I Think I Can See Where You're Going Wrong

  I Think I Can See Where

  You’re Going Wrong

  And Other Wise and Witty Comments

  from Guardian Readers

  Edited by Marc Burrows

  With illustrations by Tom Gauld

  With a foreword by John Crace

  To the memory of Georgina Henry, without whose dedication and faith in the Guardian community this book could simply never exist.

  ‘Comment is free, but facts are sacred.’

  C. P. Scott

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Foreword by John Crace

  Introduction by Marc Burrows

  A Note on Editing

  1: It’s Pronounced Keen-Wah: Food and Drink and Where to Find Them

  2: The Joy of Sex, Health and Yoga Mats

  3: The Only Way is Ethics: Modern Living and Moral Quandaries

  4: Welcome Robot Overlords: Technology and Its Uses

  5: My Family and Other Animals

  6: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Planet Earth

  7: A Guide to Great Britain and Northern Ireland

  8: Now That’s What I Call Culture

  9: Spot the Ball

  10: Why on Earth Would Anyone …?

  Acknowledgements

  About the Editor

  About the Illustrator

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Below the line. Three words guaranteed to have struck fear into Guardian writers at some point in their careers. Before the arrival of Comment Is Free, writers had a very straightforward – dare I say, satisfactory – relationship with their readers. The writers wrote and the readers read. Occasionally a letter would arrive several days after an article appeared – usually to point out an error, though sometimes to congratulate – but for the most part there was silence. A silence into which anything could be read: a silence that writers for the most part interpreted as a sign that the article they had written was indeed the best thing to have appeared in the newspaper for some months.

  Comment Is Free put an end to that particular illusion. It turned out that some readers thought the articles were completely ill-informed and the writers catatonically stupid. ‘Did xxx really get paid to write this?’ is a familiar below the line leitmotif. This is not a line of argument any writers really want drawn to their boss’s attention. Unsurprisingly, it took time for writers to learn how to engage with commenters. Some chose, and still choose, to ignore them and make a point of never responding; others chose to get stuck in.

  My own terms of engagement vary. If I am feeling a bit weedy and insecure, I try to stay away from the comments; there are some days when I don’t need my all too obvious defects pointed out. If I am feeling more robust and think I have something to add, then I will join in. It has led to some curious exchanges. Shortly after I was appointed the new parliamentary sketch-writer following the death of Simon Hoggart, it was decided I should have a new byline photo as the old one was now 10 years out of date. Within days of its first appearance, at least a dozen people had commented that the new photo was horrific and frightening. ‘Could I please change it?’ they asked. I wrote back to say that, regrettably, I couldn’t, as that was what I looked like. The only consolation I could offer was that while they could avert their eyes, I was rather stuck with it.

  Some of my below the line interactions have been bruising; people are often far more blunt, rude even, online than they would dare to be face to face. But far more have turned out to be rewarding. The spikiness of the initial exchanges has turned into something more considered and nuanced; even if neither of us has admitted we were – God forbid – wrong, we have conceded the other may have a point. Several commenters have even gone on to become regular email friends. They moan to me about something, I moan back.

  Mostly though, I’ve come to realise that below the line is a bit like being trapped in a train carriage full of Guardian readers and drifting in and out of hundreds of different conversations. Some are dull and predictable, some are repeats of what has been said the previous week and the week before that. But some – most frequently when commenters have long since moved off topic and started their own private/public conversation – are just riveting. As good, if not better, than anything that ever appears above the line. Intelligent, offbeat, deranged and funny. Though sometimes it’s hard to work out just how intentional the humour is.

  Marc Burrows has collected the finest and the weirdest below the line contributions and compiled them into the wonderful I Think I Can See Where You’re Going Wrong. There are gems on every page. My own favourites are: ‘I know someone who once drank a soy latte and six years later their car got stolen’; ‘The only thing worse than checking your phone at the dinner table, save for ethnic cleansing and genocide, is pausing live football to have a smoke’; and ‘Parents should not be allowed to buy books called “Baby Names”. They forget that they are not naming a cute little baby; they are naming someone who they hope will become a confident happy 30-year-old. Called Sonny, or Fifi. The books should be called “Person-who-will-be-choosing-your-retirement-home Names”.

  You will have your own favourites. Every area of Guardian life is here. Seek out and enjoy.

  John Crace, November 2014

  Introduction

  Someone forwarded me a tweet a few weeks ago. It said: ‘Moderating comments on the Guardian website is the worst job I can possibly imagine.’ Not air traffic controller, not sweatshop worker, not even toilet cleaner in a dysentery ward on ‘Madras Mondays’ – they considered the worst possible job anyone could ever do, in the entire world, was having to read comments on the Guardian website. It’s a statement that caught my attention because that is literally my job, and has been for the last three years. I am a senior community moderator for theguardian.com: the news and media website that by early 2014 was receiving in excess of 100 million unique visitors per month, and on a good day somewhere north of 47,000 comments. In the middle of all this is me and a small team of colleagues, trying to bring some sense of order and decency to proceedings by doing what is apparently the worst job in the entire world. Several other Twitter users agreed. It was one of those moments that cause you, however briefly, to reappraise your life choices.

