Blog Or Get Off The Pot (2006) | Hacker News Reader

Blog Or Get Off The Pot (2006)

steve-yegge.blogspot.com

66 pointsplatz40 comments

   "Blog entries should be organized by popularity, not time. Or ideally, you can 
    pick either one. Why the hell don't blogs do that?"

Voting on good or bad articles for a blog? This is a good idea.

   "For instance, I want inline comments. Putting everyone's comments at the 
    end is pretty lame. Even worse, most blog packages these days don't even 
    seem to have Slashdot-style threaded commenting. Instead, the comments 
    are ordered chronologically, just like the entries."

Comments along the side, remarking on the story as it goes? This is a good idea.

   "And I want versions. I want to make changes to my entries sometimes -- 
    heck, frequently. But that's culturally weird, and feels dishonest to me, 
    because I've sort-of permanently overwritten the old version"

Diffs? This is a good idea.

   "All that revision-history stuff complicates the commenting, of course; each 
    comment has to keep metadata about which blog revision it was talking 
    about. It's even more complicated if you have versioned comments, so 
    users can go back and fix their typos or change their minds."

This is a good extension of the previous idea.

   "When I go into Firefox, I want to be able to override every single 
    configuration option on a per-page basis, or even better, with url pattern-
    matching rules. Doesn't that seem just patently obvious?"

... uhm. Well 4 in a row aint bad.

It's pretty sad that, 7 years later, all these good ideas still haven't been incorporated into any mainstream web publishing tool in a coherent way.

The closest we have to inline comments is the Google Docs interface and StackOverflow uses and exposes revisions, but neither has a self-hosted version.

As Steve identifies in his post, I think that the critically difficult part is applying versioning to multiple degrees of the content: the prima facie post itself, but also the inline comments, etc. In a sense, you'd have to have some kind of conflict resolution. Git could be an inspiration here.

Should anyone be interested in experimenting/prototyping a system like this - I'm up for a weekend hack or so. My contact information is in my profile.

I just realized that Github's pull requests UI handles this pretty well:

You can leave a comment on a particular line in the diff and the comment will be collapsed if you update the code and the diff gets outdated, but the UI will still show you the original chunk you commented on.

The suggested commenting system was sorta implemented by Microsoft a long time ago (IE5?). Internet Explorer had a plugin called "Discussions" or "Discuss" or something to that effect. It let you have comment threads on any webpage, without involving the actual site.

I'm not sure if there was a public service, or it was more of an Intranet type thing. I do recall seeing the Discuss button in IE much later then IE5, and a quick search shows plenty of people asking what it is, so it mustn't have been too obscure a feature.

Google had that too. Can't remember what it was called though.

Google Sidewiki?

There you go.

Even on the last one, once I parsed the sentence, I thought that was a good idea, too :). Configuration should run on a sort of prototype basis, where it can be specialized at any point in whatever processing chain is at work... Excuse me, I need to rewrite some code.

OmniWeb has per-site CSS overrides and site prefs! It's actually quite nice. That's a feature I miss.

"When I go into Firefox, I want to be able to override every single configuration option on a per-page basis, or even better, with url pattern-matching rules. Doesn't that seem just patently obvious?"

Opera has per-site configuration options.

Better yet, when you go to modify your per-site config (right click -> edit site preferences) you can add wildcards to the site ... for example, I could turn on cookies for *.ycombinator.com

It's a great idea. It's called "Google Wave".

This article isn't about blogging software. To me, it was about the challenges of starting any project. Whenever I have an idea, I find that implementing that idea produces a fractal of ideas for how to make that implementation easier -- I always want a blogging platform that "just does this bit automatically", or I want my development tools to behave exactly the way I want them to, which ends up hindering my actual doing of the damn thing.

Unrelated comment directed at @martinced who commented on this page: you have been hellbanned, all your comments from the past 3 days are marked as dead even though they are (as far as I can judge) relevant and thought out.

Since the point of hellbanning is to not let the afflicted in on it, is it frowned upon to inform others of such status?

It's often a mystery why people get hellbanned.

It would be frowned upon if the hellbanned user was trolling or flaming.

If people are actually contributing, letting them know that they have been hellbanned is good for the community.

I noticed an uptick in hellbanned after the PyCon incident. It seems several otherwise rational individuals turned into violently woman-hating psychopaths during that whole debacle.

I'm not saying that's the case here (I haven't looked), but it's an interesting question as to whether such individuals, having returned to a facade of sanity, should be allowed back into the discussion.

>I noticed an uptick in hellbanned after the PyCon incident. It seems several otherwise rational individuals turned into violently woman-hating psychopaths during that whole debacle.

Alternatively, it could be that several otherwise rational individuals turned into violently politically correct, hell-banning for no much reason psychopaths during the whole debate.

Incorrect.

I resent the downvote. I made an observation and this guy comes and randomly jumps to a political conclusion about what I observed. He was absolutely and completely wrong and I didn't need to waste more than a word in response.

