A Note on the Saving Country Music Comments Section


Dear Saving Country Music Reader/Commenter,

When I started Saving Country Music in 2008, I wasn’t solely a country music fan. I was a fan of most all kinds of of music. But I had found a keen interest in what was happening in country. After witnessing the lack of creative freedom being extended to artists, the lack of support for independent artists, the disrespect for the genre’s roots, the insular nature and sometimes outright corruption of Music Row, and the corrosive effects left over from the cancellation of the [Dixie] Chicks, I felt someone needed to step up and speak out about some of the issues plaguing this important genre of music.

Saving Country Music started as a popular blog on MySpace. Watching how other bloggers on the format increased their readership and engagement by interacting with readers directly in the comments section, I chose to adopt this same practice. Along with finding it a useful tool to increase organic engagement, I also found it enriching to engage with the perspectives of others who could help challenge and inform my own opinions. It also became a great forum for suggesting new music and important topics to discuss.

Most importantly though, emphasizing the comments along with the written article itself helped foster a community of like-minded and similarly concerned country music fans with many of the same interests. Without comments, you don’t have a community. You just have the commentary of the writer of the article. Saving Country Music went from a part-time passion project to what I hope is a valuable country music resource that among other things has helped address, if not vanquish, some or most of the concerns that inspired its founding, thanks in large part to the community that has been created here.

The mantra for some is, “Never read the comments.” For Saving Country Music, it became, “Always read the comments.” These are the reasons that despite the acrimony in the comments sections of certain topics, I’ve remained committed to hosting comments, even as most other outlets have eliminated them. It’s also the reason I continue to engage with commenters directly, despite the amount of readers and commenters dramatically increasing over time, and despite this being very unusual behavior for a journalist.

Even if I disagree with something someone says, that doesn’t mean I’m condescending them. By commenting on their comment, I’m letting them know that I’m actually paying attention to what they have to say too. I believe everyone has the right to an opinion about music, and I’m proud to offer a forum for people to not just share those opinions, but share them in a way where those opinions have agency due to the amount of other people that will read them. In this way, Saving Country Music’s comment section has become like a hybrid of a message board where important information can be found that may not exist anywhere else, and it is searchable through search engines.

The last thing I want is for Saving Country Music to become an autocracy. This is why I solicit for other people’s opinions and specifically encourage ones that challenge my own, and offer up an open forum to host these dissenting viewpoints. This also fosters the viewing of a broad perspective of opinions, which creates a strategic advantage in the marketplace of ideas since I’m not siloed in an institutional or ideological echo chamber like so much of today’s media. Instead, I am constantly interfacing and interacting with a wide host of ideas so I can see the full picture. When I go to report on a specific topic, I can then speak to those perspectives.

There are logistical and even financial advantages to hosting a robust comments section. Saving Country Music is not a big legacy media outlet like Rolling Stone or Billboard. This site has no sponsors, benefactors, or underwriters, and it doesn’t advertise. Saving Country Music has always leveraged the power of Google and other search engines as it’s strategic advantage in the marketplace, and successfully. A robust comments section alerts search engines to the strong, industry-leading engagement with readers that Saving Country Music enjoys. Some people come to the site primarily or even solely to read the comments. That’s completely okay by me.

All that said, some surmise that I post about contentious subjects knowing that it will cause chaos in the comments section in hopes of creating traffic to the website. But comments don’t always denote traffic, especially unique traffic when you have many of the same individuals posting over and over as opposed to attracting a wide swath of readers. Unique traffic is how a website makes money. It’s also often these contentious subjects that cause some readers to flee Saving Country Music. So even if this strategy worked in the short-term, in the long-term it would cause SCM to bleed readers.

And make no mistake about it, Saving Country Music has bled readers due to to the contentiousness of some comments sections over time. But the elimination of comment sections in the 2010s is the very specific reason certain media outlets failed to survive the Web 2.0 transition or the more recent Tech-cession. Meanwhile, Saving Country Music is a Web 1.0 property that isn’t just surviving in the Web 3.0 world, it’s thriving. SCM should have gone extinct years ago. It has survived in part due to the comments section, and the community that the comments section has created.

So eliminating comments on Saving Country Music simply because some comments sections or some commenters can get unruly at times is an untenable option. In truth, it’s only a small percentage of comments sections that get out of control. They just happen to suck up a larger percentage of the attention. Though some love to characterize the SCM comments sections careening out of control as a recent phenomenon, in truth they’ve always been noisy and sometimes unruly because that’s the nature of hosting an open forum. The exchange of ideas is often a messy business, but it’s also a critically important one.

That said, the increased political acrimony of the last few years in the United States has not spared Saving Country Music, or the site’s comments section. Though some like to characterize the polarization as being unique or exclusive to SCM, or exceptional in nature here, this is just not the case. It is commensurate with the polarization being felt throughout society. Social media and the few websites left that do have comments sections are experiencing similar issues.

One thing you can do to avoid this acrimony if you find it off-putting is to just not read the comments section, especially on certain topics. Comment sections are optional. And even though I have made the comments sections dynamic with reply features and ‘like’ buttons, I have also made it to where someone has to consciously navigate to the comments section to engage with it. SCM is very unique and how there are no ads in the reading section of articles, which is the most lucrative place for ads to be. This hopefully results in a more pleasing and less distracting reading experience. It also comes at a cost to the website.

