Shaming and (In)civility: Elinor Ostrom on Challenge of Online Discourse

And that got me thinking: An open comments field is an example of what economists call a commons. It's a limited commodity that's available to many people who are not individually responsible for the upkeep. One way of looking at the problem is encapsulated in "The Tragedy of the Commons," a metaphor that says since there's not a direct advantage for each participant in a commons to behave responsibly, abuse is inevitable. So the only solutions are either a massive external enforcement mechanism or the elimination of the commons.

Does that mean total policing of comments, or killing them completely?

But there's another way to think about commons problems, one championed by Elinor Ostrom. Does her name sound at least vaguely familiar? It should. She just won the Nobel Prize for economics, the first woman to do so. Ostrom's theory says that common areas can be successfully and internally policed by the participants, if certain conditions are met. As she wrote in her 1990 book, "Governing the Commons":

What is missing from the policy analyst's tool kit -- and from the set of accepted, well-developed theories of human organization -- is an adequately specified theory of collective action whereby a group of principals can organize themselves voluntarily to retain the residuals of their own efforts.

(I wrote in greater detail about the "Tragedy of the Commons" and about Ostrom's theory back when she won the Nobel.)

I wondered whether she could suggest a strategy to deal with the online civility issue, so I e-mailed her at her office, at the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University.

Her courteous and thoughtful reply followed straightaway:

Dear Jeffrey – I wish I could offer a solution to this one! Groups that have some chance for occasional discussion either directly and through representatives have much greater chances for cooperation. One strategy used by some groups successfully is "shaming."

Some housing co-ops post the name of any member that did not attend a workday or is behind in voluntary payments on a prominent board for posting announcements. Helps keep these infractions down.

Shaming has to fit the problem and population involved and I can't think of a specific way you could do this but thought I would mention the idea.

Hmm. Shaming is possible online. For several years, I was one of the mainstays of a religion-themed blog run by the Dallas Morning News. Like Politics Daily, we allowed anonymous comments. And as is the case here, some of the comments were totally vile. We killed those off as fast as we saw them.

But just killing comments seemed not enough to change the tone. Once in a while we needed to make a public example. Instead of simply taking a comment down, we'd take it apart, using it as a teaching moment to let readers know what we did not -- and did -- want to see.

That seemed to work for many of our readers. Eventually we built up a small group of regular commenters who may have disagreed wildly with each other -- and with us -- but were generally as committed to civil discourse as the DMN bloggers were. And they would swing a stick at a comment that went outside the lines. They were able to help enforce the tone of the discussion.

The system wasn't perfect. Inevitably, we'd get a new idiot who didn't know the rules and needed to be taken down a peg. But repeated, explicit public shaming was the most successful strategy we came up with for converting a mob into a community.

Surely there is a place online for totally unfettered comments. The Internet is a big place and if that's your thing, go find it. But maybe those corners that are trying to be civilized, like this one, need to borrow Ostrom's idea of shaming and use it the way it works out in meatspace -- to nudge those who are capable of being shamed into doing the right thing.

And for those who cannot be shamed? Figuring out how to deal with true sociopaths is a problem for another discussion.