Jul 20 2007
Is a blog a monolog- or a dialog?
That’s the question in my mind as I read Joel’s latest.
Yeah, occassionally people are assholes. Welcome to the human race. I first started getting on local BBS’s way back in the early eighties, I was on usenet by 1986, and on the internet not long after. I was on gopher. My user id number of slashdot is 1081. My point here is I’ve been around a long time, and I’ve seen a lot of comments. I’ve seen a lot of flames (best flames: in the Asbestos Sewer on the old rBBS1 bbs at UofI- kids today have no imagination in their insults), and a lot of topic drift (worst case of topic drift: alt.sysadmin.recovery on usenet, where the average time on-topic for a thread seems to be about 3 comments). But I have to say that the bulk of the comments I’ve seen have been (more or less) on-topic.
They’ve just been confrontational. There are some kudos and thank yous (which are always appreciated), but the vast majority of comments are “You’re wrong, and here’s why”.
And I wonder if that isn’t the problem.
An example of what Joel Splosky is talking about right here from this very blog. I go and write an article about how great Postgresql is, and some MS SqlServer-bigot has to come along publish, on my blog, sullying my great post, a comment like:
I’m sorry, but that’s REALLY, REALLY slow and actually too slow for the stuff we do. On Microsoft SQL server 2k5 with a similar machine to yours, loading a million records from a CSV takes at most 30 seconds, and I can expect 100 million to be done in an hour. PostgreSQL is very slow in my experience and your article didn’t change my mind :)
Of course, what’s even worse about this horrible, horrible comment is… he has a point.
(As a side note: it turns out I was prematurely optimizing things. We now have several other tables in the 40-60M row range, with lots of columns and multiple indexes and not partitioned, and performance is just fine. Insert rates of 20-30K records/sec, fast access. To the point that we didn’t realize that the tables had grown quite that large until I want to dump one to a file, and wondered why that was taking so long… But this is a topic for a different post).
Oh, if only we had disallowed comments- I would never have had to hear the dissenting view, or confront an uncomfortable fact. Or, heaven forbid, admit I was wrong. Anything but that.
Ok, I think that’s enough sarcarsm for the moment. The reality of the situation is that the scientific method, our judicial method, and even how the founding fathers saw how our political debate would work, are all based on confrontation. In an open, fair, and rational debate, the truth tends to out (this isn’t gaurenteed, there is a large stochastic element in the process, but the tendency is obvious). And it’s not like even the queen of science itself, physics, doesn’t get mean, petty, and irrelevent- read Joao Magueijo ’s “Faster Than the Speed of Light” for examples of just how bad the scientific review process can become.
Comments aren’t about somebody else listening to you- comments are about the original poster listening. Which is why comments somewhere else are not the same thing. What are the odds that either Joel Splosky or Dave Winer will read this blog entry? Slim to none. And they probably like it that it that way. Because I’m noise. Because I’m confrontational, and disagreeing.
What Dave Winer and Joel Splosky seem to be looking for is an audience. They don’t want to listen, they want to speak, and not listen. Personally, I’ve had a belly full of that sort of thing. If I want to be an audience, I’ll watch CNN, thank you very much. Instead I read Daily Kos. Because with dKos I, and others, can respond. Watch and see how many comments, how many diaries, even how many front page diaries, are of the form “Markus is wrong- and here is why”. As a whole, and on average, dKos is more correct than CNN, because there is a correction mechanism in place. Because people disagree, even with Markus, and Markus listens.
Joao had to go through a world-class flame-war, and “the reeducation of a PRD editor” in order to get his paper publish. But guess what? At the end of the process, the paper was better for it. Because in between the flames and irrelevencies were real, legitimate, points. After all the wailing and gnashing of teeth, people disagreeing with you are helping you, if you’ll listen. If you’re right, then engaging them help illuminate that you’re right, and often will change their mind. If you’re wrong, they’re helping you to become right. If your goal is to be as correct as possible, then people challenging you are your greatest gift.
If you post a comment to this blog, I will read it. I may or may not respond to it, but I will read it. I am listening.
Joel and David aren’t. And, you know, that makes me less inclined to listen to them, too.
