Dear friends,
While I am in the process of fully re-involving me with the fulltime work on the blog, I wanted to share a few things with you.
First, now that I am fully back, I want to ask our guest authors to return to the practice of sending me their contributions to the usual email address: vineyardsaker@gmail.com and not to my assistant Amarynth as we have been doing over the past 3 months (and for some even before).
I want to use this opportunity to thank Amarynth for the immense work she has done so superbly for the blog, especially during my leave of absence. We all owe her a debt of gratitude for all she has done.
Second, I need to share a “good news, bad news” thingie with you. First, the (apparent) good news: during the early months of this year, the blog served over 10 million pages a month. Then, when then Russian SMO seemed to produce less “breaking news”, this number gradually began to go down, and even more so after I had to take my leave of absence. I asked our chief of IT and webmaster Herb, and he told me that we are down at about 5 million now. That is about half of our max, but much more importantly, this is STILL way above are usual “cursing speed” of about 1,5-2 million pages served per month. Is that a good or a bad thing? I will let you judge after reading this:
First, this huge visibility resulted in a very sophisticated attack against our servers. While in the past some script kiddies did try a few things, this time it was clearly a well coordinated, sophisticated and carefully targeted attack, which points to some source of big money, probably a private group hired by a state actor. Thanks to the superb and critical job of Herb and one more person, we eventually bounced back.
Still, all this means is that those who tried to silence us will try to do so again.
The problem is that this explosion in readership brought A LOT of new commentators who are not regular readers of the blog and whose comments were often quite disruptive of the normal mood of our comments section. So alongside plenty of very good commentators, many with true expertise, we good flooded with all sorts of very unhelpful types, including for example these:
GROUP A: the sincere (however misguided) ones
- “Drive by commentators”: they leave one sentence, such as ” this author is an IDIOT”. No argument, nothing, just an insult.
- “Preachers”: they have some agenda, say that nuclear weapons are an invention and do not exist. They will not even bother reading the article, they will just plug their slogans.
- “Jew haters”: for these folks, Jew and only Jews, are responsible for all the bad things in creation, so all they can talk about is Jews, Jews, Jews and more Jews. These are the folks who will use that stupid trick of writing trick (((Raevsky))) around the name of anybody they suspect might be a Jew.
- “Religious nutcases and assorted Bible-thumpers”: for them it is all about quoting Scripture ad nauseam no matter what the topic is. The worst of those are those who *think* that they know something about Christianity but, in reality, not only know close to nothing, but the little they know, they wholly misunderstand. They will bombard you with scriptural quotes to try to hide their own ignorance of the Scripture and its meanings.
- “Brainwashed corporate media drones”: they will say that they read in, say, the so-called Institute for the Study of War, Foreign Policy or even CNN/FOX that the Russians are out of ammo, Putin has cancer, and the latest US Wunderwaffe will turn the tide and defeat Russia.
- “Self-advertisers”: they just want to use the comments section to “plug” their website, book, ideology, etc.
- “The offended ones”” these are the folks who are offended by something a guest author or myself have written and they are on a vendetta to get back to me/us.
- “The entitled ones”: they believe that commenting on the Saker blog is a God given right, even if they don’t bother reading the moderation rules, and if their comment is not posted, they get seriously offended.
- “Idiots”: these are folks who are too dull to realize their level of ignorance and incompetence. They think that they have the “right” to their opinion and they deliver their inanities with great gravitas and pomp. When their comments get intercepted, they go into rage.
- “Sloganeers”. They are under the mistaken impression that a few disjointed sentences brough together in a paragraph amount to an argument. Typically, here is what they would write like this: “Putin is just a WEF puppet. The Russian army is getting hammered by HIMARS. Russia will soon run out of aircraft. So-and-so is a scumbag (and probably a Jew). The US F-22s and F-35 can quickly defeat the Russian forces.” 5 slogans, separated by period, no factoids, no substantiation, nothing but slogans. And BOY do they get offended if you tell them that they need to learn how to think before sharing their “gems of wisdom” with the rest of the planet.
There are many more, but I will stop here.
GROUP B: the deliberate trolls
- Technique one: they flood the comments with questions/statements which are aimed at pushing the discussion within the confines of the official narrative. For example, they will repeat mantrically that the Ukrainians have defeated Russian forces in this or that location.
- Technique two: they wait for a new post, and then the pounce like a pack of wolves. The idea is that if under an article the 10 out of 12 comments are very negative, then the article probably deserves that. That is an old psychological trick (read up on the Asch conformity experiment for interesting details).
