Comments. You can find or hear them almost anywhere.
Under your posts on Instagram; under that YouTube video you watched a couple days ago; from the hairstylist you see every few months; or behind your back and you may not even know.
Now those are just comments in general, but I’m here to look at online comments in particular.
The realities of the Comment section
While the Comment section of a social media post or blog are there for readers and viewers to express their thoughts and opinions, they aren’t always the safest places to be on the internet.
Depending on your platform and audience, these types of spaces can fill with aggression and mockery, anonymity and false information, and more (Konnikova, 2023).
Konnikova (2023) notes that this may have to do with the “online disinhibition effect” that John Suler coined and that I’ve brought up in conversation before. It’s that feeling of being able to say and do anything like nobody is watching because nobody knows who you are. Your identity is hidden by the shields of the internet, you could say.
At the same time, anonymity must be credited for its ability to encourage participation. Instead of fearing uniqueness and difference, commentors feel a sense of community. There is little to no fear in speaking one’s mind and the opportunities for creative thinking are practically endless.
Creating and implementing guidelines for commenting
To mitigate these potential issues, it would be good to create a set of guidelines for commenters and their commenting.
If I made a list for Two A.M. Thoughts, I’d make sure to include things like being respectful of others and their comments; keeping comments relevant to the post; using appropriate and clean language; and have fun with the discussion.
These guidelines are likely something you’ve read or seen before many times, but they are things that I would hope to see in the comment sections of my site too. They are values, if you want to call them those, that I uphold when I comment. So, it would be great to see that reciprocated.
In terms of implementing them, I would most likely create a page on my site dedicated to community guidelines. However, I wouldn’t expect every visitor to read that page before getting around to their commenting. Perhaps a disclaimer above comment forms with a link to the community guidelines page may do the job. Ultimately, it will have to be something moderated and reiterated until commentors catch on.
After twelve weeks of non-stop posting, PUB 101 has come to an end. But that doesn’t mean that Spilling the Royaltea has run out of potential, so here’s the plan for what’s to come.
To the Future
Over the course of these twelve weeks, I’ve really developed a love for blogging. I get to write about things that interest me without having to worry whether it would work well for an essay or whether it would be enough to get me a good grade. And having the opportunity to do things that I’d never get to do in other academic contexts, like using slang, or contractions, or starting my sentences with “so” and “and” has been so refreshing. I get the space to publish my own thoughts without thinking about what my prof will think with every word I write. So for all the above reasons and many more, I will be continuing with Spilling the Royaltea after the end of PUB 101.
In continuing my writing process, I’ll definitely keep writing posts for my hot takes, ranked, and news categories. In particular, the news category will have tons to talk about in the coming weeks, with King Charles’s coronation coming up in May. All in all, I’ll keep challenging my audience to think differently about issues and not always take for granted what they read or hear in the mainstream. And if they want light and fluffy, they’ll still have that too in the form of the “ranked” category and “Fashion, FAST!” segment.
I also want to bring back my “the chronicles of Harry and Meghan” category. Since I won’t be taking any courses in the summer, I’ll have plenty of time to watch the documentary and read the memoir, and I’m sure I’ll have lots to say about both.
And I might even create a few new categories too, like a “hot topics” category. I’ve noticed that when writing my hot takes, there are some things that I haven’t really made a final decision on, like whether the monarchy should be abolished and whether we should be worried that Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis will end up like Prince Harry. So maybe in this section, I could discuss both sides of the argument and invite readers to weigh in too.
Even More Web Design Improvements
Of course, I still want to work on my website design skills. I might even take off the training wheels and redesign Spilling the Royaltea without a template, like Gertz suggests. Now that I know the basics of WordPress, I think it’s time to branch off and try to do things my own way instead. There are still a bunch of elements I’d like to change, but my template is preventing me from actually making these changes.
For example, when readers click on one of the categories on the menu bar, I want them to see little previews of several different posts instead of the big featured image being the first thing they see. I also never got around to making a logo, which I think is one of the most important parts of website branding. So I will definitely get to that too.
Example from “melatonin-gone-missing.com” of the post previews I would like to include on my website
Overall, these changes will culminate in realizing the ultimate potential of my personal cyberinfrastructure, which will represent me and me only. And, since the site will no longer feature PUB 101 content, I can focus solely on royal family content. I might even consider archiving the PUB 101 section and making my site a fully-functioning royal family gossip site with no affiliations to SFU.
Community Guidelines
I also hope that in my future content, people start interacting more with my content, so with this comes the responsibility of creating community guidelines to ensure that Spilling the Royaltea remains a safe and uplifting community for royal family followers.
The four pillars I’ve developed for Spilling the Royaltea include respect, tolerance, openness, and togetherness. These four aspects relate most strongly to the comment section, which can end up pretty nasty if not carefully regulated. Konnikova even writes that the magazine, Popular Science decided to ban comments because of the “culture of aggression and mockery” it can cause. So that’s why I want readers to be respectful of each other when commenting, tolerant of others’ opinions and ideas, open to listening to and learning from different perspectives, and feel a sense of togetherness and community for learning and sharing.
And to protect both myself from seeing any hate comments (which, thankfully, I haven’t received yet), I’ll be regulating my comment section from those “anonymous” users who think it’s so easy to hide behind a screen and comment mean things just because it’s harder to identify them, like Konnikova describes. I’ll approve of comments as they come, and hopefully, this will keep things safe, inclusive, and welcoming on Spilling the Royaltea, which is all I could ask for as a website owner.
Here’s to the last process post and to a new chapter of Spilling the Royaltea. Olivia, signing out.
