Having an online comments section would also be an obligation to make sure it isn't getting abused. Probably resulting in yet another inbox you have to stay on top of. (Well, optimistically, it would be that. I try and never forget that the expected outcome is just flat out silence.)
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.
I have also intentionally not included a comments feature on my blog.
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.
On my personal site, I have a comments section per post but they are on a separate page. So only people who actively look for them will even see them. Bit moot though, anyone who ever ends up contacting me usually writes an email rather than a comment.
When someone posts on forums and social media, IME it's very common that the replies focus on how they can "make OP wrong". They only seem to care about how OP can be interpreted as ignorant or illogical or immoral, rather than insightful or helpful. I am sure I'm as guilty of this as anyone else.
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.
The problem is that an online comment is not a dialogue.
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.
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.
That's because finding out the mistakes in OP is one of the biggest benefits of the public comment section. Let's say I read a post about how NEW-TECH is so much better that the current state of the art. I may now be convinced to try it, but how do I know what's written in OP is not omitting serious downsides? That's where the HN (and other fora) comes in: read the comments and see if there are any problems with it.
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.)
This is a restatement of Chesterton's Fence - it's good.
(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 love having comments on my site/blog. I learn so much from some of them. For example, on my hexagon page, someone said there's a connection with "Eisenstein integers". I had never heard of them, and they were fun to learn about. Another example, I don't know "doubled coordinates" that well, so some sections of the page are incomplete. In the comments people have pointed to resources and code that fill in the gaps in my knowledge. Most recently, someone pointed out an inconsistency in something I wrote, and they were right — I have updated the page to resolve it. Before that, someone pointed to an emacs package that might make my life easier, and it looks like it will indeed partially solve the problem I had posted about.
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.
I've had similar thoughts and decided not to embed comments on my blog, but to link to social media where people can still give me feedback.
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.
I hade a comment section on a blog in the early 2000s. It was a spam nightmare. Never again. I would not have one even with the products that claim to handle that spam for you.
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.
I killed Comments on my Blog because of Spam. In its early days (2000s), comments on my blog made my day and hours. I made many friends, got many projects/contracts, along with the occasional threats and trolls. I even got a girlfriend who found it hard to believe that the visitor counter on my website increased non-stop. She commented that I'm cheating. I showed her my Web Analytics. That's how I got a girlfriend (I think 2005-2006).
Off-topic:
Same experience for me. I ended up spending too much time fighting the spam.
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..
> Talking face to face changed everything, because they could draw diagrams, pull out specs, and give concrete examples.
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.
Weirdly, I feel the same way as the author still in 2025. Flickr is much more niche now than it used to be, and has way less activity, but I still actively post my photography there and find it to primarily be a place full of positivity and some truly excellent photography. On any given day, if I go to Flickr, I can see photos that would win awards in times past (although I feel there is much less societal interest in photography since everyone has a camera in their pocket now). Despite that, I can't give up my addiction to going on technical sites and reading about the stuff, even though I also no longer write code daily.
This reminds me of one of my favourite exchanges in a detective story:
'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).
Tangential: There might be a perfectly good explanation for why something was designed the way it was, but that doesn't mean that it should stay like that in retrospect.
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.
I miss the dadgum blog. Full of short, readable, but insightful articles about sometimes very obscure technological stuff. He was in my inspiration in trying very hard to write short posts this year - because I realise almost no one wants to read long blog posts, including me.
The problem is someone posts a comment and there's an immediate response from a spergy contrarian having to interject (wink) for a moment AKKSSSSHHHHULLLLY and point out how every single thing you wrote is incorrect. If they'd written the opposite, the contrarian would spout the opposite also. Contrarianism. The internet has always been this way - before and after the normie invasion.
27 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 49.7 ms ] threadIt 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.
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.
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.
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.)
(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..
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)
It's useless pointing out what scam some influencer is pushing on Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok when they can delete your comment.