Dear Reddit, Hacker News...

http://www.zedshaw.com/blog/2008-12-25.html

by twampss • 18 years ago

133 82 18 years ago

mixmax• 18 years ago

And thanks for all the laughs Zed. We are looking forward to respectfully disagreeing with your upcoming intelligent thoughtful essays :-)

Raphael• 18 years ago

Zed is dead. Long live Zed!

unalone4• 18 years ago

I found this especially amusing after he got pissed off at proggit for constantly memeing the "Zed's dead" line from Pulp Fiction.

Whoo for respectful debate over essays!

vaksel• 18 years ago

I actually liked the rants

agotterer• 18 years ago

A lot of them make sense actually. He has the balls to say what most wont.

greml1n• 18 years ago

on the internet. (though i agree with your agreement.)

RobertL• 18 years ago

Zed actually says intelligent stuff but in a very obnoxious way.

This makes him a "half-way Reddit". Because Reddit is a place where most posters say stupid stuff in a very obnoxious way.

So, in a way, he was made for the environment. Sorry to see him leave.

iron_ball• 18 years ago

So did he drop the persona at the end of the post or at the beginning? Because he still sounded pretty damn stern and macho when he mentioned tearing down entire language communities with a single post; and I've been on the internet so long I've seen the "ha ha you actually BELIEVED all the outrageous stuff I said loudly and defended to my last breath? Oh, you poor, pathetic saps. You poor, poor, pathetic, pathetic, gullible saps" routine a million times.

gamache• 18 years ago

To me, it seemed like he did mostly believe what he said in his rants. He is only backing away from the ZSFA persona, not the things he said during his ZSFA tenure. As someone who's done time as a troll, I can verify that the persona can get pretty constrictive, even if there is a core of truth in everything you type.

KirinDave• 18 years ago

I can't bring myself to be uncharitable today, but I have to say I'll be very surprised if Zed stops writing rants. I am... very skeptical. I've seen this exact same drama played out on a dozen forums and community sites.

swombat• 18 years ago

From the sound of it Zed isn't going to stop writing rants... he's going to stop existing!

I don't find that so hard to believe. Artificial personalities can get addictive, but spending time in Zed's head must get tedious fast.

river_styx• 18 years ago

Just out of curiosity... Based on your comments, there seems to be something going on between you and Zed. Was there some incident?

thomasmallen2• 18 years ago

Comment stalking makes Santa sad...

tokenadult• 18 years ago

He has the contrast between Reddit and HN right.

barrkel• 18 years ago

You're just flattered. :)

derefr• 18 years ago

Hey, I read both (though I get annoyed by the redundancy sometimes--I'm considering writing a Greasemonkey script to display:none all visited link items.)

begemot• 18 years ago

There are a lot of smart people on reddit, dons, cgibbard, sigpfe and slava_pestov to name a few.

silentbicycle2• 18 years ago

While you're correct, I think the commenting and voting tendencies of the overall site population tend to drown them out. Intelligent discussions on Reddit seem to have a higher chance of being derailed by e.g. people posting 4chan cliches for cheap laughs.

Of course, he's flattering us, and he got voted way up...

gaius2• 18 years ago

Who is this person and why do I care?

fallentimes2• 18 years ago

About section:

http://www.zedshaw.com/

I don't know you well enough to answer the second part of the question.

gaius2• 18 years ago

Ah, one of those Ruby "ninjas" who think they're God's gift because they made a website. Say no more.

Herring• 18 years ago

Eh, I don't see that reddit is worse. For one, this article isn't at the top of the programming subreddit. The comments here are better though.

thomasmallen2• 18 years ago

I knew as soon as this popped up in my feed reader that it would be the top link on HN because it's very flattering, not that there's anything wrong with that.

alex_c• 18 years ago

Amusingly enough, a lot of Zed's blog posts never actually seem to be voted up on Reddit, and this one was posted and voted up here before it was on Reddit.

http://www.reddit.com/search?q=zedshaw&sort=new

tptacek5• 18 years ago

I don't understand why I'm meant to care about a troll promising to stop trolling.

nailer4• 18 years ago

A troll is someone who's just trying to get a reaction, but hasn't actually contributed anything worthwhile.

Zed has obviously contributed a lot, and was being trolled by the Ruby community (know what 'fuzed' stands for?) before he started ZSFA.

unalone4• 18 years ago

Yeah, and that's an important distinction, especially in cases like this.

You can be pissed off and rude and not be a troll. If you do, the people calling you out as a troll are often trolling themselves, albeit more benignly.

tptacek5• 18 years ago

When you write long-form blog posts that are about little more than the list of Ruby people that have offended you --- often writing about them for the Nth time --- I stop caring what your contributions are, and start being annoyed. Whatever Zed's "contributions" are, there are 100 Ruby developers who have contributed more, but don't demand that I attend to their neuroses.

mattmaroon• 18 years ago

I've stopped clicking the links to his posts because they're always things I can't determine why I should care about. Most of his posts that I find from here could have been written by a non-programmer, and if they were the people here would complain they were off-topic.

