Interesting Links for 06-01-2012
Jan. 6th, 2012 11:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewducker- Stephen Hawking at 70, an interview
- 5 Unusual Ways to Raise Successful Children (I'd go with four of these)
- The Joy of Quiet (not for me, but I know a few of you like to take time off from things)
- Why you shouldn't have comments on your blog (I feel exactly the opposite, of course.)
A large chunk of the reason I have a journal is for the engagement I get from commenters, and the discussions that I (and others) have on the posts. I don't want to talk to The Internet, I want to talk to people.
- The Kyobo Mirasol colour e-reader sucks. Dammit!
I was actually hoping that this would be part of a push towards colour ereaders with fast response times.
- Top five tips on women for Stephen Hawking
- How password policies actually work
- What you should eat
- Teen runs away from home, police decide she's foreign, deport her. Huzzah for Texas!
- The Religious Right gather to pick Not-Romney. (Probably Perry)
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Date: 2012-01-06 11:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-06 11:11 am (UTC)But this is still dramatically better as a starting point than most of what I saw more than ten years ago.
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Date: 2012-01-06 12:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-06 12:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-06 12:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-06 01:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-06 11:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-06 07:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-06 12:00 pm (UTC)Of course, it does mean that, in their own eyes at least, they are never wrong on teh internets...
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Date: 2012-01-06 01:05 pm (UTC)I think that for certain people operating at the top of the blogosphere, they expect that their conversations will be carried out blog to blog - I'd post something, you'd put your response in your own post, etc.
But I can't see that working for me. I like seeing it all nicely threaded.
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Date: 2012-01-06 10:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-08 07:56 pm (UTC)Comments
Date: 2012-01-06 12:55 pm (UTC)But there does seem to be a pervasive pattern that blogs with more followers than that, even if they have pleasant comment sections, almost never get the same level of conversation. I think it's probably almost inevitable that as the number of people increases, the comments are swamped by whatever is the most obvious sort of comment, which creates a feedback loop. The ultimate failure mode of this is obviously comments on news articles and youtube videos, which are usually unreadable. But I still usually skip reading comments on large blogs, finding they don't normally add much to the conversation after all. Whereas they're normally quite interesting on smaller blogs. I'm not sure if that's just a diminishing returns thing (there's definitely some of that), but I think it's a real effect too, although I'm not sure.
Two interesting cases are making light, which is a good example of a site which has generally very interesting comments, but they acheive that by setting out to create a good community (which is great if you can, but most bloggers don't really want to run a forum as well). And Language Log, which has several writers who used to not have comments at all, but experimentally turned them on with a policy of "only substansive comments" (like not even "oh, that's interesting, I liked para 3, but I would have said" but only things that add content of a similar level of research to the original post). It started off rocky -- most people are so used to commenting it's hard not to, but I don't know if it went well.
That makes sense to me. I don't know if the linked article was suggesting turning off comments on ALL blogs, or only suggesting it as a sensible option when the comments seem to stop helping.
I'm also not sure what the right answer would be, if some blogs find comments don't really work. One option is to have a separate forum (hopefully with volunteer moderators). Another might be to have screened comments, more as a "contact the author" than as an ongoing conversation, but with the understanding that minor clarifications and support and criticism would just be read, but anything the author thought people reading really ought to know would be unscreened (eg. substansive corrections). This happens a little with authors posting follow-ups "edit: I receieved an interesting email" but in a more structured way.
Re: Comments
Date: 2012-01-06 01:08 pm (UTC)It's certainly the case that larger pools of commenters can be awful to deal with - the only place I've known that handles it well is Hacker News, where the rating system means that better things tend to rise. And even that's gone downhill recently, since chunks of Reddit seem to have drifted over. Still better than most though, as the culture there means that silly comments tend to get modded into oblivion.
Re: Comments
Date: 2012-01-06 01:37 pm (UTC)Oh, well done. I'm not surprised, but I'm interested to know how much people with followers a bit bigger than mine have had to deal with.
