Why Blogs Suck

I know it may come across as, at best, clue­less, and at worst, elit­ist, to state on my blog that weblogs suck. How­ev­er, they do. It’s not the blogs’ fault, or usu­al­ly even the writ­ers’. It’s the read­ers. More accu­rate­ly, it’s the read­ers who feel so moved to post every lit­tle idi­ot­ic and annoy­ing thing they can think of. These trolls are, if not ruin­ing, at least hin­der­ing the progress toward real­ly expres­sive and use­ful com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools online.

Now, I’m hon­est­ly not refer­ring to any­one who has ever post­ed at my site. Sure, I get some troll-ish com­ment spam which is pseu­do-social-engi­neered to pro­voke a response. They usu­al­ly con­sist of some shal­low psy­cho-bab­ble about “the mean­ing­less exis­ten­tial exis­tence of fem­i­nine cul­ture has imbued a sense of degra­da­tion in the mod­ern hedo­nis­tic social col­lec­tive,” or some­thing like that. How­ev­er, that just gets delet­ed with­in a few hours and you nev­er have to suf­fer it here at super_structure. My friends, fam­i­ly, and strangers, all with some­thing inter­est­ing to post, are the only peo­ple who have cast a true-type shad­ow upon the famil­iar com­ment form below. That comes from only those rare peo­ple who have ever heard of super_structure, which is okay by me.

No, I’m refer­ring to the larg­er sites that I read through­out my dig­i­tal work­day: Slash­dot, Engad­get, TUAW, and to some extent kot­tke and many oth­ers. Many of these posts are of news or rumors which the writer asks open ques­tions such as “How could this have been bet­ter?” and “If this involved X instead of Y, how would have peo­ple react­ed?” The very nature of hav­ing open com­ment forms allows for a large con­ver­sa­tion, in which we could share ideas and cri­tiques to pro­duce some­thing great. Trey recent­ly post­ed a blurb from a much larg­er arti­cle which I’m only address­ing one small aspect of (that arti­cle was con­cern­ing the open source move­ment). These posts would be a great way to learn what great ideas are float­ing around out there and just what peo­ple real­ly want to read, see, and use. Sad­ly, as Jason Kot­tke point­ed out, this often does­n’t result in a con­ver­sa­tion at all. Most times, it isn’t even amus­ing or infor­ma­tive. It’s just one stu­pid com­ment after another.

I sup­pose I had been get­ting exposed to this behav­ior read­ing blogs increas­ing­ly over the past year or more. How­ev­er, with the recent news to which I had first hand expo­sure, it all became glar­ing­ly obvi­ous. The mas­sive amount of online expo­sure and news sto­ries brought floods of com­ments. I read in hor­ror as the dis­cus­sion just degrad­ed into how every­one involved was scum, and only the per­son writ­ing a scathing com­ment about them had any insight or sensibility.

Take an exam­ple of a post made ear­li­er this evening on Engad­get. This is a site that posts about, of all things, gad­gets. They often, after a prod­uct has been on the mar­ket for a while and many read­ers have a had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to use it, ask “what would you do to make it bet­ter?” This would be one of my favorite kinds of posts, except for com­ments like this, by mac­sucks:

first change, i’d dump this crap­py mouse along with its crap­py system…

…and they get worse from there. For every sin­gle use­ful com­ment, there are about five com­plete­ly use­less state­ments (I’m not count­ing the most inane of all, the “first post”). If Engad­get and TUAW are bad, Slash­dot has become utter­ly pathet­ic. The once uber-geek site is now host to online wannabe geeks with noth­ing bet­ter to do than bash Microsoft first and Apple sec­ond. I’m not say­ing there are legit­i­mate com­plaints about both com­pa­nies, but there’s room for that online, and mak­ing harsh com­ments about Gates and Jobs ad nau­si­um is hard­ly the way to go.

I am hard­ly above mak­ing crude jokes or rash judg­ments about peo­ple in the news, but I at least try and make some attempt to frame them as such. Fur­ther, I usu­al­ly try and main­tain enough of the human virtue of empa­thy to at least under­stand that I do not know all of the sto­ry and there­fore can’t serve as a fault­less judge. That being said, maybe some of these trolls are just hav­ing a bad day and need to vent… or maybe Jason John­son’s right: they’re just 12 year old jerks with too much free time.

Either way, until there is a Grease­mon­key script which allows for a stu­pid­i­ty thresh­old, I’m going to cur­tail my read­ing of com­ments and stop post­ing com­ments myself. Unless I can find some decent con­ver­sa­tions online underway,as I seem to have lit­tle luck in start­ing them myself.

[I con­tin­ue to make a liar out of myself by post­ing to these and oth­er blogs. Why to I hate myself so?]

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Categorized as Geek, Meta

By Jason Coleman

Structural engineer and technical content manager Bentley Systems by day. Geeky father and husband all the rest of time.

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