Why I don't write about programming and why it's not really worthwhile to do so
marco.org
marco.org
Unfortunately, although I don't have comments on my site, as the moderator of a forum I get them de facto in the comments threads here. It's a uniquely unpleasant situation. In a way it's worse than having comments on my site. On my own site I could delete nasty comments, but here if I do I'll be accused of censorship.
Frankly, I'm stumped. I've occasionally thought of banning paulgraham.com, but people would accuse me of censorship if I did that too.
I think perhaps getting rid of points will mitigate this problem though.
It'd be nice if people recognized that sometimes when folks don't respond, it's because they have better things to do, and not because they agree with what's being said.
The problem is you think that you know that people know that you know that somebody thinks you don't know what you're talking about, but you don't know that people know that you know that somebody thinks you don't know what you're talking about, and in fact it is quite possible that people think that you know that they know that you know what you're talking about, so if you just thought that people think that you know that they know that you know what you're talking about, then it wouldn't matter if they think that you know that they know that you know what you're talking about at all, which has the side effect of mooting whether they know that you know that somebody thinks you don't know what you're talking about.
Oof, my parser just blew the stack. Short version: you're well-liked here and have objectively extant accomplishments elsewhere (presumably a source of more happiness than the aggregate opinion of the HN community). The existence of people who disagree with you does not diminish either your general well-likedness or your other accomplishments. Don't worry about them -- the rest of us certainly don't.
a) People who generally like you and your essays, who will continue to agree with you, and
b) People who don't like you or your essays, who will take it as further evidence that you don't know what you're talking about.
and by replying you're just making the people from category b) post more.
But here I do know, and everyone knows I know
Not really. There's no "this post was read by pg" flag next to it. If you don't reply, at worst people will think you just couldn't be bothered to respond, which isn't a bad thing.
I dare say not many people here would fall for that, and you shouldn't really care about those who do. Most are still surprised you take the time to answer as much as you do.
I'd say the problems with points are different though. From the way my comments are voted recently I noticed three things:
- the upvoted comments are those which fit the common opinion, and upvoting them is used to express it.
- the ones I honestly considered good and original stay at 1-2. I have absolutely no idea if they made an impact whatsoever.
- from the way scores fluctuate I'm guessing some amount of downvoting
Overall I tend to believe that HN is more and more aggregating _opinions_ instead of _ideas_.
Yes it is. And here's something I learned by accident...
Many times I have been challenged by something I said. Often a great point, but just as often something totally illogical. I always felt compelled to engage immediately or else I'd look like I was acquiescing to the other.
Then a strange thing happened. I got so busy that I could only visit a few times per day. So when I returned to a thread I had commented in, I was challenged, and others had responded instead of me. And their responses were often much better than mine would have been.
So now that's my default. I let others respond for me simply because I'm not here. And I've been very pleasantly surprised. For every jerk, there are 10 people ready to downvote or comment.
There's a natural tendency to stick up for yourself, so it's tough to let it go and give others a chance to do it for you. But give it a try anyway. Have faith in this community. When you're too busy to respond, we've got your back.
That is my theory on allowing and/or censoring nasty comments.
I agree with you to some extent, you are much more likely to get good, interesting responses on something "of theirs," just not sure its solvable.
Of course, that only works if the comment falls into the obviously nasty category. I suspect the comments that annoy you the most fall into the subtlety nasty category.
That's why I advocate selecting a group of trusted users to do it instead. Its non trivial to select this group correctly, but I think the end result is more effective. Over time you can expand this group based on the users that have the highest percentage of civil comments. Once you get the ball rolling, the group simply scales as the site gets larger.
I strongly encourage strict civility enforcement. I'm looking forward to its implementation, especially since so few places do it. Reddit constantly ostracizes and mocks its users whose beliefs may differ from its mainstream users; for instance, if you look at /r/christianity, many threads are eventually invaded by /r/atheist, and they upvote comments like "There is no god so don't worry about it", and downvote all of the serious responses that a peruser of /r/christianity would want to see. They leave abusive comments on the responses by Christians. The place is brimming with hostility for alternate viewpoints.
