Ask Edward Tufte: Moderating internet forums: What's smart, not what's new

Looking around on Edward Tufte's site, I was a bit surprised to find pixel fonts with hideous kerning on his front page: http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/index

(I'm talking about the captions on the smaller images below the motion blur dog; they basically read as "16 new pr ints by ed ward t ufte", etc.)

I'm not suggesting Tufte is a bad designer for having a couple of ugly captions, or anything like that (presumably he has someone else doing the actual Photoshop work for stuff like this). Rather my point is simply that when the expectations are very high -- he has a NYT quote on that same page calling him "the Leonardo da Vinci of data" -- this kind of tiny detail leaps out because poor typography is an example of how design mistakes can make it more difficult to convey information.

"Philip Greenspun constructed a filter at photo.net which bounced all those who misspelled the word "aperture," on the grounds that they did not know much about photography."

Bouncing someone for a single typo, or maybe because English isn't their first language, seems a little extreme.

Notwithstanding his eminence, someone snarkily commenting on other people's misuse of "it's" should not be misusing "myself" non-reflexively.

Viz. Five people are involved in the part-time (very part-time) management of this forum: Dariane Hunt (web designer), Elaine Morse (my design assistant), David Rodriguez (programmer), a very wise anonymous external reviewer, and myself.

I don't think it is entirely wrong to be harsh on comments. What Tufte is trying to achieve is value on his site. Every comment that do not provide value is then removed.

The alternative option can give a worse signal-to-noise ratio. Bad signal-to-noise ratio will make all intelligent beings with little time on hand go to other places, because wading through all the noise is too expensive. In that respect, it might be worth being harsh on comments to keep certain commentors on the site.

I don't see it as censorship. You are free to make your own blog post condemning the view, start a comment-stream, use well-argued points, etcetera. In fact if the discussion is so vastly different it would probably be better served as a post of its own, laid out with good argumentation.

His approach verges on being arrogant and probably only works when you already have fanatic followers.

Just because the guy's everyone's favorite visual information guy, why would we rely on his opinion for user interface? Especially social interaction?

His "better" iPhone interface was godawful.

This post on forums is also totally missing the point.

I see somebody already re-submitted Clay Shirky's good, thoughtful essay on the subject (Clay Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy).

I wouldn't waste your time on this one. Read that one instead.