Please read the comments

http://blog.codinghorror.com/please-read-the-comments/

by czr80 • 12 years ago

54 53 12 years ago

blog.codinghorror.com

No comments to read here. :/

vacri• 12 years 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.

Sniffnoy• 12 years 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.

krapp• 12 years 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.

quanticle2• 12 years 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/) is a very good essay that illustrates my point.

swanson• 12 years 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• 12 years 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 has short pointers to two things sent in by readers, which they presumably would have left as a comment, if I had comments.

jseliger• 12 years 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-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• 12 years ago

solidify my own thoughts

By refusing to listen to commentary that disagrees with you?

derefr2• 12 years 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.

quanticle2• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

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

tunesmith• 12 years 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.

maxerickson3• 12 years 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/ )

voltagex_2• 12 years 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.

codinghorror3• 12 years ago

It's a hybrid model, but primarily flat.

gweinberg• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

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

davidgerard• 12 years ago

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

zem• 12 years ago

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

smsm42• 12 years 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• 12 years 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• 12 years 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.

DanBC2• 12 years 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-jai...

http://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/twitter-trolls-jailed-o...

http://spyhollywood.com/charlotte-dawson-australian-televisi...

EC12• 12 years 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.

eitland3• 12 years ago

I guess which sites you visit influences the quality of the comments a whole lot more than anonymity or not.

At least my experience is that some of the most thoughtless and intolerant people are the same who will happily post using Facebook login, full name etc.

cgriswald• 12 years ago

You are effectively anonymous to me. (Granted: It is really pseudonymity.) I know nothing about you. I could check out your comment history to get a little better idea of you as a person, but doing that for every single person whose comments interest me would be time consuming and probably would not provide much benefit.

And yet, you've offered ideas here that I may not have considered on my own. I find value in that regardless of whether I ultimately agree, disagree, or choose not to consider it further.

HN has a variety of comments, some excellent, some mindless, but most effectively anonymous. So I don't think I can agree that anonymity is the problem.

Perhaps the problem is accountability. HN (and really, any comments section that is still worthwhile) has methods for punishing bad behavior and rewarding good behavior. Or maybe we are simply lucky enough to be small enough to not be that interesting to trolls.

snowwrestler• 12 years ago

It's just a question of how much noise you're willing to tolerate in hopes of a signal. Would you till a whole field for just one or two carrots?

With a few exceptions, websites no longer attract a high enough percentage of the smart, articulate, responsible commenters to make a comments section worthwhile.

The best discussions now happen on forums and aggregators like Slashdot, HN, subreddits, etc., or via competing blog posts promoted on social media. Corrections and related links work well on Twitter.

wpietri• 12 years ago

The difference being that dirt supports the growth of carrots. While asshole comments actively drive away good commenters.

m0nastic• 12 years 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• 12 years 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• 12 years 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.

codinghorror3• 12 years 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.

NateDad• 12 years ago

I can't imagine not having comments on my blog. With no comments it's basically just a diary. You can track pageviews, but you never know if anyone actually read or learned anything from your post. You have no idea if anyone cares.

I have comments on my blog. I'd never consider removing them for all but the most touchy of subjects. Yes, sometimes people say things I don't agree with. Welcome to the real world.

I do moderate my comments (100% pre-moderated, because I hate captcha and yet also hate spam) but I don't get enough comments to actually make that a burden. I also don't moderate out anything that's not pure obvious spam (though to be fair, my posts don't usually cover anything terribly controversial either).

c23gooey• 12 years 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.

codinghorror3• 12 years 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• 12 years 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• 12 years 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-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.

DanBC2• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

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

eitland3• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

Here's one that I like:

http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm

pseudotrue• 12 years ago

Boing Boing apparently uses it: http://bbs.boingboing.net/

greggman• 12 years 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.

Please read the comments

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