  You might wonder what problem anyone could possibly have with the Guardian comments section. Surely it’s all recipes for lentil casserole and shared plans for knitting one’s own yurt from leftover string and wholemeal organic noodles? Well, yes, inevitably there is a bit of that, but that’s by no means the whole story. The Guardian’s (and indeed the Observer’s; for the two share the site) website has become one of the most populated platforms for online discussion in the entire world, and that inevitably means the conversational tone is set rather wide: all human life is here somewhere, ranting about the news, the weather, the football or debating the origins of Shakespeare’s plays in a comment thread that runs to double the length of the Bard’s complete works (a real example, by the way; only two commenters were involved). Left- or right-leaning, male or female, old or young, online communities do tend to attract commenters that passionately believe the first rule of the internet: they are completely right, and everyone else is wrong.

  What’s fascinating is how utterly contradictory this can sometimes make the Guardian community. For example, some commenters, let’s call them Group A, will respond to an article about the BBC with a rant stating that the beloved corporation is a fundamentally biased leftwing nest of barely contained Marxist sedition (and Doctor Who). Then there’s Group B, which claims that the BBC is nothing more than the mouthpiece of the Tory-led coalition, and as such a
nest of rightwing reactionaries desperate to tread on the poor while propagating its agenda of iron-fisted austerity and Thatcherism (and Doctor Who). Obviously there’s also Group C, which will chat eloquently and knowledgeably about the inner workings of the media; Group D, which will just do puns at the expense of Groups A, B and C, and Group E, which just wants to talk about Doctor Who.* Obviously they can’t all be right, but that’s not the point – the point is the conversation. The thread becomes a heaving stew of opinions, rants, jokes, facts and heartfelt declaration that Matt Smith is simply a better Doctor than David Tennant, though served badly by the scripts (this comes up even in articles about Question Time).

  Yes it’s contradictory but in those contradictions is the joy of our community. A reader is taken from the viewpoint of the initial writer, has those opinions reinforced, questioned and joked about by a group of informed and uninformed readers, is completely broadsided by a fact about something unrelated and generally has his or her day enriched, just that little bit.

  Years ago this process simply didn’t exist: journalism was a straightforward, one-way discourse between active writer and passive reader. The only way you could argue with an article was via the letters page (‘Dear Sir, I was startled to notice when reading your paper …’) or through a bit of paper tied to a brick and heaved through the editor’s window. The idea that the public could be involved in this process, that it could be a conversation as opposed to a broadcast, seemed ridiculous, unnecessary and ultimately unthinkable, much like Lib Dems in government: a nice idea in principle, but no one expected it to actually happen.

  The internet changed everything, of course. Interactivity came along; newsgroups, blogging, social media and, yes, comments at the foot of articles: the simplest and most obvious way to react to a published piece.

  In the Guardian this began in 2006 with the launch of Comment Is Free, under the editorship of the much-missed force of nature, the late Georgina Henry. ‘CIF’, as it quickly became known, was named not after a lemon-scented bathroom cleaner but after a quote by the great Guardian editor C. P. Scott, whose most famous editorial claimed, ‘Comment is free, but facts are sacred.’ Up to this point the paper’s journalism had, save for the odd lively comment piece, been rooted in the second half of that statement. CIF would be different, featuring a wide range of writers who would focus on their own opinions – almost always strongly held and fiercely expressed – and allowing dissenting voices to debate the issues of the day.

  What’s more, Guardian readers would have a voice, too – almost every article would be debated ‘below the line’. The articles would, at least in theory, honour the second half of Scott’s famous quote, while the comments in the bottom half of the website often didn’t. So successful was this arrangement, and indeed so obvious once you thought about it, that the idea spread quickly to other mainstream newspaper websites, as well as extending to the rest of the Guardian. Nearly a decade since the launch of Comment Is Free, which still does a roaring trade, its original format of ‘article above/comments below’ is ubiquitous. This has resulted not just in endless reams of comment and debate, but also in the formation of a vibrant community of Guardian readers sharing its thoughts and its never-ever-wrong-about-anything-ever opinions.

  Strong moderation, of course, is essential. That’s where the ‘worst job in the world’ comes in, with our department forming the thin red line that keeps the internet’s Billy Goats Gruff safe from the trolls. Trolling (essentially saying something with the deliberate intention of annoying someone else) is a regular feature of online culture, and it takes many forms. The mod team exists to decide whether someone is being argumentative and opinionated or, well, being a dick. We’re there to make sure people play nicely and to wipe out the insults or hate speech that inevitably appears in online discussion forums. Any internet forum, even the one on the famously partisan Daily Mail website, has a duty to weed out the serious trolling from its comments. We do our best to keep the deliberate derailing to a minimum and allow the genuinely interesting readers to dominate the conversation instead, as well as dealing with more spam than a Monty Python convention in a processed-meat factory.