I see this kind of thing creeping into HN, too. I've noticed recently a large increase in the number of unworthily downvoted comments, and end up upvoting these to increase their scores though I otherwise wouldn't have done so. It seems to me that people here are beginning to fall into the same thought process that seems to eventually take over every "social news" site, where users with differing beliefs or opinions, no matter how articulately or thought-provokingly expressed, are oppressed by the tyranny of the mob.
So, please, I implore you to keep incivility off of HN to whatever extent possible. Strict moderation is key, imo. Let the naysayers say on; do what's needed to preserve the utility and pleasantness of the community. There are plenty of places online for the abuser and flamer to find refuge; let HN be a beacon of intelligence, helpfulness, and civility. It's especially needed among tech/programming communities.
EDIT: I realize your comment was in response to PG's, but what is considered a "censor-able" comment? I've seen some discourse on here where someone legitimately called PG out. As I recall, the person turned out to be wrong but they weren't trolling (at least not at first) even though they were accused of it from the start. Should this have been censored?
If someone posts something that you strongly suspect they wouldn't say in person, suspend their account until either (a) they verifiably attach their real name to it, demonstrating their willingness to say it without the cloak of pseudonymity; or (b) they retract the offending post.
That sounds like an idea for yet another Twitter app: make a widget that displays a Twitter search for a blog post specific #tag, e.g. #m_eiman12 for by 12:th post. This will make it harder to be anonymous (not difficult, but at least a few more steps), and with an added filter to allow "deletion" of unwanted tweets should help keep it civil.
Even better, from a usability and SEO perspective, would be to use the actual URL of the post instead of a tag, but most URLs are probably too long. Maybe with a shortened URL, but they're Evil. Having a link makes it trivial for followers of commentators to find and read the post in question.
I don't think that there's any problem with disagreement or common and civilized discussion. The problem arises when the discussion turns into a contention, and the contention gives into resentment, bitterness, name-calling, etc. Once something has devolved that far, it is generally irredeemable, so if you things heading down that path I think it's more often better to just leave it, even if the original comment is inflammatory and accusatory, because those people have already forsaken reasonability and intelligence (usually as a response to being stumped), and what's the point in discussing a thing with one like that, or one whose biases are immovable and emotional?
Blog posts about actual programming, as in "here's how I implemented x" are almost always a great read, and if they are really good they will sustain their value for a long time and reach far beyond the blog's readership as they start appearing in Google searches etc.
It's all about signal vs noise. You may have a great insight, but if Joel/37 Signals/Coding Horror/etc already wrote about it you're just adding more noise.
If generalized advice actually worked for human beings, the entire human race would probably be a lot better off.
In practice, I find it hard to believe that anyone takes these lists of dos and don'ts and actually turns them into guiding principles for how they run their business.
Losing weight, for example, should be really simple but there's a boatload of people out there who don't seem to be able to follow the "heavy weightlifting + calorie controlled diet" advice.
Admittedly, it might be worse if I were a celebrity blogger with tons of readers; when only relatively few people read you, generally it's only people who have some reason to like your work that would bother commenting.
I find that any really interesting programming problem is too complex to be reduced to prose in a form digestible in someone's 10-minute blog break. Yeah, I could post about the umpteenth-zillion Sudoku solver, or about this tricky Haskell problem I solved - but if it's general enough to be broadly interesting, it's too shallow to be enlightening, and if it's deep enough to be useful, it's probably too specific to have a widely interested readership. Worse, I feel that by participating in the blogosphere, I'm deluding myself into thinking that these information soundbites are worth anything, and taking up my attention with little factoids that distract me from getting actually interesting work done.
