It does seem that many of us have completely different mindsets for online commenting. They say that tone is lost in text, which is certainly true. Probably better thinking of it as the color magenta. That is, a bit of a fake thing that is often fully inferred by our brains from other signals.
The biggest reason is to avoid extrinsic motivation. What we really miss from the early web is that people were publishing with almost purely intrinsic motivations. Nowadays almost everything on the web is extrinsically motivated, and that is the source of much of the toxicity.
The second reason is a matter of principle. It’s _my_ blog. I publish things here. Why should I feel obliged to allow any rando to publish their screed right next to mine on _my_ website? If you got something to say, go publish on your own web site. If you want, email me. Maybe if I’m feeling generous I will publish a letter to the editor, like a traditional newspaper or magazine.
IMO comments sections were largely a mistake. We would have been better off in a place where we didn’t take for granted that every single article published on the web would have one.
If you see this reply in time you might choose to edit your comment.
Alternatively, feel free to explain to me why I'm wrong!
(Edit: Now fixed ... happy to help. Cheers!)
It would be good if we understood this phenomenon better, why we do it and how we can be more balanced in our approach to what others say online.
This is tied to the societal confusion that wrong is the same as bad. Culturally it's bad to be wrong, so we are made to feel ashamed when we're wrong. Really, we should be grateful because it gives us the chance to learn and grow. Being wrong isn't bad, staying wrong might me.
And then you tie in a societal misperception that some people hold that life is a zero sum game, and you can only get ahead by tearing someone else down, and you get the modern internet.
However, HN is also one of the few places where it's not uncommon for me to see people push back on it. And often comments that "pounce on a few words" are offering valid criticism on only that part IMO, while still accepting the larger work that's been posted.
Comments like “^ This”, are generally frowned on, because they don’t contribute knowledge to the discussion and we have votes to show agreement. Constructive criticism does. I think this is a good thing, on forums like HN I prefer constructive criticism over unconstructive praise.
However, it doesn’t explain unconstructive criticism (“how OP can be interpreted as ignorant or illogical or immoral”). Maybe people don’t know how to criticize gently and helpfully*, or being rude correlates more with expressing your opinion.
* My advice would be: make objective points and focus on the content, don’t make subjective points or attack the commenter.
- Constructive criticism, but worded nicely. "This is a cool project, it would be cooler if..." is a nicer way (with some praise) of saying "This part isn't very good: ... [inverted]"
- Appreciating a specific part of the project, which I think is the technical definition of "constructive praise". "I especially liked X". This is useful because it implicitly suggests what to emphasize or elaborate (the part being praised) and what to improve or change (other parts). Unfortunately this may be the rarest, especially on HN; it's at least rarer than constructive criticism.
- Suggestions for new features. Actually these are pretty common on HN. I was lumping them with criticism ("you don't have X") but that's just a reinterpretation, and any constructive feedback can be reinterpreted as criticism ("I especially liked X" => "Every part was bad except X"). That's probably why I didn't address the other kinds of feedback, but thinking about it more, criticism is only the feedback that's phrased negatively.
I'd call it the "Duty Calls Law" after https://xkcd.com/386/
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law
(I'm really hoping you were intentionally setting up the straight line for that joke; if not, sincerest apologies).
Outcome | Helpful | Contrarian
-----------|------------------------
Contrarian | Contrarian Contrarian
Helpful | Helpful Contrarian
But it almost doesn't matter whether contrarian attitudes really are "very common". Absent a force that mitigates this unbalanced outcome matrix, it's almost an asymptotic statistical certainty that any Internet thread with enough participants will have enough contrarians in it that the entire thread (and the dominant strategy for anyone who wants to participate in the thread) devolves towards contrarianism.
Folks say "I'm making it all about me," and maybe they're right, but it sure beats the usual "drop trou, and drop grogan" style of many folks.
