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Comment by morganvachon | Hacker News Reader

> He claims to want to encourage conversations, but comments are disabled.

That bothered me as well, especially his flippant attitude about it ("Comments are never going to happen. Stop trying to make comments happen"). I get the joke, it's from that Lindsay Lohan movie. But the cognitive dissonance that it creates is annoying.

He's basically saying "I want Twitter to die because they don't allow proper conversations to take place. Oh and by the way, don't bother commenting on my post because I don't believe in blog post conversations."

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More likely, Alex does not want to spend the time to provide moderation for a comments section. His stance is that Twitter is bad because the kind of community it creates—it would be silly for him to create a comment section that similarly failed to meet his expectations.

It is perfectly fine for Alex to criticize Twitter without providing his own alternative (though he does tacitly recommend using IRC and Facebook instead). Alex is a Rackspace employee who also is heavily involved in the Python community. The expectations on him for providing a space to talk are completely different than a company who's business is providing a communications platform.

He says though, you can email him, write your own email blog, except that you don't comment on his blog.

Does that mean he doesn't want communication to happen?

I emailed him once. At the time, I was a big python fanatic, and had a few questions about pypy. He never replied. So I asked someone else, and wrote a blogpost on pypy.

Between the two, I can only conclude that he has something very, very specific in mind as the proper form a community should assume. I wonder what it is.

I think it's pretty clear what he wants. He wants the ability to selectively include some people, and exclude others. Like Facebook, where you can set your privacy policy to "friends only" and then you only get comments from people you've mutually agreed to converse with.

This is defining a community in terms of its edges. He seems to believe that if you can't exclude anyone, you can't define a community. It's just, I don't know, a crowd.

Twitter doesn't work this way, and neither do website comments. Both invite anyone at all to speak to you.

There's something very sad about defining a community by who is excluded.

I think you've nailed it. He isn't happy that Twitter has no boundaries or walls for him to build and maintain. It appears that in his mind, Twitter should go away since it doesn't serve his specific needs, never mind the 200 million+ other users who are happy with how it works.

I don't care for Twitter myself, but I'm not going to call for its demise just because I don't get much out of it. Obviously it has a prominent place as a major social media engine, and that's just fine. But then, it's not all about me.

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