14 ms·

Please read the comments

54 points by czr80 13y ago

Sniffnoy 13y ago
Hm, I'd always understood "don't read the comments" to refer to large news sites and such, not small blogs where there are regular commenters and the comments are half the point.
heinrich5991 13y ago
No comments to read here. :/
vacri 13y ago
Regarding the seed he's arguing against, there is a definite irony in using twitter to argue that blog comments shouldn't be read because they are poorly written.
krapp 13y ago
I have to agree with him. A blog really isn't a blog without comments. A series of essays and posts arranged in chronological order, maybe, but not a blog. To me, facilitating reaction to your content and allowing two-way dialogue is one of the fundamental properties of a blog. Which means yes, either you're willing to tolerate a certain amount of crap or you have to be willing to put the hammer down and moderate.
- quanticle 13y ago
  In practice, you always have to put the hammer down and moderate, if you don't want your community to be overrun by people who are willing to invest the time and energy to ensure that their voices dominate the discussion. This (http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/) is a very good essay that illustrates my point.
swanson 13y ago
I don't think most people with a blog want to build a community. I sure don't. I write to solidify my own thoughts and to share what knowledge I have gained with others. My blog is my place on the internet. A place that represents me and a place that I control. If a reader wants to add a comment to the discussion, that's great but do it at your own place. But my place is for my stuff, and I plan to keep it that way.
- mjn 13y ago
  That's more or less my view. I think if I had a blog that was part of some community, like a blog discussing issues of interest to Americans in Copenhagen or something similar, I might have comments. But for my personal site, which is a mixture of essays, annotated bibliographies, book reviews, research write-ups, etc., I'm not sure I want to support the ability of random passerby to append text to the end of the page. Maybe that means it's not a blog, which is also ok (I don't actually use the word "blog" anywhere on it). I do like thoughtful feedback, and I also think additional information contributed by third parties can sometimes be useful to append to the end of an essay, if it has clarifications/corrections/etc. So my half-way approach has been to explicitly note at the bottom of each page that comments are welcome by email, and then, if I do receive useful emails, I'll update with the newly received information. For example, the bottom of http://www.kmjn.org/notes/prolog_lost_steam.html http://www.kmjn.org/notes/prolog_lost_steam.html has short pointers to two things sent in by readers, which they presumably would have left as a comment, if I had comments.
- jseliger 13y ago
  I don't think most people with a blog want to build a community I suspect that different people have different motives, which is why we see so many different philosophies on comments (mine, FWIW, is here: https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2009/05/11/commenting-on-comments/ https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2009/05/11/commenting-on-comm... ). In addition, some blogs are popular enough to become quasi communities and some aren't. My blog is the latter though I wouldn't mind if it were the former, and it serves a variety of purposes; solidifying and sharing my thoughts are two but not the only two.
- travisby 13y ago
  solidify my own thoughts By refusing to listen to commentary that disagrees with you?
  - derefr 13y ago
    What part of the parent's comment implied that they refused to listen to commentary? People can still comment; they just do it somewhere else. I think Tumblr has it right when it comes to blog commenting: to reply to someone's post, you don't leave a comment on their blog; you make a "reblog" post on your own blog, which quotes their post and responds to it, and the fact that this happened is automatically propagated back to them. The original post stays on the author's blog. The reply stays on the replier's blog. If the original author replies to the reply, though, then that appears on the author's blog, too, with the replier's post quoted for context. In other words: it's called hypertext, folks.
quanticle 13y ago
Joel's definition of a blog is one that is very idiosyncratic, and I'm not sure that it's shared with very many other people. A blog is a web log. It's a space for you to write and share your thoughts. Nowhere does it say that you have to leave space for others or that you have to create a "community". If a community springs up, that's great! But a blog without comments is still a blog. If it weren't, what else would it be?
- jeroen 13y ago
  The piece is written by Jeff Atwood, not Joel Spolsky. They started Stack Overflow together.
tunesmith 13y ago
I still don't get Discourse. I went to the comments, saw a comment, read a couple of replies, scrolled down, and then I found the replies again. It just doesn't make sense to me. Is it ordered by recency, or is it threaded? It sort of seems like the worst of both worlds. HN comments make sense - parent comments ordered by score, with sane threaded discussions underneath.
- maxerickson 13y ago