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11 Responses to “Is a blog a monolog- or a dialog?”
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Well said. I think also that Spolsky answers his own criticism by bitching about anonymous posters – don’t have anonymity. Or at least require registration so that abusive types can be placed in moderation.
I’ve also been tooling around for some time – not as long, my first /. id was in the low 5000s – and I’ve learnt that the trick of managing any online community is establishing early on what will and won’t be accepted. A firm but polite hand may cut down the number of comments, but who needs comments when they suck?
An Australian example I am familiar with is the difference between Catallaxy and Club Troppo. The former has hundreds of comments on many stories, but is essentially a warzone most of the time. The latter can seem pretty slow in comparison, but most comments are ontopic because I and other admins are prepared to step in to edit or delete comments or put people in moderation after making a warning.
Once you’ve established the house rules, people tend to follow them. It’s not as though you need to moderate all the time. People who don’t like the rules will generally stay away; the people who stay are usually better value anyhow.
Both you and Joel Spolsky have good points. I think that both of you, however, fail to recognize that there’s both a quantitative and a qualitative difference betweeen various types of blogs — which is to say, between various types of online communities.
Some blogs (online communities) boast unfailingly polite and thoughtful comments. Example: David Brin’s blog. Other blogs qualify as toxic waste dumps of crazed hate speech. Example: Little Green Footballs, where the comment that liberals’ heads should be sawed off with a bowie knife and “Don’t worry, it’s easy going once you get past the jugular” was par for the course.
In his classic essay “A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy,”
http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
Clar Shirky points out that some online communities just turn toxic. Others work well. And there isn’t a reliable way to predict it. It’s a complex mix of presonalities and rules.
Shirky has pointed out that size matters. When an online community (blog) grows beyond a certain point, enough of the comments become problematic that it becomes a serious issue.
I don’t think either you or Joel Spolsky are taking the size of the group into account, or the personalities of the people reading the blog. If you have a blog by a coolly rational commentator talking about what’s wrong with both the right and left ends of the political spectrum read by a moderate number of people, the comments are likely to be rational and productive. If, on the other hand, you had (say) a hypothetical blog by a radical feminist who constantly makes provocative statements, and if that blog’s readership is large, you’re pretty well guaranteed to get a lot of flames and plenty of “anonymous hate speech” as Joel calls it.
It really does matter what the readership is like, and how large the readership is. Depending on the mix, both you and Joel are right.
Brilliant!
Couldn’t have said it any better myself. I dread any day that I am so arrogant that I believe my understanding doesn’t require peer scrutiny.
You’re wrong, and here’s why:
You suck!
FRISTPOST!!!1111
-Joel Splosky
ps:
I know I personally like to read articles when posted on slashdot, reddit, digg, etc. even if I’ve already read it because of the comments and even though a lot of the sites report the same stories, I’ll sometimes read em all just to find a good, well written comment or two.
Duh. Obviously a lot of people feel that way or these sites wouldn’t exist or be so popular…but that’s the benefit of the article’s audience, you argue that comments could (should?) have a benefit for the author, in that it can suggest improvements to the original article.
The first issue is taken care of by the existence of the aforementioned sites; even if a blog doesn’t allow comments, reddit does. (I’m mentioning reddit specifically, just because that’s where I found this post). The second issue is basically a matter of the author’s preference. People are arguing now on reddit between your’s and Joel’s (and Winer’s) points.
But the thing is, you’re both right. A blog can be a monologue or a dialogue…If a blogger wants, he can open comments to solicit feedback if he gives a shit about what people think. The interaction might give you insights for improving your writing, or make your posts more popular…or it might be a bunch of crap.
On the other hand, anyone is free to ban comments on your site. Joel and Winer are high-profile enough that they don’t really have to worry about what every bozo thinks about their column. Anybody with something to say will do it on reddit, etc. Somebody might even respond with a blog post of their own that becomes popular enough that Joel ends up reading it…and (maybe?) giving a shit…
…I was thinking that you’re sort of cheating here though, by using comment moderation…although that actually proves both your points: You are basically guaranteeing that you read every comment made on your article beore posting it, thereby seeing any insighful points and probably filtering out crappy comments (like this one). But to Joel and Winer’s point, you also have to read every crappy comment.
