Mercurial

Cheah Chu Yeow, pondering about the trackback spammers, issues a warning to a possible TBS:

and in doing so, he opens the archetypical can o'worms.
Remember that old post by Mark Pilgrim, the one that said that spam was going to infect all blogging, and that the problem with a clearinghouse such as Jay's is that you don't have a way to choose good from bad, spam from completely random commentary, threat from censorship.
Well, we are getting there. I see Cheah's right to stop and denounce a blogger that simply starts to indiscriminately pinging blogs, mostly in order to gain notoriety and traffic. Easy. If the posts are not even mildly related, Cheah, as editor, may delete or not such pings, and that is his/her privilege.

But what about those cases of strong political dissenting opinions, to cite the most obvious problem? True, the trigger-happy blogger denouncing others then gets blacklisted themselves, but not after they have effectively silenced their opposition for a short while – a trick that can be extended through some fake blogpost accounts.

And solutions based in the commenter's signature are all either overkill or too complex to gain widespread acceptance: Your ID before you board the plane or post a comment in my blog? don't think so, not yet. Otherwise, the whole thing becomes completely closed and dependant on previous approval from the truth committee, and that simply breaks the idea of a rich link environment.

Yet again, in this case, Cemper's posts may have no relation whatsoever to what was being said (Certainly not a clear one that I can see), and I would qualify them as traffic attention-getters. OK, and delete it.

But I do not like the idea of the clearinghouse used as a way to silence anyone with whom we disagree. Simply brutal censorship.

As Pandora did, though, Cheah opened the box.