If I'm conversing with someone in real life, and they say something I strongly disagree with, I can disagree, and we can discuss and perhaps they tell me that I misunderstood them, or they articulated themselves incorrectly, or we are proceeding from different assumptions, etc. I'm reading something online, and I reach a sentence that I strongly disagree with, I essentially have to stop reading at that point, because from that point on I have diverged from being in alignment with the perspective of the author. And there's no back-and-forth to be had, so I need to state my point as clearly as possible - otherwise someone will just do the same thing back to me.
I dunno, I kind of feel like I'm probably the type of person that's being described here, but I don't really intend to "make OP wrong". I just don't see any other option other than to state my disagreement as plainly as possible, so other people can pick it apart.
I agree, but I think it has more to do with how online comments are presented. Start with that word, comments. The very word suggests a response rather than a dialogue.
Or look at it a different way, look at it from the perspective of how content is presented online. Have you ever noticed how the host of some YouTube videos invite people to comment with a prompt, such as soliciting information? It is meant to encourage positive conversations. Unfortunately, this is relatively rare with written content. People who have positive things to say may say those things, but negative comments are usually going to win out because the people who make those comments feel that it has to be said. Of course, you are going to have extremes on either side. A community of disciplined readers may keep things positive against all odds and a community of trolls are going to troll, but the lack of a prompt to encourage dialogue is simply gambling on the outcome.
This is a great insight. I always wondered why video platforms seemed to have much more positive comments than text platforms, but now it makes sense. Most videos have some prompt ("leave a comment below if you have X" or "if this made you remember a funny time in your life leave a comment on my video") to answer whereas most text doesn't which primes folks to respond negatively.
The focus is not really on making some nebulous "OP" wrong, as if anyone thinks about anything but themselves. The focus is compelling the software to give a result in response. The more obtuse a comment is, the more likely the algorithm will deliver.
> why we do it
Because there is no value in writing a comment that doesn't offer a result. You'd write in your private journal instead if that is what you were looking for. Different tools for different jobs.
> how we can be more balanced in our approach to what others say online.
No need to try and make your hammer a screwdriver when you can use an actual screwdriver just as easily instead. That experience is found in not being online and going outside to talk to people rather than software instead. Use the right tool for the job, as they say.
And according to the golden rule, this means I should also focus on negative comments. If someone told me an important NEW-TECH-1 downside in the past, and I see NEW-TECH-2 and I know its downside (maybe because I had to try it at work, maybe because I am an expert in the area), then I better hop in and post that.
Positive experiences are also useful, but they feel redundant: after all, if OP is positive about NEW-TECH, it likely already mentions all the good things already.
(note that "OP" is original post, not original poster. Arguing against people on internet is almost always a bad idea. Arguing against specific posts is much better.)
It's a fine line. A culture too positive and you get shills and "+1 that looks great" repeated endlessly. A culture too negative and you get tangential rants disguised as criticism.
(Here's me leaving an inane comment on the outsourced comment blog, heh.)
However, for low-traffic "blogs" I like having comments enabled, even if many never get shown, because sometimes the ONLY thing you can find on the Internet related to your issue is this one blog, and there's one comment with an updated link that saves all of your bacon and half the farm, too.
I spend almost zero time moderating, because I've outsourced it to blogger/disqus. I'm not a big fan of disqus but the comments provide so much value to me, and disqus does the moderation so well, that I keep using it for now.
I think of it like giving a talk at a conference, and having questions afterwards. At some conferences, the questions are a waste of time. But at other conferences, the questions are quite valuable. I think comments don't work well on all sites. But they work well on mine.
One of the most positive things I've done though is to generate "Comment by email" links at the end of each post. People who reach out directly and only to me behave much differently than people who do performative commenting on social media.
The overall rationale for not having comments on my blog is here https://ergaster.org/posts/2024/03/06-welcoming-feedback/
As for the "I thought about this problem for 10s let me tell you all the things wrong with it" - yeah. Engineers do that. I'm constantly pointing it out in relation to LLM coding agents.
