31–40 of 45 posts
Great idea, though something I accepted about myself years ago is I always want to read at least some of the comments, even if they’re horrific and make me want to sand off my own eyeballs. It may be horrible a lot of the time, but the total boredom and loneliness of experiencing the internet without feeling the presence of others is somehow worse. I know it’s ridiculous, just seems to be the way I am.
The trick is to not auto-publish anything. Every comment posted to the website first gets written to a text file which I then review, usually during the weekends. I ignore all the spam, fix any obvious typos in the legitimate comments and then publish them to my website.
Perhaps a little unrelated but I want to mention that I take great joy in maintaining an active comments section on my website: https://susam.net/comments/ The trick is to not auto-publish anything. Every comment posted to the website first gets written to a text file which I then review, usually during the weekends. I ignore all the spam, fix any obvious typos in the legitimate comments and then publish them to my w…
In general, browser extensions are not to be trusted. Even if you trust them now, they could change owners. There are examples.
I prefer using Greasemonkey / Tampermonkey but the ecosystem is full of sketchy scripts too and some people foolishly have auto-updates enabled. Also it's bizarrely really hard to get someone to use such a user script if they don't already have the parent extension installed, but if you package it as an extension on its own they'll try it much more easily.
And thus concludes the internet's decades long transition from a peer community of idea exchange ala UseNet to a broadcast messaging medium controlled by elites for their own benefit ala Bari Weiss' CBS. Welcome to the Dead Internet.
Great idea, though something I accepted about myself years ago is I always want to read at least some of the comments, even if they’re horrific and make me want to sand off my own eyeballs. It may be horrible a lot of the time, but the total boredom and loneliness of experiencing the internet without feeling the presence of others is somehow worse. I know it’s ridiculous, just seems to be the way I am.
HN comments are insightful. And while there is bot farms out there it’s important to know talking points of someone you disagree with to both consider their validity and to enable you to refute them well.
I find this to be kind of the whole reason why acting inciteful is socially problematic anyways: it derails conversations. It's also why I can consider it malicious: you can lay into this effect parasitically, with intention. You point to HN; I find that this idea is reflected in the HN guidelines as well (or at least the lessons from it are), but also that it's by no means immune.
Great idea, though something I accepted about myself years ago is I always want to read at least some of the comments, even if they’re horrific and make me want to sand off my own eyeballs. It may be horrible a lot of the time, but the total boredom and loneliness of experiencing the internet without feeling the presence of others is somehow worse. I know it’s ridiculous, just seems to be the way I am.
Heh, this reminds me of that study that showed people would rather give themselves painful electric shocks than be alone. https://www.science.org/content/article/people-would-rather-...