  The "replies" button appears to be some sort of appeasement for those who do not like the one true way of showing comments linearly. I don't really get why discourse (apparently) does so much work to show 40 comments. I guess it might work fine on a fast enough machine, but I at least think I'd rather wait a few hundred extra milliseconds at the beginning and not have things clunking into place the whole time I'm looking through the comments. (one true way: http://blog.codinghorror.com/web-discussions-flat-by-design/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/web-discussions-flat-by-design/ )
  - voltagex_ 13y ago
    Part of it is the Javascript that they're using is really heavy (I think they still have an open bug for poor performance on Android) and part of it is the backend is really really really resource hungry.
    - sams99 13y ago
      "and part of it is the backend is really really really resource hungry." hmmm ... we are serving our topic pages in 83ms median in 6 hours I can count 4 times it took us a second to serve a topic page. This is across MANY sites. so I am sorry going to have to call bullshit on perf issues caused by server perf. Server perf is fine. Client perf can improve and we are constantly working on improving it. That said: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140320_HJ_923/ http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140320_HJ_923/ First view 3.255 Repeat view 2.075 Is pretty good, and it is actually faster than that when navigating between pages.
gweinberg 13y ago
Am I the only one who initially assumed "comments" referred to code comments? I was surprised to hear of code comments that are misogynistic, homophobic, etc, although I have read a few that were pretty insulting.
transitionality 13y ago
The internet is comments. There's nothing else to it.
davidgerard 13y ago
tl;dr it's an ad for his open-core forum software, Discourse.
- zem 13y ago
  or, less cynically, he believes in the value of comments enough that he actually built something to improve the ecosystem.
smsm42 13y ago
And yet another smart person who calls "no rules" a "libertarian paradise" without even bothering to check what libertarians are actually talking about (hint: not the same thing as anarchists, and even anarchists are not the same as misanthropes) complete with unfunny picture. Sigh. This guy is not some troll, he is smart, he is educated, he writes about responsible behavior - and he doesn't even bother to behave responsible himself by getting basic facts he uses as the argument straight. How depressing is that?
- baddox 13y ago
  I have to assume he threw in the libertarian stuff as a tongue-in-cheek jab at an ideology he rejects. I find it extremely hard to believe that he is truly that ignorant, but easy to believe that he is that unhumorous.
benihana 13y ago
I hate the whole "don't read the comments" crap. It's like burying your head in the sand and saying "I don't want to hear anything that I may not like." I get it. Anonymous people on the internet are assholes. What I don't get is how letting anonymous assholes typing things you've seen hundreds of times keep you from finding some signal in the noise is a good idea. There are some great insights to be found out there. Not everyone has enough insight to write an entire fresh blog post, or maybe someone's blog post was the spark needed to light the thoughts. It's like saying we shouldn't eat potatoes and carrots because they grow in the dirt and the dirt is gross and nasty. Missing out on smart comments, extra contributions, corrections or anything related to the article because a mean person said some bad words that made you feel bad is pretty immature.
- DanBC 13y ago
  You can wash the dirt off a carrot and you're left with a tasty carrot. Sometimes people are being told by hundreds of other people to "go hang yourself"; "put your face in a toaster"; "get raped"; and so on. Sometimes the threats are from a few people but more direct. "I know where you live and I'm going to rape you". Please don't underestimate the volume or unpleasantness of modern online trolling. People find it significantly stressful, and some people die as a result of it. I would turn off comments for any blog I had, but include some kind of email address. This would increase the amount of junk in my inbox but reduce the amount of useless pointless crap (which is what most Internet comments are). http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/sep/13/internet-troll-jailed-mocking-teenagers http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/sep/13/internet-troll-jai... http://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/twitter-trolls-jailed-over-menacing-abuse-sent-to-feminist-campaigner-caroline-criadoperez-9082213.html http://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/twitter-trolls-jailed-o... http://spyhollywood.com/charlotte-dawson-australian-television-personality-and-presenter-found-dead-2/ http://spyhollywood.com/charlotte-dawson-australian-televisi...
- EC1 13y ago
  > I get it. Anonymous people on the internet are assholes. What I don't get is how letting anonymous assholes typing things you've seen hundreds of times keep you from finding some signal in the noise is a good idea. There are some great insights to be found out there. The way I see it, is anonymity itself is the problem. I don't bother reading comments anywhere, because the chance of me being "enlightened" is slim to none. I have no idea who is posting, or if what they are posting is true, or who they are. I'm more likely to get quality reading out of books on specific topics I want to learn. Comments are just a waste of time. I think HN is the one place left which still has decent comments.
m0nastic 13y ago
