I get the feeling that Joel Spolsky doesn't like blog comments:
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I don't know how many times I've read a brilliant article someone wrote on a blog. By the end of the article, I'm excited, I'm impressed, it was a great article. And then you get the dribble of morbid, meaningless, thoughtless comments. If the article, for example, mentions anything in anyway related to Microsoft, you get some kind of open source nuclear war. If the article mentions web browsing in any way, there's always some person without an outbound filter who feels compelled to tell you about how he uses Opera, so he doesn't have this problem, although, frankly, I could care less what Anonymous uses. He's not even human to me, he's anonymous. What web browser he uses doesn't amount to a hill of beans. It's not a single bean. It's not even the memory of last week's huevos rancheros. It's just noise. Useless noise. Thoughtless drivel written by some anonymous non-entity who really didn't read the article very carefully and didn't come close to understanding it and who has no ability whatsoever to control his typing diarrhea if the site's software doesn't physically prevent him from posting.
Harrumph. There are plenty of blogs with open comments that can get 100s of messages per topic, without having them turn into a mess of noise, where the participants know enough to avoid certain topics, where drive-bys are simply ignored. It's all about the regulars, the tone they set, and how they moderate discussions.
hmmm, a software developer who doesn’t like human interaction. sounds improbable….
M$ Windoze sux!
Hi Cleek!
Just clicked over from Neddie’s. Like your blog! Bookmarked you.
BG
Blog comments aside, my only real experience on the web with any form of ‘user comments’ is The Code Project, and I used to hang out a lot in the ‘Soapbox’ forum back in the day. Sadly it is now a shadow of it’s former self, and where once you could have a reasonably intelligent debate (even with people that are diametrically opposed to your views on a particular subject), now it is full of pre-teen trolls, scary right-wing loons, and the occasional religious nutjob.
The only other places I tend to post comments are on very specific sites that may interest me (the odd Radiohead message board for example). And here of course. :)
BG, welcome to my little one-pump rest-stop on the interweb supa-hi-way.
Rob,
yeah… the Soapbox. i quit going there once i started feeling like i’d had all the conversations there were to have with that group of people. … and that some of the conversations had the potential of boiling over into real life, and i didn’t want to find some gun-totin Republican knocking at my front door late one night all pissed cause i’d disrespected The Great Bush.
Soapbox. Yes, I think I remember your final ‘this isn’t me’ post. I also seem to remember one prominent wing-nut effectively accusing you of being a racist. He’s still there and is twice as deranged as he was back then. Scary.
yeah, Stan. fuck that guy.