Community Guidelines

Gigaom provides readers with a number of ways to interact with its writers and discuss its content. We try to foster a welcoming atmosphere for you to voice your opinion, and we encourage an open conversation. You are free to disagree, but we will not tolerate personal attacks or offensive behavior.

What follows is an overview of our approach to the kind of community we wish to create.

We do encourage:

  • Expressing opinions: We welcome debate and dissent but please keep it constructive, respectful and concise.

  • Additional information: If you know something more about a particular issue, feel free to share it.

  • Constructive criticism: If you disagree with the content or have a suggestion, we’re open to your criticism — as long as it’s helpful and positive.

  • Clarifying errors: We welcome corrections of misstated facts, misspellings, or obvious errors, but we’d ask that you report such errors in a respectful manner. We will not amend our opinions, and understand that fact and opinion can exist in the same post.

We don’t allow:

  • Hate: We do not tolerate racism, sexism, homophobia or other forms of hate speech. We also don’t allow personal attacks and other harmful behavior like threats, harassment, intimidation, stalking and invading privacy.

  • Profanity: We reserve the right to delete comments containing words that many people find offensive. While we love George Carlin, we want to create an environment where everyone can feel comfortable.

  • Spam: Please don’t try to sell our readers your product — we do not allow solicitations or advertisements. We actively discourage commercial entities passing themselves off as individuals in order to promote advertising material. We also don’t allow people to post propaganda without adding to the quality of the discussion. And we can see your IP addresses: multiple comments with slight variations under different names with the same IP address will be considered astroturfing. Google it.

  • Irrelevance: Please stay on topic. While it’s understandable that a discussion can veer into a different direction, we’ll watch these conversations and remove off-topic comments as needed.