
Please read the comments - czr80
http://blog.codinghorror.com/please-read-the-comments/
======
m0nastic
I reject categorically the idea that you should let other people control your
time and attention. What you chose to spend your time on is among the most
important decisions that you can make.

If you find reading other people's comments fulfilling (either on your own
site or on sites that you visit), that's awesome.

I tend not to read comments on any site that has them. I consider sites like
HN which exist solely for comments an exception. If I had a blog, I certainly
wouldn't let other people comment on it. I suppose this means there's a chance
I might miss out on some really enlightening comment that someone makes. Based
on ~20 years of reading comments on the internet, I'm willing to take that
chance.

It might just be my innate negative reaction to someone telling people what to
do, but listening to someone make bullshit blanket statements about how you
should spend your time pisses me off (although at least he said "please").

~~~
codinghorror
As I mentioned in the article, it's like saying "please read the Wikipedia
citations". You can get plenty of benefit from the main Wikipedia article
itself, but it's nice when the comments are sane and contain signal, as they
can help you drill down into the claims of the article and evaluate them.

It is definitely optional, comments are like annotations to the article.

Counterpoint: sometimes I skip to the HN comments _before_ reading the linked
URL to see if there are any major problems / concerns / flaws in the article.
Kind of conceptually the same way people use Amazon user reviews when
determining if they want to buy a product or not. Crowdsourcing credibility..

The manufacturer (writer) tells one story, the consumers (readers) may tell
another. If you want the bigger picture, it is nice to consider both. But
you're right that a well written article should stand on its own, the comments
shouldn't be _necessary_ to complete the article.

------
swanson
I don't think most people with a blog want to build a community. I sure don't.
I write to solidify my own thoughts and to share what knowledge I have gained
with others.

My blog is _my_ place on the internet. A place that represents me and a place
that I control. If a reader wants to add a comment to the discussion, that's
great but do it at your own place. But my place is for my stuff, and I plan to
keep it that way.

~~~
travisby
_solidify my own thoughts_

By refusing to listen to commentary that disagrees with you?

~~~
derefr
What part of the parent's comment implied that they refused to _listen_ to
commentary? People can still comment; they just do it somewhere else.

I think Tumblr has it right when it comes to blog commenting: to reply to
someone's post, you don't leave a comment on their blog; you make a "reblog"
post on _your own_ blog, which quotes their post and responds to it, and the
fact that this happened is automatically propagated back to them.

The original post stays on the author's blog. The reply stays on the replier's
blog. If the original author replies to the reply, though, then _that_ appears
on the author's blog, too, with the replier's post quoted for context.

In other words: it's called hypertext, folks.

~~~
Daiz
>I think Tumblr has it right when it comes to blog commenting

Tumblr's model is absolutely awful, though, because it conflates likes, plain
reblogs and reblogs that actually add commentary together (and sometimes
doesn't even note all of the latter?) into a single stream of "notes", making
it basically impossible to trace or even find the actual conversations and
commentary from all the noise. Their quote inlining can be terribly confusing
at times too. I honestly wonder how anyone manages to discuss _anything_ on
the site.

~~~
derefr
> I honestly wonder how anyone manages to discuss anything on the site.

There's an assumption that both Tumblr and Twitter make: if two people want to
have a back-and-forth conversation, they'll mutually follow one-another, so
that their replies to one-another will show up naturally in their feeds. And
if they aren't following one-another, that must mean they want to basically
ignore one-another.

------
Sniffnoy
Hm, I'd always understood "don't read the comments" to refer to large news
sites and such, not small blogs where there are regular commenters and the
comments are half the point.

------
greggman
Wow, what's with all the hate?

Isn't HN actually an example of what he's talking about? I thought HN is
moderated. People vote, they can down vote comments out of existence. The
community does, or at least used to, self moderate. Telling people who are
being uncivil to cut it out.

I'm pretty happy Discourse is trying to help solve this issue. I guess the
test would be to use it on a site that gets controversial comments, say
FeministFrequency.com, and see if it fairs any better.

Of course his point though isn't that Discourse will solve the issue, only
that it's a step. He says you need moderation if you want good comments. Is
that wrong? How is that any different than having a bouncer at a bar or
security guard at a lecture that will escort out anyone who is being a jerk.

Personally I appreciate comments on most of the sites I read. I see some
headline, I check the comments for support, reactions, and for alternative
ideas. That works for me on HN, on Ars, it even works enough of the time on
Slashdot and Reddit.

I agree with him. If your site's comments are full of bile you're doing it
wrong. Delete the bile. If you're a big site hire someone to delete the bile.
Consider things like Joel did (and maybe Jeff does the same thing?) where when
he marks a comment as deleted it's actually just hidden for everyone but the
commenter. That way the commenter thinks his snarky comment is still there
oblivious that no one else is actually seeing it.

That's just one example. I'm sure Jeff and Discourse have many others.

------
tunesmith
I still don't get Discourse. I went to the comments, saw a comment, read a
couple of replies, scrolled down, and then I found the replies again. It just
doesn't make sense to me. Is it ordered by recency, or is it threaded? It sort
of seems like the worst of both worlds. HN comments make sense - parent
comments ordered by score, with sane threaded discussions underneath.

