It would be good if the software could list the multiple personalities of any schizophrenics we have with us.

Maybe there are incentives for certain individuals to take advantage of the comment system as it currently stands. What’s the right balance between control and free-reign? Do you really think just “asking them to stop” will work?

There are some sophisticated comment rating algorithms and crowd-sourcing tools out there – many that you can install as ready-made wordpress plugins. See:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search.php?q=comment+voting

I am not sure if you noticed this, but in some of the recent posts, a narrow-minded simpleton badgered me on a few of occasions. I could have use the same low-rent attack to get even but that just doesn’t suit me. It was a minor issue and I’ve simply and efficiently addressed it. I am particularly pleased with inventing a woman character to do the heavy slapping! Guys like this simpleton usually don’t know how to interact with women!

At any rate, I definitely do not blame you for not noticing this conflict. I also admit on a very few occasions I too have harassed another without provocation. It is a character flaw. I enjoy making fun of simpletons with strong convictions. I’ll try to control myself.

There will always be conflict. If you do react to these conflicts it is very important that you appear fair. Unfortunately to keep up the appearance of fairness to all people is an impossible task. There is no way you can keep up with all the interactions. Since you are not inclined to upgrade the software of baselinescenario so that the community can self police, I have the following suggestion. You should let some of the minor conflicts muddle through. Let the minor issues sorts themselves out. Hahah, muddle through like the trouble banks! This will be fine for a small community. But beyond certain user base, you’ll need better software.

Overall, I completely disagree with you that the use of alias is wrong. I won’t argue why since you probably don’t really want to debate this. By the way, I hope you enjoyed my previous reply to you regarding posting response to the first message. At least I hope you had a chuckle! I won’t promise not to use multiple aliases again but I usually don’t use multiple aliases.

Please check back, I’ll try to write something soon!

The only solution I’ve found is to avoid having a popular economics blog :-). Sad to say, that doesn’t solve your own problem, alas. As for moderation, for popular economics blogs there’s just too much comments volume for meaningful moderation. As for the notion of forcing people to comment under their real names, nobody knows who anybody is on the Internet. I can tell you that my name is Spartacus Jones, and there’s no way you can prove that’s not my name. I.e., not useful. So I’m stumped, other than to say that maybe if you’re boring enough for long enough, the trolls and gold bugs and conspiracy theorists will get bored and go elsewhere. It’s the only thing that’s ever worked for me, anyhow (sigh!).

Anyhow, I really need to go read about psychophysics and sampling.

You may be confused, this is a private blog. The internet is the public space, people can go there and say whatever they like.

Of course since there’s real money involved and James and Simon have been having an impact, I wonder how much of this is also “astroturf” – where industry people are trying to skew the conversation.

That sort of behavior is also unethical and leaves one wondering if there really is hope for this world…

Thanks for education about the sock puppets! Trolls, I’m familiar with – but sock puppets is a new term to me! I never realized people create cyber-Sybils in an attempt to win an argument.

Just ask a feminist blogger–ANY feminist blogger and she’ll tell you ALL about it, right up to the latest rape/death threats in the massive file she keeps of such things. Shoot, we have Best Troll competitions!