I reject categorically the idea that you should let other people control your time and attention. What you chose to spend your time on is among the most important decisions that you can make. If you find reading other people's comments fulfilling (either on your own site or on sites that you visit), that's awesome. I tend not to read comments on any site that has them. I consider sites like HN which exist solely for comments an exception. If I had a blog, I certainly wouldn't let other people comment on it. I suppose this means there's a chance I might miss out on some really enlightening comment that someone makes. Based on ~20 years of reading comments on the internet, I'm willing to take that chance. It might just be my innate negative reaction to someone telling people what to do, but listening to someone make bullshit blanket statements about how you should spend your time pisses me off (although at least he said "please").
- chris_mahan 13y ago
  I agree completely. I put my phone number and email address on my web site, then I don't enable comments. You want to say something to me, you know how to reach me. You want to write something for the web, pay for your own hosting, and use hyperlinks. If you can't be bothered to host your own words in your own domain, I can't be bothered to read them. Of course, the irony of me writing this on HN does not escape me, but in this case, I think we write the actual content.
- yukichan 13y ago
  Agreed, but creating an awesome community could be worth it if you can do it, those last for years and lead to amazing things.
- codinghorror 13y ago
  As I mentioned in the article, it's like saying "please read the Wikipedia citations". You can get plenty of benefit from the main Wikipedia article itself, but it's nice when the comments are sane and contain signal, as they can help you drill down into the claims of the article and evaluate them. It is definitely optional, comments are like annotations to the article. Counterpoint: sometimes I skip to the HN comments before reading the linked URL to see if there are any major problems / concerns / flaws in the article. Kind of conceptually the same way people use Amazon user reviews when determining if they want to buy a product or not. Crowdsourcing credibility.. The manufacturer (writer) tells one story, the consumers (readers) may tell another. If you want the bigger picture, it is nice to consider both. But you're right that a well written article should stand on its own, the comments shouldn't be necessary to complete the article.
c23gooey 13y ago
tl;dr Please read the comments... because i have just spent a lot of time on a new product that is entirely focussed around comments.
- codinghorror 13y ago
  Discourse is focused around community creation, not necessarily comments per se. That's kind of a secondary use and it is good from a dogfooding perspective. I'll tell you this: Discourse is a zillion times better at making my admin / moderation tasks easier than the TypePad commenting tools it came from.
spinlock 13y ago
The thing I hate most about stack overflow is that you can't say please or thanks. You didn't solve the moderator problem with that one.
gmisra 13y ago
For those looking for more information as to how personally damaging "the comments" can be, I'll just leave this here: http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/women-arent-welcome-internet-72170/ http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/women-ar... To me, it seems simplistic and woefully inaccurate to characterize all internet communities with comments as sufficiently similar to even consider either approach as a blanket dogma.
- DanBC 13y ago
  It seems important to mention that two people were jailed for the threats to CAROLINE CRIADO-PEREZ, one of which was a woman.
neves 13y ago
What do you think of Discourse? Is it really revolutionary? I still don't get it.
- eitland 13y ago
  > I still don't get it. You are not alone it seems. (If someone knows where I can find discourse-installations except for the sandbox, post a link please)
  - tarr11 13y ago
    Here's one that I like: http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm
  - pseudotrue 13y ago
    Boing Boing apparently uses it: http://bbs.boingboing.net/ http://bbs.boingboing.net/
greggman 13y ago
Wow, what's with all the hate? Isn't HN actually an example of what he's talking about? I thought HN is moderated. People vote, they can down vote comments out of existence. The community does, or at least used to, self moderate. Telling people who are being uncivil to cut it out. I'm pretty happy Discourse is trying to help solve this issue. I guess the test would be to use it on a site that gets controversial comments, say FeministFrequency.com, and see if it fairs any better. Of course his point though isn't that Discourse will solve the issue, only that it's a step. He says you need moderation if you want good comments. Is that wrong? How is that any different than having a bouncer at a bar or security guard at a lecture that will escort out anyone who is being a jerk. Personally I appreciate comments on most of the sites I read. I see some headline, I check the comments for support, reactions, and for alternative ideas. That works for me on HN, on Ars, it even works enough of the time on Slashdot and Reddit. I agree with him. If your site's comments are full of bile you're doing it wrong. Delete the bile. If you're a big site hire someone to delete the bile. Consider things like Joel did (and maybe Jeff does the same thing?) where when he marks a comment as deleted it's actually just hidden for everyone but the commenter. That way the commenter thinks his snarky comment is still there oblivious that no one else is actually seeing it. That's just one example. I'm sure Jeff and Discourse have many others.