GROUP C: computer generated trolls
- These are trolls which don’t exist, they are just paid PSYOP operators supported by AI machines. One of the things which gives them away is that they never check if their comments are posted. We have had some of these which for YEARS post 3-10 comments PER DAY even though we banned them many years ago and none of their comments ever get posted. Yet they still continue.
Now, I would argue that the only perfect comments section is one which does not exist. For any other comments section, even a very well managed one, there will always be “leakers”, that is just a fact of life.
I do not want to close the comment section simply because for all the problems and frustrations many of us, including myself, have had with it, it represents something important to our readers and the Saker community. However, I do feel that due to the sharp increase in readership and the proportional sharp increase in “troll attacks” (let’s call them that), I want to make the following changes:
First, I want to restrict the comments section only to those who have signed up and where given login credentials, that is a username and password. And just to clarify, you do NOT have to use your real name so your anonymity is not threatened here. The goals for this measure are:
- Make “drive by comments” impossible
- To easily eject any of the types of commentators I described above in “GROUP A”.
- To inject a sense of responsibility into those commentators who think that the comments section is their private and personal trash bin into which they can spit, or worse, with no regards for others.
- I want to reduce the workload for the moderators. Without giving our any real figures, I can tell you that the number of intercepted comments on a daily basis is typically over 30 and often higher than that. As for our list of banned trolls, it is over 100 entries long.
IMPORTANT NOTE: even after this change, all the rules of moderation will remain in place and the moderators will STILL parse every comment. I do hope, however, that their workload could be eased and brought back to more manageable numbers.
Second, from now on (well, after a transition period of maybe a week or two), I want to give each guest author the option to chose “I do want comments under my article” or “I do not want comments under my article”.
Why? Because some of our authors are literally persecuted by various groups and interests who try to pollute the comments section under anything these targeted authors write. The goal here is also to provide each author with a “safe and clean” place to share his/her ideas.
To me this measure is a no brainer and uncontroversial. Think of it as a courtesy to our honored guests :-)
Okay,
Now a last comment about yours truly: when I came back to the blog, a week ago, I did not expect two things to happen. First, as Murphy’s law would mandate it, I got sick with COVID, and in my case, pretty severely. So I was “out” from Monday until Friday. Now I am happy to report that I am doing well again, I just need a few days to get over the residual exhaustion of my body (slept 14 hours last night!). But, again, I am 100% fine, no need to worry or advise me on meds. However, that explains why I did not write anything since last week.
Second, when I came back there were quite a few administrative problems (including the comments section issues I mention above) which also took the little time and energy I had to deal with them first. I am dealing with them now and I am confident that at the end of this process, things will be better than before. I just ask for two things:
- Please be a little more patient during this transition/reorganization period
- Forgive me for a slower than expected transition to fulltime writing as I will have to spend a lot of time dealing with “behind the scenes” before I can fully dedicated myself to writing analyses.
Right now all of the above is our plan, and we will keep you posted. There might be a few false starts and kinks to deal with, but the bottom line is this: we are simplifying/optimizing how we work behind the scenes and this will only benefit the blog and its readers.
That’s my news update for the day.
I wish you a great Sunday!
Andrei
I’ve been thinking about your comments for two days. While I understand your concern about troll attacks, and other, how will you decide who gets to post or not? One of the big appeals besides reading your fantastic articles is the comments section. The comments people post and the references they leave sometimes lead to further investigation of an issue not related to the article but are enlightening none the less. I’m concerned that this will border on censorship of free exchange and ideas. The ability to have free discourse about a topic is so important. Look at covid-19. All discourse about the vaccines and early treatment has been removed from msm and social media. Yet, this is information the public should know. Your site provides the ability to have that free discourse and yes, some of the comments are not relevant to the article, may border on religious topics, etc. but if you start picking and choosing who gets to respond then you limit the responses to a select few. The large volume of comments you get are a reflection of the interest in your website and a big appeal to readers. At least I find that to be true. I’m okay with whatever you decide, and I know this is a big job for your excellent team, but the ability to have a voice in these ever more censoring times is very important. You have 26,000+ viewers on a good article and maybe 150 comments. Is that not an appropriate amount?
I agree with Cindy.
Without the diversity of comments, the blog will lose much of its interest and originality.
The number of readers will decrease and the trolls will rejoice.
