would be hard to get a Rizla between you and him on the issue of What Israel Is And What It Should Do. The main difference is that you're approaching the issue from two very different rhetorical directions. I appear to have answered my own question. Carry on.

[jamie]

Daniel - ah, right. It's a clustering problem. If it gets much heavier it'll implode into a red dwarf, or maybe that should be "left liberal but in a snit about France" dwarf.

Chris - I think David Hirsh believes that he's the only person whose doubts about Israeli policy are unquestionably not tainted by anti-semitism.

[dsquared]

My trouble with David Hirsh is that he's one of those guys who is terribly worried about anti-Semitism, because he thinks it may lead to criticism of Israel.

(basically, it is a particular humourless and joyless tendency that I saw a hell of a lot of in the Welsh Nationalist movement while growing up, and developed a considerable Ricardian comparative advantage in being rude about.)

[Backword Dave]

Now the Staggers editor is playing. But he published it first.

[Phil]

D^2 - I'm not at my best this morning (long night's fisking, y'know) but I'm struggling to picture a Welsh analogue for the horse/cart reversal you describe - and I am familiar with the humourless Welsh Nationalists of whom you speak. Wotchewonabaht?

[Simstim]

Isn't prefixing "humourless" to any form of "nationalist" a bit of a tautology?