Time For A Shift: A Clearer Stand On Profanity, Lewdness

Also, old fav that meets your acronym rules: SNAFU.

Before anyone gets their knickers in a twist and manufactures erroneous and reactive thoughts about this post, I thought I’d make sure — as one of the more “anything goes” mods — I would chime in and have Nico’s back.

This is an issue of responsibility, both at the personal level and at the level of community. In the cocoon of AN, where so many of us are friends in “real life” and feel totally safe and familiar here, it’s very easy to forget that this isn’t just our own personal clubhouse to say whatever we want in whatever language we deem appropriate. In our rush and comfort to participate, it can be easy to forget that AN is now one of — if not THE — most popular non-political blogs on the entire internet, with literally thousands of visitors a day… not all or even most of which are the mods, posters and commentator/contributors with whom we are all familiar and to whom we would feel (and rightfully so) that we could say anything in any terms, no matter how playfully crude.

I am taking the lead in the comments here because I am probably the guiltiest of the front page writers when it comes to posting questionable material, as well as the “moderator” most apt to let fly with a torrent of curse words whenever Bob Geren pinch hits for the 3, 4 and 5 hitters with the sacks juiced (see? listen to me with my sacks juiced and we’re only in paragraph #3 here) and down a run in extra innings. So I feel I should take responsibility and try to put things in a broader context so this doesn’t just seem like an attempt at Nannying AN, which it is most decidedly NOT an attempt to do by our Blogfather.

The truth is that digital media have to grow up: the Beavis & Butthead mentality — somewhere between a frat house and the men’s room at the Coliseum — only goes so far and tends to feed the image of blogs as Juvenile Outlets of Questionable Content, which itself only serves (rightly or wrongly) to hold back the ascent of the new media to what I feel will eventually be its rightful and legitimate place in the mainstream of the coverage of things. As you’ve heard Chris Townsend say many times, before he found this place he assumed that AN was like the vast preponderance of blogs out there that attacks players and their families, talks a ton of unfounded smack about the team it’s covering and generally makes a negative spectacle of itself… a view we all know was as ill-conceived as a Daric Barton bunt attempt in the bottom of the first with Rajai Davis on second. Thankfully, after months spent integrating AN with his previous general view of blogs, CT has come to adore and accept us here, but I can assure you that his previously-held attitude is still often the prevalent one when it comes to outsiders’ views of what blogs are and what they do.

The bottom line (or, if you prefer, BOTTOM LINE!) is that for approximately 197,219,731,197,419,892,011 different reasons, we here are among the leaders of digital media in the world: no joke. Especially among the non-political sites — which are in a sense easier to discount because they often carry with them a pronounced ideological agenda and a contentual slant to match — we are at the forefront of redefining what blogs are and can be in a mediaverse that is changing and evolving at an extremely fast pace. Like it or not — and you/we should all be very proud of what AN is and has achieved — we get a tremendous, almost unprecedented amount of traffic and again, in the words of my pal CT, we have become and for all intents and purposes are the best and most comprehensive site about the Oakland Athletics to be found on the web, surpassing by a large margin even the official site of the franchise itself.

The point, such as it is, is that with such gravitas comes responsibility: responsibility to evolve our caliber of discourse in a manner commensurate with our position of undeniable influence. In recent times it’s begun to get back to the people that run this thing that there are a lot of folks — both new visitors and old friends — who have come to feel excluded and in a sense put off by what they see and feel as a less respectful, more gratuitously funky sort of discourse on AN, particularly in the Game Threads which are arguably the centerpiece of what we do here.

Now, no one is really saying that we have lost our way. As I said, never before has this blog (or any non-political blog, really) enjoyed such a tremendous sphere of influence and cache among even the denizens of established media. This should be clear, if only from the idea that when we have a tailgate in the Coliseum parking lot, mainstream media types like Susan Slusser and the aforementioned host of A’s Talk are often there hanging out with us. Chris himself has told me that his bosses at the radio station read this thing cover-to-cover, including every single comment, on a daily basis… as well they should, as this is the Numero Uno outpost of substantive and informed material of, by and for the Athletics’ fanbase that exists in the world today. When you saw Brodie Brazil from CSN come on and essentially ask all of us exactly what the TV postgame show should look like, there was a reason for that, and the reason is that this blog has become THE oasis in the desert as far as A’s content.

So we are at a crossroads: how do we retain the flavor (admittedly super-spicy) that made and continues to make this place what it is without driving away the potential readers and contributors that might someday make it what it CAN become, which is something as yet unestablished by digital media but is nonetheless within our grasp as a community because we are JUST THAT AWESOME? What we’re trying to say isn’t “Don’t curse!” or “Watch what you say!” so much as it is a request to begin to consider what we are saying and how we are saying it in a broader and more inclusive context than digital media previously felt possible or necessary. This will help to ensure that people will not be driven away and that the stereotype of digimedia in general and blogs in particular will not continue to be perpetuated by Athletics Nation, which has established itself in the vanguard of these outlets and can, if it takes responsibility for itself at a higher and more self-considerate level, continue to grow into the leadership role that awaits it in the Future of All Media that is in the process of coalescing into what it will be.

The message is: don’t feel infantilized. Feel empowered, because you are… in ways that are at the forefront of shaping what sites like this can be in the future whether we are aware in the moment of such possibilities or not.

These new rules seem fine to me. Perhaps a tad more restrictive than I might like outside of CT Threads, DLD, and Game Threads, but then again almost all of my AN activity is in Game Threads, so this doesn’t affect me much.

But I did have one question. Is the..

specific provision that edgy images must be posted as links, not posted as images, for the security of readers who log on at work and can’t afford for edgy photos or images to pop up on the screen

…a new rule or simply a restatement of an old one?

That is, is this a new restriction on Game Threads or just what we’ve always done: respecting the fact that images need to be safe for work (and reasonably sized)?

And if this is a new restriction, what precisely counts as “edgy”?

Thanks for any clarifications you can offer, Your Blogfatherness!

and the part that is more baseball focused should have certain rules although I often find that the arguments in the baseball posts are more personal and heated.

As far as the game threads I’d hate to think I might be driving people away as I’m only trying to have fun and nothing I post should be taken seriously as it’s just the first goofy thing that pops in my head.

I really enjoy this site and I hope more people who read it join the fray and make the site even better.

I know some don’t like it, but I think we do have to remember that this site is much easier to find from more “mainstream” sites (e.g. Yahoo! game recaps). Therefore, the profanity and innuendo should be relegated to areas more common with regular users.

That’s nothing new.

Read the CGs.

These are changes to the censorship regime.

I happen to think these changes are reasonable. Others might not.

But this is an argument over the shape and extent of censorship not over whether or not to introduce censorship.

admission is free on AN. My memory may not cooperate but my heart sure plans on doing so. Basically if I want to exercise my freedom then I will just stay in Game Threads and CT Threads.