kiss-4-cibachrome-2001-lg.jpg

This post is written a few weeks ago when I first knew about the idea of applying moderation in Balatarin.

A few nights ago, I went to my mother in law’s place, just to be whipped by her and by my angry wife, Azadeh, both of whom are members of the Iranian community, Balatarin.

Earlier that day, I had shown the email Mehdi, one of Balatarin’s owners, had sent to me and a to few other users. There, he had talked about the need for having some level of moderation in Balatarin, “to make sure the links abide the laws and also to prevent abusive users”. I had agreed with him. As the number of users of Balatarin are increasing, so is the number of users who think it is funny, and genius, to vote for a link with multiple usernames which read like ali1, ali2, ali3, ali4, ali5, etc. Also, we have started to see links to pornography and anti-Islam offensive content posted in Balatarin. So, it was very easy to understand; we did need moderation.

After I pushed the buzz, Azadeh came to the door. I could sniff trouble. Even the cat was looking at me angrily. I went to the kitchen and sat down. That was when I was bombarded by sentences like “hello, Mr. Supreme Leader”. “Guess who was talking about democracy a while ago”. As much as I remember, I was under heavy artillery fire for over an hour.

Right now, at the middle of over thirty activist women having been arrested, and Iran being on the brink of a war, the three most clicked-on links in Balatarin are as follows; a creatively sexist ad for a lotion, a part of a Shah-era movie shot in a women’s public bathroom, and an X-ray of a kiss (shown in the above). In fact, there is only one “intellectually decent” link in the list of the ten most popular links in Balatarin. I guess this proves, as if anyone had any doubt, that the Persian blogsphere is interested in what the rest of the world is interested in, you might say a bit excessively though. This discussion probably shows that a link-list which targets the Blogestan, and, to some people’s understanding, is in fact nothing but an archive of what Iranians find interesting, should be as Balatarin is slowly turning into. Or, should it?

Everyone has the right to be interested in anything they want and to write about them in their blogs. That’s probably why Google returns over a hundred million entries when you search for “one plus one is three“. That, however, does not mean that the Internet, in a general meaning, is a lousy place. Having said that, I never begin my day by searching “Iran” in Google. So, to my understanding, Balatarin is not just a smaller sample of the Internet. This is also emphasized in the “add new link” page in Balatarin. For example, Balatarin policy states that “your description should be related to the link you are posting. If you have any personal idea about the link you can always write about it in your blog and then post the regarding link”. Also, copying content from other sources and using offensive language are banned. Having said all this, I think the ladies pointed out a very serious threat, that Balatarin may become close to what Sobhaneh has turned into.

I was talking to Alee, another to-be moderator of Balatarin, a short while ago. He told me that on top of everything else, Balatarin had helped him “know more people”. I thought he meant in a general way, but he continued, “before, I knew people who were around me and were in fact very much like me”. I agree with him. Balatarin users come from very different backgrounds, and I think that’s one of the factors that makes Balatarin strong. I guess there are many teenager users in Balatarin, whose interests are completely different from mine, an almost thirty-year-old man who is losing his hair.

I made peace that night with the ladies, not through strong reasoning or begging. We kind of reached the point that we all knew what the worries were. I think we need the same thing in Balatarin. After all, any of the moderators will lose their “position” if they start acting like a Khameneii.

Update: A respected commenter seems to have got the wrong message from my sentence “we have started to see links to pornography and anti-Islam offensive content posted in Balatarin”. First, the point is that from the thousands of links ever posted in Balatarin, only a couple of them have been found to be offensive/pornographic and thus have been removed. As much as I remember, there was only one irrelevantly offensive anti-Islam link. Maybe it helps to remind you that Balatarin is known to be a liberal website to many people. Sometimes, blogging is harder than writing a scientific paper! (Thanks to Mehdi for the reminder)