Happily, the plague chronicle has a large and well-informed community of commenters. It is because I know to treasure this, and because I value their contributions and their criticism highly, that I outline here some basic rules for the comment section.
I’d rather spend my time writing and reading your comments than policing the commentary of hostile and disagreeable people, so violating these rules won’t necessarily get your comments deleted or banned. Those who violate them often enough, or behave obnoxiously enough to generate reader reports, will however get the (metaphorical) hammer. If you want to break the rules and avoid a ban, you can comment way downthread; I’m most interested in keeping the first 100 comments or so presentable, because these are the comments everyone reads.
As a general rule, off-topic comments are fine, but on-topic commentary is preferred unless I announce an open thread. If your comments are off-topic and there is no open thread, they’ll be subjected to much closer scrutiny.
Certain kinds of off-topic comments really are not helpful and they are a pain to scroll through. Specifically, these kinds are discouraged:
1) Any kind of spam or advertisement. If you’re posting links to a thing that you’re selling, you’ll get banned for life as soon as I see it. I beg my readers to please, please report every last item of advertising spam they encounter. My comments aren’t for selling things, a great aspect of Substack is the general absence of ads, and I have no patience for exploitative use of my comment section like this. If you want to link to your own work in your comments, that’s generally fine, as long as it appears to be an original post (and not something you’re cutting and pasting into the comments of multiple blogs) and it’s at least somewhat on-topic.
2) Walls of schizoid text and/or long series of links to essays outlining your favourite Theory of a Thing. I’ll let these go one or two times, but if you keep doing this you’ll sooner or later get banned. Exceptions are link compilations which are a) specifically relevant and on-topic, or b) off-topic but related to recent developments in your corner of the globe. We all like to get updates and these enhance the utility of the comment section.
3) Relentlessly rude and disagreeable comments. You can obviously disagree with my posts, and you can disagree with other commenters, but if you do so in excessively rude or strident or unrelenting ways – that is, if I get the impression that your sole purpose here is to start fights – you’ll probably get banned, if only just temporarily in the hopes that you’ll cool off and come back in a better mood. It’s just important not to be an irritant.
4) Incitements to potentially illegal activity, or links to posts inciting potentially illegal activity. This should be self-explanatory. We are all under a lot of scrutiny here.
If you’re a trusted commenter or a friend or a subscriber (but I repeat myself), you have special privileges especially as regards the non-commercial links proscribed in article 1) and basically the entirety of prohibitions in article 2). To a limited extent, I’ll overlook some article 3) behaviour as well. Basically, friendship is hugely important to me, and if you’re a friend, I’m fine with your commentary and you shouldn’t worry about this.
5) We now move on to the much more serious matter, namely illegal speech. Because I live in Germany, I have to worry about the increasingly repressive nature of the German state. A great deal of speech is illegal in Germany that is totally protected in much of the rest of the ostensibly free world. It may be illegal a) to insult individuals, b) to engage in incitement against social subgroups, and c) to discuss in an approving or rehabilitative way certain historical themes related to National Socialist Germany.
I’ve listed these in the order in which they inspire nervousness within me. If, as a reader, you encounter comments of the b) or c) variety, you will be doing me an enormous favour by reporting them so I can at the very least delete the potentially illegal material. This may also protect the offending commenters, so you shouldn’t feel like a snitch. And, valued commenters: please don’t make me delete your comments or ban you over stupid stuff like this.
I compose this Comment Policy with reluctance, because housekeeping is tiresome and it’s hard to outline rules without seeming like a self-important self-obsessed blowhard. I mainly hope this will give me something to cite in the future when people complain that they got nailed, and I also hope that it will prevent misunderstandings.
Finally, I would like to address the inevitable “eugyppius is engaging in censorship!” crowd: If my blog had hundreds of millions of readers you might have a point. Instead, this is a small and intensely personal internet enterprise, and you are all free to violate all of my rules on your own accounts whenever and as often as you wish.