Glad I don’t run a blog. It saves me having to decide where to draw the line on free speech. That said, on a gut philosophical level I am aligned with those (for example, J.S. Mill) who believe that maximal leeway should be given to people opining, which — of course — requires enormous tolerance and forbearance given the kind of non-sense coming out of some people’s mouth.
That said, the average reader here seems to be very well able to discern agendas, trolling and just plain trash. In other cases, the arduous task of others’ correctively having to point to facts to set things straight may be required to serve the salutary function of educating and persuading the mistaken. That’s the way it’s always been in enlightened circles.
Given these facts, claiming a necessity to censor appears at best lazy; at worst, specious. It risks the accusation of nanny state-like “protection”, or worse yet: increasingly moving “discourse” towards homogeneity, cancel culture and group-think that reflects a one party line.
This kind of intolerant and illiberal thinking has now taken hold of not just social media and society in general, but also institutions of higher learning. Unfortunately, this blog appears to have been struck by the same malady. Too bad.
If the owner of a private blog wants to tighten up the moderation process to reduce incivility and disinformation, that is NOT censorship.
I don’t think the Saker has any plans to institute to implement nanny state protection and homogeneity, cancel culture, and group think. I think you and others voicing this worry are way overreacting.
Finally, if you don’t like it, start your own blog and allow anyone to say anything they want.
“Finally, if you don’t like it, start your own blog and allow anyone to say anything they want.”
Why so rude? He made his point well; it’s a valid comment (you should be rude in yours at least).
Ok. I get the incivility part but I have trouble with the word “disinformation.” Who decides what is disinformation? Who has supreme knowledge on whatever is posted.
In Feb, the definition of domestic terrorism was changed by our govt. to include mis dis and mal information that goes against the govts narrative. That is the ultimate in censorship that leaves the narrative in the hands of the govt. See:
Summary of Terrorism Threat to the U.S. Homeland
https://www.dhs.gov/ntas/advisory/national-terrorism-advisory-system-bulletin-february-07-2022
Isn’t this concerning to anyone?
“If the owner of a private blog wants to tighten up the moderation process to reduce incivility and disinformation, that is NOT censorship.”
(1) An owner of a blog can do a lot, even declare him or herself God, or the final arbitrator of all Truth as allowed on his or her blog, which — however — only supports the PERCEPTION of arbitrariness, or heavy handedness that I spoke of. You seem to think that is unproblematic. I think it might actually impinge negatively on his or her credibility, so I would eschew such APPEARANCES.
(2) About your use of the word “civility”, it’s tricky, isn’t it? I didn’t feel you were particularly uncivil to me, but another commentator thought you were. As important as civility is, at some point that same word is abused and spills into a highly subjective mess, where being “triggered” and counter remonstrations of snowflackishness — as we have all witnessed in the last 10 years — become the oppressive order of the day. Listen to what Jordan Peterson has to say about this to catch the two-edge-sword conundrum regarding civility. I would argue that it is basically modeled and taught at home. If a person didn’t get it there, maybe the collective should nudge him or her towards it (or model it) through appropriate reminders of what is not befitting. I am not an absolutist on this, but would here too caution restraint. That is to say, I can see certain cases where the “blog cops” need to bring order into the house. But, given the vague, ambiguous and often subjective (and culturally defined) nature of “civility” (the permitted level of aggression in discussions varies considerably among different ethnic and cultural groups), one needs to be especially careful hoisting this flag.
That said, you need to reread the nature of the broad “offenses” listed. More than a few go into what COULD be called questionable, eyebrow-raising territory. If you haven’t gotten my point yet: I don’t think that PERCEPTION is helpful, as indicated by some of the responses to the announcement. It will certainly “tighten” things, but also leave the more thick-skinned readers with the impression that voices (inane or dumb as they may be) are being stifled.
(3) Regarding your use of the word “disinformation” — that dubious, often ab- and mis-used word that has become synonymous with self-appointed “authorities” making stuff up to steer and manipulate narratives to their liking — that word should (as has become clear to many in the last few years) not be defined by one person or group, but ideally by (in order to avoid the APPEARANCE of, or actual abuse) to open conversations and the collective BS meter that always eventually sorts out right from wrong. That purpose is expeditiously and best served my letting a wide variety of folks chime in, and then the BS gets sussed out.
Again, far be it from me to claim I know what exactly somebody is thinking. It’s about actions and the APPEARANCE they give and the ACCUSATIONS people open themselves up to due to their actions.
