slate: you suck, farhad.

first and foremost, let me get this out of the way,  i don’t think farhad manjoo sucks.  onward…

for this article, farhad writes about slate’s commenting policy, the problems with anonymous commenting, and his belief that commenting should be transparent with users required to log in using a vetted service. i fully agree that trolls are a problem in commenting, and because of them (well, idiots in general), i mostly don’t bother reading comments. while i don’t think that a commentator has to release their full name, i do feel a commentator’s history, biases and temperament should be reviewable, even if that persona is different from the one on their driver’s license. while everyone has the right to say what they think, they still should be required to say it to a person’s face (or something that constitutes a face on the internoodles).

slate: troll, reveal thyself, by farhad manjoo.

on the art side of things, when i sent the sketches, everyone loved ‘you suck, farhad’, INCLUDING farhad (he writes it in the first paragraph), however, editorial requested the copy on the homepage be the friendlier, ‘you stink.’ a great thing about working with the slaties in that they were perfectly happy with me sending and discussing various copy choices, and even ran ‘you stink, farhad’ on the article page. below are the various alternatives, which i even kept clean for the kiddies. comment away!
ad: holly allen

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