Tag Archives: Huffington Post

#LoveWins

Leave a reply

You may have heard, the Supreme Court of the United States made a landmark decision on Friday. Just like that [snaps fingers] same-sex marriage became legal in all 50 states. Suffice it to say that America and a good part of the rest of the world went completely nuts (mostly in a good way).

#LoveWins was immediately trending on Twitter and if you use the hashtag they will throw in a little rainbow coloured heart just for kicks.

Rainbow themed profile pictures cropped up on Facebook and started multiplying like Gremlins after a nice long bath. I used the Facebook rainbow profile pic generator and at 7:05 pm on Friday, June 26, I changed my profile picture to this:

By 10:00 am the next morning I counted 57 of my 443 Facebook friends with a rainbow or otherwise equality themed profile picture.

By 2:15 pm the day following the decision I counted 80.

By 8:45 pm the number was up to 97 (my friends list was also down to 440 – more on that later).

When I woke up this morning the number was 108!

A good number of other people had also made comments about not changing their profile pic but in full support of it. I hope they never change them back. I love the look of my news feed now. Nothing goes better with pictures of cats than pictures of rainbows.

The White House was even lit like a rainbow that night – and it was absolutely gorgeous. Scores of corporations changed their avatars or sent out product-themed equality messages. This one is my favourites:

You should take a look at this article which listed 35 of the most notable

I like the above image for a couple of reasons. First, I think the way they used their products to create a rainbow was quite clever. “Look at how diverse our brands are!” Second, the message that “Labels are for Products. Not People.” is bang on. Lastly, I like that P&G did this because they are a BIG company. They’re not the biggest company to come out in support of equality, but they have more brands and products than I can name, and for them to show this kind of support with such an on-point message, in such a creative way, deserves a tip of the cap.

Now, in case it wasn’t clear: this decision is a big deal. This is on par with Roe v. Wade and is one hell of an equality bombshell of a decision.

It’s not all bubblegum and rainbows though and as expected, not everyone was on board. Just like the abortion debate, it will continue to rage. Just like equal rights for women, there is still much work to do. Just like systemic and institutionalized racism, hatred still runs rampant.

There is a list of companies that are against it and have been for a while. Some you may have heard of and some may surprise you (it’s an 18-month-old list so apologies in advance if times have changed for any of these. From what I can tell, they haven’t):

There are also scores of politicians, pundits, and prognosticators in the U.S. that have gone completely bat shit crazy (even one of the dissenting voters from SCOTUS flew off the handle). I can’t imagine Vladimir Putin has any nice things to say about Barack Obama either (not that he ever does anyway). Even in Canada, where as of tomorrow (June 29) same-sex marriage will celebrate 10 years of being federally enshrined, our Prime Minister has been mysteriously silent. Nary a tweet of congratulations from the leader of a nation that prides itself on equality.

Let’s not forget that in several states a person can still be discriminated against and lose their job for simply being gay. The Center for American Progress has a great infographic that outlines how far the U.S. still has to go on this issue.

But all is not lost. There are more than a hundred people among my Facebook friends alone that will support this fight, and there are literally millions more out there. Some of the biggest corporations in America are even on board and that’s going to make a big difference. because in the good ole U-S-of-A money talks, baby!

So keep marching forward gays and allies. For the future; there is hope, and today; love wins.

~ Andrew

Your Comment Is Awaiting Moderation

10 Replies

Pre-moderating: sensible thing to do or petty censorship?

When it comes to pre-moderating comments on blogs I have to say that I’m a little bit baffled. If you’re a site for children I totally get it; and the same for a news or media outlet, but if you’re just one of a boat load of blogs out there, from the big name to the small time, what’s the rationale for pre-moderating comments?

News sites tend to moderate the hell out of their comments. Given that they are in the business of spreading news to hundreds of millions of people it behooves them to keep a tight reign on the content below their headers. The last thing they need is for some wingnut to fly off the handle in front of an audience the size of most nations.

For most things corporate I understand as well, though I do find it refreshing when the big players don’t turn every web page like a giant legal cover-your-ass exercise. The Google Blog doesn’t moderate their comments – at least it doesn’t pre-moderate them (it’s possible they just delete anything that doesn’t meet their standards for submission after it’s posted). While Google isn’t exactly a small time company they’re also well known for being a little more relaxed about things so I’m taking the absence of pre-moderation of comments for what it’s worth.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8gCV0KYdJc?rel=0]

As for my little corner of the blogosphere I just can’t wrap my head around the idea that a comment would need my approval before I allowed it on my site. It smells a little bit like censorship, don’t you think? Besides, who the hell am I to say what people can and cannot say about something I fully intended the entire Internet to read (or at least a few hundred people)?

Back in 2005 I had a different blog and one particular asshole starting commenting and causing a ruckus. For a time I just didn’t allow comments in hopes he would find someone else to hassle but realizing that it wasn’t fair to other readers who did want to comment I turned them back on. It was at this point that I tinkered with the idea of moderating the comments. In the end I chose not to, but had my finger on the “report” button just in case he got out of hand. He never did. Contrary to some beliefs, there are a lot of problems that will just go away if you ignore them.

A brief poll to a few friends who blog and a little bit of research on the web dug up the following nuggets of extrememly precise data:

  • A large number do not moderate their comments
  • Many only moderate for spam
  • Some use a form of word verification
It would seem that for those who moderate spam is the biggest concern. No one wants a slew of ads and unrelated links clogging up their comments section and this is where I think the word verification comes in. That was one thing I ended up implementing myself, and as far as a security feature goes; forcing a person to enter in a couple words just so you know they’re not a robot isn’t much, but it does keeps the spam down and in my case also allows anonymous comments (while I prefer people stand in front of their comments by putting their name on them, I can understand that some people may have concerns over privacy and things like that).

There’s lots of comment plug-ins for the popular platforms like Blogger and WordPress and both have at least a couple variations on moderation. Another one is Disqus, which I used for a while but abandoned for reasons I don’t remember.

But to the question at hand, is it just best practice or are we making it out to be worse than it is? As far as my blog goes, I’ve decided that until I actually have a problem I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing. I like to think of it as giving the public an opportunity to disappoint.

So far, they have not (except this person).

~ Andrew

For those interested, here’s a sampling of a few news sites and their moderation policies:

NY Times
Click this sentence for just the policy text

CBC
Click this sentence for just the policy text

Huffington Post