I find that the value of writing about programming is in the "Why?" and the "Roads not taken" of software systems. So I keep a development journal of my personal projects. At the very least, it keeps me from revisiting design decisions I've already decided. But this doesn't need to be public to serve its purpose, and I've found that making it public anyway is too distracting to maintain forward momentum on the projects. Instead, I open things up after the project has succeeded or failed, like I did with Diary of a Failed Startup and like I'll hopefully do with this programming language I'm developing. No, it's not the ego boost that constant, instantaneous feedback gives you - but that ego boost becomes a drug that keeps you from functioning when people (as the article points out) turn on you, as they inevitably do.
For the average joe schmoe programmer, people don't have such expectations, so there is far less negative reaction. Also, personality does play a huge role. Someone who doesn't seem too aloof and distant from other people will be better off (take _why for example).
"full of himself", "aloof and distant", "For the average joe schmoe programmer (implying only they can appreciate his work)"
_why isn't the best example - he was awesome, but part of his appeal was that he was distant and not on the same plane as the rest of us.. just not in a negative way. Nonetheless, before he disappeared he tweeted:
programming is rather thankless. u see your works become replaced by superior ones in a year. unable to run at all in a few more.
Even though he didn't attract much negativity due to his whimsical, impenetrable persona, it didn't seem to help him feel much better about his excellent work.
I suppose in our profession we are able to perpetuate ourselves by communicating our ideas into the world. Our influence is felt in posterity through the inspiration of thought in our successors. The kernel may evolve over time, but its evolution may be guided by the initial conditions of its initial code base (and subsequent changes).
A civil engineer may be directly remembered by the the bridge that bears his or her name; a software engineer may be indirectly remembered by the smart code he or she has written.
You want a legacy? Move up the food chain and start discovering new data structures and algorithms. Or work on a large project like GMail.
Writing about programming -- techniques, thought processes, libraries, and code -- is highly valuable, at least in my opinion.
On the other hand, posts that are informed by real-world experience and stories that discuss specific implementations are almost always at least somewhat interesting. This is what Joel came up on; he became well-known because his blog detailed hiring practices and how they've worked out for his company, certain strategies and fallacies at Juno, Microsoft, and Fog Creek, and the outcomes of them, and informed analyses of progress at the institutions wherein he has specific knowledge (primarily Fog Creek, I reckon).
Joel's posts were interesting because he had a lot of stories and a lot of anecdotes to back them up. His blog doesn't simply say, "I think if you give programmers offices with good equipment you'll end with some pretty good programmers", but "I thought if you gave programmers offices and good equipment you'd get good programmers, so here at Fog Creek we do that. Here are some pictures. When I was at Microsoft, everyone was sad because middle-management got the glory and the offices. At Fog Creek, we focus on our programmers, and it greatly increases our productivity, morale, etc.". One of these is much more interesting.
Not quite true. Slashdot is from about '96 and JOS is from about 1999-2000. Could the real reason be a bit simpler as suggested Joel is running out of new ideas? Is it possible the upcoming IPO might also play part?
"... I can’t, which is one of the reasons why I rarely write about programming: it’s just not worth the risk of putting myself out there on that subject because the risk of strongly negative feedback is higher than with most other content that I can produce. It’s much easier to share my breakfast than my easily argued, easily disproven, intellectually vulnerable thoughts on programming. ..."
And all loose out. Has this kind of negative feedback held people back from conversing in past times?
I think you’re misreading. The author was saying that Joel’s posts would have been just as relevant before slashdot as they are today, not that the posts actually predate slashdot.
Point taken. Misleading though.
I try to do that through writing, and I'd like to think that I've been moderately successful. I sold a few copies of my programming-related book, and many people have met me at conferences and have told me how my blog helped them in some way. It's helped people get over the fears of learning Emacs Lisp, it's helped people start using object databases, it's helped people realize that library code is just like the code they write, and that they can just start contributing! These are all things that make me happy, and knowing that I am helping push other people in this direction makes me even happier. All this by just being instructional and mostly "unbiased"; not every piece of writing that influences someone has to be filled with argumentative rhetoric. (I found out early on that "my $foo is better because $bar" just makes people mad. So I try to write "here's how $foo works" and let people make their own decision. This results in a lot less hate, although I admit that I can't resist writing a good piece of flamebait now and again. It makes me feel good if only one person agrees, and it makes me feel good when someone who I've never met thinks its worth his time to tell me to "die in a fire". Who says I'm not mentally ill?)