~~~
maxerickson
The "replies" button appears to be some sort of appeasement for those who do
not like the one true way of showing comments linearly.

I don't really get why discourse (apparently) does so much work to show 40
comments. I guess it might work fine on a fast enough machine, but I at least
think I'd rather wait a few hundred extra milliseconds at the beginning and
not have things clunking into place the whole time I'm looking through the
comments.

(one true way: [http://blog.codinghorror.com/web-discussions-flat-by-
design/](http://blog.codinghorror.com/web-discussions-flat-by-design/) )

~~~
voltagex_
Part of it is the Javascript that they're using is really heavy (I think they
still have an open bug for poor performance on Android) and part of it is the
backend is really really really resource hungry.

~~~
sams99
"and part of it is the backend is really really really resource hungry."

hmmm ... we are serving our topic pages in 83ms median in 6 hours I can count
4 times it took us a second to serve a topic page. This is across MANY sites.

so I am sorry going to have to call bullshit on perf issues caused by server
perf. Server perf is fine.

Client perf can improve and we are constantly working on improving it.

That said:

[http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140320_HJ_923/](http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140320_HJ_923/)

First view 3.255 Repeat view 2.075

Is pretty good, and it is actually faster than that when navigating between
pages.

~~~
maxerickson
The comparison is vaguely obnoxious, but HN is in the browser rendering before
the first byte is returned from Discourse:

[http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140320_K8_MJF/](http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140320_K8_MJF/)

I realize they are different systems with different goals (and different users
and...), but the spare interface here does come with some benefits.

~~~
sams99
My blog runs Discourse as the backend

[http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140320_55_XPN/](http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140320_55_XPN/)

just sayin...

~~~
maxerickson
I thought the more interesting part of the comparison was as a point of
reference for the qualitative evaluation of 'fast enough'. Discourse is a lot
more feature rich than HN, so the actual difference in terms of numbers isn't
real useful, but HN at 0.7 seconds or whatever still doesn't feel ultra
snappy.

------
smsm42
And yet another smart person who calls "no rules" a "libertarian paradise"
without even bothering to check what libertarians are actually talking about
(hint: not the same thing as anarchists, and even anarchists are not the same
as misanthropes) complete with unfunny picture. Sigh. This guy is not some
troll, he is smart, he is educated, he writes about responsible behavior - and
he doesn't even bother to behave responsible himself by getting basic facts he
uses as the argument straight. How depressing is that?

~~~
baddox
I have to assume he threw in the libertarian stuff as a tongue-in-cheek jab at
an ideology he rejects. I find it extremely hard to believe that he is truly
that ignorant, but easy to believe that he is that unhumorous.

------
gmisra
For those looking for more information as to how personally damaging "the
comments" can be, I'll just leave this here:

[http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/women-
ar...](http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/women-arent-
welcome-internet-72170/)

To me, it seems simplistic and woefully inaccurate to characterize all
internet communities with comments as sufficiently similar to even consider
either approach as a blanket dogma.

~~~
DanBC
It seems important to mention that two people were jailed for the threats to
CAROLINE CRIADO-PEREZ, one of which was a woman.

------
quanticle
Joel's definition of a blog is one that is very idiosyncratic, and I'm not
sure that it's shared with very many other people. A blog is a _web log_. It's
a space for you to write and share your thoughts. Nowhere does it say that you
have to leave space for others or that you have to create a "community". If a
community springs up, that's great! But a blog without comments is still a
blog. If it weren't, what else would it be?

~~~
jeroen
The piece is written by Jeff Atwood, not Joel Spolsky. They started Stack
Overflow together.