It's very Valleywagish actually.

tptacek5• 18 years ago

I follow HN in NetNewsWire and can't always tell that a link goes to Zed; if I could tell, I'd ignore them.

trominos• 18 years ago

On one hand, I don't like to let myself be flattered, especially when I have no idea how sincere the flattery is.

On the other: you like us? All right, c'mon, group hug.

d0mine3• 18 years ago

Base flattery works.

Troll and Man’s Man™ are different beasts. But trolling works too.

I doubt that C++ or Lisp's success has anything to do with stern looks.

nailer4• 18 years ago

Are C++ and Lisp successful?

C++ doesn't seem so popular in the last decade. Lisp was That Language That Abuse Was Written In to a lot of people.

d0mine3• 18 years ago

Both C++ and Lisp are successful. Of cause It depends on how you define a "success" among thousands of programming languages.

jbjohns• 18 years ago

C++ certainly was popular, in fact the most popular by every measurement I saw back in the day. And he's talking about how it got there when it did, not today. I don't necessarily agree, but what he was saying should have been pretty obvious. :)

Hexstream• 18 years ago

He said that Lisp isn't popular because it doesn't have the stern looks...

d0mine3• 18 years ago

I should have said:

I doubt that C++ or Lisp's success or a lack of it has anything to do with stern looks.

pavelludiq• 18 years ago

Zed, i wish you the best of luck, and hope you find new and creative ways to wreak havoc on the internet!

maurycy• 18 years ago

Best luck, Zed.

jcapote• 18 years ago

I will miss the maddox of the tech community

0_o• 18 years ago

Maddox is much funnier than this dork

wfarr2• 18 years ago

The last time I found Maddox funny was back in middle school.

amix• 18 years ago

"Zed's dead baby, Zed's dead."

pmarsh• 18 years ago

Perhaps I am too far down the ladder of programmers, but was I the only one who didn't care about the recent teenage prom queen drama to engulf the Ruby community?

Good hacks continued to come out, the language was still fun to write in, and Rails and Merb continued to move forward.

Perhaps I don't follow enough on twitter, or something. I get the sense enough energy was wasted in the past year to power several nations.

Merry Christmas all, glad Zed is doing what he enjoys as always, we should all strive to live each day that way.

muitocomplicado• 18 years ago

I feel the same way. Being an outsider, who cares about the bickering between coding groups. It's still a nice programming language to code in and improve on.

FraaJad• 18 years ago

I, for one, look forward to reading about his exploits in the Python world.

He has done some very interesting work in recent days using Python (vellum, SoS ...).

Compared to all the drama that goes on in the Ruby (should I say Rails?) world, reading Python blogs on planetpython.org is a learning experience.

davi• 18 years ago

"Programmers will listen to people ... not because what they say is all that intelligent or thoughtful, but because they say it like a Man’s Man™."

Yep. We are primates. Purely logical communication is rare amongst us -- a speaker's body language, inflection, status, and arousal level all affect how we hear what they are saying.

People who do not respond in this way are considered weird; those who cannot, receive a diagnosis.

joe• 18 years ago

I truly hope that Zed has some "just fucking do it" left in him after the slaps in the face he's taken from some of the Ruby/Rails community. If he makes good on his plans, stops talking about himself, and lets his actions and intelligence speak for themselves, I'll gain a world of respect for him.

Oh, and Zed: "Any more" is written "any more" when referring to additional items. "I will not write rants anymore" would be grammatically correct, however. Just a bit of constructive criticism. :)

petercooper• 18 years ago

Stop giving this guy popularity! Merely breathing hot air and having a fiesty online "persona" should not make you newsworthy (although, sadly, it clearly does).

He had some good points a year ago. Now, not so much.

dangrover• 18 years ago

That was kind of the point of the post.

jdp• 18 years ago

At least he had enough sense to give up the gimmick before it got old

nonrecursive• 18 years ago

I'm really happy about this. I heard about Zed because of one of his first rants, but after browsing around his site I found gems like http://www.zedshaw.com/essays/master_and_expert.html . I'm really looking forward to reading more.

gommm• 18 years ago

Yeah, when I first started looking at zed's website (around the time mongrel became popular), I really enjoyed his essays.. At that time, even his rants were interesting (http://www.zedshaw.com/rants/programmer_stats.html).

So thanks Zed for going back to writing thoughtful essays :-)

michaelneale• 18 years ago

"What you have witnessed is a year long proof that programmers will usually only listen to the man who seems toughest, not the one who’s most possibly right."

I have noticed this throughout the years - there is a whole lot of testosterone around and it only gets worse. I like his mention of the OO book covers in the early days ;)

SingAlong• 18 years ago

And the letter to Reddit, Dear Reddit is his last blog rant :)

theBobMcCormick• 18 years ago

Zed is such a douche.

mhb• 18 years ago

Does this mean his site will change to something less contrary than white on black?

Dear Reddit, Hacker News...

Related Stories