{"id":10583,"date":"2018-05-18T07:00:42","date_gmt":"2018-05-18T11:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/?p=10583"},"modified":"2018-05-17T14:58:56","modified_gmt":"2018-05-17T18:58:56","slug":"on-comments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/?p=10583","title":{"rendered":"On Comments"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Adam Pagnucco.<\/em><\/p>\n

Yesterday, a reader asked on our Facebook page why there were no comments directly on Seventh State posts.\u00a0 Well, we have a history with comments.<\/p>\n

Our old blog, Maryland Politics Watch, originally allowed anonymous comments.\u00a0 That was a mistake!\u00a0 Many of them were vile, personal, racist and downright deplorable (just like a certain President\u2019s Twitter feed).\u00a0 Eventually, the anons chased out almost all of the people commenting under their own names.\u00a0 The final straw came when a candidate dropped out of a race because of a terminal illness in his family.\u00a0 An anonymous commenter accused him of making up the illness and dropping out because he allegedly knew he would lose.\u00a0 The candidate went ballistic.\u00a0 That\u2019s when we banned anonymous comments<\/a> and required people to use their real names.<\/p>\n

But that wasn\u2019t enough.\u00a0 Under our old platform, Blogger, it was very easy to register a Google or Blogger account under any name and use it for commenting.\u00a0 How could we tell if they were real or not?\u00a0 The issue came to a head during my war with the \u201cBoy King<\/a>,\u201d an intern hired by the Washington Post to write editorials about MoCo and Maryland.\u00a0 The Boy King became so alarmed by my writings that he sent a college friend to troll us using a phony name.\u00a0 So I tracked him down<\/a> and printed the troll\u2019s real name<\/a>!\u00a0 That was great fun, but I thought, \u201cWhy am I spending so much time on this when I could be writing real stuff?\u201d\u00a0 The new policy was ineffective.<\/p>\n

Accordingly, when David Lublin started Seventh State, I totally understood why he was uninterested in going down that road again.\u00a0 But we had a new tool for interaction that had not yet ripened in the old days: Facebook.\u00a0 For better or worse, Facebook has become Seventh State\u2019s de facto comment page.\u00a0 There are certainly phony Facebook accounts and some of them played a role in our last presidential election.\u00a0 But sadly, Vladimir Putin seems to not care about who gets elected to the Montgomery County Council, so there don\u2019t seem to be a lot of bots here!<\/p>\n

The quality of interaction that we get through Facebook far exceeds what we were able to obtain in the Maryland Politics Watch days.\u00a0 I personally read every single comment on the Facebook page.\u00a0 I like most of them and learn from a lot of them, even \u2013 and perhaps especially \u2013 from the folks who disagree with me.\u00a0 There have been several occasions when a reader\u2019s comment caused me to think, \u201cHmmmmm, I should look into that.\u00a0 That could be a great post!\u201d<\/p>\n

Overall, the comments we receive reinforce what David and I have known for a long time \u2013 you are the best media audience in the county and perhaps in the entire state.\u00a0 No one knows our politics and our community better than Seventh State readers.\u00a0 Maybe more importantly, no one CARES more than Seventh State readers.\u00a0 That\u2019s why elected officials, candidates, advocates and other muckety-mucks come on here.\u00a0 They may not care what David and I think, but they care what YOU think, and they should.<\/p>\n

Thank you for reading Seventh State.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Adam Pagnucco. Yesterday, a reader asked on our Facebook page why there were no comments directly on Seventh State posts.\u00a0 Well, we have a history with comments. Our old blog, Maryland Politics Watch, originally allowed anonymous comments.\u00a0 That was a mistake!\u00a0 Many of them were vile, personal, racist and downright deplorable (just like a … Continue reading On Comments<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[151,345],"tags":[1545,2196],"class_list":["post-10583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adam-pagnucco","category-comments","tag-adam-pagnucco","tag-comments"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4mKJE-2KH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10583"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10583\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10584,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10583\/revisions\/10584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}