Anyway, I think writing about programming is highly worthwhile -- both for the author, and the wider "programming community". I'm not going to stop, and I'm not going to miss Joel.
Some people claim that they don’t care and that they can ignore it. I don’t know if Joel can. I can’t, which is one of the reasons why I rarely write about programming: it’s just not worth the risk of putting myself out there on that subject because the risk of strongly negative feedback is higher than with most other content that I can produce. It’s much easier to share my breakfast than my easily argued, easily disproven, intellectually vulnerable thoughts on programming.
We programmers probably tend to nitpick a bit more than your average audience, and that isn't always a bad thing. It can't be all that encouraging to the writers though.
As HN grew, it regressed toward the mean. It still has a more respectful and intelligent community than reddit, for example, but there's a more reddit-like tendency to attack than there was in the early days.
My theory is that there's a non-linear relationship between community size and disrespect. Small online communities can maintain a respectful tone, but once disrespect creeps in it tends to provoke a similar response, and a vicious circle is created. The larger the community, the harder it is to suppress those kernels of disrespect.
Anything that is out there for the public to comment on is subjected to this. Just take that as a given, this is what you get when you make public comments. People not being nice on the internet is just a fact of life. That doesn't immediately devalue what you're saying. There are plenty of people out there who don't read or write commentary and read postings on their merit.
Not writing in public just because people might say nasty things about you or your writings seems wrong to me.
Also, VI rocks! Down with Emacs! Yeah! Screw your non-modal editors!
I like threads and tree like comments as it can be interesting to see the ideas and feedback at play. But sometimes I think it would be far better if the comments remained completely on topic.
The problem is good jeurnalism is inherently difficult. I resist writing blog posts because I'd spend too long on a post. As a teacher I'd spend a day at least on a hand out. And a post requires listening to feedback and fine tuning it. That's great if you have an informed receptive audience.
If I do ever bother with a blog, I think I'd ask for my desired feedback. I'd like users to submit links to relavant associated content.
I do enjoy a 'good' article about programming, I specifically like to hear about people's mistakes.
there are many ways to write about programming: one is to actually write about programming, that is, posts containing some experience to share about some technology, or a pattern one writer noticed about programming languages that is interesting, or how to implement such algorithm in a better way, or just this-is-how-I-made-this-stuff and so forth. People tend to love this stuff, if you search the HN / progreddit / slashdot archives.
Then there is another way to write about programming: the speculation. A few well known blogs really master this art, as they are able to run successful programming blogs for years without actually ever really writing about programmings. In this blogs you'll find a mix about obvious things narrated in an inspirational way, a few rants about why people should do A instead of B, and so forth.
My impression is that the latter kind of blogs, not really designed to share what you think, but more to think about what you could share to be interesting and cool, are the ones more often subject to criticisms.
But writing about generalities is not only hard more open to criticism as you suggest, but they are also harder to come up with because they require more condensed knowledge. Coming from that perspective I can understand why Joel says he has nothing more to write about, and I think it's reflected in the quality of his posts recently.
I write about programming, and it is entirely worthwhile for me. I changed my style of writing at a certain point, but that had more to do with what I wanted to explore than with whether people were critical.
Speaking of which, lots of people have said critical things about my writing. But lots more said nice things. Overall, I feel that I get far more positive feedback than negative. I could be wearing rose-coloured glasses.
So... My experience differs from the author. But that makes sense, we are different people.
Then again, people writing angry comments are rarely the kind of people who will take the time to reflect on what they read.