I've locked a comment thread once or twice, and eventually screened anonymous comments, which cut off someone who always posted semi-anonymously and was interesting, but way, way too inflamatory to be worth it, but no more.
And yeah, comments with votes is another interesting paradigm I forgot to list; it never seems as good as you'd hope, but definitely does help somewhat.
Re: Comments
Date: 2012-01-06 06:57 pm (UTC)I don't like rating systems where posts get voted up or down since if there is a community that interests you and you want to join in, but you don't quite quite fit, it's easy to get disappeared, as it were, even if what you are saying is valid but doesn't fit the current sentiment, posting style or you're just not one of the in crowd.
Much as I like SomethingAwful, there are parts of it that at times are very cliquey and if you're not a known poster or post in the right style you would find it hard to be accepted.
That said, people respond to the structure that they are presented with. Looking at many blogs and so forth, there is a big post at the top, and "comments?" or somesuch at the bottom. All I'm doing here is adding a comment -
Re: Comments
Date: 2012-01-06 07:21 pm (UTC)I am. And while you may be grumpy, difficult, and sarcastic, I don't think you've ever got into an argument here with anyone other than me, and I've never felt that you were arguing in bad faith, although we have sometimes argued at cross-purposes and taken a while to work out why we were failing to communicate. The people that were banned were just being dicks.
I know what you mean about this being The Home Of AndrewDucker, because, well, it is. I don't mind massively long comments, but they aren't going to tend to get the same weight from people as the original post (well, probably. I've occasionally pointed people at particularly good comments). Forums are better for things that feel less lopsided, for sure.
Hacker News is quite good for voting things up/down based on whether the comment is well-argued and on-topic, rather than expressing a dissenting view, but it's about the best I've seen, and it's that way because of a carefully curated culture, and originally populated by fairly adult people. Other sites don't tend to work as well with it.
Re: Comments
Date: 2012-01-06 07:31 pm (UTC)It's annoying when you find a forum that has a style that excludes you. There's a really good (for information and pictures) scale modelling forum that I'd love to post on, but (as far as I can tell) the regular posters are primarily middle-aged or older guys, some of whom either were in the military, others probably pretend to have been, there's a lot of military slang at times and a lot of txtspeak or at least a distinct lack of things like good punctuation, capitalisation and such.
Re: Comments
Date: 2012-01-06 07:37 pm (UTC)Quite a few links (not just from you) to tech blogs, or things about copyright or privacy and similar issues that nerdy types feel strongly about have led me to blogs so interchangeable that they could be written by the same person and have had comments just full of people agreeing and discussing the fine detail rather than some weirdo screaming "No, you're just totally wrong, and an idiot. This doesn't work in the real world outside of your precious little websites, fuck you and here's why..."
Re: Comments
Date: 2012-01-06 08:05 pm (UTC)I mean, sure, I wish more people thought like me, and I get frustrated, upset, etc. by people's awfulness sometimes. But I try to have a sense of awareness that life is dramatically better than it was 50 years ago (when homosexuality was illegal) or even 21 years ago (back when marital rape wasn't a crime), and that feeling entitled to have the entire world to move in the direction I want is just foolish.
Re: Comments
Date: 2012-01-06 08:09 pm (UTC)If you've had a certain kind of upbringing, lifestyle, or a very set type of friend, you could be fairly unfamiliar with how things are elsewhere. Even articles aimed at Americans are noticeably odd at times, when read in the UK. I don't really have online friends in other countries that I talk to, so it sometimes catches me unawares that people replying to things on your LJ might drive on the wrong side of the road and wear their pants on the outside.
Re: Comments
Date: 2012-01-06 08:11 pm (UTC)And yes, some of them have some very odd ideas. Some of them even seem to think that black folks have rights!
Re: Comments
Date: 2012-01-06 08:22 pm (UTC)Re: Comments
Date: 2012-01-06 08:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-06 01:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-06 01:37 pm (UTC)The Religious Right gather to pick Not-Romney
Date: 2012-01-06 01:32 pm (UTC)I sort of wish someone had blogged a reasonable one-line summary of the republican candidates so I could follow the discourse better. I know I ought to be able to look it up, but I'm almost too depressed about the race to try.