I value what this blog and its participants have taught me. If that has involved people outing themselves as trolls or uncivil actors, then so be it. Putting a lid on that just deprives me of information I’d rather have. That doesn’t help MY analyses.
Having read your reasoning behind the procedures you undertake to keep the comments section functioning ,I discovered a link to Asch Solomon. I believe, using my interpetation, I have an answer to my quest of perplexing actions presented to me by depersonized people.We all have personal experience the different aggravating and hostile responses that over the last 5 years have seemingly manifested out of nowhere.And theres no getting thru to them. They simply ignore you. And shortly the ad hominem responses start. Well, did they have hide away their true person,and replace it a suto person. Who becomes very angry, because their actuall self now has been squirrels away. Thanks fo your insight and possible answer to an important puzzel.
Saker, slaying the evil dragon of the west to secure the future of Russia is a noble cause . . .
See: https://off-guardian.org/wp-content/medialibrary/KeepSwinging300-2000×900.jpg?x70731
Vox Day’s blog, who is how I found your site many months ago, had similar experiences with the above types of commenters.
Especially annoying are two types. The concern trolls become instantly identifiable after you’ve read enough of that type. The other annoying (and far more dangerous to comment sections) are those who are certain that it is their right to be able to share their wise insights with the entire world on the blog site that you’re paying for and putting your blood and sweat into.
For the second type, go comment elsewhere. It’s a privilege to comment, not a right. Start your own blog and get your own audience. And if we go three weeks without a single comment from you, no one will notice and no one will care. Go bother your local HOA or community meeting.
“The other annoying (and far more dangerous to comment sections) are those who are certain that it is their right to be able to share their wise insights with the entire world on the blog site”
Isn’t that only if they’re posted? Once it’s clear their comment will not be posted, most people stop trying, right? I would!
I see some academic websites where they require a username and a password, but I doubt they get millions of hits. They get the private club they want, but not large numbers. The commentary sign-in change is admittedly to drive some people out, right? It’s about less, not more.
Einfach Dankeschön für die gute informative Arbeit
Get and Stay well Andrei!
FLCCC website for post care if I were to recommend anything, but of course I’m not:)
https://covid19criticalcare.com/covid-19-protocols/
Dennis. 22 years at Mass General Hospital RRT, RN. Fired for refusing the shot
Just wanted to add my thanks to everybody as well.
I have just been a lurker/reader until this year, dabbling in comments on a couple topic areas. Some sort of sign up or account beyond just giving a name and email makes sense to me for commenting. I don’t think that would cause any undue censorship or prevent legitimate commenters.
For those of us who are American citizens, it’s valuable to have English-language opportunities to share and explore ideas from outside the Overton window/imperial narrative/globalist fascist media. I like to think some essence or spirit of these conversations percolates across US and Russian thinking, making it at least partly a two way street or win-win engagement. There are remarkably few direct contacts between ordinary citizens – people who don’t represent the ruling power structure – across our two nations.
This list looks like a good chunk of the generic internet crowd (such as post-4chan imageboards).
Are you sure you want it to turn into a sleepy hugbox with its own jargon and the same comments eternally reposted? Because that’s how converging to a single habitual mood is likely to end.
Of course, if it’s flooded so much the moderators can’t handle the rush hour, well, what you can do.
Just don’t expect this to hinder the up-to-date bots much. There are entire swarms of social media accounts running on scripts (see “thot bot”). A botnet whose owners are aligned with anything big (even a few tiers below goo gle) will have as many new emails per minute as necessary, and probably will recycle them for all its targets.
Dear Saker and Staff,
Thank you for this update. I for one am very glad to see the guest writers being given the opportunity to decide for themselves what they would like to see. Hopefully comments will go back to fairly intelligent responses that add depth and critical analysis to the article being commented on.
Kind regards.
May I advice Andrei to dive into this old but ill understood matter of Pasteur vs Béchamp. Shining light on this matter will get you to very interesting scientist like Stefan Lanka.
Wishing you excellent health, dear Saker!
Hi Saker,
All I can say is great job. You have been a beacon of light for many years and I appreciate it very much. Keep up the great work.
“I want to use this opportunity to thank Amarynth for the immense work she has done so superbly for the blog, especially during my leave of absence.”
She was/is enthusiastic about the blog and her “boss.” She was flexible and democratic, so one can say that she maintained these Vineyard assets well. I thought her sense of loyalty sometimes made her get too personal, yet this would be a minor thing and easy to change. She’s a good writer too. Her loyalty and devotion stand out; they’re like the backbone of any community.