54 points by czr80 13y ago

Hm, I'd always understood "don't read the comments" to refer to large news sites and such, not small blogs where there are regular commenters and the comments are half the point.

heinrich5991 13y ago

No comments to read here. :/

vacri 13y ago

Regarding the seed he's arguing against, there is a definite irony in using twitter to argue that blog comments shouldn't be read because they are poorly written.

krapp 13y ago

I have to agree with him. A blog really isn't a blog without comments. A series of essays and posts arranged in chronological order, maybe, but not a blog. To me, facilitating reaction to your content and allowing two-way dialogue is one of the fundamental properties of a blog. Which means yes, either you're willing to tolerate a certain amount of crap or you have to be willing to put the hammer down and moderate.

quanticle 13y ago
In practice, you always have to put the hammer down and moderate, if you don't want your community to be overrun by people who are willing to invest the time and energy to ensure that their voices dominate the discussion. This (http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/) is a very good essay that illustrates my point.

swanson 13y ago

I don't think most people with a blog want to build a community. I sure don't. I write to solidify my own thoughts and to share what knowledge I have gained with others. My blog is my place on the internet. A place that represents me and a place that I control. If a reader wants to add a comment to the discussion, that's great but do it at your own place. But my place is for my stuff, and I plan to keep it that way.

mjn 13y ago
That's more or less my view. I think if I had a blog that was part of some community, like a blog discussing issues of interest to Americans in Copenhagen or something similar, I might have comments. But for my personal site, which is a mixture of essays, annotated bibliographies, book reviews, research write-ups, etc., I'm not sure I want to support the ability of random passerby to append text to the end of the page. Maybe that means it's not a blog, which is also ok (I don't actually use the word "blog" anywhere on it). I do like thoughtful feedback, and I also think additional information contributed by third parties can sometimes be useful to append to the end of an essay, if it has clarifications/corrections/etc. So my half-way approach has been to explicitly note at the bottom of each page that comments are welcome by email, and then, if I do receive useful emails, I'll update with the newly received information. For example, the bottom of http://www.kmjn.org/notes/prolog_lost_steam.html http://www.kmjn.org/notes/prolog_lost_steam.html has short pointers to two things sent in by readers, which they presumably would have left as a comment, if I had comments.
jseliger 13y ago
I don't think most people with a blog want to build a community I suspect that different people have different motives, which is why we see so many different philosophies on comments (mine, FWIW, is here: https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2009/05/11/commenting-on-comments/ https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2009/05/11/commenting-on-comm... ). In addition, some blogs are popular enough to become quasi communities and some aren't. My blog is the latter though I wouldn't mind if it were the former, and it serves a variety of purposes; solidifying and sharing my thoughts are two but not the only two.
travisby 13y ago
solidify my own thoughts By refusing to listen to commentary that disagrees with you?
- derefr 13y ago
  What part of the parent's comment implied that they refused to listen to commentary? People can still comment; they just do it somewhere else. I think Tumblr has it right when it comes to blog commenting: to reply to someone's post, you don't leave a comment on their blog; you make a "reblog" post on your own blog, which quotes their post and responds to it, and the fact that this happened is automatically propagated back to them. The original post stays on the author's blog. The reply stays on the replier's blog. If the original author replies to the reply, though, then that appears on the author's blog, too, with the replier's post quoted for context. In other words: it's called hypertext, folks.

quanticle 13y ago

Joel's definition of a blog is one that is very idiosyncratic, and I'm not sure that it's shared with very many other people. A blog is a web log. It's a space for you to write and share your thoughts. Nowhere does it say that you have to leave space for others or that you have to create a "community". If a community springs up, that's great! But a blog without comments is still a blog. If it weren't, what else would it be?

jeroen 13y ago
The piece is written by Jeff Atwood, not Joel Spolsky. They started Stack Overflow together.

tunesmith 13y ago

I still don't get Discourse. I went to the comments, saw a comment, read a couple of replies, scrolled down, and then I found the replies again. It just doesn't make sense to me. Is it ordered by recency, or is it threaded? It sort of seems like the worst of both worlds. HN comments make sense - parent comments ordered by score, with sane threaded discussions underneath.