------
krapp
I have to agree with him. A blog really isn't a blog without comments. A
series of essays and posts arranged in chronological order, maybe, but not a
blog. To me, facilitating reaction to your content and allowing two-way
dialogue is one of the fundamental properties of a blog. Which means yes,
either you're willing to tolerate a certain amount of crap or you have to be
willing to put the hammer down and moderate.

~~~
quanticle
In practice, you always have to put the hammer down and moderate, if you don't
want your community to be overrun by people who are willing to invest the time
and energy to ensure that their voices dominate the discussion.

This
([http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/))
is a very good essay that illustrates my point.

------
c23gooey
tl;dr

Please read the comments... because i have just spent a lot of time on a new
product that is entirely focussed around comments.

~~~
codinghorror
Discourse is focused around community creation, not necessarily comments per
se. That's kind of a secondary use and it is good from a dogfooding
perspective.

I'll tell you this: Discourse is a zillion times better at making my admin /
moderation tasks easier than the TypePad commenting tools it came from.

------
spinlock
The thing I hate most about stack overflow is that you can't say please or
thanks. You didn't solve the moderator problem with that one.

------
davidgerard
tl;dr it's an ad for his open-core forum software, Discourse.

~~~
zem
or, less cynically, he believes in the value of comments enough that he
actually built something to improve the ecosystem.

------
gweinberg
Am I the only one who initially assumed "comments" referred to code comments?
I was surprised to hear of code comments that are misogynistic, homophobic,
etc, although I have read a few that were pretty insulting.

------
vacri
Regarding the seed he's arguing against, there is a definite irony in using
twitter to argue that blog comments shouldn't be read because they are poorly
written.

------
neves
What do you think of Discourse? Is it really revolutionary? I still don't get
it.

~~~
eitland
> I still don't get it.

You are not alone it seems.

(If someone knows where I can find discourse-installations except for the
sandbox, post a link please)

~~~
pseudotrue
Boing Boing apparently uses it:
[http://bbs.boingboing.net/](http://bbs.boingboing.net/)

------
heinrich5991
No comments to read here. :/

------
benihana
I hate the whole "don't read the comments" crap. It's like burying your head
in the sand and saying "I don't want to hear anything that I may not like."

I get it. Anonymous people on the internet are assholes. What I don't get is
how letting anonymous assholes typing things you've seen hundreds of times
keep you from finding some signal in the noise is a good idea. There are some
great insights to be found out there. Not everyone has enough insight to write
an entire fresh blog post, or maybe someone's blog post was the spark needed
to light the thoughts.

It's like saying we shouldn't eat potatoes and carrots because they grow in
the dirt and the dirt is gross and nasty. Missing out on smart comments, extra
contributions, corrections or anything related to the article because a mean
person said some bad words that made you feel bad is pretty immature.

~~~
EC1
> I get it. Anonymous people on the internet are assholes. What I don't get is
> how letting anonymous assholes typing things you've seen hundreds of times
> keep you from finding some signal in the noise is a good idea. There are
> some great insights to be found out there.

The way I see it, is anonymity itself is the problem. I don't bother reading
comments anywhere, because the chance of me being "enlightened" is slim to
none. I have no idea who is posting, or if what they are posting is true, or
who they are. I'm more likely to get quality reading out of books on specific
topics I want to learn. Comments are just a waste of time. I think HN is the
one place left which still has decent comments.

~~~
cgriswald
You are effectively anonymous to me. (Granted: It is really pseudonymity.) I
know nothing about you. I could check out your comment history to get a little
better idea of you as a person, but doing that for every single person whose
comments interest me would be time consuming and probably would not provide
much benefit.

And yet, you've offered ideas here that I may not have considered on my own. I
find value in that regardless of whether I ultimately agree, disagree, or
choose not to consider it further.

HN has a variety of comments, some excellent, some mindless, but most
effectively anonymous. So I don't think I can agree that anonymity is the
problem.

Perhaps the problem is accountability. HN (and really, any comments section
that is still worthwhile) has methods for punishing bad behavior and rewarding
good behavior. Or maybe we are simply lucky enough to be small enough to not
be that interesting to trolls.

~~~
EC1
Actually yeah, I just gave this some thought and you're right. It's
accountability. No sites ban users anymore for anything. Except HN.

------
transitionality
The internet _is_ comments. There's nothing else to it.