So maybe it just comes down to a matter of scale. I don’t know how many people read (or comment) on your blog, but I’d bet the volume is…ummm, less…than Joel or Winer on average. And what’s the average ratio of good to crap comments? If your blog was as well known as theirs, you might decide the majority of reader comments are not worth the time it takes to read em, too.
Sites like slashdot, reddit, etc can have a huge amount of comments, but they employ user moderation, which can essentially be an automatic method of filtering stupid comments, spam, or flame wars (yeah, I know it’s not perfect, but it scales better than having the author review every comment post)
pps: Oh yeah…I’m not really Joel Splosky. I just thought it would be funny. I kill me.
ppps: Please ignore the first and last parts of this comment.
I think the thing you are failing to address, however, is the noise to signal ratio problem of blog comments. I thought Spolsky’s post was more worried about the off-topic flame wars than the on-topic disagreements. In a blog with a large enough audience, the noise becomes too much and the useful/relevant comments get lost in the mix, virtually eliminating the value that you are talking about.
This post seemed like some good tardbait: we got a lot of posts whose sole point seemed to be to drive down the signal-to-noise ratio.
Of course, that’s what moderators are there for. :-D
~~ Your Friendly Local Mod.
Great Post!
“What Dave Winer and Joel Splosky seem to be looking for is an audience.”
Close, but not quite. What they are looking for is a circle jerk. They don’t just want an audience, they also want their fellow jerkers to stroke them, err, their egos. Its not just about telling the world how brilliant they are, its also about the other useless bloggers agreeing about their brilliance.
You can’t risk giving a forum to someone who might disagree with you, that would be crushing to someone who’s life revolves around pretending to know everything online. So instead you post your nonsense, wait for one of your friends to post “joel is so smart, look what he said today”, and then you post a link to their site so everyone can see that someone validated your opinion for you.
@Joe
That’s actually one of my big concerns with this blog. I really like the fact that we’ve got a healthy amount of argumentation, and people come out of the woodwork when a blog post is off — I’ve become as good a developer as I am by being told how good a developer I’m not, and how I could do so much better if only…
Beyond which, to the sharp manager, the key value I offer as a consultant is an outside view, and a wealth of experiences from outside the corporate culture. If I surrounded myself with people who think just like me, I wouldn’t be able to offer that value.
I think there’s a blog post here — why a consultant is not just a warm body with the life span of a single project.
I do read all comments- but I never said I read all comments in anything approaching a timely fasion… :-)
First of all, welcome Joel. Simply by posting here you make a good point- thanks to trackbacks, responses on other blogs are, in some way, linked- and even read by the original poster. There are two differences. First, the fragmented and disjoint nature of the conversation makes it hard to follow. And the second reason is that comments on this blog are read by me at least three times- once in email (I get emailed whenever someone posts to one of my stories), once in RSS (we have a RSS comment feed I follow for the comments on the other posts), and once when I go directly to the site to respond. But note, I’ve not yet read a single comment on this discussion on reddit.
I do want to respond to this:
In one sense you’re right. But the size of popularity of your/his blogs have nothing to do with- you can have a blog with three readers whose author doesn’t worry (nor does he have to) about what every bozo things about their column.
My point was that you’re never too big or too important to be wrong- and you’re never too small or too unimportant to not be right. And example number one (with a bullet) for this has to be the run up to the war in Iraq. As Andrew Sullivan himself has come to realize:
The point I’m making here applies to both the debate on the war in Iraq, and on wether Ocaml or C++ is the better programming language- no single person has a monopoly on the truth. Not George Bush. Not Howard Dean. Not Brian Hurt.
I do agree that comments need moderation. These days, if for no other reason than to prevent comment spam. Which even this blog has a problem with. Which, I suppose, is a good point- both Joel and I agree that some comments simply are not worst wasting bits on, we just disagree as to what level to put the threshold at.
One further comment- I disagree with Shirky, as I have seen large on-line communities that work. DailyKos being example #1. How many millions of visitors a day does it have? How many thousands of posts, and hundred of diaries? And yet the main “noise” problem is not off-topic comments or flames, but just “low signal” posts.