maxerickson 13y ago
The "replies" button appears to be some sort of appeasement for those who do not like the one true way of showing comments linearly. I don't really get why discourse (apparently) does so much work to show 40 comments. I guess it might work fine on a fast enough machine, but I at least think I'd rather wait a few hundred extra milliseconds at the beginning and not have things clunking into place the whole time I'm looking through the comments. (one true way: http://blog.codinghorror.com/web-discussions-flat-by-design/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/web-discussions-flat-by-design/ )
- voltagex_ 13y ago
  Part of it is the Javascript that they're using is really heavy (I think they still have an open bug for poor performance on Android) and part of it is the backend is really really really resource hungry.
  - sams99 13y ago
    "and part of it is the backend is really really really resource hungry." hmmm ... we are serving our topic pages in 83ms median in 6 hours I can count 4 times it took us a second to serve a topic page. This is across MANY sites. so I am sorry going to have to call bullshit on perf issues caused by server perf. Server perf is fine. Client perf can improve and we are constantly working on improving it. That said: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140320_HJ_923/ http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140320_HJ_923/ First view 3.255 Repeat view 2.075 Is pretty good, and it is actually faster than that when navigating between pages.

gweinberg 13y ago

Am I the only one who initially assumed "comments" referred to code comments? I was surprised to hear of code comments that are misogynistic, homophobic, etc, although I have read a few that were pretty insulting.

transitionality 13y ago

The internet is comments. There's nothing else to it.

davidgerard 13y ago

tl;dr it's an ad for his open-core forum software, Discourse.

zem 13y ago
or, less cynically, he believes in the value of comments enough that he actually built something to improve the ecosystem.

smsm42 13y ago

And yet another smart person who calls "no rules" a "libertarian paradise" without even bothering to check what libertarians are actually talking about (hint: not the same thing as anarchists, and even anarchists are not the same as misanthropes) complete with unfunny picture. Sigh. This guy is not some troll, he is smart, he is educated, he writes about responsible behavior - and he doesn't even bother to behave responsible himself by getting basic facts he uses as the argument straight. How depressing is that?

baddox 13y ago
I have to assume he threw in the libertarian stuff as a tongue-in-cheek jab at an ideology he rejects. I find it extremely hard to believe that he is truly that ignorant, but easy to believe that he is that unhumorous.

benihana 13y ago

I hate the whole "don't read the comments" crap. It's like burying your head in the sand and saying "I don't want to hear anything that I may not like." I get it. Anonymous people on the internet are assholes. What I don't get is how letting anonymous assholes typing things you've seen hundreds of times keep you from finding some signal in the noise is a good idea. There are some great insights to be found out there. Not everyone has enough insight to write an entire fresh blog post, or maybe someone's blog post was the spark needed to light the thoughts. It's like saying we shouldn't eat potatoes and carrots because they grow in the dirt and the dirt is gross and nasty. Missing out on smart comments, extra contributions, corrections or anything related to the article because a mean person said some bad words that made you feel bad is pretty immature.

DanBC 13y ago
You can wash the dirt off a carrot and you're left with a tasty carrot. Sometimes people are being told by hundreds of other people to "go hang yourself"; "put your face in a toaster"; "get raped"; and so on. Sometimes the threats are from a few people but more direct. "I know where you live and I'm going to rape you". Please don't underestimate the volume or unpleasantness of modern online trolling. People find it significantly stressful, and some people die as a result of it. I would turn off comments for any blog I had, but include some kind of email address. This would increase the amount of junk in my inbox but reduce the amount of useless pointless crap (which is what most Internet comments are). http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/sep/13/internet-troll-jailed-mocking-teenagers http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/sep/13/internet-troll-jai... http://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/twitter-trolls-jailed-over-menacing-abuse-sent-to-feminist-campaigner-caroline-criadoperez-9082213.html http://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/twitter-trolls-jailed-o... http://spyhollywood.com/charlotte-dawson-australian-television-personality-and-presenter-found-dead-2/ http://spyhollywood.com/charlotte-dawson-australian-televisi...
EC1 13y ago
> I get it. Anonymous people on the internet are assholes. What I don't get is how letting anonymous assholes typing things you've seen hundreds of times keep you from finding some signal in the noise is a good idea. There are some great insights to be found out there. The way I see it, is anonymity itself is the problem. I don't bother reading comments anywhere, because the chance of me being "enlightened" is slim to none. I have no idea who is posting, or if what they are posting is true, or who they are. I'm more likely to get quality reading out of books on specific topics I want to learn. Comments are just a waste of time. I think HN is the one place left which still has decent comments.