Lately I've been stuck in YouTube court cases recommendations. There are live trials and many archives for all sorts of real court cases at every stage. I have grown an appreciation for what a judge does. A judge listens and makes sure all information has been provided before making a judgement/ruling/order. The patience those folks show is significant. I can only imagine how tiring that amount of active listening must be. I have found it personally inspiring and educational.
https://www.vera.org/news/how-to-be-a-court-watcher-and-why-...
Spam killed it, and let go of blog comments in 2021. https://brajeshwar.com/2021/brajeshwar.com-2021/
The way the spammers got past even hard CAPTCHAs and anti-spam measures convinced me there were humans involved at least some of the time. It made me so sad..
There's not much you can do if you become "targeted" but having your own even trivial custom captcha seems to reduce spam a lot. Years ago when I helped moderate a small forum, we added an extra input box for registration that went something like "What holds objects down on the earth, noodles or gravity?" and that entirely eliminated spambot registrations. And approximately no one reads my blog, so again no one's bothering to target explicitly, but I've not had a spam problem in ~15+ years with a combination of the <form>'s action lying about where the POST endpoint is (JS is required for the real one) and a captcha input box of "Please join these two "words" together (without spaces): uoguvwwp and urdugjgy" where the 8 letter 'words' are randomly generated.
The original programmer should have included all that (design docs, specs, diagrams, examples) in the commit messages, or at least made references in code comments / commit messages, and included this design material in the same repo. It's good if you can talk to the original author; it's better if you can read their original thoughts in their absence.
'Dear me!' said Miss de Vine, 'who is that very uninspired young woman? She seems very much annoyed with my review of Mr. Winterlake's book on Essex. She seems to think I ought to have torn the poor man to pieces because of a trifling error of a few months made in dealing, quite incidentally, with the early history of the Bacon family. She attaches no importance to the fact that the book is the most illuminating and scholarly handling to date of the interactions of two most enigmatic characters.'
'Bacon family history is her subject,' said Miss Lydgate, 'so I've no doubt she feels strongly about it.'
'It's a great mistake to see one's own subject out of proportion to its background. The error should be corrected, of course; I did correct it--in a private letter to the author, which is the proper medium for trifling corrections. But the man has, I feel sure, got hold of the master-key to the situation between those two men, and in so doing he has got hold of a fact of genuine importance.'
-- Gaudy Night, D.L.Sayers (1935)
I think comment sections tend to bring out the "feels strongly" responses where the "private letter" ones would be more appropriate.
While Gaudy Night is a detective story, it's just as much a love letter to Oxford academia (the author being an alumni).
On a daily basis I encounter code written by people who have skills in one area and are trying to solve that problem within the context of another area they do not have skills in. These people will make poor decisions which are intended to solve problems I can easily imagine but which should have been solved a wholly different way.
No Comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1057133 - Jan 2010 (65 comments)
gnabgib•1d ago
ColinWright•1d ago
I'm now interested to compare any comments and contributions here with those made last time. Have people's opinions changed?
satvikpendem•1d ago
krapp•1d ago
People show up here expecting a community far more erudite , intellectually and technically deep and separated from popular culture than they find, and when disillusion sets in they interpret this as a degradation of the culture.
Also in a culture that eschews humor and common sentiment the way HN often does (in order to not "be like Reddit") hostility, misanthropy and cynicism become intellectual virtue signals.
armchairhacker•1d ago
lmm•16h ago
Karrot_Kream•11h ago
thunderbong•1d ago
> I have a simple guideline for real life interactions with others that carries over quite well on-line, "Deal with issues; ignore details." > It's amazing how well this works in person, especially when trying to get something done. My number one question to another is probably, "Is that an issue or a detail?" We can almost always decide together which it is. Then, if it's an issue, we deal with it, and if it's a detail, we move on to the next issue.
> This has also saved me countless hours and aggravation on-line. If I post something and someone disagrees, I quickly decide whether or not it's really an issue and only engage the other if it is. I realize that this is just a judgment call, but I'd estimate about 90% of on-line disagreements are just details. In these cases, I think it's best to simply move on.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1057250