Crime and Puzzlement

Earlier this year, the Ukiah Daily Journal opened an unmoderated a community forum on our website. Technically, we’ve been doing this for longer than that, but it wasn’t until February that it became truly functional and began to attract users in large numbers.

Bruce Sterling wrote in “The Hacker Crackdown” that anywhere you put a communication system you also put a community and, as human beings, we bring all of their virtues and prejudices with us into the online world. This is not surprising, as Sterling notes, our lives in the real world are just as complicated despite significantly more practice.

In this county, this appears to mean that almost every discussion on the forum will eventually became an argument about marijuana.

There is a lot to be said about marijuana, and we write about the topic frequently. Even if Measure B were not on the ballot, I would still be writing about something to do with marijuana at least once a week without even looking that hard.

You would think that this would provide ample opportunity for anyone who wanted to talk about marijuana to do so, but this is apparently not the case.

In the office we have coined the phrase “time to pot.” This is a measure of the number of posts it takes for comments on a non-marijuana story to mention marijuana, generally diverting and polarizing the thread.

For a several weeks the fastest “time to pot” was three posts, on a story about a man who was alleged to have sexually assaulted his girlfriends daughter. You would think there would be plenty to discuss in that case, and there is, but that doesn’t keep marijuana from becoming a factor.

That story remained the fastest “time to pot” for almost a month until a story in Thursdays paper, about a local sign dancer, was diverted to a discussion of marijuana in a single post.

Marijuana stories tend to be the most read in the newspaper as near as I can tell. They are usually among the most viewed on our website, they are the most likely to attract triple-digit numbers of comments. Coworkers in the circulation department tell me that any paper with a big marijuana story in it sells roughly 10 percent more copies than one without.

Online, this phenomenon has become so bad that there is actually a forum thread on the site dedicated to the discussion of whether or not the entire forum system should be separated. Divided into one forum for people to talk about marijuana and one forum for people to talk about everything else.

This is the problem with communities, no matter where you put them. There will always be enough extremists and ideologues warring back and forth to control the discussion and divert it to what they want to talk about.

If only we could put them in their own room out here too.