  By definition we do have to read a lot of pretty awful stuff in order to do our job and make sure the website is an interesting and fun place to visit. So why would anyone put himself through that? Why wade through other people’s petty arguments and wretched opinions?

  Because Guardian readers are brilliant. Honestly, they are fascinating. You can become lost in their sheer enthusiasm for the most arcane of details, their exploration of the furthest corners of erudite knowledge. They care so much about so many things, and they want you to care as well. There’s the commenter who worried that installing a waterslide on Bristol High Street for a day would contribute to obesity as people wouldn’t need to walk any more, or the reader who pondered whether, as a 31-year-old, he was being discriminated against because he was banned from Club 18–30 holidays. There’s as much genuine wisdom below the line as there is wit, and countless articles have been enriched by added information from knowledgeable commenters. On the site we see forensic examinations of the facts presented in the original piece, we regularly read responses that help uncover problems on important issues such as zero hours contracts, NHS reforms and even how to deal with the nuclear leak at Fukushima. There’s also some fantastically odd perspectives: a personal favourite included in this book is the commenter who made an astonishing leap of logic to argue that banning Christmas trees could prevent diabetes. What a stunning mind!

  They’re funny, too. Much of this book is comprised of clever people making excellent jokes – the alfresco sex enthusiast who refers to his wife as ‘her outdoors’, the reader who invented ‘poga’ (yoga on a pogo stick), or the movie fan who discredited the accuracy of a 3D-printed model of Keanu Reeves on the grounds that, in real life, ‘Keanu doesn’t have three dimensions.’

  This is our way of celebrating this huge mass of enthusiasm, wisdom, wit and bewildering argument that has accumulated beneath our articles these past eight years and added so much to the experience of reading our work. Some of these comments have been selected because of their unintentional oddness, giving us a little glimpse into the mindset of someone, somewhere, on one particular day. Some of them have been picked because the commenter is a hilarious writer whose work deserves to be shared with as many people as possible.

  The Guardian and Observer community is practically unique in internet culture. All websites, forums and blogs have trolls and ranters (the first rule, remember?), but very few have quite the glimmers of brilliance, daftness, good-natured advice and utterly sincere concerns about the biggest and smallest of issues that can be found in these pages. Please enjoy this brief snapshot of our community and remember that Guardian commenters are like Marmite – strongly flavoured, a little gooey but hugely enjoyable if used with moderation.

  ‘The worst job in the world?’ Not a bit of it.

  Marc Burrows, November 2014

  * There is also Group F, whose dearest wish is to write the word ‘FIRST’ as the first comment under any article. This comment will inevitably appear fourth or fifth down, before being deleted by a moderator as ‘Off Topic’. If I had my way, we’d also hunt down these users and ask them to take a long, hard look at the void of their lives, then pay a small fine to buy the mods a drink. Alas, this policy has yet to be approved by the Guardian powers.

  A Note on Editing

  Unlike comments on the website, which are never altered, some of these contributions have been edited a little to ensure they make sense on the page without the context of the original article or the rest of the conversation, and great care has been taken to preserve the meaning and intent of the original commenter. Edits have been made only where it was necessary to add a word here or there, to make the comment understandable without having to read the article above it, remove a bit of irrelevant text or to correct the odd bit of spelling or grammar. If you do spot a g
rammatical mistake it will be the fault of this book’s editor, not the original commenter. This is the Guardian, after all, and we have a reputation to maintain.

  1

  It’s Pronounced Keen-Wah: Food and Drink and Where to Find Them

  Guardian readers hold many things dear – the search for peace in the troubled areas of the world, the pursuit of decent liberal values at home, and the absolute rock-solid certainty that anyone who has fish in their packed lunch at work is the spawn of Satan. A similar deep contempt is generated by people who eat Pot Noodles or can’t pronounce ‘quinoa’ properly. Diet is an important part of any true Guardianista’s thought process, and the day is not complete without a sustainably sourced soy latte.

  Courses and Convenience

  Re: Tesco Bolognese

  60% horsemeat? Well, that comes as a surprise to me. Based on the taste I thought they were 90% basil and oregano.

  Who buys ready-made Bolognese?!

  I’m sorry, but if you’re going to compare small locally sourced, properly cooked food with traditions to Nando’s,* you shouldn’t be allowed to write about food, unless it’s on the wall in McDonald’s in your favourite colour crayon.

  If I get to a point where I don’t think life can sink any lower, I remember any situation can be made worse by experiencing it chowing down on a Pot Noodle.

  Sometimes I eat a Pot Noodle at my desk for lunch. The way people look at me you’d honestly think I’d sat down to eat a pot of kittens’ heads. Or a small owl.