Instead, ads have been placed between the article and the comments section to discourage people from navigating to the comments if they don’t want to see them. Like a moth to the flame though, some people are drawn to them even though they know they will hate what they find there. I cannot budget for this any more than I already have, and to be frank, it’s unfair when people leave feedback saying they will no longer read Saving Country Music because of what transpires in the comment sections. If you don’t want to read the comments, don’t read them.

It should go without saying that the views expressed within the Saving Country Music comments section do not always express the viewpoints of the website or myself specifically, especially when dissenting and differing viewpoints are specifically encouraged. They simply illustrate the opinion of that specific commenter. Acting like any commenter represents SCM in total is underhanded and irresponsible not just to myself, but all of the other commenters and readers.

We’re in a bad moment in society when some people on the right feel like it’s their duty to walk right up to the line of acceptable conversation, or cross it into verboten discourse. Meanwhile, some people on the left seem to believe that people on the right shouldn’t be allowed to express their opinions at all and keep moving the line of acceptable discourse, which often only agitates the right and makes them want to ratchet up the rhetoric even more until you have a perpetual motion machine of increasing acrimony until it spirals out of control.

All of the readers and commenters of Saving Country Music need to understand that no individual commenter represents the entire website, but that as a community, we all work to represent what Saving Country Music is all about, which is the strong and spirited exchange of heterodox views, while also remaining respectful of everybody regardless of their opinions or background. This is what I try to do in my writing, and this is what happens in the comments sections when they’re working properly. And often they do work properly, resulting in an enriching conversation and exchange of ideas where important details of a topic are sussed out, even if some endless and ugly shouting match back and forth is where people’s eyes are often drawn.

The absolute last thing that I ever want to do is edit or moderate someone’s comment, or to close down the comments section of an article. Unfortunately, segments of the media itself these days are strangely participatory in the growing censorship regime. But I will come into a comments section to attempt to restore at least some modicum of decency so that the discussion can continue and in a relatively healthy and civil manner. In these instances, it is often these unruly commenters who are inadvertently censoring others by steering the discussion off topic or in a detrimental direction, discouraging others from commenting, or even coming to Saving Country Music in the first place.

Closing comment sections down temporarily is also a way to help control an unruly discussion and without having to delete anyone’s specific comments. I have been forced to use this option more and more to various degrees of success, and in one instance, closed comments down on an article from the start. Some subjects are so contentious in the comments, it discourages me from posting about them at all, which is an unhealthy situation when I need to use this forum to address critically important current events in country music. Closing down the comments section entirely is a better option than censoring myself.

But closing down a comments section is a last resort too, and an element of censorship itself. Ideally, the Saving Country Music community could behave itself, and that option could be avoided because comments are critically important to this site’s ecosystem as explained above. Also, if you see a comment you disagree with, speak out and challenge it as opposed to grousing that it exists or the person was allowed to comment, and try to convince the other commenter of your perspective as opposed to just descending into name calling.

Overtly racist and bigoted comments, as well as personal threats and potentially libelous statements are eliminated from the comments section. But where the line of decency is tends to be in the eye of the beholder. If I start taking liberties with censoring comments more aggressively, I can steer the discussion in the direction I want it to go as opposed to the where the community wants to go. This can lead into dangerous territory where I start stamping out dissent. The baseline for moderating comments starts at not moderating them at all, and only stepping in as a last resort.

I am a music journalist and critic, not a comment moderator. Often I’m working on other articles, busy screening music submissions, or sometimes out in the field at live shows or festivals when comments come in. I do the best I can to screen comments in real time, but never claim to be perfect in anything I do, including comment moderation. But I do believe that I am fair, and try to do the best I can. Despite some claiming that Saving Country Music is unfair to one side of the culture war or the other, the political alignment of the comments do not bear that out, and consistently. A rather incredible and reassuring cross section of perspectives and ideologies are represented here.

What are the comment rules? The rules are different for different topics. If an article has a political angle to it, then sometimes politically-centric comments are appropriate. When it’s an album review with no political component whatsoever, they are not. People know where the lines are and what the rules should be. They just often try to cross those lines and stretch the boundaries, which is disrespectful to this website, it’s community, and it’s mission.

I appreciate everyone reading and commenting on Saving Country Music. I’d rather shut the website down before shutting the comments down entirely. But for them to remain open, we all have to participate in keeping the discussions healthy and constructive, avoid veering into divisive political subjects when they’re not specifically broached in the article itself or relevant to country music, and not participate in meaningless back and forth name calling. Since I am a commenter on this website too, these rules also apply and are worth underscoring to myself as well.

The reason you’re even on this website is because you’re a country music lover. We all have that in common. We all care about the creative freedom of our favorite artists, about preserving the roots and artistic expressions of this genre, and about supporting the art that we all believe is best representative of what country music should be. Once we all zoom out and understand that we’re tugging at the same yoke for the most part and our differences are at the margins, hopefully we can discuss the specifics and hash out disagreements with more respect for each other in our differing perspectives.

Because if not, the comments section might go away. And if the comment sections goes away, Saving Country Music might go away. And this would not be cool.

Thanks for your understanding.

–Trigger

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