m0nastic 13y ago

I reject categorically the idea that you should let other people control your time and attention. What you chose to spend your time on is among the most important decisions that you can make. If you find reading other people's comments fulfilling (either on your own site or on sites that you visit), that's awesome. I tend not to read comments on any site that has them. I consider sites like HN which exist solely for comments an exception. If I had a blog, I certainly wouldn't let other people comment on it. I suppose this means there's a chance I might miss out on some really enlightening comment that someone makes. Based on ~20 years of reading comments on the internet, I'm willing to take that chance. It might just be my innate negative reaction to someone telling people what to do, but listening to someone make bullshit blanket statements about how you should spend your time pisses me off (although at least he said "please").

chris_mahan 13y ago
I agree completely. I put my phone number and email address on my web site, then I don't enable comments. You want to say something to me, you know how to reach me. You want to write something for the web, pay for your own hosting, and use hyperlinks. If you can't be bothered to host your own words in your own domain, I can't be bothered to read them. Of course, the irony of me writing this on HN does not escape me, but in this case, I think we write the actual content.
yukichan 13y ago
Agreed, but creating an awesome community could be worth it if you can do it, those last for years and lead to amazing things.
codinghorror 13y ago
As I mentioned in the article, it's like saying "please read the Wikipedia citations". You can get plenty of benefit from the main Wikipedia article itself, but it's nice when the comments are sane and contain signal, as they can help you drill down into the claims of the article and evaluate them. It is definitely optional, comments are like annotations to the article. Counterpoint: sometimes I skip to the HN comments before reading the linked URL to see if there are any major problems / concerns / flaws in the article. Kind of conceptually the same way people use Amazon user reviews when determining if they want to buy a product or not. Crowdsourcing credibility.. The manufacturer (writer) tells one story, the consumers (readers) may tell another. If you want the bigger picture, it is nice to consider both. But you're right that a well written article should stand on its own, the comments shouldn't be necessary to complete the article.

c23gooey 13y ago

tl;dr Please read the comments... because i have just spent a lot of time on a new product that is entirely focussed around comments.

codinghorror 13y ago
Discourse is focused around community creation, not necessarily comments per se. That's kind of a secondary use and it is good from a dogfooding perspective. I'll tell you this: Discourse is a zillion times better at making my admin / moderation tasks easier than the TypePad commenting tools it came from.

spinlock 13y ago

The thing I hate most about stack overflow is that you can't say please or thanks. You didn't solve the moderator problem with that one.

gmisra 13y ago

For those looking for more information as to how personally damaging "the comments" can be, I'll just leave this here: http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/women-arent-welcome-internet-72170/ http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/women-ar... To me, it seems simplistic and woefully inaccurate to characterize all internet communities with comments as sufficiently similar to even consider either approach as a blanket dogma.

DanBC 13y ago
It seems important to mention that two people were jailed for the threats to CAROLINE CRIADO-PEREZ, one of which was a woman.

neves 13y ago

What do you think of Discourse? Is it really revolutionary? I still don't get it.

eitland 13y ago
> I still don't get it. You are not alone it seems. (If someone knows where I can find discourse-installations except for the sandbox, post a link please)
- tarr11 13y ago
  Here's one that I like: http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm
- pseudotrue 13y ago
  Boing Boing apparently uses it: http://bbs.boingboing.net/ http://bbs.boingboing.net/

greggman 13y ago

Wow, what's with all the hate? Isn't HN actually an example of what he's talking about? I thought HN is moderated. People vote, they can down vote comments out of existence. The community does, or at least used to, self moderate. Telling people who are being uncivil to cut it out. I'm pretty happy Discourse is trying to help solve this issue. I guess the test would be to use it on a site that gets controversial comments, say FeministFrequency.com, and see if it fairs any better. Of course his point though isn't that Discourse will solve the issue, only that it's a step. He says you need moderation if you want good comments. Is that wrong? How is that any different than having a bouncer at a bar or security guard at a lecture that will escort out anyone who is being a jerk. Personally I appreciate comments on most of the sites I read. I see some headline, I check the comments for support, reactions, and for alternative ideas. That works for me on HN, on Ars, it even works enough of the time on Slashdot and Reddit. I agree with him. If your site's comments are full of bile you're doing it wrong. Delete the bile. If you're a big site hire someone to delete the bile. Consider things like Joel did (and maybe Jeff does the same thing?) where when he marks a comment as deleted it's actually just hidden for everyone but the commenter. That way the commenter thinks his snarky comment is still there oblivious that no one else is actually seeing it. That's just one example. I'm sure Jeff and Discourse have many others.