To be fair, even your original observation is complete speculation that may or may not apply, as admitted by yourself. You could easily reformulate your statement as:

> I noticed an uptick in hellbanned after the baked-goods incident. It seems several otherwise rational individuals turned into violently cupcake and confectionery haters during that whole debacle.

I'm not saying that's the case here (I haven't looked), [...]

And it would carry about the same meaning. "Here is an event that happened, which I admit I have no idea if it applies to this other event, but here is some speculation linking the two events together.

Note: I didn't downvote you, but I can see why people are. Plus if you only have one word to say about a subject, a downvote is a better choice.

Speculation based on first-order observations. That may not be slightly off-topic, but it's completely different from second-order politically-motivated speculation about my observations. coldtea used my comment as his soapbox even though he didn't have the first clue what he was talking about. I should also point out that since he responded to me I couldn't downvote him.

The thing I found particularly irritating is that hellbanning someone can not make you a psychopath in the way that wishing rape and death upon people does (because that is what I observed). I don't need people assuming I'm some kind of male-guilt feminist crusader just because I'm not a member all-manners-are-just-a-form-of-political-correctness-because-social-skills-are-beneath-me set.

>I resent the downvote. I made an observation and this guy comes and randomly jumps to a political conclusion about what I observed. He was absolutely and completely wrong and I didn't need to waste more than a word in response.

Let me get this straight.

You have the right to make an observation but nobody has the right can suggest otherwise (as I did)?

And if anybody dares to suggest a different theory than yours, people must take your words that he is "completely and absolutely wrong", with no argumentation provided whatsoever?

>Speculation based on first-order observations. That may not be slightly off-topic, but it's completely different from second-order politically-motivated speculation about my observations.

For one, I never said anything about your observations or you. I never characterized you anything.

I merely suggested an alternative theory of what happened to your one.

Now, can you explain this BS about "first-order observations" (as if nobody besides you can be a first-order observer of the same phenomenon)? We are all on the same social news site. He can all observe the same first-order things.

That I commented after you told us your observation and theory, doesn't make me a "second-order observer". Even eye-witnesses can have alternate stories and contradict one another. Much less here, where what was under discussion wasn't the observation itself (the facts), but the explanation of why they happened (the "exegesis").

>coldtea used my comment as his soapbox even though he didn't have the first clue what he was talking about.

And this statement is based on what? Or should the mere fact that you didn't like my comment suffice to show that "I don't have a clue what I'm talking about"?

>I should also point out that since he responded to me I couldn't downvote him.

Oh, the humanity. Somebody did the next best thing though, he went and downvoted my last pageful of comments in a very clumsy way (all N last comments down one point, which never happens -- must be someone's idea of "internet revenge"). Well, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, but still...

>The thing I found particularly irritating is that hellbanning someone can not make you a psychopath in the way that wishing rape and death upon people does (because that is what I observed). I don't need people assuming I'm some kind of male-guilt feminist crusader just because I'm not a member all-manners-are-just-a-form-of-political-correctness-because-social-skills-are-beneath-me set.

Hell-banning is an exercise of power and censorship. Those might be needed at times, but those are very much negative aspects of society, and far more dangerous (because they have more reach and they are more serious) than some idle bullying by immature people over the internet.

Let me put it this way: wishing rape/death on the net is 4-chan, hi-school bully level shit. Censorship on the other hand is actual dictatorship level shit. Censorship has been historically associated with the very worst in societies and regimes. Immature threats from anonymous cowards on the other hand, have not.

Note also how you to others what you say you don't like for yourself: suddenly, being opposed to hell-banning is being "a member all-manners-are-just-a-form-of-political-correctness-because-social-skills-are-beneath-me set".

> Now, can you explain this BS about "first-order observations" (as if nobody besides you can be a first-order observer of the same phenomenon)? We are all on the same social news site. He can all observe the same first-order things.

Fair point. What I should have said was that the hellbanned comments I saw could not have been interpreted the way you did.

> Let me put it this way: wishing rape/death on the net is 4-chan, hi-school bully level shit. Censorship on the other hand is actual dictatorship level shit. Censorship has been historically associated with the very worst in societies and regimes. Immature threats from anonymous cowards on the other hand, have not.

Here's where you and I disagree. It's not for men to say that wishing rape and death on women is just high-school-level shit, just like it's not for white people to say that black people need to lighten up about the whole race thing. You just don't have any moral basis to make light of those things, regardless of how correct you might be about the ultimate effects of a given attitude.

Hellbanning would be dictatorship-level if it somehow extended beyond a single private internet site. But the thing is, hellbanning, cruel though it may seem, is entirely proportional to the problem of internet trolling which is extremely intractable via more "humane" methods due to disposable nature of online identity.

>Here's where you and I disagree. It's not for men to say that wishing rape and death on women is just high-school-level shit, just like it's not for white people to say that black people need to lighten up about the whole race thing.

Yes, here is were we actually disagree. I thing it's equally valid for a man or a woman to say that those things are just "high-school-level shit".

