131–140 of 147 posts
I think the idea of the participatory web came at a time when people who were participating in the web were a lot kinder and a lot more curios and open about the web in general. I remember being able to scroll through a few forums on which I spent time and being able to engage in conversations with complete strangers with relative ease (late 90s early 00s). At this point, even a somewhat harmless comment on here can…
I have been blogging for about 14 years - 7 of these on a blog dedicated for software engineering topics. I removed all commenting options after about 8 years of blogging. The reason was spam, noise and little value add. Around 2015 70% of comments coming in to my blog were from bots and another 10% from anonymous folks making irrelevant, and sometimes insulting comments which I all had to delete. About 20% of the co…
I have been blogging for about 14 years - 7 of these on a blog dedicated for software engineering topics. I removed all commenting options after about 8 years of blogging. The reason was spam, noise and little value add. Around 2015 70% of comments coming in to my blog were from bots and another 10% from anonymous folks making irrelevant, and sometimes insulting comments which I all had to delete. About 20% of the co…
I can confirm this with what I've experienced. I've blogged since around 2003(ish?) and around 5 years ago I decided that it's just not worth the hazzle. If your goal is to provide a safe discussion space, it's way too much maintenance work for a non-financially-driven and no-clickbait blog. The bad people of 4chan were always commenting from time to time in waves, but last year kind of made me realize that I probabl…
And there's the hypersensitivity these days. I'm a boring blogger that writes about dry highly niche technical subjects. None that stir the pot. The least divisive topics one can imagine. And still I got burned. One of my pieces got a fair amount of reads and from referrals I could see quite a few came from Twitter, which I normally avoid like the plague.
Checking the sources there, I was in disbelief. I'm not going to be repeating the exact fragment, but imagine writing on your blog something like this:
"So to operate this control, you use your keyboard to..."
And on Twitter somebody behind your back goes:
"Keyboard!??! What fucking ableist douchebag is this idiot guy"?
And their (luckily) small bubble clapped in agreement of what a dark character I am. We all know it's typical of Twitter, but I always figured it happens to other people, not to boring me. I guess the bar really is that low now, and writing anything at all has become a liability. Even more so if you consider that future bad faith interpretations are likely to be even more extreme, so they'll be digging up your stuff with a passion.
I guess I got lucky. Had my sin be slightly larger, they'd likely be calling my employer for my termination.
Which begs the question, with this type of hostility, why write at all?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only ? You can't imagine a selfless motivation? Someone wanting to share or help others without requiring recompense and/or feedback? Just want to be clear here.
The thought that anyone would want to read what you have to say alone is ego. > share or help others without requiring recompense Most authors of book seek actual monetary compensation
I run a pretty large NBA blog, that gets crazy traffic. We decided to spend energy and time moderating comments. Basically we go by "don't be an asshole", and while it's onerous, the community that has sprung up around it is incredible. We have people who've been commenting since 2007, and it was worth it if you have the time to spare. My $0.02
EDIT: perhaps links to various discussion sites would also be useful.