Re: The Religious Right gather to pick Not-Romney
Date: 2012-01-06 01:36 pm (UTC)Re: The Religious Right gather to pick Not-Romney
Date: 2012-01-06 02:18 pm (UTC)Re: The Religious Right gather to pick Not-Romney
Date: 2012-01-06 08:25 pm (UTC)Re: The Religious Right gather to pick Not-Romney
Date: 2012-01-06 01:57 pm (UTC)I should probably do the same for this set of GOP candidates.
Re: The Religious Right gather to pick Not-Romney
Date: 2012-01-06 02:19 pm (UTC)Re: The Religious Right gather to pick Not-Romney
Date: 2012-01-06 02:20 pm (UTC)http://wellinghall.livejournal.com/304628.html#comments
"Giuliani: Mayor of New York when Al-Qaeda flew those planes into the World Trade Centre. Brought in zero-tolerance policing. Not a religious conservative like many Republicans.
Huckabee: Creationist loon. Pure nutter.
McCain: Former POW in 'Nam. Tough guy image. Very hawkish on foreign policy but has criticised current administration's handling of Iraq. Has co-sponsored bills with Obama.
Paul: Free trade libertarian (and has stood as a Libertarian candidate in the past). Advocates non-intervention in foreign policy, and hence voted against Iraq War. Big on small (federal) government. Won't win.
Romney: Mormon. Has positioned himself to get the religious nutter vote, but is much more socially conservative now than he has been in the past, so this is probably just blatant populism.
Thompson: TV and film actor. Professional lobbyist. Before that he was a lawyer (including a spell on the Senate committee that investigated Watergate). Big on image (average bloke image) but small on policies.
Clinton: Wife. Woman. Claimed that Monica Lewinsky was just "a right-wing conspiracy" to discredit her husband. Old-fashioned 'Liberal' in the American sense of the word.
Edwards: Was Kerry's running mate last time around. Remember Kerry? No? Nobody else does either. Wife is dying. Personal injury compensation lawyer. Opposed tax cuts. Would be considered left-wing even in most parts of Europe.
Kucinich: The Mafia once tried to kill him when he was Mayor of Cleveland. Has been a supporter of Hugo Chavez in the past. Don't worry - he won't win. Not even Americans are stupid enough to vote for a Chavez apologist. Unlike Londoners.
Obama: Mixed race (portrayed as 'black', but his mother is white). Young. Father is a foreigner (Kenyan). Oprah is a fan. Criticised Bush for starting a new war in Iraq before finishing Afghanistan. Another lawyer. Certainly not a Jesse Jackson style black democrat. Has co-sponsored bills with McCain. Possibly a bit like Beyonce or Halle Berry - black enough to appeal to blacks and white enough to appeal to whites. Would probably be considered centre-right by European or British standards.
I think Obama may well take the prize."
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Date: 2012-01-06 06:47 pm (UTC)Imagine I linked that Jack Lalande video again, to show how little (genuine) nutritional advice has changed over the last couple of decades.
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Date: 2012-01-06 08:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-06 08:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-06 08:12 pm (UTC)Sundays, of course, is for rainbow coloured foods.
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Date: 2012-01-06 08:21 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2012-01-06 08:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-06 08:26 pm (UTC)I've got a system for most of passwords that uses letters, numbers and symbols, and uses a different password for every different thing I sign into, yet lets me remember them when I need 'em. But it doesn't have any capital letters, so on some sites I sign in, fail, then go "Oh, it's one of them.", and there's at least one website I use that doesn't allow symbols, which again makes it annoying.
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Date: 2012-01-08 05:14 am (UTC)2) It irks me when bloggers disable comments; it irks me even more when they purport to use email as a workaround, and have a strict format for how you may send them email, and then never once respond. (See: Kottke.org.)
2b) It irks me when a blog does have comments enabled, but has no way to automatically follow them -- or only offers an RSS feed to follow comments, which is just as useless for me.
3) xkcd explained it best on password strength: http://xkcd.com/936/