
Ten Comments You Think Are Cool And Insightful But Aren’t - jasonlbaptiste
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/28/ten-comments-you-think-are-cool-and-insightful-but-arent/
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lacker
You can't make a crowd become smart commenters by criticizing the way they
comment. Instead, TechCrunch should really move to some sort of voting scheme
so that the good comments move up and you can ignore the bad ones. I really
don't know why more big blog sites don't do this already - it seems like a
straightforward win in terms of user experience.

~~~
arien
Why can't you criticise (did I spell that right?) your users now and then,
when they do that to you on every single post? It's not like you care about
offending them anyway, since they are the kind of users you do not want :)

~~~
lacker
Sure, it's not _morally wrong_ to criticize your users... it's just not going
to _work_.

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mixmax
_We don’t publish the real names of these people, but I do keep a list of
people that seem to be really disturbed in some way. It’s often funny to see
them at an event, acting like they really think TechCrunch is great._

Apparently, on the Internet Michael Arrington knows you're a dog.

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jrockway
Arrington is amusing. I can't tell if he's insecure or just immature.

~~~
vnorby
I feel that way about a lot of these "tech bloggers." A lot of them just have
the wrong combination of immaturity, poor writing skills, and little sense of
journalistic integrity.

~~~
Hexstream
If they had more to say they'd probably write less.

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dcurtis
To my astonishment, this writeup was actually interesting. I wonder what they
could do to improve the quality of the comments on TechCrunch. These 11 types
seem to make up the vast majority of the things said there, unfortunately.

~~~
arien
People usually are lazy to express their agreement with someone, however when
we have different views we want to let our opinion be known to the world ASAP.

That's why usually the louder sectors of users/readers/etc are the ones that
are not pleased for one reason or another (or the most bored ones). It's very
obvious in customer support forums (take for example a MMO forum, 90% of the
posts are whines, although it only represents a 20%? of the real playerbase).

Probably the only thing to do to improve quality is write what they want to
hear, but then you'd have the group that was previously happy complaining
about how you betrayed your own standards, etc. And why should you submit to
them and change your ways, in any case?

IMO Techcrunch is fine as it is, it's people who need to shape up and have
some manners in 'teh internetz'. Remember that PennyArcade comic? :P

~~~
alecco
I'm all for an optional up/down vote with more granularity (with _one_ click.)
There are ambiguous situations where you get stuck on just voting up or down.
For example, you might disagree with a post but consider it important to the
discussion. Another typical problem is the +1/bump vote on forums. And "Thank
you." A whole thing is the flag for relevancy. It gets messy, but IMHO
something is needed.

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aditya
Right. TC is where the news may be, but it is definitely not where the
conversation is...

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queensnake
I thought this was going to be a much more insightful / useful article,
pointing out 10 different /common/ arguments or sub-threads that you see all
the time, such that conversation would be improved if we all avoided starting
or continuing them. Maybe with a nice, anchored list, so we could point people
to them.

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raganwald
This one line made the entire post worthwhile: _We don’t strive to be
balanced. We strive to be correct._ I don't know if TC is correct, but I like
the sentiment.

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ObieJazz
Slow news day?

~~~
pg
When I read Arrington's post I thought smugly "at least we don't get so much
of that here." Alas too soon.

~~~
Retric
Yes, but in this case; it's funny.

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rantfoil
Techcrunch comments could be a great launch pad for an anti-comment-troll
API/service. Ultimately it does come down to trust networks. Couldn't pagerank
methods be applied to the 'trustworthiness' of commenters, and therefore
people who consistently troll could be removed from the conversation entirely?

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TweedHeads
I wish they removed techcrunch posts from HN

