Hooray! Met First Goal Quickly, Now on to the Second: Supporting the Commentariat

Thanks to our generous readers for making Naked Capitalism a priority when many of you are just back from a holiday break. Your quick action helped us meet our first target, for our IT essentials, in a smidge over 24 hours. This is the best we’ve done since we started fundraisers around Labor Day in meeting our first objective. You turned this around so quickly that Lambert had not yet put up his thermometer to track progress toward each target.

We are now $210 towards our second goal, of supporting the comments section. We are also 199 donations towards the fundraiser target of 1100 donors.

Your donations prove that you value this community and want a better debate and a better society. You are willing to invest to have us improve Naked Capitalism so it can be an even more effective voice for you. If you haven’t had time to give yet, please visit our Tip Jar to support our efforts. Whatever you can give, whether $10 or $1000, enables us to provide your daily dose of of extensive news overviews, pointed commentary, penetrating analysis, and heart-warming animal pictures, as well as a place to hang out with the like-minded.

In 2021, we made a big addition to Naked Capitalism’s services out of the “commentariat” budget, that of our monthly newsletter. As much as we like having you come here every day, we know you have important real world lives and ever if you keen about the site, might take some time off from us. So please take your hats off to moderator katiebird, who is also the major domo of the monthly newsletter.

Readers have been sending gratifying messages. From sporble:

I just wanted to say THANKS again for all that you do. Your writing, posts, analysis, scathing wit, humor and eye-rolling at all the shit we’re all trying to deal with helps me cling tenaciously to the silky tendrils of my sanity.

And now you know: the $ is on the way.

Wishing you all the very best outta mega-hot Berlin (really!)

And Keith H:

The check is for $250 this time. I would definitely be lost without NakedCapitalism. Thank you for your tireless work, and for all the efforts of the terrific NC team.

And Mark M:

Many thanks for NC and all you folks do. As of course you know, it’s so hard to read or hear critical, skeptical thinking anywhere now. And I particularly appreciate that your site is mostly for readers, not viewers. For myself at least, the difference in what is thoughtfully absorbed between reading vs hearing is huge. Just now I started reading ‘Future of Denial’ by Tad Delay (what an ironic name!); so far it’s promising. I’m a retired engineer; the ubiquitous denial of reality, not just climate change but also the laws of thermodynamics and logic, is driving me crazy. The community you foster at NC helps so much…

And katiebird’s, and semperloquitur’s heavy lifting, comments are freed faster than in the past. But the moderators also play an essential role in adjudicating cases, which are typically discussed among all of the site admins (as in with Lambert and me). They also correct inaccurate links and sometimes intercedes in comments. Katiebird maintains a spreadsheet of who is in various doghouses and why, which is extremely helpful when we reconsider cases. She is also the major domo of our monthly newsletter and semperloquitur handles some key administrative tasks

With the punditry and much of social media finding it to their advantage to sow polarization, the result is more cheap sloganeering and heated tempers across the Web.It’s taken more work to keep Naked Capitalism an oasis of sanity and civility this a media desert.

So if you appreciate the value of comments at Naked Capitalism, feel free to skip the rest of this post, go straight to the Tip Jar which tell you how to give by check, credit or debit card. Promote stimulating, vigorous, informative, and often witty debates among members of the commentariat

Managing comments has always come at a cost. Lambert and I once took care of the process at the expense of research and posting. We actually do try to light-touch but with so much understandable collective anxiety regularly producing overhasty and overheated reactions, it takes real effort. If anything, the cost has been rising because we’ve had to impose even more mod rules, which sadly means more comments go into moderation. So getting to them quickly is even more important than ever.

Managing comments does not mean just handling the moderation queue, setting up and tweaking the various rules (that sometimes, as you also know too well, operate in a Skynet-like manner, despite our best intent). That also means reading the comments, multiple times a day, and wading in as necessary, sometimes to de-escalate or act as referees, sometimes to clear up benign- or malign-looking mischaracterizations of what the posts or readers said.

We also spend more time than you think in dealing with borderline comments. We often discuss those decisions together, and review a commenter’s history to see if he/she is just having an off day, or whether the comment under consideration is part of a not-good pattern that we’d missed. And that’s before we get to trolling and non-organic drive-bys. (Skynet catches most bots, fortunately.)

This oversight cumulatively takes a lot of time but is a critical investment, since it helps keep the comments at a generally high level. Our efforts also help assure readers that they can express their views and supply important information as long as they adhere to guidelines meant to encourage not just communication but high standards of accuracy and rigor.

The proof of the success of this approach is the fact that we have a real community at Naked Capitalism where many voices can and do express themselves, despite the widely-recognized deterioration of quality of discourse across the Web. Naked Capitalism is even cited in journalism courses as an example of the sort of engaged audience that major media outlets think they want to have (and which they could have, if they’d stop toeing the line of important advertisers and elite interests). So to support these efforts, please give now. Whether it’s $5, $50, or $5000, all help meet our goals.

We have set a target of $22,000 which frankly only partly covers the total cost of comments moderation and the newsletter. So please do your part and chip in pronto! The Tip Jar tells you how to give by check, credit or debit card. And if you do send a check, please send an e-mail to yves@nakedcapitalism.com with “Check is in the mail” in the subject line so we can include it in our running tally.

Again, please invest in the commentariat! This goal is for all of us!