Derek Powazek - Your right to comment ends at my front door.

powazek.com

4 points·frossie··3 comments

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I don’t think the problem is that people are stupid. I think that people, when given crappy tools, with almost no oversight, no incentive to behave, and no semblance of real identity, often behave stupidly.

The lack of any real community at many places that have comment threads is one of the big problems imo, which would create some of the "incentive to behave" and "semblance of real identity" (even if "real" is pseudonymous, it's real within a community). And it's pretty hard to build a community around one person's personal blog, unless it's a very small one (their circle of personal friends).

That's one reason I think the HN comments are often better than the comments on the posts HN links to. It's also one reason I think there are significant downsides to the de-centralization of tech blogging: where in 1998 someone with an article to post would have posted it within a community (say, submitted it to Kuro5hin, or Metafilter), today they often post it on their personal blog. There are definite pros to the ability of anyone to publish anywhere, but I think it makes everything more disjointed on the discussions.

Or the problem could be that the decentralization hasn't been taken far enough. Why should comments be tied to a particular website at all? Comments can be federated in exactly the same way people are talking about opening up Twitter and turning it into a "distributed service" or even a "protocol". Even without true federation, you can still extract comments from the major aggregators via their APIs. So the notion of where a comment ultimately "lives" starts to get blurry.

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