Now imagine all of the fake news, trolling, and negativity amplified a 100 times.
– Rajiv Abraham doesn’t want to see the toxicity of the Closed Web spill into the Open Web.
This is a valid concern and should certainly be on the mind of both the community as a whole and those who make the software upon which blogging lives.
However, the Open Web and especially the blog-based sections of it already have years of experience in dealing with these problems; a good example is the aforementioned Micro.blog, as an alternative to a commenting system is quite brilliant in its elegance – now as individuals we do not have to manage the comments on our site, whilst those who are either writing for a site in a group or employed to do so can either choose to manage the comments or not… or even better, turn to something like Micro.blog where the comments are a lot less likely to be poisonous from the get-go.
Of course this is also dependent on the development of platforms like Micro.blog; it could go either way. The point here is that we all know more now than we ever did and it is upon those of us who care to actually go to the effort to have community standards, including codes of conduct and active moderating where it is needed.
There is no doubt that the vitriol from which the big Closed Web media companies have been profiting is a different kind of beast from what we once so naively referred to as “Internet Drama”, and we should be vigilant lest it spreads entirely across the web but we have hope like never before be it from the experienced crowd of web users, the bright new minds of so-called digital natives, or those of us who have adapted to the ever growing blend of physical and digital. We are determined to not so easily lose this world before it has barely begun, certainly not to the likes of those who clearly care not for the people who have built their success whether that’s Mark or Jack, and most certainly not to the people who use their work to wreak havoc in our lives.
We can do better. And I think we will.