Why? Because if we strive for equality, we cannot grant unequal rights to any party. What you suggest amounts, for me, to saying "women are too precious to deal with these things" so they have a right to be upset about them, but men don't get to have a say. Which perpetuates the kind of distinction we want to avoid.

>It's not for men to say that wishing rape and death on women is just high-school-level shit, just like it's not for white people to say that black people need to lighten up about the whole race thing. You just don't have any moral basis to make light of those things, regardless of how correct you might be about the ultimate effects of a given attitude.

I don't think you need a moral basis if you aren't doing the bad things yourself. It's par for the course for living in a society, to get to have a say in all issues.

But you have a point about active/ongoing injustices. Just that some times, even though the injustice is real, people use it for hypocritical reasons (playing the victim).

Oh I try so hard to not go meta, but this complaint is too much.

I was favourably inclined to your original post ("I noticed an uptick..."), and disfavourably inclined against coldtea's ("violently politically correct"; anyone who says "politically correct" gets dismissal from me!). But everything you said after that was somewhere in the set {unproductive, confrontationally unproductive, paranoid}.

You made an observation about patterns, and proposed an explanation. He proposed an alternate explanation for the same observation. They're equally epistemologically privileged, and your nonsense about "first-order observations" doesn't hold water. His reply added to the conversation (marginally... ugh). Your "incorrect" added zero to the conversation, it was simple static, so it deserves downvotes. I didn't bother to downvote it -- as I usually don't -- but I understand why other people did.

You then complained about the downvotes. Obvious straightforward infraction of site guidelines, and now you retroactively deserve even more downvotes.

And then you went on a paranoid screed about him attacking you personally. It becomes clear that YOU were talking about why YOU hellbanned people (I guess?), and thus you interpret coldtea's alternate theory as being about YOU, but no reasonable person reading the original comments would have read either of those posts that way.

The only problem here is you.

Oh, and one more thing: just as hellbanning isn't really psychopathy, neither is uttering childish threats on the internet, even if I happen to agree with you that the latter is a more serious offense. So when you use "psychopaths" metaphorically, it licenses people who respond to you to use the same metaphor. When you start the hyperbole, you should put up with its continuance.

So much of this is gibberish there's little to reply to except this: if you think wishing rape and death upon people is just childish internet threats then I certainly am not the only problem here. There's no place for that anywhere.

Looking at his history, it looks like you are on the right track; he did make a questionable comment regarding the subject.

I would argue that it while it was perhaps misguided (and actually unclear what his point was), it was certainly not "violently woman-hating..." etc. Those lightning-quick to jump on "misogyny!!!" do themselves no favor in the gender discussion.

So his almost 5 years of contributions are nullified by one unclear non-pc comment. As I ponder all the mostly-well-meaning-but-dumb things I said in my twenties I believe this is a bad sign. I appreciate that the signal to noise is high here, but at risk of big-brother thought control.

Personally, I've had a critical comment about Ubuntu quality killed because someone didn't like it.

Don't know about others but I will be curtailing my comments here for fear of retribution.

You shouldn't have to go to Reddit to get a decent directory of my blog. Anyway, you can't; anything that makes it onto Digg or Reddit or del.icio.us is mixed in with everything else, and gets bumped down into oblivion by stuff that's newer and/or better.

Actually you can "unmix" it:

http://www.reddit.com/domain/steve-yegge.blogspot.com/top/

I know this is a far cry from what he's asking for, but it's still damn useful.

   "For instance, I want inline comments. Putting everyone's comments at the 
    end is pretty lame. Even worse, most blog packages these days don't even 
    seem to have Slashdot-style threaded commenting. Instead, the comments 
    are ordered chronologically, just like the entries."

Isn't this what Rap Genius does?

I may misunderstand, but it seems that rap genius has a specific type of annotation (ie best explanation rather than comment-thread). I think the OP's suggestion is more similar to how soundcloud does comments.

It's essentially a threaded HTML-box overlay for a certain part of text. I think that's how you would implement such a system, isn't it? Just because RG uses it for explanations doesn't mean that it can't be used for exposition/comments. In fact, I think that when RG blogged on their problems with Heroku, this is the style that they used.

if all you meant was text-overlay, then yes. in fact, lot's of sites do this.

I haven't checked it out in detail, but Jeff Atwood's 'Discourse' (http://www.discourse.org/) does seem to have some of this stuff. It's a forum, but I wonder if it could be used as a blog.

And although I agree that the prevalent blogging software could use some lovin', but I hardly think it is as broken as the article seems to imply.

His points make me think of Google Wave. I find myself missing the wave all the time, and the competing products xxx don´t come close.

I'm not sure about the emphasis on commenting features on a blog. It might be for the best if blogs did not support comments at all, at least in a ideal world. Instead replies would be composed in the commenters personal blog, and some kind of trackback link system would connect the blog-posts together.

From the comments:

> Keep an eye on ycombinator's infogami. The creator has strong ties to the reddit crew and is probably pretty well placed to realise your redditblogiki idea.

RIP Aaron.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com