

Good fences make good neighbors - marketer
http://garry.posterous.com/good-fences-make-good-neighbor

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tptacek
Doesn't the Robert Frost poem this article takes its title from make pretty
much the exact opposite point?

 _We have to use a spell to make them balance:

'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'_

...

 _It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall [...]_

...

 _[...] Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence._

~~~
rantfoil
I guess online is just bizarro world in that sense... when everyone is
anonymous and there are no barriers, we get YouTube-like comments.

Like it or not, even Hacker News has significant barriers to new users.
Arguably that's why it's such a great place to spend time.

I wish it were not so, but it certainly seems to me to be the case.

~~~
elai
I don't see what are the significant barriers? You can still comment, post new
links and articles and read like anyone else. If whatever you say has merit,
then nobody will care what your score is in the hacker news game.

~~~
rantfoil
If you run HN with "showdead" you'll see the cruft that gets killed. This
stuff actually really represents a real danger to every online community.

Point is, there are real people who edit HN, and these people use karma score
as a major determining factor when deciding whether or not to mark as dead.

This is aside from the typical flame or personal insult... that anyone can and
will do, even those with high karma scores. ;-)

------
elai
This anonymity is also one of the greatest virtues of the internet.

~~~
mindslight
And note that the vast majority of sites requiring any sort of identity are
_pseudonymous_.

If I make an offensive comment on HN or reddit, my exposure is limited to
downmods. A site which requires a real name and affiliation exposes me to
considerably higher risk.

------
helveticaman
Flaming someone online is not as bad as taking a dump on their porch.

~~~
rantfoil
Depends on how bad the flame is... or flaming is just the first level. What
about spam? What about hate speech?

~~~
helveticaman
EDIT: you're right, of course, it depends on the flame. Perhaps I should say I
haven't seen a lot of online crap that ranks ranker than a dump on my porch.

